So, refusing to be pushed out of the main political stream even by a Prime Minister, a large number of the women voters went on serenely demanding equal political and economic rights, an equal moral standard, and equal status for married women in relation to employment, nationality and the guardianship of children. To many male candidates it came as a disagreeable shock to realise that women’s desire - so long complacently taken for granted by anti-feminists - to assume such inconvenient responsibilities could now be attained by them as the result of persistence. When these reforms, too, were obtained by the women, what would become of their opponents? It was indeed a horrid speculation, which caused a spontaneous revision of election addresses all over the country. The over-active Six Point Group had already published a selection of quotations from the speeches of Black List M.P.s which their makers would have been thankful to forget; who knew where such detestable expedients would end?
When the election results were published, it was found that sixteen of the twenty-two White List M.P.s had been returned to Parliament, and only twelve of the twenty-three on the Black List. In spite of this encouraging portent, the twelve untouchables consistently withstood, with a united determination worthy of a better cause, the growing influence of the women’s vote, and among them one of the most conspicuous was Mr - now Sir - Dennis Herbert, the Conservative M.P. for the Watford Division of Hertfordshire.
During the debates on the Criminal Law Amendment Bill, Mr Herbert displayed,c in the eyes of the Six Point Group, a distinct tendency to defend the double standard of morality as a convenient museum-piece of English social tradition, and in the discussions on one of the most revolutionary measures of 1923, Major Entwistle’s Matrimonial Causes Bill, this inclination reappeared. ‘Is there any man in this House who is the father of a son and a daughter,’ Mr Herbert dramatically demanded in opposing the measure, ‘who would regard the sin of adultery on the part of his son as being as serious as the sin of adultery on the part of his daughter ?’d
In spite of such archaic criticism, Major Entwistle’s Bill had passed both Houses of Parliament by the middle of July 1923, and for the first time in England the rights of men and women were equal with regard to divorce. As usual in matrimonial legislation, adultery was over-emphasised as a wrecking factor in marriage, and conditions far more disastrous to marital relations - such as habitual drunkenness, insanity and excessive incompatibility - remained inadmissible as causes for their dissolution. ‘Civilised man,’ as a Time and Tide leader-writer expressed it, ‘recognises that sexual intercourse is not the only thing that matters in married life, and he knows that there are other things besides physical unfaithfulness which can make married life impossible.’ Still, it was at least an advance towards the far-off ideal of equal companionship when even the law, with its former pompous wink at masculine irregularities, began to expect the same standard of conduct from husbands as from wives, and the Six Point Group felt a strong political reluctance to forgive Mr Herbert for his endeavours to prevent the introduction of even so small a measure of civilisation into marriage.
So on July 12th the Group took a large hall in Watford and organised a protest meeting against the attitude displayed by the Member for that division towards the Criminal Law Amendment and Matrimonial Causes Bills. Numerous local clerics appeared on the platform, although one of them had included Mr Herbert amongst his churchwardens, and the hall was, irrelevantly but not unnaturally, packed with jubilant members of the local Liberal and Labour Parties. As it happened, the meeting coincided with the end of a nine days’ heat wave; only three nights before, London had been kept awake until dawn by one of the most prolonged and violent thunderstorms within English memory, and the hot passions in the hall were inflamed by the sultriness of the still summer air.
It was one of the most terrifying evenings of my life. With my usual rashness I had agreed to be first on the list of speakers, and the knowledge that Mr Herbert, courageous and unrepentant, was in the hall ready to meet his critics did not exactly give me the feeling that this was a pleasant party. My first novel was about to be published after a series of agitating vicissitudes, and only the previous week my mother’s mother had died after a serious operation which for a fortnight had thrown the whole family into a condition of grieved perturbation. Neither of these occurrences was conducive to that robust state of mind best suited to a political fight, but I endeavoured to pretend that I possessed it as I rose to attack this arch-anti-feminist with such eloquence as I could still command. I dared not use my notes, for I knew that the hands that held them would tremble and give me away. Later, in an interview with the local Press, Mr Herbert referred contemptuously to me as ‘a sulky child’, and suggested that the Six Point Group must indeed be hard up for supporters if they allowed so young and foolish a creature to advocate their cause. But even he was not so conscious as myself of the defects of my qualities. Never had I longed more passionately for a ‘presence’ and a dignified manner; if only, I thought, the harsh experiences of the past ten years could have been inscribed on my countenance or reproduced in my gestures! Was I always to remain this youthful, unimpressive figure, suggestive of the nursery rather than the platform?
As I had foreseen all too clearly, Mr Herbert heckled me furiously in the middle of my speech and challenged the accuracy of my statements, but the clerical chairman, who sympathised with the Group, persuaded him to allow me to continue by offering him a later opportunity to put his own case to the audience. As soon as I had finished, Lady Rhondda herself continued the indictment; flourishing several copies of Hansard, she flung Mr Herbert’s own utterances back at him with fearless indignation. I have never heard her make a better fighting speech; its effect was to convert the meeting, which passed the Six Point Group resolution, ‘specially deploring’ Mr Herbert’s attitude towards the two Bills, and urging him to bear in mind ‘the effect of his utterances upon the young people of the neighbourhood’, by a majority of about four to one.
