My Brother Evelyn & Other Profiles Page 13

It was only an affair of whispers and if nothing more had transpired, such a temporary recession would have provided an effective background for an adulatory welcoming of The Herries Chronicle. ‘In the later ‘twenties,’ so might the encomia have read, ‘there were not lacking those who questioned Sir Hugh’s qualities, but now incontestably the proof is here.…’ That is how it might have been. But instead these whispers became a pedestal for the ‘Aunt Sally’ absurdities of Alroy Kear.

  It is honourable to strive for fame, the pursuit of money is venial not venal, but to write in order to become ‘a person of importance’ is not a creditable objective. That is a goal for politicians. A professional writer could not be exposed to a more damaging attack, and the power of Cakes and Ale was accentuated by a complete absence of ‘hatred, malice, and uncharitableness’ on its author’s part. Maugham has admitted that Cakes and Ale is the book he enjoyed writing most. It is told in the first person, and ‘Ashenden’ throughout is in the best of tempers. The atmosphere is sunny and good-natured. There is no suggestion that Maugham is trying to get his own back. He is just ‘having fun’.

  It must be admitted that Maugham drew several red herrings across the trail. He made Walpole a good golfer, which he was not, he attributed his celibacy to unrequited love, and there were a number of minor points of dissimilarity. J. B. Priestley, who collaborated once with Walpole, was dining with me shortly after its publication. One of my guests, my school-friend H. S. Mackintosh, whose ballades and light verse have recently received a more than cordial reception, but who was then no more than ‘somebody in trade’, referred to the caricature of Walpole. Priestley asked him why he assumed that it was Walpole. ‘Walpole would never order a lunch like that,’ he said. ‘But who else could it be?’ Mackintosh replied.

  That was the point. The character was too lifelike not to have been drawn from life; too much in it rang true; too much could be confirmed; too many ageing novelists recalled the flattering tributes to their work from a young writer, which were followed a few months after by the advance copy of a novel graciously inscribed ‘from a pupil to a master’; too many reviewers who had written in a lukewarm way about Walpole’s work, had received if not invitations to lunch, at least long letters expressing gratitude for the review, interest in the criticisms made and a resolve to profit at a next endeavour; too many literary ‘punters’ had noted how his apparently disinterested concern for his fellow writers—his letter to the Times Literary Supplement about first novels for example—had in fact provided Walpole with wide publicity without particularly benefiting the objects of his concern.

  The red herrings, by and large, made the situation worse. Where so many traits could be recognized, every touch of the palette knife was accepted as direct portraiture. Anthony West, reviewing Rupert Hart-Davis’s biography was to write (twenty-two years later) in the New Yorker: ‘Everything was there; the appealing charm that Walpole could lavish on those who were successful and might be useful, and the bland indifference with which he could treat old friends who had betrayed him by being neither, and most unkind of all his almost complete lack of talent.’

  That is unfair. Alroy Kear was based on Walpole but it was not completely Walpole. It is not true that Walpole dropped old friends who had ceased to be successful. He was on the contrary generous with his loans of money, and many writers now established stand in his debt for kindness and encouragement. Nor was he by any means without talent. He was industrious and ambitious. His novels had both theme and plot. He was not afraid of melodrama: he could evoke curiosity and maintain suspense. He could build up a background. He rarely created a vivid character, but he so enjoyed telling a story, he was so excited by what he had to tell that the reader became anxious about the outcome and was sufficiently ‘held’ not to be worried by the flatness of the actual writing.

  Alroy Kear is a composite creation, and a cruel but genuine portrait with ‘warts and all’ would have done less damage. Cakes and Ale ruined the last ten years of Walpole’s life.

  The story has been told that he began to read it while he was changing for dinner, as a guest in a country house. He had propped the book on the mantelpiece. The story opens with Kear and before he had read ten pages he had identified himself. In fascinated horror he read on; he forgot his dressing, he forgot dinner, he went on reading. When his host finally came up to see if anything was wrong he found Walpole standing before the mantelpiece, his shirt-tails flapping about his knees and his unbraced trousers in a coil round his ankles. His own account of the incident in his diary is less dramatic, but it was the embroidered story that went the rounds.*

  ‘How was Hugh taking it?’ Everyone was asking that, and Edward Knoblock was reported to have earned a diploma for tact by having asserted at a lunch party in Walpole’s company that it was ‘a little caddish of Willie to have written quite so cruelly about poor John Drink-water’.

