My Brother Evelyn & Other Profiles Read online

  In the course of 1920, or it may have been 1921, his father, whom I had assumed to be a person of consequence in business, had a stroke. He was helpless and speechless. After a few days Ralph’s mother, on going down to her husband’s office to negotiate a cheque with which to meet the expenses of her household, learned that for many years her husband had been cutting into capital and that there was no money left. There had been no need for him to do so. If he had told his family fifteen years before that a need for economy had arisen, economies could have been effected without discomfort. It was a cruel blow for Straus and he took it with courage, dignity and common sense. After a couple of bewildered days, he settled down to see what could be rescued from the ruin. The house in Craven Road was given up; he sold his library and he moved his mother into his uncle’s flat, occupying there himself a minute room which was both his study and his bedroom, and set about increasing his income.

  In many ways it was easier then than it is now for a writer to earn a living. The B.B.C. did not provide a market, but there were many more newspapers, sixpenny weeklies and magazines. Hutchinson had a large group of magazines, so had Cassell’s. A boy-meets-girl story had to be quite bad not to find a purchaser. At the same time the prices paid in 1920 were very low. Five guineas a thousand was a satisfactory price for a featured article. The Daily Mail paid three guineas for signed three-hundred-word articles on its leader page and advertised itself as paying the highest standard rates in contemporary journalism.

  If you were to live by your pen, you had to rely on output. Into this jungle was launched at the age of forty Ralph Straus, who up to then had been able to write the kinds of article he liked, at his own pace, for papers of his own choice.

  He showed great character during those next years. He never grumbled, never displayed self-pity, never talked nostalgically of ‘my affluent days’. No one who did not know him well would have been aware that he had suffered a reverse. He played tennis at Prince’s, entertained at the Odde Volumes and the Omar Khayyam, played cricket for J. C. Squire’s Invalids; he was always well dressed, he drove a Morris Cowley; he economized in ways which were not obvious and he worked extremely hard.

  Many novelists in such a predicament would have added to their income by writing detective or historical novels under a pseudonym, but Straus concentrated on journalism, particularly in the Daily Chronicle, adopting a female pseudonym—Gertrude Belt, a character from one of his novels—to increase his output; it was thus that he acquired his nickname among the members of Clifford Bax’s annual cricket tour. One morning when we were on tour an article signed by Gertrude Belt opened with the line ‘We women, and particularly those of us who are blessed with nephews and nieces …’ When Straus came down to breakfast, he was greeted with a guffaw from Eric Gillett. ‘Well, Auntie, and how are your little ones this morning?’

  The nickname stuck and he was always known afterwards as ‘Auntie’—but only upon cricket tours. A junior member of the side who addressed him as ‘Auntie’ at a London cocktail party was reminded that there was a place for all things. He was, however, known to many as ‘Uncle Ralph’. This was due to his style of reviewing in the Sunday Times. At that time the paper was able to devote several pages to books. The editor, Leonard Rees, took a special pride in them. He was a good editor to work for, making his contributors feel that they were members of a family. He gave large men’s dinners for them at the Savile and also entertained them—in mixed company—in his own house. He liked at the end of a dinner to send away his guests in a good temper with a commission to contribute to his columns.

  Rees took a personal interest in each individual contribution and he built up Ralph Straus into an influential figure in the world of letters. To begin with he gave Straus a half-column of novels; not the most important ones and not at the top of the page. But within a year or two the half-column had become a column.

  Gerald Gould reviewed novels for the Observer and no two men could have approached the same task more differently. Gould was enthusiastic and romantic. He was criticized for being over ready to praise, but that is a fault on the credit side. He looked for the merits in a book and the readers of his column felt on a Sunday morning that a week of enjoyment lay ahead of them. Next day they hurried expectantly to their branch of Boot’s or Smith’s.

  Straus’s approach was altogether different. He was a slippered writer. This was against him as a novelist. He liked to tell his stories through the eyes of the kind of man that he would have liked to be, a scholar and a recluse, moneyed and worldly-wise, who regards the traffic of human beings with benevolent, amused detachment. This limited his range, only a certain kind of action came within the scrutiny of his narrator. His most successful novel was entitled The Unseemly Adventure, but nothing indecorous occurred in it. Horace Lorrimer said that he did not mind what the characters in a Saturday Evening Post serial did between instalments, but I cannot recall any character of Straus’s committing an act of fornication at any point of his or her life.

  The characteristics which made Straus often an ineffective novelist helped him, however, as a reviewer. He talked across a fire-place, reasonably and quietly, telling his reader the kind of novel it was and whether it was good of that kind. He was even-tempered, he was never flustered. The readers of his column could rely upon his advice, and authors found him kind, helpful, encouraging; he explained them to their public. He claimed that he could read any novel within two hours, but he always knew what the book in consideration was about. He never missed its point. His manner was avuncular. It is not surprising that he was known affectionately as ‘Uncle Ralph’.

  He had a happy life and very possibly in the long run he was made the happier by the reversal of his family fortune. He was brought through it into closer touch with his friends and when the Second War brought its restrictions and its burden of taxation, he was already inoculated against that kind of shock.

