My Brother Evelyn & Other Profiles Page 5

  4

  Frank Swinnerton’s

  Nocturne

  I told in my autobiography of the lucky concatenation of circumstances that made a best-seller of The Loom of Youth. The timing was lucky and 1917 was a lean year for novels. Nineteen-sixteen had been a very good year, and 1918 was to be, but when I read after Christmas, in my dug-out, north of Arras, the various estimates of the year’s books, I recognized how little competition I had had to face.

  The year’s best-seller was H. G. Wells’s Mr Britling Sees It Through which had been published in the preceding autumn; Stephen McKenna’s Sonia came second and that too had been published in 1916. Arnold Bennett had not published a novel, one of the few years in which he had not; Galsworthy had published an astonishingly poor book. J. C. Squire, reviewing it in Land and Water under the heading ‘Galsworthy gives them Gyp’, started with a quotation, then went on: ‘you recognise the style? It is the Family Herald, it is Mrs Barclay, no, you are wrong. It is Mr John Galsworthy in his novel which for some reason that is beyond me, he calls “Beyond”.’ Conrad was silent. None of the younger novelists, Hugh Walpole, Compton Mackenzie, Gilbert Cannan, D. H. Lawrence, W. L. George, was represented. Gilbert Frankau, who up to then had been known as a writer of light Kipling-esque verses, began his career as a novelist with The Woman of the Horizon; it sold fairly well, but was not accorded much critical attention. Norman Douglas’s South Wind had, indeed, come out during the spring, but that kind of book does not create an immediate stir, in war-time. I did not myself order a copy until January. It was a lean, lean year and as I read the various critics’ assessments of the year’s output, I could myself recall only one novel that had struck me as important; a book that had been highly praised but had had little public success—Frank Swinnerton’s Nocturne.

  Today that book is an established classic. It holds a unique position. It stands in a field of its own. It is under fifty thousand words long; which is an admirable length by artistic standards; since such a book can be read in a single evening and the author can impose and maintain his hold upon the reader through its entire course, but it is a bad length commercially. It was, then, too long for a magazine, and circulating libraries do not like it; subscribers need a book long enough to last them over a week-end. A novelist faced with a subject suitable to such a length preferred to compress it into a long short story or enlarge it into a 75,000-word novel. Nocturne was, so it seemed to me, an exceptional example of literary integrity. Swinnerton had felt that this particular story could be told only in this way, and had eschewed the possibility of greater emoluments in the resolve to make his book as good as possible.

  On my return to England, when I spoke of this to Gilbert Cannan, I was greeted with a smile.

  ‘There was a sound commercial reason for Nocturne,’ I was informed. ‘Swinnerton had one more novel to deliver under an old contract with Martin Secker. He had been offered a very much better contract by Methuen; he wanted his next major novel to be published by them, so he decided to polish off his Secker contract with a short novel.’

  That story had always seemed to be an excellent example of the fortuitous nature of creation. Great books often are produced by a fluke. I had meant to quote Nocturne as an example. Before I did, however, I took the precaution of writing to Frank Swinnerton to ask if the story was true. In return I received the following letter, which he has been kind enough to allow me to quote.

  What a good job I’m still alive to tell you the true story of Nocturne! What you were told was, as they say in Alice in Wonderland, ‘all wrong from beginning to end’. All the same, I think the true story is just as illuminating of the casualness of events. What happened was this. In 1911 or so Algernon Methuen, hearing that Arnold Bennett thought well of my prentice work, made a contract for two books with an option on a third. The second of these books, On the Staircase, was published in the Spring of 1914 and pleased old Methuen (whose wife apparently read it to him in bed) so much that he took up his option on the third book and made a contract for 3 more books. I was thus bound to him, when the 1914 War broke out, for no fewer than 4 books.

  Methuen, as you remember, thought books would be absolutely ruined; so he wrote to his famous authors, Wells, Bennett, &c, offering advances, while to me he suggested that a suspension of authorship for the duration would be desirable. This must have been in 1915; and I had written or was writing a novel called The Chaste Wife. Not to have published it would have been a financial embarrassment, as I had relied on advances of £75 apiece from England and the U.S. At this point Secker, who had published my much decried book on Stevenson in 1914, said ‘I’ll publish it’. So he did, by arrangement with Methuen, who allowed this one book to be interposed without regarding it as a breach of their contract.