  How was he taking it? How should he take it? The worst human misfortune had befallen him. He had been made to look an ass; and what was there that he could do about it? The days of duelling were past. He could not have assaulted in public a man fifteen years his senior and six inches shorter. He could not have addressed a letter to The Times. Ninety-nine times in a hundred it is wise to ignore attack; Walpole in that respect was wise. Unfortunately he overdid it. He not only behaved as though nothing had happened, but went out of his way to insist that nothing had happened.

  A year later Elinor Mordaunt published anonymously a novel of which Maugham was undisguisedly the central character. It was called Gin and Bitters in America, and Full Circle in England. Maugham brought an action against the book in the English courts and obtained its suppression.

  On the book’s appearance in America, Walpole attacked it violently. The book was published there by Farrar and Rinehart, and for many years there hung in the firm’s office a cartoon by Will Dyson entitled ‘The noble art of Self-defence’. It showed a small frail woman, holding a book before her face to protect herself from the assault of a man twice her size. Her assailant is umistake-ably Hugh Walpole. The book in her hand is Gin and Bitters and the caption reads, ‘Now no one can say that Cakes and Ale was meant for me.’

  The caricature of Walpole is lethally vindictive. The name of Dyson may not convey much today. The reputation of a political cartoonist is fugitive. But his gift was great and individual. He worked for the extreme left wing, and no one could have rendered more bestially the profiteers of the First War and the moneyed worldlings of the ‘twenties. He drew them half-animal, half-human, sometimes as pigs in overtight morning coats and over-tall top hats, their fingers dripping blood that became gold sovereigns as they reached their moneybags.

  It was with that technique that he drew Walpole. He posed him in a Rupert Brooke style open shirt posturing as the incarnation of careless youth; but you saw at once that he was middle-aged; there was a glandular obscenity about his retarded adolescence; his fingers were heavily ringed; they were long, pointed, pudgy; the fingers of a decadent. It exposed a basic unwholesomeness underlying a spurious healthiness. ‘The Man with the Red Hair’ showing beneath ‘Fortitude’. It was hard to look at Walpole afterwards without remembering that cartoon.

  I have been told that it was only by degrees that Walpole realized how much damage the book had done him. Cakes and Ale would not blow over. It was too good a book; as long as it was being read, and there seemed no likelihood of its not being read during his lifetime, he would look an ass. And it became in time apparent that he had made a mistake in letting himself still be numbered among Maugham’s acquaintances.

  Late in the ‘thirties Maugham gave a large supper party at Claridge’s in honour of his grandchild’s birth. There must have been a hundred and fifty people there. There was no fixed seating, there were a number of small tables and you sat where you chose. Most of the guests were connected in some way with the arts, and the grandchild’s health was proposed by Osbert Sitwell. Walpole was in any gathering, because of his height and chin, a
conspicuous figure, and there was a whispered ‘Fancy him being here’, as he moved from one table to another. It was felt that he would have shown dignity had he stayed away.

  His knighthood did his reputation little good. For no good reason, a knighthood has less prestige value for a novelist than it has for an actor or a painter, a critic or an historian. The best novelists have not been knighted and Galsworthy declined a knighthood. It was perhaps this reluctance of the novelist and poet to be addressed as Sir Francis or Sir George that encouraged Edward VII to institute the Order of Merit. When Walpole’s name appeared in the Honours List, people said, ‘Ah, it’s a consolation prize for Cakes and Ale’ Walpole, to judge from the published extract in his diary, was aware of this. But he felt he would ‘like to be a knight’.