  His writing career was exposed to the same vicissitudes as that of most of us. He had his strokes of bad luck and his strokes of good, a marked piece of good fortune coming at a time when he desperately needed money.

  A. P. Herbert was complaining, I believe during one of J. C. Squire’s cricket matches, that he had thought of a fine title but could not devise a book to fit it. ‘What was the title?’ he was asked.

  ‘“Married Alive.”’

  ‘I wish you’d give it to me,’ said Straus.

  ‘Very well, I will.’

  It was an excellent title, but it was not Straus’s subject either and the book which he attached to it was feeble. But Hollywood was so attracted by the title that it bought it for £700. The film that starred Lew Cody bore no resemblance to Straus’s plot. The two words ‘Married Alive’ were all Hollywood needed. It had no use for the other hundred thousand. A. P. H. had virtually made Straus a present of £700.

  He died in the early summer of 1950. His home in east Kent had been badly bombed during the war and on my return from the Middle East I had noticed that his right hand trembled, but he had seemed well enough during the preceding autumn and I had been seeing him constantly at the Savile Club, and at the three dining clubs of which we were both members, and for which he had proposed my candidature, the Odde Volumes, the Saintsbury and the Omar Khayyam. He was an excellent after-dinner speaker in his own flippant and facetious style and the last speech I heard him make when he proposed the toast of the guests at the Omar was one of his wittiest. I saw him for the last time as I had seen Hugh Kingsmill, from the top of a bus. He was walking slowly on the arm of a friend past the Café Royal. I had known that he had been ill, but the news of his death was as much a surprise as a blow. For me and for many others those three clubs have not been the same since.

  8

  W. L. George

  Another novelist, also a man twice my age who was to become a close friend in the post-war period, was W. L. George. He died young, in January 1926, and it is now many years since a book bearing his name has figured upon a booksta
ll. A new generation has probably never heard of him, but he was a remarkable man and his name often appears in contemporary autobiographies. ‘Prolific, tough, ambitious and capable’ are the adjectives with which Ivor Brown describes him in The Way of My World and between 1910 and 1926 he was much discussed in London.

  I met him at the first adult dinner party that I went to, in January 1919, at the Ford Madox Hueffers—as Violet Hunt and Ford Madox Ford were, at that time, known.* George was then forty-two years old. He was short, dapper, nearly bald, with prominent eyes and a short clipped dark moustache. He spoke with a French accent. He had been brought up in France and had done his military service there. I am not sure whether he had any English blood. His wife, Russet, was handsome and well dressed, with a great graciousness of manner.

  At that time, among his male contemporaries and seniors George was by no means popular; for several reasons. In the first place he had specialized in sex. His first novel A Bed of Roses, a serious sociological study, showed how a well brought up woman became a prostitute. With a lurid jacket it was displayed in a shilling edition in Villiers Street beside damaroids and contraceptives. He wrote articles about sex, he lectured on sex; though he did not boast of his conquests, he did not conceal that the pursuit of women was his chief preoccupation. That in itself would not have stood against him. Few writers have been more popular with their fellows than H. G. Wells. But George was a Frenchman. That made a difference. Xenophobia is easily excited where sex is concerned. Masculine resentment is usually aroused when a foreigner attracts feminine attention.

  In the second place his methods of self-advertisement were ostentatious; he had a facetious entry in Who’s Who. He was always being referred to in the gossip columns. Clifford Bax, who disliked personal publicity, noticed that whenever he gave a party and George was at it, there would be a paragraph in the Press within a week.

  Thirdly, George made a substantial income out of writing. That would not have put his contemporaries against him. Writers usually are pleased by the successes of their friends, because it reminds them that money can be made out of writing. Nor do they object to a writer stage-managing his career. Arnold Bennett was a much loved man. But much of George’s journalism was cheap, unworthy of his own high talents and lowering to the dignity of authorship.

  Politically, he was on the left of left. He had been very near to pacifism during the war. In view of his age and the imminent breakdown of his health, it is doubtful if he would have been accepted for active service, but he is reported to have said that he had no intention of joining the army; he did not mind being killed, but he could not bear the risk of disfigurement and becoming repulsive to women. He did not conceal his minority opinions, and was nearly expelled from the Savile Club for taking Ramsay MacDonald there to lunch. In September 1919 when there was a railway strike, he advocated in the then extremely left wing Daily Herald the setting up of Soviets throughout the country.

  Socialism alone would not have put his fellows against him. Bertrand Russell had served a prison sentence as a pacifist. But George’s urge to make money by almost any means was an inappropriate companion to his socialism, and revolutionary behaviour did not come well from a rich man who had been brought up in France. He was un-English, that was what it all came down to.

  This let it be remembered was in 1919; opinions changed towards him during his last two years, and even in 1919 he had many loyal friends, women especially. He was a literary uncle to a number of young women writers, to Sheila Kaye-Smith and G. B. Stern in particular. He discussed their contracts with them and their relations with editors and agents. He helped them plot the graphs of their careers. His advice was sound commercially and it was wise in a larger literary sense. He enjoyed talking ‘shop’ but at the same time he never lost sight of the writer’s proper goal—the writing of a masterpiece.

