My Brother Evelyn & Other Profiles Read online

  In 1914 he had been little known outside a narrow literary circle but by Armistice Day he was more than a coming man, he had arrived. Chance had been upon his side. In his early ‘thirties, a man of great energy who worked fast, he had been rejected for military service for bad sight. Since most of his contemporaries were in khaki, he had been consequently subjected to a minimum of competition at the very moment when his powers were coming to their peak.

  When the war ended he was well placed to take advantage of the boom that followed. He had friends with capital which they were ready to invest in magazines. They already owned Land and Water; they now launched a literary monthly, the London Mercury. That summer the Hawthornden Prize was founded, the best book by an author of under forty earning a gold medal and a cheque for £100. Squire was one of the committee. In the autumn he became the chief literary critic on the Observer. He had some connection with the publishing house of George Bell & Sons.

  Not only was he himself in a position of power, but so were several of his friends. Edward Shanks, who had also been unfit for military service, was sub-editor of the London Mercury and of the New Statesman. Shanks appeared in the 1918–1919 volume of Georgian Poetry and was the first winner of the Hawthornden Prize. He had a serial running in Land and Water; he reviewed novels for the London Mercury and the Saturday Westminster Gazette—a paper of quality and influence.

  There was also W. J. Turner who had appeared in the 1916—1917 volume of Georgian Poetry. He was an Australian and when I met him first in 1919 he was in uniform, but I fancy he had been on sick leave for some while. He reviewed the theatre in Land and Water. Squire’s brother-in-law, Clennel Wilkinson, became a little later if not the editor of the Outlook the man who accepted manuscripts.

  A fantastic situation had in fact arisen. Squire and his friends had control of, or an influence over Land and Water, the Observer, the London Mercury, the New Statesman, the Outlook, and the Saturday Westminster Gazette. The Hawthornden Prize was one of their subsidiaries. During 1918 a warm friendship sprang up between Edmund Gosse and Squire; that gave Squire the ear of the Sunday Times. Robert Lynd was a close friend of Squire and that accounted for the Daily News.

  This situation was not the outcome of a ‘deep-laid plot’, but of Squire’s career reaching a peak at a time when his competitors were away and of two close friends of his, who were also good poets and good critics, appearing simultaneously upon the scene. There were jobs going and no one was available who could fill them better. But it is not surprising that there should have been envious talk about the ‘Squirearchy’.

  Writers returning from the war and war work and, in some cases such as D. H. Lawrence, from the obscurity to which unpopular war views had consigned them, men as yet unadjusted to new conditions, many of them in financial difficulties, found that they could not get a hearing. Wherever they looked they saw ‘the gang’ at work. A monopoly had been established for the placid pastoral poetry of John Freeman, Francis Brett-Young, Martin Armstrong, Edmund Blunden; excellent of its kind, but there were other kinds. A whole group of poets lacked a forum—D. H. Lawrence, F. S. Flint, Richard Aldington, T. S. Eliot, Ford Madox Ford, John Gould Fletcher.

  I often saw Harold Monro during those years. I had worked for him for a few weeks at the Poetry Bookshop. We played squash together at the R.A.C. and dined together afterwards. Monro was warm-hearted, affectionate, very companionable, but he was a disappointed man. Before the war he had edited and published Poetry and Drama in which Brooke’s ‘Grantchester’ appeared; he had issued chapbooks and volumes of poetry—Robert Graves’s first book among them: he had organized weekly poetry readings. He had also published Georgian Poetry. The Poetry Bookshop had been a centre for the new idea. Now the centre had moved. He felt he had been shouldered out.