  During the last months before the war he contributed a critical causerie to the Daily Graphic, a paper now amalgamated with the Sketch, that had at the time no literary standing. One wondered why he accepted the assignment. He could not have needed the money, and it must have been boring to wade through mediocre books. Did he want to feel somebody of consequence? At the end of the ‘twenties Arnold Bennett had written a weekly article on books for the Evening Standard. But that had been a different matter. The Evening Standard was an important and influential paper. It gave Bennett a pulpit. And he had enjoyed a sense of day-to-day event-fulness. He had felt in the swim. He ‘made’ several books, Jew Süss in particular, and every writer was anxious to be reviewed by Bennett. But the Graphic could not do that for Walpole.

  As the 1930s moved to their shadowed close, a feeling of irritation towards Walpole became apparent among other writers, the result possibly of a sense of guilt on their part, the realization that they had been unjust to him. It would be idle to pretend that most of us had not taken a malicious pleasure in his discomfiture. The Malvolio motif is an unfailing formula, it is human to be jealous of success, and Cakes and Ale had been very funny. But all the same we recognized that he had been unfairly treated. We resented his having given us the sense of guilt.

  In the spring of 1939 he was sent to Rome by the Herald Tribune to report the coronation of the Pope. In Roman Fountain, he used this trip as the framework for a variety of digressions. It is one of his better books, but it was published after the war had started and it contained much with which at such a time it was hard not to feel impatient. He wrote gratefully of the kindnesses he had received from Somerset Maugham when he was a young man in London. Why, one asked, must he maintain this pretence of friendship? He explained that he had given a false impression of complacence when he was young by holding up his prominent chin to keep his pince-nez-position. It seemed childish that he should be worrying about that at this late day. He described his loneliness in a hotel bedroom on his first night in Rome. It was a self-pitying passage. ‘Really,’ one thought, ‘what is the old quean fussing about now, living in a comfortable hotel as the Tribune’s guest with a large cheque waiting him at the end!’ He went on to wonder whether in such a hotel he might not one night feel the first symptoms of a mortal malady. A morbid passage. But, as I said, one was unfair to Walpole. Perhaps he did have a premonition then. At any rate, two years later he was dead.

  He died in June 1941, when nerves were strained. For a year England had been carrying on a war single-handed. Russia had not yet been invaded, America seemed stable in neutrality. There had been the winter’s bombing. Defeat was following defeat, in the Balkans, Greece, and Crete; the brief gains in the desert had been mostly lost. It was easy at such a time to snap. But making allowance for the temper of the moment, his obituary notices were astonishingly malevolent; they gave the impression that their authors had been smouldering for years with irritation, that they had not wanted to say what they felt during his lifetime because ‘after all the old boy was likeable and they were sorry for him’, but that now they could not wait to get it off their chests. Nothing could have surprised me more at Christmas 1918 than to have been told that in 1941 I should be reading such obituaries.

  Maugham has said more than once that a man who has done you a bad turn never forgives you for it, and it would seem that he has not forgiven Walpole the injury he did him.

  In A Writer’s Notebook he unfairly compares in terms of popularity Charles Garvice and Walpole—unfairly because Walpole must surely have made very much more money than Garvice did. And in his preface to the American edition of Cakes and Ale which was printed on the front page of the Sunday Book Section of the New York Times, he identified Hugh Walpole as the original of Alroy Kear, describing him as a man whom you could like but could not respect, dismissing his work as negligible. The nail in the coffin.

  Rupert Hart-Davis quoted in his biography, in particular reference to The Times obituary notice, the concluding sentence of Charles Morgan’s section on Walpole in The House of Macmillan; ‘So good a story-teller is likely at any rate to live longer than many a petit maître who sneered at him as soon as he was dead.’ But with the driving of that nail home, it is probable that more and more readers will join Anthony West in a mistaken identification of Alroy Kear with Walpole, so that Walpole will be recalled not as the author of The Herries Chronicle but as a minor character in one of the world’s best light novels. Literary history contains few episodes as ironic.

  11

  Two Poet Cricketers

  CLIFFORD BAX, J. C. SQUIRE

  Somerset Maugham in Cakes and Ale referred to the period when authors to show their manliness played cricket and drank beer, and between the wars, the name ‘Authors XI’ often appeared in the fixture lists of a number of minor public schools and southern villages. These sides were captained either by J. C. Squire or Clifford Bax. Squire called his side ‘the Invalids’ and Bax ‘the Old Broughtonians’, the former because the idea of launching such a side had come to Squire when he was visiting a friend in hospital, the latter name because between 1911 and 1914 Bax had owned the Manor House at Broughton-Gifford and made it the centre for an annual cricket tour. The qualification for membership was the same, a personal friendship with the captain.