  He was also helpful to young men. Douglas Jerrold pays a deserved tribute to him in Georgian Adventure. He never forced his good services upon you, he was never officious, but he was always ready to put you in touch with an editor to whom your work might appeal. He did not waste the time of busy men with pointless introductions, but where he could put the right people in touch with one another, he did. I had good reason to be grateful to him on several counts.

  George was a generous host. He lived on the north side of the Park, in Albion Street, and I have the happiest memories of his parties. I noted with admiration the way he organized them; he always had his eye upon his guests; he was quick to observe when a conversation had begun to flag and he would separate the two, moving another guest across. It was annoying sometimes to be interrupted in the middle of a conversation, but more often than not the change was welcomed. You were given a chance of talking to everybody in the room. I have often thought of George in later days when I have found myself saying at the end of an evening, to a fellow guest, ‘It’s too bad, but we haven’t had one word together.’ I learnt from George one very valuable social lesson, not to be a guest at your own party.

  George was, naturally, an author whom I was anxious to get onto Chapman & Hall’s list, but there seemed little likelihood that I should succeed as he had recently signed a three-novel contract with Methuen, with good advances. It was through chance we got him. Lunching at the Savage with C. S. Evans and myself, he mentioned that A Bed of Roses was out of print. I told my father this. We were not likely, I said, to make real money from a cheap edition, but it would be good window-dressing to have George’s name upon our list, and when the Methuen contract expired, he might think of us. We had better move fast, I added, or Charlie Evans would be on to it. Within a week a contract for the cheap rights of A Bed of Roses had been signed. A little later Eric Pinker rang me up to say that Methuen’s were complaining that W. L. George’s new book was obscene. Would we be interested?

  The book was The Confession of Ursula Trent; it told the story of a girl of county family, who makes no particular resistance to a seducer in the private room of a London restaurant, becomes a manicurist and has a long illicit love affair before she finds happiness in marriage. That in itself was not very shocking at that time, but told in the first person, through the woman’s eye, it had a cogent intimacy. A young woman reading it would feel that all this was happening to herself and that she was approving it. That was why Methuen’s objected. But even so, even in 1921 it seemed surprising that a publisher who had signed a three-novel contract with the author of A Bed of Roses—knowing the kind of book that he was likely to write—should have objected to Ursula Trent.

  George himself was of the opinion that Methuen’s reaction was determined, subconsciously if not actually, by their having lost money on his previous book, a not very exciting story about a newspaper proprietor, through paying a too high advance. George’s book before it, Blind Alley, one of his best and published during a boom, had sold very well. Methuen had expected his sales to go up but they went down instead. They perhaps welcomed an opportunity to cut their losses.

  ‘It’s always best,’ George would say, ‘to ask for a high royalty rather than a high advance. A publisher hates over-advances. He’s always happy when an advance has been earned, even though, through a high royalty, it has been earned by the sale of fewer copies. I’d never have had that trouble with Methuen if I’d remembered that.’

  Luckily for us, he had not remembered it, and luckily for himself, too, in the long run. He was as happy at Henrietta Street as we were to see him there. He became one of the easiest authors on our list. He never bothered us with suggestions or enquiries, did not ask for daily accounts of how the book was selling or with complaints that the librarian of the Smith’s branch at Notting Hill had never heard of it. When he delivered the manuscript, he considered that his job was done and that it was now up to the publisher to sell it. He wrote a publicity handout for the Press and he gave his opinion on the jacket if it was invited. But that was all. He never interfered. If a book did not sell as well as he had hoped, he did not necessarily blame the pu
blisher.

  He published all his subsequent books through us. For his novels he accepted an advance of £300. This may seem very small but only authors and publishers know how little money an author can make out of a book that appears to be successful.

  George gave me this advice, ‘Never confess your sales as a novelist. If you tell the truth, people will be astonished and think you are unsuccessful. It harms you to have them thinking that.

  ‘On the other hand you can safely discuss the prices you receive from American magazines. What, they will exclaim, a thousand dollars just for that!’

  The Confession of Ursula Trent was published in the early autumn of 1921. It sold quite well, and a number of men, Clifford Bax among them, considered it remarkable that George should have been able to enter a woman’s mind so convincingly, but it had a bad press and it was during that autumn that George’s stock in terms of social popularity touched its lowest level.

  In the previous autumn he and his wife had gone to America on a lecture tour. In January Russet died. She was very popular, George was devoted to her, and genuine sympathy was felt. That sympathy diminished when Ursula Trent appeared. A heartbroken widower should not, it was felt, have been writing at that time, that kind of book. Then in the late autumn his engagement to be remarried was announced.

  The engagement, like everything to do with George, was widely publicized. His fiancée had a Spanish background and distinguished antecedents. Her photographs showed her as dark, not very tall, slight, with an exceptionally good figure, pale skinned, and with a Southern air. It was rumoured that she was rich. After the honeymoon, they were to sail for America, for a lecture tour. The general reaction was a ‘Well now, really’.