  If Squire himself was aware of the hostile atmosphere that his success engendered, he never showed it. He behaved as though he had not an enemy in the world. There are very few people whom I have never heard say an unkind or spiteful thing about another person, and of those very few, some, I suspect, have been charitable partly through caution and partly through a lack of definiteness in their own personalities; tolerance is often no more than the child of laziness and indifference. Squire was not like that. He was too busy to have enemies and too large-hearted. He had supreme self-confidence. If there is such a thing as a superiority complex, then he had one. He was never boastful, but he had no doubt of his own talents. Poetry was to him the alpha and omega of existence. He knew he was a good poet, and if, so he felt, you are a poet, everything falls into place.

  He was always welcoming, exuberant, enthusiastic. He was generous and open-handed. The members of his Surrey cricket tour were all of them his guests. In his days of affluence he befriended many young poets who had financial problems and he paid the college fees of one of them. His material fortunes were to know many fluctuations, but circumstance was powerless against him. He never looked crestfallen.

  The ‘Squirearchy’ fell apart during the 1920s. Spain which under Charles V had been swollen by the satellite principalities of the Holy Roman Empire remained a power under Philip II: and so did Squire when Shanks and Turner followed separate careers.

  He described himself as a centipede with a foot in a hundred worlds. In addition to his critical and editorial work, he found time to stand for Parliament as a Liberal—in 1918 he had stood as a Labour candidate—and each time he forfeited his deposit. For ten harried years he wrote little poetry, but in the mid nineteen-’thirties he enjoyed a St Martin’s summer and A Face in Candlelight contains some of his finest work. In 1932 a large dinner which he appeared to have organized himself was given in his honour, and shortly afterwards he was knighted.

  In March 1953 his seventieth birthday was honoured by a small dinner at the Garrick Club, organized by J. B. Priestley and A. D. Peters, and attended by his oldest friends. It was a genuine disappointment to me that I should have had to be abroad. It was a great success.

  Squire died in 1958. In his last years he lived in the country, at an inn. He rarely came to London, but his friends visited him and the villagers revered him. He was one of Macmillan’s chief advisers and his book page each week in the Illustrated London News had its own special quality. His reputation was firmly based upon high achievement.

  I wrote of Clifford Bax at some length in my autobiography. But he was then still alive—he died in the autumn of 1962—and I was anxious not to say anything that would seem to him too personal. He disliked publicity and had a stubborn regard for privacy. As it was, one of his friends upbraided me for contending that Bax’s father had made a mistake in not sending him to Eton. Would Clifford, she argued, have been any more charming or sympathetic if he had. That was not my point. I believed and believe that Bax’s career exemplifies the disadvantages of an unconventional education.

  If a man departs from the norm, he should do so under the compulsion of his own temperament and not because of external pressure. It is a mistake to encourage a boy to consider himself exceptional. It is for him to prove that he is exceptional. A boy should be brought up among his equals. If you send the son of an earl to a small grammar school, he will be looked on as an oddity; it is unwise for a boy to be brought up with those much poorer or much richer than himself. A boy should feel himself at one with the group into which he is born, and incited to excel his contemporaries on their own ground.

  If it is clear in the nursery that a boy is a freak, physically or mentally, then he should be prescribed a special treatment. But Clifford Bax was not a freak. He was healthy, athletic, with a love of games, with a fine alert mind. Born into the upper-middle class in 1884, he should have gone to the kind of school to which members of that class go. As he would inherit a considerable income and as he had no family links with another school, Eton was the right one for him. He would have learnt there that the possession of money is a privilege and a responsibility, shared by others. He would also by competing with his contemporaries have
acquired a standard with which to appraise his own abilities. This is very important for an Englishman. He tends otherwise to over or underestimate his powers. Bax in his early years did both. His view of himself was out of focus.

  When I met him first in June 1920, he was living in a top-floor studio in Edwardes Square. It was a large sunny room, with some fine pieces of furniture; warmed with a stove it was relatively comfortable, though the rain dripped through the roof and he arranged a series of vases on the floor to catch the drops. He had no resident maid but a woman came in daily to provide breakfast and to tidy up. He took all his meals out, except tea which he prepared himself. He had no telephone. He often did not open the door to visitors, preferring not to be disturbed; his friends devised a code of knocks, so that he should know who was on the door-step.