The campaign was continued by the Group in Watford during the 1923 election, which not only put the first minority Labour Government into office on the day following the death of Lenin in Russia, but by giving seats to eight women M.P.s carried the hopes of political women to a point which, ten years previously, had seemed likely to remain unwarranted for centuries. In Conservative Watford the activities of the Six Point Group, rather than the left swing of the pendulum, were probably responsible for the drop of nearly 500 votes in Mr Herbert’s large majority, and for several weeks after the first Watford meeting an acrimonious correspondence raged in the columns of the West Herts Post and Watford Newsletter. In the letters contributed by Mr Herbert’s supporters my name and personality were treated with that uncompromising frankness which always characterises political controversy, and I was obliged to attempt to defend myself. But the agitation caused me by this continuous polemic was soon swallowed up in the far greater perturbations which accompanied the publication of my novel The Dark Tide.
12
For the first two or three years of my onslaught upon editorial offices, my journalism, like Winifred’s, remained persistent and hopeful rather than progressive. It might, indeed, have perished altogether from sheer lack of encouragement as soon as I left the flattering undergraduate atmosphere of Oxford, had I not been haunted by the memory of a ride through Fleet Street with my St Monica’s aunt on the top of a No. 13 ’bus while I was still at school.
We were going back to London Bridge in the early twilight of a late autumn evening; against the smouldering red of the November sunset, the roofs of the tall newspaper buildings were silhouetted with black, challenging sharpness. Clenching my hands in the earnest ecstasy of seventeen, I vowed to win for myself the right to enter those offices as a respected contributor. The War came and went; love and life came and went; but the dream remained. It was with me when, in the early days of Time and Tide, I took my first tentative notes and articles to the former Fleet Street office. It is with me still; though for years
now I have passed on numerous professional errands along that narrow thoroughfare, I never see the name ‘Fleet Street’ without a profound, absurd renewal of the old childish emotion.
From time to time during the months in Bloomsbury, Roland’s father, who maintained his benevolent interest in our literary prospects, discussed our work with us, and deplored ‘the fume and fret’ of our London activities. Actually, as he came later to realise, we could hardly have had a better preparation for the free-lance political journalism to which we were both growing more and more attracted than that turbulent, kaleidoscopic life of journeys and meetings, platforms and debates and speeches. Under its influence our articles, from being the colourless, anecdotal productions which every newspaper office receives by the thousand, gradually acquired those provocative qualities which alone bring the era of rejection-slips to a close. Even when lectures and pacifist controversies were new and nerve-racking experiences, the delightful sense that I now had something else to write about but the memories which were then still too painful to be reconstructed with detachment caused me to send Winifred an unusually optimistic letter.
‘I sometimes envy the Huxley family, with its swarm of distinguished relatives and hereditary niche in literature,’ I told her in November 1921. ‘And yet, I think, if one can only do it, it’s really more exciting to rise “from obscurity”, as Machiavelli would put it.’
For book-writing our swift, eager days did not, perhaps, provide the best possible atmosphere, although they did supply a wealth of material for that future time when some change in political or personal circumstances would bring the opportunity for recapitulating their complicated emotions and experiences. But book-writing of a sort was carried on with fervour; and in spite of lectures, and teaching, and propaganda, and persevering much-travelled articles, our first novels were both finished by the spring of 1922. Roland’s father, after reading and approving of The Dark Tide, decided to take it to Putnams’, where a leading member of the firm was an old friend of his, while Winifred, also by his advice, approached Cassells’ with Anderby Wold, her story of Yorkshire farm life.
Putnams’ reaction to The Dark Tide - a dramatic tale of Oxford women students, with black and white values quite unrelieved by half-tones - was much, and perhaps even more than, what might have been expected. Frankly, they said, they did not recommend publication, and though they thought the author should go on writing, they suggested that perhaps it would not be a bad idea for her to wait until she had settled down and had a little more experience of life before attempting another novel.
I wrote rather bitterly in response to the letter from Roland’s father which enclosed this communication, for I felt that I had had quite as much experience of life (to say nothing of death) as I wanted for the present. After giving him my opinion of Putnams’ perspicacity, I begged him not to involve himself in any more of my failures; would he please return the manuscript and let me shoulder the burden of possible future rejections myself? In sending back the book, he suggested that I should try John Murray, so I called, greatly intimidated, at the offices of that impressive and decorous firm. There I saw Mr Leonard Huxley, who received me with gracious benevolence; I was standing, he told me, in the place where Byron had stood, and I was a young author aspiring to fame. His publishing house, however, soon repudiated the responsibility of helping me to achieve that aspiration, and for the second time The Dark Tide returned to Doughty Street, where Anderby Wold, back from Cassells’, very soon joined it.
