A Man of Parts

by David Lodge

  ‘I must get home,’ he said to Rebecca.

  ‘Don’t go,’ she pleaded. ‘I feel the baby may come at any moment.’

  ‘It’s not due yet.’

  ‘I know, but … it could be early. Why must you go?’

  ‘I have to write something about this war, for the Daily Chronicle,’ he said. He had a lucrative agreement with this paper to write on topical issues any time he felt inclined. ‘I can’t fight, but I can write, and I can only do that at home. I will leave you in Lettie’s safe hands.’ And against her protest he caught the last train from Hunstanton to Bishop’s Stortford.

  It was dark by the time he alighted from the train, and he was grateful for the moonlight supplementing the weak beams of Gladys’s headlamps as he made his way back through the country lanes to Easton Glebe. Once he narrowly escaped ending up in a ditch as a fox running across the road made him swerve. He felt euphoric rather than nervous, however, and this unaccustomed night drive took on an epic quality in his imagination, as if he were the commander of an armoured car pursuing some urgent secret mission on the eve of battle. The die was cast. It was war – and he knew how it should be presented to the British people, and how to turn the apparent negation of all his hopes for mankind into a positive crusade.

  It was past midnight by the time he rolled up outside the front door of Easton Glebe. Jane heard the throb of his engine and the crunch of his tyres on the gravel, and came downstairs in her dressing gown to let him in. She took him to the kitchen and gave him cocoa and a ham sandwich as they talked. ‘Poor dear, you must be exhausted,’ she said as he finished the sandwich and drained his mug. ‘Come to bed. Sleep in my room tonight. I want to be cuddled.’

  ‘No, I’m sorry, Jane. I must work.’

  ‘Work?’ she protested. ‘For heaven’s sake, H.G.! What work can you possibly have to do tonight?’

  ‘An article for the Chronicle,’ he said.

  They parted with a kiss on the landing, and he went to his own bedroom with its alcove equipped for writing at night: a desk with a green shaded lamp, a spirit stove for boiling a kettle to make tea, a barrel of biscuits, and a bottle of whisky for a nightcap when he was finished. He took off his clothes and put on the comfortable sleeping-suit, rather like an overgrown baby’s garment, which he preferred to a dressing gown for these late-night writing sessions. He sat down at the desk, took a clean foolscap block from a drawer, and filled his fountain pen with blue-black ink.

  He had already rehearsed the argument in his head on his journey from Hunstanton, and it did not take him very long to write it out. The awesome scale of the war which had suddenly engulfed Europe, and was bound to spread eventually to America in the west and as far as Japan in the east, was a measure of the prize which victory would bring: a permanent worldwide peace. For that reason it was a war which had to be won:

  There can be no diplomatic settlement that will leave German Imperialism free to explain its failure to its people and start new preparations. We have to go on until we are absolutely done for, or until the Germans as a people know they are beaten, and are convinced they have had enough of war.

  We are fighting Germany. But we are fighting without any hatred of the German people. We do not intend to destroy either their freedom or their unity. But we have to destroy an evil system of government and the mental and material corruption that has got hold of the German imagination and taken possession of German life. We have to smash the Prussian Imperialism as thoroughly as Germany in 1871 smashed the rotten Imperialism of Napoleon III. And also we have to learn from the failure of that victory to avoid a vindictive triumph.

  This is already the vastest war in history. It is a war not of nations but of mankind. It is a war to exorcise a world-madness and end an age.

  When he had finished the article, he poured himself two fingers of whisky and sipped it as he read through the draft, making occasional emendations. Then he wrote at the top of the first page in capital letters, ‘THE WAR THAT WILL END WAR’, turned out the lamp on the desk, felt his way to the bed, crawled under the covers, and fell into a deep sleep.

  He was woken at eight o’clock by a servant with a telegram: ‘BABY BOY BORN FIVE MINUTES PAST MIDNIGHT THIS MORNING STOP MOTHER AND CHILD BOTH WELL STOP LETTIE’.

  ‘Is there a reply, sir?’ said the housemaid. ‘The boy is waiting.’