  He dressed in unpressed tweeds. He resented having to put on evening clothes, and when he did he wore heavy brogue shoes, sometimes with rubber soles. In winter he wore a heavy, threadbare coat, fifteen years old; it had belonged to a poacher and had voluminous inside pockets. He was considering, he told me, the purchase of a new one, and was deliberating the wisdom of having it made for him by a tailor. He was apprehensive lest in ten years’ time he should have put on weight and a coat that now fitted well might then constrict him. He wore dark felt hats with narrow brims. Once he bought a new one, and its contrast with the threadbare coat was disconcerting. I am not easily embarrassed, but I could not help suspecting that we looked an incongruous couple as we walked down Kensington High Street, myself short and dapper with a military bearing, he tall and undulant, like a scarecrow swaying in a wind.

  When I met him first, he was in a morose mood. He had been writing for several years with limited success. Under no compulsion to earn a living, he had not Squire’s sense of self-direction. He was ready to accept any publisher’s suggestion. He was not the man who brought ideas to publishers. His bibliography, in consequence, contains several minor books. The man who stage-manages a career realizes that it is important for a book to look important. Instead of writing a short biography of Bianca Capello to fit into a publisher’s series, Bax would have been wise to have put three or four contrasted biographies inside a single volume, as Lesley Blanch did in The Wilder Shores of Love.

  Taught by a private tutor, he made friends by chance. We all do that, but he did not in his early years meet the kinds of man with whom he had most in common. The nearest approach was Godwin Baynes, the doctor and rowing blue. Only meeting those who were also being exposed to eccentric forms of education, he did not become a part of his generation, and his marriage accentuated this divergence. His wife was several years older than himself and she did not, as a young wife might have done, open the door for him into the world of his contemporaries. On the contrary she encouraged him to take a house in Wiltshire and write poetry, which was all wrong for a young man who was by birth and tastes a townsman.

  Within three years he had left Wiltshire and established himself in London with a young and attractive female. This in England before World War I was a highly unconventional procedure. The English are infinitely tolerant of anything to which they can close their eyes but even now convention decrees that unmarried couples should reside under separate roofs. The adventure showed a poetic courage on Bax’s part since he had good reasons for fearing that his father would disinherit him. The fears proved unfounded, but so dubious a ménage cast his lot still further among the unconventional, a set to which he did not by taste belong. ‘I am tired,’ he said to me in 1925, ‘of failures and of misfits.’ The ménage did not last very long, but by the time it ended he was nearly thirty.

  The war would have given him a chance of finding the type of friend he needed, but he was medically unfit for service. As young men who were not in uniform in 1914–18 inevitably did, he gravitated still further among misfits.

  It was while he was emerging from this fog that I first met him. I will not say that he was a disappointed man, he was too young, too vital, too ambitious to be that. But he was aggrieved at the lack of recognition that his work had received.

  He published that autumn a book of poems, A House of Words, which contained a number of fine poems, but received a small and lukewarm press. The Saturday Westminster Gazette suggested that Clifford Bax’s role in the arts was not that of a creator, but of an appraiser and interpreter, and the notice was editorially headed ‘Mistaken Vocations’. This hurt his feelings very much. It was illogical that it should, since he had no respect for the critical standards of the day. But no one is logical in this respect. Many people were surprised to learn from her notebooks how much store Virginia Woolf had set by her reviews. She had such little respect for most of the objects of popular veneration that one would have imagined that she would have suspected her own work’s quality if it had been greeted with a chorus of praise. Why should an artist expect a public which he considers mistaken on every other point, to assess his own work correctly? Some writers expect to be acclaimed the winner of a race for which they have not entered themselves as starters.

