My Brother Evelyn & Other Profiles Page 3

  It is a common, a familiar plight. An agent was saying to me the other day of a mutual friend, ‘Poor Jackson tortures himself because he can’t produce a masterpiece. If only he would be content with the kind of work he does so well and that is in fact very profitable.’ Thurston’s predicament precisely. But the solution is not as easy as the agent thought. It was only because Thurston was so desperately anxious to write supremely well, that he was able to write as effectively as he did.

  Though I heard more talk about Thurston than any other of Chapman & Hall’s authors—how well I remember my father’s dismay when Thurston wanted to call one of his novels ‘The Love Story of an Ugly Man’; it was an impossible title for Thurston in 1912, but possibly it would be an enticing one in our day of the anti-hero—I did not read one of his novels until I had left school. Much of Desmond Coke’s work, on the other hand, I knew by heart. He wrote school stories that could be appreciated both by a schoolboy and an adult; some of his books indeed were published simultaneously in two separate editions, one after being serialized in The Captain, the chief schoolboys’ magazine, in a popular boys’ series with lurid coloured illustrations, the other by Chapman & Hall in sober hard covers for the parents.

  The Bending of a Twig was published in 1906. It was in part a satire on the conventional school story. A poet suddenly decides to send his son, who has never been away from home, to Shrewsbury, the public school to which Coke went himself. The father in order to equip his son for this new experience provides him with a collection of school stories, Tom Brown’s Schooldays, Eric, or Little by Little, Stalky & Co., The Hill, and one or two of the cheaper imitations of those classics. The poet’s son derives an entirely false impression of school life; and the opening chapters describing his mistakes and his ridiculous search for the school bully are extremely funny.

  The first part is satire; the last two-thirds describe with sympathetic realism how the poet’s son gradually becomes the conventional school prefect, how the twig is bent in fact. At no point was the system itself criticized; it was a popular conception that was satirized. Yet in retrospect it can be seen that Coke’s book was the first step in that debunking of the public school mystique, in which ten years later I was to play my part.

  In 1922, in an anonymous article for The Times on the public school in fiction I wrote that The Bending of a Twig had struck the first note of rebellion. Coke thanked me for the article ‘in which I recognise your Roman hand. I am having my cards changed from “the last of the Victorians” to “the first of the Georgians”.’ But in fact, Coke was anything but a rebel. To him the standards of public-school life were sacrosanct. Indeed he was one of those Englishmen who remain all their lives exactly what they are at nineteen, the school prefect believing that the issues that lie outside his cloistered world will be basically the same, on a larger scale. That is no doubt why I at fifteen felt so much in tune with him. He confirmed the standards to which I was being trained; he did not raise uncomfortable doubts. He was tall, handsome, neat; unobtrusively well dressed; the man who never let down the side. The mildly disapproving letter that he wrote to my father when The Loom of Youth was published, is now in the Sherborne school library.

  Coke wrote in addition a few unspecialized novels about adult life. One of them occupies a footnote in literary history. In 1910 he published a novel called Beauty from Ashes. It made little stir and Somerset Maugham had never heard of it when he planned to call his long autobiographical novel ‘Beauty from Ashes’. When he found that the title had already been used, he switched to Of Human Bondage. He was possibly irritated at the time; there was a view then that a positive was preferable to a negative title. When Geoffrey Moss’s Defeat appeared, W. L. George said, ‘What a pity he couldn’t have called it “Victory”.’ In terms of his sequence of comedy successes on the stage, Maugham may have thought Of Human Bondage too drab, too depressing a title for a popular success; but how well it fitted that majestic, sombre epic. How finicky in comparison is ‘Beauty from Ashes’. Perhaps under that title, the novel would not have been the abiding success it has.