  What he wanted to say could not be passed under the inquisitive eyes of the Easton post office. ‘No reply – but here’s a sovereign for the boy.’

  ‘A sovereign, sir?’ The girl looked shocked, as well she might – it was more than a week’s wages for her.

  ‘I mean, a shilling,’ he said, smiling and shaking his head, and gave it to her. Later he wrote a letter to Rebecca:

  I am radiant this morning. With difficulty I refrain from giving people large tips. I am so delighted that I have a manchild in the world – of yours. I will get the world tidy for him … I keep thinking of your dear, dear grave beloved face on your pillow and you and it. I do most tremendous love you, Panther.

  Jaguar

  – ‘The War That Will End War …’ That didn’t enhance your reputation as a prophet.

  – Oh, don’t rub it in. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been asked to eat those words. I didn’t mean it as a simple prediction – but as an aim. I said in that very first article that we might go under. I just wanted to emphasise what was at stake, why it was worth fighting the war to the death. And I said we must avoid a vindictive triumph if we won – good counsel which was ignored in the event, with disastrous consequences.

  – But you ruled out a negotiated peace. ‘There can be no negotiated settlement.’ That attitude, which was widely shared, led to a four-year war of attrition, mostly fought over the same narrow strip of territory, and the loss of millions of lives.

  – Nobody foresaw it would last so long. And that was mainly the fault of the military establishment, their total lack of imagination about tactics and weaponry. They could think of nothing except an artillery bombardment which was supposed to disable the enemy trenches, but more often than not failed to do so, followed by an infantry charge across no man’s land into a hail of machine-gun fire. I invented tanks – I mean the idea of them – in 1903, in a short story called ‘The Land Ironclads’, but nobody thought of making them until halfway through the war, and they weren’t really effective until it was nearly over.

  – But your journalism at the beginning of the war brought you into alliance with every dyed-in-the-wool patriot and jingoist in the country. Didn’t that worry you?

  – Not for some time. You know what it was like in England in the early months – a kind of hysteria gripped the country. The shock of finding ourselves at war was converted into a Crusade mentality. Bishops identified the Allied cause with Christianity. Men mobbed the recruiting offices to join up. Boys and middle-aged men falsified their ages to get into the army.

  – And the Germans were demonised with stories, mostly faked, of atrocities committed in Belgium. Vesta Tilley sang ‘We don’t want to lose you but we think you ought to go’ at recruiting rallies, and children handed out white feathers to the men who didn’t immediately volunteer.

  – I never approved of the white feather business. My Daily Chronicle articles rode on a tide of popular feeling in which there was a lot of meretricious rubbish mixed up with idealism.

  – It wasn’t just those articles, though, was it? There were letters to the papers. One to the Times, for instance, calling for the civilian population to be armed to resist a German invasion. ‘Many men, and not a few women, will turn out to shoot Germans. And if the raiders are so badly advised as to try terror-striking reprisals on the Belgian pattern, we irregulars will, of course, massacre every German straggler we can put a gun to.’

  – I can’t defend that. It wasn’t really a practical suggestion, and the authorities just laughed at it. But I thought we should demonstrate to the world that the entire nation was committed to resistin
g German militarism. Very early in the war Charlie Masterman summoned a whole lot of writers to a meeting in Whitehall to ask what we could do to boost morale in the country. We were an oddly assorted bunch, but very distinguished – Robert Bridges, Henry Newbolt, Granville Barker, Barrie, Conan Doyle, Chesterton, Gilbert Murray, John Masefield, Arnold of course, and me, and lots of others I can’t remember, some of them liberal, some conservative – and there was no way we would all agree on anything, so I suggested we should each act individually. As I did. In retrospect, some things I wrote in the heat of the moment were ill-judged.

  – They lost you some friends: Violet Paget, for instance. She wrote about you, ‘he enlisted at once for the Fleet Street front and bid us unsheath the Sword of Peace for the final extermination of Militarism.’

  – She never forgave me for supporting the war. Neither did the Bloomsbury group, but that didn’t bother me. I never had much time for them, or they for me.

  – And Shaw?

