My Brother Evelyn & Other Profiles Read online

  There are two kinds of military intelligence, offensive and defensive. Offensive intelligence tries to discover the enemy’s intentions, defensive to conceal one’s own. Offensive intelligence operates in an enemy or neutral territory. It is invariably exciting and often dangerous. Defensive intelligence operates in one’s own or in an allied country and, in spite of its importance, can be extremely dull, since it often has to concentrate on preventing one’s own troops from acting in a manner that would give information to the enemy, if there were an enemy agent on the watch. It is a negative activity employed against an imaginary and often non-existent foe. Defensive intelligence can, however, be exciting when it is pitted directly against active offensive intelligence and it was on this kind of work that I was employed for two years in Baghdad.

  My particular job was to watch the subversive elements of Iraq, in particular the agents and groups of agents who were sending information to German Intelligence in Turkey. Though the actual fighting was by now many miles away, it was important for the Germans to be misinformed about the quantity and quality of the troops stationed in Iraq; it was important that saboteurs should not interfere with the transport of aid to Russia; nor with the oil installations in Kirkuk and Abadan; it was important that agents provocateurs should not cause civil trouble and thereby necessitate the maintenance of troops who could be better employed elsewhere. Thirty years before Baghdad and Mosul had been vilayets in the Ottoman Empire. Many of the elder Iraqis had been educated in Turkey. The Turks had been allies of the Germans. There was no lack of disaffected persons ready to assist their former friends. At times I felt that I was living in a novel by Phillips Oppenheim. Could this really be happening to me?

  I was present at the arrest of several men who were working for the Germans. It was invaluable for a novelist to observe how men who have had no reason for suspecting that they are being watched behave when they are arrested. To my surprise not one of them showed surprise or fear. The only man who did show fear was completely innocent. He was a barber. In the old quarters of Baghdad, where the streets are narrow and congested, and it is difficult for a postman to find his way, barber’s shops are used like an Englishman’s club as a poste restante and when we arrested the members of a subversive group who had used a particular shop in this way, we had to take its owner into custody as well.

  We arrested him on a Sunday morning when his shop was opening and I have never seen a man more harassed and distressed. We took him back to his house so that he could collect some clothes and inform his family. He was desperate with despair. He ransacked his trunk for paper money and scattered a quantity of it among the womenfolk who were squatting on cushions round a coffee-pot. He had no idea what it was all about, he told them. His ignorance, no doubt, accentuated his alarm. He had read stories of innocent people caught up in a plot. This was now happening to him. Anything might happen next. The other men who knew precisely what they had done, were stoical. The barber was back with his family within three days but those three days must have been a torture for him.

  I also while I was in Baghdad saw the C.I.D. at work. When Iraq acquired its independence after World War I, a number of British experts were appointed as technical advisers to organize the various Ministries. They were all of them men of the highest quality and they worked no less loyally because their efforts were devoted to the making of their own posts unnecessary through rendering these organizations so efficient that there would be no need for technical advisers.

  The technical adviser to the police was Colonel Wilkins, a Scot who had been trained by Scotland Yard. He was in his middle sixties when I met him, tall, white-haired, urbane, with a twinkle in his eye. I saw him on an average twice a week.

  Within three minutes of my arrival, as in all Arab offices and houses, a cup of strong black coffee would be offered me. During Ramadhan, so that the drinking of coffee should not offend orthodox Moslems, the cups were brought in cardboard boxes. We would sip the coffee and gossip and then Wilkie would begin to talk.

  Interviews with him tended to last two hours. He was never in a hurry. He did not go home for lunch. It was believed that he brought sandwiches down with him but I never saw him eat them. He would pull out the bottom drawer of his desk, place his foot in it and on this leverage rotate himself in a swivel chair. He would talk round and round a subject, thinking it out as he was talking, reading a report slowly, lifting it to his nose and shaking his head, ‘No, no, I don’t like the smell of it, I don’t like the smell of it at all.’

  In the heavy heat of a Baghdad summer when for days on end the temperature does not drop below 110°F. and often rises into the 120s, it was hard not to feel drowsy, sitting there while he talked. To cool the room brushwood was stacked outside the window with an arrangement that let water trickle over it. As he swung in his swivel chair I would sit there half mesmerized watching the drops drip from twig to twig as his voice droned on.

  I cannot say exactly what it was I learned during these long hours in Wilkie’s office, but I believe I gradually absorbed an atmosphere. Friends have told me that in my West Indian novel Island in the Sun the character of the policeman Whittingham rang true. If it did, it was because of those long hot noon-day visits to that shaded room, with the water dropping twig by twig and the taste of strong sweet coffee on my palate and the sound of that voice going on and on. There he was, the spider at the centre of the web, benign, friendly, humorous, but inexorable in the pursuit of justice.

  I also learnt how large a part chance plays in criminal research. Much depends on how busy the investigating officer may be. If he has three important cases on his hands, he is likely to dismiss cursorily a minor case. If, however, he has nothing particular to do, he is likely to raise a hornets’ nest; and the enquiries that he initiates often reveal conspiracies of quite another nature.