  Inevitably Coke in 1914 was one of the first to hurry into khaki, and within a few months was with the B.E.F. in France. He was mentioned in dispatches, but trench fever combined with a heart-attack invalided him from the service, and in the lieu of war work, he enrolled on the teaching staff of Clayesmore School. He must at times have looked forward with some anxiety to peace conditions. He had only moderate private means, his books had never earned large sums, and he could scarcely anticipate, in that direction, a sudden change of fortune; but fate ‘turned its wheel’. An uncle who lived in Australia whom he had scarcely seen, who was childless and had taken great pride in having a nephew who wrote books, made him his sole heir. Coke, a rich man now, returned to the staff at Clayesmore and became one of the school’s chief benefactors. He showed, unobtrusively, great generosity to many friends. He indulged his hobby as a collector of eighteenth-century silhouettes and Rowlandson drawings. He wrote a few books, which received kindly reviews, without having to worry whether they sold more than moderately well. His last years (he died in 1931) were apart from his bad health among his happiest.

  I have used the general outline of Coke’s career in lectures that I have given on the problems of the modern novelist, altering the facts to suit my purpose. This is the story as I have told it to my audiences. An adaptation that provides a pertinent example of the way in which novelists make copy out of their friends.

  In the anecdote as I have recounted it, I have turned Coke into an elegant young man of fashion, a Londoner who wrote round about 1910 rather precious novels that were well reviewed in the exclusive weeklies. He averaged a novel a year, and usually a few months before he was due to deliver his manuscript, he paid my father a Sunday afternoon visit to discuss it. He had, he would say, a problem. It was invariably the same problem. He was two-thirds of the way through his book, and had got his characters involved into a confusion from which he could not extricate them. The situation in which they were involved never seemed particularly original or obscure. Those were the days, morally, of the double standard, and a young woman with a past had become engaged to be married and was wondering whether or not she should confess her misdemeanour. Could she act a lie; would she imperil her marriage if she told the truth?

  My father who had encountered many similar situations in the novels that he had published and reviewed, suggested a conventional solution. ‘Why not,’ he said, ‘have the girl confess, and then have the man say, “Well my dear, I’m very glad you’ve told me this, but in point of fact I’ve known it all along.”’

  The novelist shook his head sadly. Those were the days when plots were out of fashion, when the traffic of humanity was compared to the Heraclitan river, that changed from second to second, but continued to appear the same. All things were in a state of flux. Novels in those days did not finish. They stopped. ‘No, no,’ said the novelist, ‘you can’t have things being “known all along”. That’s a cliché; the kind of thing that only happens in third-rate novels.’ The novel, he explained, should end in a compromise, showing how one incident flowed into another; with nothing beginning and nothing ending; a continuing process of effect and cause.

  And that was how he ended his own novels, in a compromise that was a kind of fog, with nothing clearly resolved and the reader in some doubt as to what had actually happened to the various characters in whose fortunes he had been invited to be concerned; and as that is really the one thing that the reader does need to know—how it eventually works out for Jack and Jill—his novels were far from being ‘best-sellers’, yet equally they were very far from being failures. He had genuine merits. He had a knack of narrative; he could make a reader want to turn the page and see what was on the next; he led a brisk social life; he had interesting settings to describe; his work had a literary quality. He deserved the critical recognition that he received. His books lay on the table of the drawing-rooms he frequented. A
nd as he drew a reasonable private income from Russian oil fields, he could accept with equanimity the small royalties from his books. He reminded himself that Henry James had never attracted a large public. His day would come. In the meantime, the present was extremely pleasant. In that last high rich summer of 1914, he was as happy as any mortal can expect to be in this imperfect world.

  Then the war came, changing everything. He was one of the first into khaki, and he was gassed in the first attack at Ypres; his health was permanently ruined. The Russian Revolution followed and with it the confiscation of private property and the end of his private income. His future had suddenly become shadowed. He came out to Underhill one Sunday, early in 1918, when I was home on leave, in a despondent mood. ‘I don’t know how it’s all going to work out,’ he said. He began to talk about his private life in the same way that five years earlier he had talked about his novels. He could see no solution to a confused situation.