  Then, one day, Secker and I were lunching with Nigel de Grey, who remarked incidentally ‘I wonder nobody has ever written a novel about the events of a single evening’. We couldn’t remember that anybody had done this: & I said it wouldn’t be easy to do it. As Seeker and I walked away after lunch, he said (I think with a memory of Oliver Onions’s In Accordance with the Evidence) ‘I wish you’d write me a novel under the Methuen contract length—say fifty thousand words’. I said ‘I will. I’ll write one about the events of a single evening.’

  I can’t remember how soon I began the book; but it was being set up from my MS. while I was still writing it; and I think Seeker brought me the first galleys the day after I had delivered the last chapter. He said ‘It begins well.’ When he brought the second batch of galleys he said ‘I think it’s very good.’ And when he brought the end he said ‘I think it’s a masterpiece.’

  I have never thought much of it myself; but of course I’m much obliged to it. I’m also much obliged to you for your praise of it. Thank you. I am delighted that it should still please.

  Yes, I’m very well, thank you. Rather overworked at the moment, as Penguins are bringing out half a dozen Arnold Bennetts next year (including the O.W.T.) and I have been writing introductions to the books and making a frightful butchery of the Journal to make a single volume. I have mentioned that the publishers were rather horrified by the O.W.T.’s [Old Wives’ Tale] length; but the Journal makes it clear that your Father soon realised its virtue. I think one always has to remember that the publisher sees a book as typescript, with no aura of prestige; and in 1908 Bennett, though recognised as a clever fellow, had never had any sale. In fact he had just left Chatto & Windus for Chapman & Hall because he was not (I think I am right in saying) earning the small advances Chatto’ gave him.

  With all good wishes

  Yours sincerely

  (signed) Frank Swinnerton

  A postscript about Nocturne. I offered our then maid the MS. for fire-lighting. She said the paper was too stiff. I told Secker, who said ‘Oh, give it to me!’ I did so; he had it bound, and kept it. When he was terribly hard up he sold it to Hugh Walpole, along with the MS. of ‘Sinister Street’ and perhaps others. Walpole gave his collection of MSS., I believe, to King’s School, Canterbury. Secker could tell you about this. He could also confirm what I have said about the writing of Nocturne. The book sold 1500 copies; was then out of print for a year owing to Secker’s absence from the office; and was later reprinted several times. Then it was put into ‘The World’s Classics’. Then Hutchinsons, by their marvellous mass salesmanship, sold enormous numbers at 6d or 1/6d. The result of this is that the book has lost all computation. Rather an amusing history.

  In the New Year Honours list appeared the names of several men of letters. Anthony Hope was honoured with a knighthood, so was John Galsworthy. Next day it was announced that Galsworthy had declined the honour but that his letter had not reached the appropriate authorities in time. The New Statesman on the following Saturday devoted its entire ‘Books in General’ page to the subject. It opened with the following three paragraphs:

  The posthumous honours bestowed upon Mr. Anthony Hope and Mr. John Galsworthy are… Thus had I beg
un when I opened another paper and learnt that Mr. Galsworthy’s knighthood had been refused. The conferments, intended and achieved, are of the usual sort. Mr. Galsworthy’s best work was done years ago, and Mr. Anthony Hope ought to have received a knighthood from Queen Victoria or not at all. I remember him with affection which has not been dimmed by the long lapse of years since I last heard of him. Up to the time of ‘Sophy of Kravonia’ he amused and moved me more than most. His defects are obvious, and it is too late to discuss them; but he only narrowly missed being a very good novelist.

  The usual thing has happened. When every honours list is being compiled some responsible jack-in-office remembers that ‘we must give a knighthood or two to literature and art’. Out of some Panjandrum’s stagnant and cobwebbed mind emerge names from the past, names which were much talked of when last the dignitary read a book. I wonder how often they have to make researches to find out whether the objects of their esteem are really still above ground. I wonder whether this year, or last year, they wrote to Wilkie Collins or George Gissing offering a knighthood and received no reply. They are obviously running fearful risks; for the Galsworthy episode shows that proposed names sometimes slip into the definitive lists when answers have either not been received or have not been properly docketed.