  The police know both more and less than is generally recognized, and in war-time when a man is suspect, they proceed to find out all they can about him—which are his clubs, who are his friends, what are his tastes and habits. Not only is his correspondence censored, but that of his friends. Several cases of tax evasion came to the notice of authority in this way. Once we were watching a man who had come to our attention because a friend of his was a pro-German suspect. The man was, we eventually found, a person of blameless political affiliations but his correspondence proved him to be a homosexual who in company with an acquaintance made a practice of picking up Air Force personnel in cinemas, taking them back to his house and doping them with arak into acquiescence.

  It is the general practice to leave a suspect at liberty as long as he is not immediately dangerous, so as not to frighten his friends and to obtain information from his correspondence. But a time may come when his activities become so quiescent that more information can be obtained by taking him into custody for interrogation. Such a position was reached on one occasion in the case of a man who was, we were very certain, concerned with a pro-German conspiracy. We had not enough evidence to ask for his arrest by the Iraqi Police—Iraq being a sovereign state—but when he applied for permission to take a holiday in Beirut we had our chance. He could be arrested by the French and taken to Cairo for cross-examination. I was in charge of the case and it was for me to decide whether it was more advantageous to arrest him or leave him at liberty.

  This is not, I must explain in advance, a story that confers any credit on myself.

  In Baghdad there was an almost complete lack of eligible feminine society. Iraq is a strictly Moslem country and my three years there were celibate. My only relief from the consequent strain was an occasional ‘mental orgy’ with the kind of book that is catalogued as ‘curious’. Such books were unobtainable in Iraq but they were in copious supply in Cairo. If the arrest was made, I should be sent there to assist in the interrogation, and I could replenish my library. I weighed the reasons for and against the making of the arrest. They seemed to balance out exactly. If I had had no personal preference either way, I should ha
ve flicked a coin. But I had a personal preference.

  There are those who out of an exaggerated sense of duty would have chosen against their own wishes; in the same way there are those in authority who deliberately ignore the claims to promotion of a friend or relative. I am not like that. I tabled every pro and con, decided that the score was level, and ordered the arrest.

  Perhaps more often than one would think, some frivolous equivalent of the need of a sex-starved officer for a dirty book leads to the click of handcuffs.

  I did not, as it happened, go to Cairo. The suspect either in fright or in an attempt to commit suicide fell off the train in which he was being taken as a prisoner. He was in hospital for several weeks. By the time he had recovered, the situation in Baghdad had shifted. I was heavily occupied with another case, and a younger officer who had recently had a bad attack of sand-fly fever and who was felt to need a change of climate was sent instead. The cross-examination of the suspect did not produce any very conclusive evidence, but my brother officer returned glowing with recovered health after a rumbustious romance with a member of the Palestinian A.T.S.

  In another respect too, my six years’ breather was a great piece of good fortune. It gave me an opportunity to review my own writing from a detached critical standpoint and to reassess it.

  In January 1945, when the Battle of the Bulge had been converted into victory, and it had become clear that the war in Europe would be over early in the summer, it was rumoured that the oldest soldiers and those with the longest service records would be demobilized at once. By the end of the year, therefore, I should be back at my desk, at work on novels and short stories. I looked forward confidently to their resumption, but I presumed that I should find the machine a little rusty when I set it into motion, that it would take me a short story or two and half a novel to get back into smooth production. I thought I would be wise to read some of my earlier books and see what standard I had set myself. I wrote to England to have three or four sent out.

  The reading of them was a considerable shock. I was disconcerted by the slovenliness, not in their actual writing but in the development of the plots. I would construct a situation, for fifty or sixty pages the narrative would mount rapidly; then there would be a break; the story would start somewhere else. There would be fifty or sixty effective pages, then once again there would be a break; eventually at the close there would be an attempt to gather up the loose threads in a final situation that would give significance to the whole.

  A novel is a parabola. The curve is gradual; about a third of the way up it steepens; four-fifths of the way along its length it turns into a sharp decline towards the climax. When you are going downhill, writing is easy and very pleasant; it is a gallop. The opening when the situation is set out and the characters set in motion can also be—though it is not invariably so—easy and pleasant writing. The difficult part comes when the rise of the curve steepens with every implication of the story pointed, in a gathering momentum, to the peak. Look at any major novel and you will see this principle at work. What I had done, I now realized, time and again, was to shirk that extra effort that was required to send the curve to its peak; instead I had taken a short cut and reached the climax along the level. By so doing I had not got the full dramatic value out of the situation, nor had I raised my characters to the summit of experience where they could reveal themselves and their potentials. I had never exploited to the full the situation that I had set out in the first fifth.

  I had taken ‘short cuts’ and that is fatal, not only for the artist but in every walk of life. How had I come to do it? I exposed myself to a personal inquisition. I had known all along that the novelist’s problem was three-pronged. He had to find the material for his books, he had to find the leisure and peace of mind in which to write them, and he had somehow to fit into that pattern the human beings with whom he was personally involved. Looking back at the five years before the war, I recognized that I had not given myself enough leisure in which to get my writing done.