At this moment I happened to read a Press paragraph stating that the Femina Vie-Heureuse Prize for 1921-22 had been awarded to Rose Macaulay for her novel Dangerous Ages. Tentatively I wrote to congratulate her without the slightest hope that she would remember me, but she replied almost at once, concluding with an inquiry after the progress of the novel that I had mentioned at the Somerville Bazaar. Nothing, had I but known it, could have been more profoundly self-sacrificing than this inquiry by an established writer of a junior Somervillian, for all successful authors are accustomed to receive so many requests from complete strangers for assistance with publishers, and so many unsolicited manuscripts with confident demands for free criticism, that the mere mention of somebody who has an unpublished novel and wants advice might well be enough to send any one of them out of town for a week.
Innocently regarding myself as quite a special case, I poured out to Miss Macaulay the tale of my disappointment over The Dark Tide, and in another letter of which the generous kindness was quite unspoilt by condescension, she suggested that I should send the book to Collins, her own publishers, offering at the same time to write to their chief reader, Mr J. D. Beresford, on my behalf. When the book, despite her intervention, came back once more, with a detailed letter of criticism upon which Mr Beresford must have spent several hours of precious time, she asked me to tea to talk it over. What she really thought of the raw crudities which even a cursory glance revealed, I now shudder to imagine, but she was too considerate, and too wise, to suggest those fundamental reconstructions which maturity and literary experience alone can make. Her advice enabled me to make numerous improvements in such details of style and syntax as were capable of amendment, and I carried away a glowing memory of hot crumpets and brisk, incisive conversation upon which I relied exclusively for stimulus in the disheartening months that followed.
During the remainder of that year I sent The Dark Tide to almost every publisher in London and elsewhere. It came back, on each occasion a little grimier and more dog-eared, from Constable, and Blackwell, and Chatto & Windus, and Martin Secker, and Sidgwick & Jackson; after that my memory loses count. Most publishers contented themselves with rejection-slips, but quite a number of eminent ‘readers’ wrote letters of advice, suggesting that I should rewrite the beginning, or the end, or the middle, or counselling a different form of dialogue, or urging me to change the story’s melancholy conclusion to a ‘happy ending’.
One thing, at any rate, this prolonged period of rebuff did teach me, and that was the enormous, unfailing patience of the established author with the novice. After each new rejection the untiring Miss Macaulay was ready with her inexhaustible supply of suggestions and encouragement, and to-day, when unsolicited manuscripts arrive at my house from unfamiliar sources with requests for criticism at my busiest moments, I remember her generosity to me when I was an unutterable nuisance myself, and wish that I could feel or show to my importunate correspondents a quarter of her persistent goodwill. Her periodic letters were the lamps which lighted that unprofitable year of 1922, so black in its continual discouragement, so empty, after the small comparative triumphs at Oxford, of any sign of ultimate literary success. But for Rose Macaulay I might well have given up, and although in the past ten years I have done so little of all that I hoped to do, and have advanced so short a distance along that humble path to achievement which so dimly resembles the shining highroad of my early confident dreams, I have never ceased to be glad that I did go on.
Meanwhile, the vicissitudes of Winifred’s novel, Anderby Wold, were proving much briefer and far less harassing. When we called at the Doughty Street studio before going to our respective families for a holiday after the Geneva Summer School of 1922, Winifred opened a letter from the firm of John Lane which made, to her humble astonishment, an offer for her book. To me also this event was something of a psychological crisis; Winifred was considerably my junior, at Oxford she had followed modestly in my literary wake, and it had simply never occurred to me that her work could be preferred and published before my own. In Kensington, alone in my bedroom, I made myself face and acknowledge the hard fact that Anderby Wold was a better book than The Dark Tide. Inwardly I knew it to be more balanced and mature than my own novel in spite of the fact that Winifred had planned and begun it when barely twenty-two, and at last I wrote her the appreciation which I had dumbfoundedly withheld in Bloomsbury.
‘I am trying to make myself believe that a book of yours will really exist, with your name on the cover, and
we shall perhaps stand outside Bumpus’s and look at it on the shelf of new novels . . . I know the reviews will be nice - it is a kind book as well as a clever one and has always inspired me with a secret envy . . . You make me feel very humble - one who talks but never achieves while you quietly achieve and don’t talk. You will be quite famous by the time you are my age - and one rare thing will make your success the more distinguished, and that is that you cannot get any success so great as the success you deserve . . . I shall be glad really to know someone intimately who succeeds - just because all my best friends so far have either died before they could achieve anything or else are held up for lack of funds. One needs a change to prove that just occasionally life does repay one for living . . . Somehow the whole world seems subtly changed by your book getting taken. I suppose it’s like what I said . . . about crossing the gulf between aspiration and achievement; once people have done it they are never quite the same again.’
By the end of 1922, I had come to the sad but resigned conclusion that The Dark Tide was never likely to find a home, and in desperation had begun to draft my second novel, ‘The Man on the Crucifix’, which was afterwards published under the title Not Without Honour. In spite of this new experiment, the hope of becoming a writer of any kind was flickering very low; apart from Rose Macaulay, the literary world of London seemed to have made it very clear that they did not want me and my ingenuous efforts, and I began once again to feel that I could justify my survival of the War only by piping for peace upon an indefinite series of platforms. And yet, notwithstanding the lack of external evidence from publishers and editors, I could not quite slay an inward conviction that it was not really upon platforms that I could best plead either that or any other unpopular cause.
Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 Page 64