  – Ours was always a very combative friendship, punctuated with periods of outright hostility, of which that was certainly one. I attacked him for his Common Sense about the War pamphlet in November 1914, and similar stuff. He advised the soldiers on both sides to shoot their officers and go home. Of course that wasn’t common sense at all, it was a rhetorical flourish, which enraged public opinion. But basically he was right. The war was futile, and should have been stopped before it became unstoppable. It took me some time to see that. Some time and hundreds of thousands of casualties.

  – But you didn’t become a pacifist.

  – No, but neither did Shaw, for that matter. His real point of view was hard to pin down, as usual. He liked to goad people into re-examining their assumptions, but all he usually succeeded in doing was to annoy the hell out of them. Some of the writers who were at that meeting convened by Masterman wanted him tarred and feathered.

  – On the whole, established senior writers didn’t come out of the war very well, did they? From the safety of their studies they filled the newspaper columns with patriotic poems and anti-German rants and confident predictions of the course of the war which were invariably wrong. The heroes were the young poets who fought and died, and the conscientious objectors who were vilified and sometimes locked up for their principles

  – I wouldn’t disagree with that. It was a queer war – unimaginable horror on the Western Front, and life going on much as normal at home, only a few hundred miles away. Of course there were shortages and so on, and later on a few air raids, but for much of the time, if you didn’t read the newspapers and you didn’t have a close relative involved, you could forget that there was a war on at all – in fact one tried to forget it, otherwise it was too depressing. We went on having weekend parties at Easton all through the war, with hockey and tennis and badminton, and charades and dancing to the pianola in the barn.

  – You were fortunate in being, at forty-eight, too old to be expected to fight, and with sons much too young to be called up.

  – I was aware of that, aware I was an object of envy, and almost resentment, to friends with husbands or sons at the Front – especially if they were among the casualties. Poor old Pember Reeves, for instance, was completely broken up when his son was killed, and never replied to my letter of condolence. I couldn’t blame him. Of course I was affected by the deaths of young men I knew – especially the brilliant young men I’d met at Cambridge, Rupert Brooke, for instance, and Ben Keeling. But as the war got worse and worse I felt my personal immunity undermined my authority to speak about it. I was less and less comfortable as a propagandist, but frustrated in my efforts to find a more useful role. There were frustrations in my private life too …

  The elation, almost euphoria, he had felt on the first day of the war was produced by the convergence of Rebecca’s safe delivery of their child and his vision of a mission for himself in the great historic conflict ahead. But just as the war became bogged down in a costly and indecisive struggle with no happy resolution in sight, so, to compare little things with great, did his relationship with Rebecca. Looking back later, he realised that the seed of all its problems was letting Rebecca keep the baby, but how could he have denied her? When he arrived at Brig-y-don to see his child for the first time she was suckling him, looking down with a fond smile as he lay cradled in her arms, with mouth clamped to her nipple and nose squashed against her generous breast. She looked up briefly to say, ‘Hallo, Jaguar,’ and returned her gaze to the child. ‘What a beautiful sight,’ he said, stooping to kiss her forehead. ‘Madonna and child.’ ‘I love him,’ she said. ‘I want to keep him. I couldn’t bear to give him to somebody else.’ ‘Then you must keep him, Panther,’ he said. ‘Thank you, Jaguar!’ she said, with a radiant smile, and raised her face to be kissed again, this time on the lips.

  Later he tentatively restated the case for adoption: bringing up the child would be a time-consuming responsibility, interfering with the literary career she had planned for herself, and making it more difficult to keep their relationship discreetly hidden. But she shook her head vehemently in denial of these obvious truths. One couldn’t be writing all the time, and anyway he could afford to provide her with servants, couldn’t he? And as to the risk of public disapproval, she didn’t care. All she knew was that the baby was her child and she wanted to bring him up. ‘All right, then,’ he said. ‘What shall we call him?’

  They agreed to call him Anthony Panther West. Rebecca chose the name ‘Anthony’ mainly because it had no associations with her family or his. ‘Panther’ was his own suggestion, a defiant reference to the love which had produced the child. The clerk at the Register Office of Births, startled by the second forename, looked up with his pen poised in the air and asked him to spell it out before inscribing it, with obvious disapproval, on the certificate.