  My father did his best to be encouraging. My father had a Pickwickian manner. ‘It’ll turn out better than you expect,’ he prophesied. ‘Those White Russian generals have a trick or two up their sleeves. Your oil shares will be paying dividends before very long. And after the squalor of the trenches, the public will be wanting to read books like yours, dignified, restrained, classical: your innings is going to begin.’

  But he did not believe it would. He had no faith in the White Russian generals, nor did he expect that a war-weary, but ruthless generation would have much use for remote, austere stories about idle worldlings. A new lean day would create its own idiom of self-expression. Yet at the same time he did not think the future was too dark. Our friend would have a disability pension; probably the Bolsheviks, once the Revolution was established, would pay some token recompense to former shareholders, so as to earn the goodwill of other governments. He would live economically on the Riviera, cherishing his health, which was in itself an occupation. His pen would still earn him something. Every so often he would address to one of the highbrow weeklies a captious complaint on the shortcomings of the latest school of novelists. ‘In fact,’ said my father, ‘it’ll end like one of his own novels, in a compromise.’ But fate had a last trump in its hand.

  Early in 1921 he again invited himself to tea. My father had not seen him for three years and was curious and a little apprehensive. It might be an embarrassing situation. Far from it. Punctually at half past four a long, low, shining car drew up outside my father’s modest residence. The door of the car was opened by a trim chauffeur. The novelist had always been unobtrusively well dressed: dark well-cut suits and stiff starched linen. But today there was a definite gloss about him. There was also a conspiratorial twinkle in his eye.

  ‘Now what does all this mean?’ my father asked. The author laughed. This, he explained, was how it had all come about. He had had in Australia a widowed and childless cousin whom he had never seen and of whom he had scarcely heard. His novels were this cousin’s sole family link with England. He bought each novel as it appeared. He had them bound in leather and arranged under glass. When one of his friends came down from one of the stations for a week-end, he would lend him one of these novels to take up to bed with him. He was delighted next morning when his friend said that he could not make head or tail of it. He was proud to have a cousin who wrote novels; he was even prouder that they were novels his friends could not understand, so that when he died, he left his entire fortune to his cousin.

  The novelist paused. His smile became a grin. He had a sense of humour. ‘It’s the kind of thing,’ he said, ‘that only happens in third-rate novels and real life.’

  One other writer was a constant visitor at Underhill, though he was not a Chapman & Hall author. His name is well remembered and he is held in respect today, as a poet and as the original editor of the Everyman Library.

  I think that my father had first met Ernest Rhys at Gosse’s; or it may have been through Richard Le Gallienne. But our two families as far back as I can remember lived on terms of close and affectionate cordiality. Rhys was married to a minor Irish essayist, and the name Grace Rhys during the ‘nineties and before the First War, appeared on several charming volumes of belles-lettres. The Rhyses lived near to us, in Hampstead, we were ‘in-and-out of each other’s houses’ and they always came to our tree on Christmas Eve. They had three children, a boy and a girl several years older than myself and a daughter Stella who was Evelyn’s age, who did nursery lessons with him, and of whom he has written in A Little Learning. I, in terms of age, fell between the two groups. Brian, the eldest, when I was a preparatory schoolboy was an undergraduate at Oxford, and Megan was an art student at the Slade. She was handsome and dynamic, and wore loose Liberty silk blouses. For those days she was considered wild and it was whispered that she had anticipated the marriage ceremony with the man who eventually became her husband. She inspired in me an awed and breathless curiosity.