  Before my marriage, I had gone into seclusion when I had a book on hand. In the early ‘twenties when I had a half-time employment with Chapman & Hall, I used, during the autumn and winter, to go every Monday night to a small inn in the country, work for three solid days and return to London on the Friday morning. During the later ‘twenties, when I was no longer working for Chapman & Hall, I would leave London for long periods; I never found that I could work in London, any more than I was to find later that I could work in New York: too many things were happening, the air was too electric. I would go to the South of France, to Villefranche; or to an inn in Devonshire, the Easton Court Hotel at Chagford on whose stout tables many writers have inscribed many solid books. A small hotel bedroom has its link with the monk’s cell. There is the discipline of contemplation. On my long trips abroad to the South Seas, the West Indies and the Far East, I had found that same discipline. There were no Pan-American Clippers in those days. I would sit for hour after hour, in my cabin or in the smoking-room, at a table; then at the end of the day I would walk round the deck, breathing in the clean sea air, planning out my next day’s work. I would find that a transatlantic crossing gave me exactly the right amount of time for a ten-thousand-word magazine short story. My best work during the five years before the war was the short stories that I wrote on transatlantic crossings. But I had not, during those years, given my novels a chance.

  I thought I was doing so, but in point of fact I had not. My wife had bought a comfortably sized Queen Anne house on the Hampshire-Berkshire borders in which I had a comfortable study. But we also had a small service flat in London. I spent on the average a couple of nights a week there. I was a Clubman. The Wine and Food Society started in 1932. There was a sudden specialized interest in wine. We all carried around little ivory cards tabulating the good vintage years. There was a good deal of entertaining.

  During the summer I played cricket two or three times a week and went on a couple of tours. I also played golf regularly. We had week-end guests. We entertained and were entertained both in the country and in London. My magazine market in the United States was developing, and I went to New York most years. I was, in fact, leading a varied and entertaining life, but I was not giving myself those long, quiet, uneventful periods which a novel requires, which I had given myself during the ‘twenties, but had not since my marriage. With only one of my novels written in the 1930s was I satisfied, a West Indian novel on which I was at work when the war broke out.

  I had begun it in late June. I was short of money. I wanted to go to New York in September, so I decided to avoid London until then and stay in the country, writing continuously. I went to work on the book again in January 1940. I was then back in the Army, at Dorchester, organizing the training of recruits in the manipulation of track-lined vehicles. I have always found the atmosphere of regimental life conducive to writing. You are leading a healthy open-air life: you are in touch with human beings, you have congenial company; your mind is not greatly exercised. You have plenty of opportunity to brood. When I was in the Army in 1916, I wrote The Loom of Youth in two stretches of three and three and a half weeks, writing for two hours before parades and two hours after them. In 1940 I wrote the last fifty thousand words of No Truce with Time in seven weeks, getting up every morning at half past two and going to bed every night at eight.

  During those seven weeks I lived with the book. It came out at an unlucky time, in February 1941, when neither in England nor America was anyone likely to be enthusiastic about an unsociological story dealing with characters who, though contemporary, were not affected by the war. It was, however, serialized by Redbook and the film rights were bought by M.G.M. though the picture was never made. I think it one of my better books. Certainly, as I re-read it in Baghdad, on the eve of my return to authorship, I accepted the lesson that it had to give; that I must, in future, give myself the proper atmosphere in which to write long novels. I must build for myself a routine of day-to-day eventlessness,
so that I could dig deep into my subconscious and discover how much the particular subject had to offer.

  Nearly always the idea for a novel or short story comes in a flash, but that flash—flash is the wrong metaphor, but it is an accepted cliché—is the first showing above ground of a plant that may have deep roots. You cannot tell till you have tended it, watered it, protected it, given it time. It may be a tree, it may be a flower; but you must not dig it up and transplant it right away. That first showing of green is nothing in itself. You have to wait. And that was the vow I made myself in the spring of 1945, in far Baghdad. I would turn over a new leaf. I would give myself the time to write.

  If I had not had that six years’ break, if I had not had that opportunity of taking stock of myself, of seeing my books, from a distance, with new eyes, I do not believe that I should have been able to stay the course into the ‘sixties. Between 1919 and 1939 I published fifteen novels. Since 1945 I have published only five. The last three certainly are better than any of their between-the-wars predecessors, and have been considerably more successful.

  15

  The Lawyer

  E. S. P. HAYNES

  I returned from the Middle East in mid-June 1945. Almost the first number that I rang was that of E. S. P. Haynes, one of my oldest friends, whom I had first met in January 1917.

  I was home then from Sandhurst for the Christmas recess and S. P. B. Mais was staying at my parents’ house; he had dined on a Saturday night with Haynes, returned late and noisily and disturbed the poodle. On the following morning he was not at breakfast. When I returned from church he was still in his room. He sent down a message that he was supposed to be going for a walk with his host of the previous evening but that he did not feel like walking; could Haynes be telephoned? At that time there was no telephone in my parents’ house. Oh, well, Petre Mais replied; it did not matter. He did not suppose that his host would feel like walking either.