  Lettie, who had hitherto shown no sign of forgiving him for seducing her young sister, seemed at last to warm towards him to some extent and thanked him for agreeing to support Rebecca in her desire to keep the child. ‘I don’t say it’s a sensible thing for her to do,’ Lettie said, ‘but it’s generous of you.’ ‘Well, I’m a rich man,’ he said. ‘I can afford to give her that.’ Mrs Townshend, who arrived on the scene a few days later, approved his decision. ‘It was delightful to see R.W. with her boy,’ she wrote. ‘It would be a thousand pities to separate them. Suckling is a wonderful calmant. A lover at discreet intervals isn’t enough for her: she needs a baby and a home as well. Even as a writer she’ll do better work if she has them. I don’t know how you‘re going to manage it.’

  The first task, obviously, was to find a more suitable home than Brig-y-don for mother and child. He accordingly asked Mrs Townshend to look for somewhere at a convenient distance from Easton, and she soon found a substantial detached house called ‘Quinbourne’ outside the village of Braughing in Hertfordshire, only a dozen miles from Easton Glebe. There he settled Rebecca in September, with a full complement of servants – housekeeper, nursemaid, housemaid and cook – and for a while she was happy. She was infatuated with her baby, pleased to be mistress of her own household for the first time, and even began to do a little journalistic work. But then, as autumn gave way to winter, the disadvantages of her situation made themselves felt. Quinbourne, formerly a farmhouse, was isolated, at the end of a muddy track some distance from the village, and although he was able to run over in Gladys to see Rebecca at frequent intervals, for most of the time her servants were the only people with whom she was in regular contact. The Irish midwife who had delivered Anthony, and stayed on as his nurse, was a treasure, but not intellectually stimulating company. The other women, having guessed that Anthony was his child, and discovered his real identity, began to intimate their disapproval in a multitude of sly hints that she dared not challenge. This petty harassment turned ugly when the housekeeper was caught by Rebecca attempting to pilfer money, and retaliated with blackmail, threatening to tell Jane of the existence of his mistress. The threat was simply dealt with by te
lling her that Jane already knew, and the woman was dismissed, but she persisted in spreading scandal in the neighbourhood. Then one day the cook burst into the dining room and began to make mad, obscene allegations against the nurse and housemaid. It transpired that the poor woman had just heard she had lost the third of three brothers killed in Flanders, and had tried to drown her grief in brandy. She deserved only pity and sympathy, but it was an upsetting incident, which further increased Rebecca’s dissatisfaction with her situation.

  ‘It’s like being marooned on the dark side of the moon here,’ she said, developing this analogy from some astronomical remark of his own. ‘This house is a satellite of Easton Glebe. Anthony and I revolve round your other life, but we can never share it, and we must remain invisible to your family and friends.’ Her sense that he enjoyed another life only a few miles away, full of interesting visitors and amusing entertainment from which she was excluded, was a constant source of niggling discontent, and it was no use for him to say that at present Easton Glebe was made unbearably noisy and inconvenient by the extensive building work that was in progress, and that Jane complained that he was neglecting her by spending too much time in Braughing. Rebecca responded by alluding to his ‘promise’ to marry her one day, and hinted that the sooner he divorced Jane for that purpose, the better. This suggestion he firmly squashed, but he agreed that the current set-up was unsatisfactory, and that she ought to move to London where she would be able to see her friends easily and take a more active part in literary life. The spring of 1915 was devoted to pursuing this plan, and by midsummer she and Anthony were settled in a villa called ‘Alderton’ in Hatch End, on the northern outskirts of London, with Wilma Meikle, a friend from suffragette days, as housekeeper and companion, and the usual complement of servants. He felt it was still necessary for their benefit, and that of the neighbours, to invent a cover story for this new ménage. Rebecca was ‘Miss West’, bringing up her orphaned nephew, and he was a family friend overseeing their welfare who occasionally visited and stayed the night in the guest room. This pretence, he strongly suspected, fooled nobody, but respectability was precariously maintained.