  Rhys himself, in those early days, seemed to me colourless and ineffective. I judged him by the narrow standards of a public schoolboy. He was tall, moustached, deliberate in walk and speech. He was not untidily but loosely dressed; the equivalent in tweeds for his daughter’s Liberty silk draperies. He was clearly not particularly well off. Old Dent, the publisher of Everyman, was a difficult man to work with: parsimonious and dilatory in his payments; and I often heard Rhys describe, amusingly, without self-pity, the devices to which he was driven to extract his periodic pittances. Schoolboys set high store by success and they gauge it by a very narrow standard. Ostensibly, on the surface the Waughs were doing better than the Rhyses. At the same time I thought Rhys a sport. My father told me of how at a children’s party at their house, Rhys had come up to him in agitation. ‘This party isn’t going well,’ he said, ‘I’d better black my face.’ I admired a grown man who was prepared to make himself ridiculous for the benefit of kids.

  It was not till I began to read the minor poets of the ‘nineties that I came to appreciate what he stood for. He had been a member of the Rhymers’ Club of which Arthur Symons had written in his preface to Ernest Dowson’s poems. He had sat in the Cheshire Cheese, with Yeats, Davidson, Le Gallienne, Lionel Johnson, listening to their poems, privileged to read his own. The Rhymers published two collections of their poems; as the sum earned in royalties was too small to be divided among the contributors, it was devoted to a dinner in a Soho restaurant. Each contributor was allowed to bring one guest. My father went as Rhys’s. I could not ask Rhys too many questions about the men who had become my heroes. He had some excellent stories to tell, many of which he has included in his reminiscences.

  Nor were his anecdotes confined to the poets of the ’nineties. He had kept in touch with the young, in a way that my father had been prevented from doing by his asthma. He knew many of the young Georgians. He was particularly amusing about Ezra Pound. Whenever I came home on army leave during 1915—17 I managed to see the Rhyses. It was Grace Rhys who first took me to the Poetry Bookshop in the late autumn of 1915 to hear a reading of Gordon Bottomley’s King Lear’s Wife.

  At that time I was interested in Rhys because he had known writers in whom I was interested. It was not till a good deal later that I came to realize what he was himself. The creation of ‘Everyman’ was a definite achievement, but he was much more than the founder of a library. He was a genuine man of letters. As a critic and a poet he had earned the respect of his contemporaries; of his elders when he was young, and of his juniors when he was old. He had held his pen in trust. His gift for writing poetry was a slender one, but he had worked on it steadily, had developed it so that when a powerful idea struck him, he was on two or three occasions able to write a memorable poem. He often read his poems at Underhill. I remember him on a summer evening in 1916, reading a poem which he had just written called ‘The Leaf Burners’. It was rhythmed, without a marked metre. It was alliterative. ‘The rhymes,’ he explained, ‘come at the beginning of the words instead of at the end.’ I was moved. Later I said to my father, ‘Surely th
at was very good.’ My father nodded. ‘It is hard to tell when you hear a poem for the first time. But I think it was.’ ‘The Leaf Burners’ was the title poem of his next book of poems, and it has been included in a number of anthologies.

  At his memorial service in June 1946, two of his poems were read by Richard Church, ‘The Old Men’ and ‘Autobiography’.

  Wales England wed; so I was bred,

  ‘twas merry London gave me breath.

  I dreamt of love—and fame: I strove:

  But Ireland taught me love was best.

  And Irish eyes and London cries,

  And streams of Wales may tell the rest;

  What more than these I asked of life,

  I am content to have from Death.

  Three or four poems may not seem a very substantial harvest from a lifetime’s sowing, but it was only by careful assiduous husbandry that his small plot of land was able to yield those few faultless flowers. If he had not written three hundred negligible poems, he would not have been able to write those three.

  A luncheon was given for him in London on his seventy-fifth birthday. Not many of his contemporaries were still alive. Yeats and Ernest Radford were the only Rhymers left, but his juniors were there to pay him honour. He had never made very much money. He had never been ‘in the news’. He had never been able to entertain on a large scale, but many of us remember gratefully the small Sunday tea-parties where friends who had much in common met to exchange opinions and to read their poems. He had led a full and happy life. And he is remembered today, whereas so many who seemed so much more important during their brief, bright hour of prominence, are forgotten.