  No two men could have been less alike than Bax and Squire. Bax was tall and well built; as a young man he was handsome, in later life distinguished. At the age of forty he grew a short Shakespearean beard which made him look like an hidalgo. Squire was of medium height and stocky. He had no distinction of appearance, but he had a pleasant, friendly face. He was short-sighted and peered at you through heavy lenses. He was untidy and usually looked as though he had shaved with a blunt razor eighteen hours before. Arnold Bennett described him in a pre-war diary as ‘Jaegerish’. At the end of his life he grew a long untidy beard. The last time I saw him was in 1956 at the luncheon Cassell’s gave to celebrate the laying by Sir Winston Churchill of the corner-stone of their new offices in Red Lion Square. Squire sat at the same table as myself on the opposite side. I wondered who he was.

  In appearance Bax had every advantage over Squire, but it was Squire who had the more definite personality; he had an air of attack on life while Bax was diffident, gentle, self-effacing. Squire was a countryman, Bax a townsman. Squire came of sound, unmoneyed, West Country stock. Bax was a man of substance, but he rarely spoke of his father and I do not know in which generation the foundations of the family’s wealth were laid. Squire had the conventional upbringing of a man born into his class, Blundell’s and St John’s College, Cambridge. Bax was educated first by a tutor, then at Heidelberg.

  Both married young but whereas Squire was temperamentally a family man, Bax was not. Squire had four children, and till they were launched in the world, maintained a home for them. Bax had one daughter, Undine, but his marriage broke up early and his wife refused him a divorce. Within a few months of her death in 1925, he remarried, but was soon established in a bachelor set in Albany.

  Writers, because they do not have to keep fixed hours, are exposed to two main occupational hazards—gallantry and alcohol. Bax during the years when I knew him best, was perpetually invol
ved in an emotional disturbance. One of his early poems begins,

  Snare me anew dear net of woman’s beauty,

  I am too early free.

  and concludes with a reference to the time when

  My own eternal spirit shall rule me wholly

  And all your charm be vain.

  That time never came.

  Squire, on the other hand, led a domestic life of exemplary decorum. His problem was conviviality. The cricketer who arrived late for a match of Squire’s was wise to preface his apology with an account of how he had attended an Old Boys’ dinner on the previous night. Bax was more inclined to be indulgent to the delinquent who began, ‘The trouble was, there was a girl…’

  Both were ambitious but their careers followed divergent courses. Squire had to earn a living. Bax had not. The label ‘careerist’ is applied to writers in a derogatory sense, but every man who has to earn a living must be a careerist if he is to amount to anything, and it is no criticism of Squire to describe him in his early years as a man with a sense of self-direction.

  I first heard of Squire in 1915 from Gerard Meynell, a neighbour of his in Chiswick, the director of the Westminster Press who had an office in No. 11 Henrietta Street and lunched with my father at Gatti’s two or three times a week.

  Meynell lent me Squire’s satirical war verses, ‘The Survival of the Fittest’, that contained the quatrain,

  God heard the embattled nations shout,

  Gott straffe England and God save the king,

  God this, God that, and God the other thing,

  Good God, said God, I’ve got my work cut out.

  Squire was then contributing to the New Statesman over the signature Solomon Eagle a weekly causerie on books which I now started to read each Saturday with keen appreciation of its lively readiness to expose pomposity. I then, as others, thought of him primarily as a wit and parodist. But by November 1918 he was cast for a very different part. His contributions to Georgian Poetry 1916–17 had established him as one of the foremost of the younger poets. He was now editor of the New Statesman. He contributed an influential weekly causerie to Land and Water. And in his collection of parodies ‘Tricks of the Trade’, he had taken leave of his old role of jester by dedicating them to Robert Lynd as ‘these last essays in a not wholly admirable art’.