  I am myself surprised that Bax’s poems so rarely appear in anthologies. For me they are deep in feeling, human and finely wrought. He suggested to me once that his being a Buddhist had militated against their appeal since the philosophy at the back of them was foreign to a reader raised in a different faith. This may be true. In Inland Far he paints a sympathetic picture of the Buddhist who converted him, but he gives no reason for having found Buddhism more satisfactory than the faith of his fathers. Keyserling in his Travel Diary of a Philosopher stresses the influence of climate on religion and in his chapter on ‘Colombo’ argues that Buddhism is in tune with the heavy heat and lush luxuriant foliage of Ceylon. Is it fanciful to suggest that Bax’s adoption of a faith alien to the bleak cold north is a corollary to his eccentric education?

  He did have a certain measure of success. The Rose Without a Thorn had a long run when it was first produced, has been frequently acted by amateurs, and has been used on the radio and on TV. He wrote several charming ballad operas. He adapted Polly for the stage; Midsummer Madness was exquisitely staged by Nigel Playfair at the Lyric, Hammersmith with Marie Tempest in the lead. Mr Pepys too was a success. But in his choice of subject he was frequently handicapped through not having the same educational background as his fellow-countrymen.

  In The Rose Without a Thorn he had in Henry VIII a character in whom everyone was interested; so had he in Mr Pepys, but it was a different matter when he wrote of fifteenth-century Italians. He himself considered The Venetian his best play, but my own interest in it was immeasurably diminished by my ignorance of the period; others were in my plight. It is hard to interest an audience in a period other than its own, unless the conflict of that period can be related to its own, unless a parallel can be drawn, or unless it is already familiar with it. Shakespeare’s plays have, for instance, made certain historical characters familiar, so that Gordon Daviot’s Richard of Bordeaux presented from a new angle a man about whom the public already had its own idea.

  It is important for the writer of historical plays and novels to recognize which these characters and periods are. It is also important for a playwright—for any writer for that matter—to gauge how much knowledge he can assume in the public which he is anxious to address. Nothing annoys a reader more than having a story hinge on a reference he cannot catch. For the writer of historical plays this is particularly important. The historical dramatist is in one respect at a disadvantage with regard to the writer of drawing-room comedies. He is robbed of the effects of suspense and of surprise because the audience knows how it will all turn out; watching The First Gentleman, for example, it knows that George IV’s daughter will die in childbirth, otherwise how could Queen Victoria have reached the throne. But in compensation he has a ready-made sense of dramatic irony. In John Drinkwater’s Mary Stuart, the tension was heightened by the audience’s foreknowledge that Rizzio had only a few minutes to live. In The Venetian Bax assumed that t
his sense of dramatic irony existed. He made a duke reflect on the eve of battle, that five hundred years hence men would be discussing what he achieved or failed to achieve in the next few hours. But the greater part of the audience had never heard of the battle or the duke and were wondering why they were being invited to be concerned over what seemed to them a remote tribal skirmish.

  ‘Birds of a feather’, I suppose, and the lives of nearly all my men friends have been convulsed by a series of romantic crises. As their friend, I have received a number of confidences from the ladies of their concern. Bax attracted a great many women; though he had a soft voice and a gentle manner he was intensely virile. He was kind, generous, attentive in small things; in love tenderly forceful, concerned with a woman’s pleasure before his own. He had an intuitive and sympathetic grasp of a woman’s problems; women felt that they were understood by him. This understanding is exemplified right through his work, particularly in his rhymed Plays for Girls, in Midsummer Madness and in the character of Catherine Howard in The Rose Without a Thorn. He was a good friend to women, capable of deep and unselfish friendship. It was, I fancy, women more often than he who refused to be satisfied with ‘just friendship’.

  Though he was anything but promiscuous, he was rarely uninvolved in a liaison. He said to me more than once, ‘I have had now all the experience that I can absorb. When this thing is over, I’m going to quit all that and turn my experience into plays.’ But ‘this thing’ was always followed by another ‘thing’.