  Mr. John Galsworthy did himself credit, and his craft justice, in electing to remain a gentleman—even though on this occasion he would have had the distinction of climbing the honorific ladder in company with, though below and behind, that illustrious man, who has become a baronet, and Marmaduke, Lord Furness, who has been made a Viscount, shortly after complaining bitterly about the taxes at a company meeting whereat he also declared a dividend of 30 per cent. One cannot too often repeat that these titles, as a body, never have been any test or token of merit or service and are to-day less than ever so. Consequently, they are wasted on men of conspicuous genius or virtue unless they are given sufficiently early to be—the world being what it is—a real help in the man’s career. A good artist who has not yet arrived at financial security could certainly be assisted by a knighthood, which would convince the sheep and the slowcoaches that he really was a person of importance. But to a man who has reached fame and a competence the thing has no uses at all.

  This article had two amusing sequels. Galsworthy far from having ‘done his best work years ago’, completed The Forsyte Saga with In Chancery and To Let and wrote two of his best plays, The Skin Game and Loyalties during the next five years.

  The article was signed Solomon Eagle, the pseudonym of J. C. Squire, who became Sir John Squire in 1933.

  5

  The Soldier Poets

  ROBERT NICHOLS, ROBERT GRAVES, SIEGFRIED SASSOON, RICHARD ALDINGTON

  Nineteen-seventeen, though a meagre year for novels, was a vintage one for poetry, and saw the emergence of a new group of soldier poets. The Rupert Brooke wave of enthusiasm which had welcomed the declaration of war, had not survived the slaughter of the Somme. In France, Henri Barbusse’s novel Le Feu had struck a note of outraged indignation that was repeated by several of the younger English poets.

  The third volume of Georgian Poetry was issued in the autumn and E. M. wrote in his foreword, ‘Of the eighteen writers included, nine appear in the series for the first time. The representation of the older inhabitants has in most cases been restricted in order to allow full space for the newcomers; and the alphabetical order of the names has been reversed, so as to bring more of these into prominence than would otherwise have been done.’ The newcomers were W. J. Turner, J. C. Squire, Siegfried Sassoon, I. Rosenberg, Robert Nichols, Robert Graves, John Freeman, Maurice Baring and Herbert Asquith.

  The three war poets, Nichols, Graves and Sassoon, were at that time treated as a team in the same way that Cecil Day Lewis, W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender were in the 1930s. In both instances the differences between the three were far greater than the resemblances, but the fact that the poets of the 1930s had left-wing affinities and that the soldier poets of 1917 were brother officers made their linking convenient and inevitable.

  Graves, Nichols and Sassoon were all highly praised, and the order in which their qualities were assessed often depended less on the intrinsic merits of their poetry than on the political slant of the reviewer. Sassoon has told in his Sherston trilogy the story of his revolt against what he held to be the imperialist conduct of the war, and he was a useful weapon with which a left-wing writer could attack the Government. He had moreover a concentrated satiric strain, a journalist’s eye for the telling phrase. The poems that were most quoted were those in which this strain was most pronounced.

  ‘Blighters’

  I’d like to see a Tank come down the stalls.

  ‘In the Pink’

  To-night he’s in the pink; but soon he’ll die.

  And still the war goes on—he don’t know why.

  ‘The General’

  ‘He’s a cheery old card,’ grunted Harry to Jack

  As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack.

  .….….….…

  But he did for them both by his plan of attack.

  Less attention was paid then to the tragic, tender poem ‘The Death Bed’ by which today he is more often represented in anthologies.

  For an imperialist, of the ‘my country right or wrong’ type, like E. B. Osborn, Robert Nichols was the favourite. Nichols struck the heroic note:

  Arms to have and to use them,

  And a Soul to be made

  Worthy if unworthy;

  If afraid, unafraid!

  Nichols’s poetry could be used effectively, as Rupert Brooke’s, in the peroration of a sermon. This is not said in disparagement of Nichols’s poetry; what seemed good in it then, seems good today. He was a genuine poet, but he appealed to a different public. He was in tune with the loyalties of a larger audience; Ardours and Endurances was the best-selling book of poetry since 1914 and Other Poems, and he was sent to America on a propaganda mission.

  Robert Graves was, I fancy, the least immediately successful of the three. He stood outside the conflict. He was wistful, witty, sentimental, regarding the war as an intrusion on his private world of childhood memories. He did not provide quotable material for the pacifist or for the home-front patriot. On his marriage to Nancy Nicolson in January 1918 Sydney Pawling remarked, ‘Heaven knows what they are going to live on, even if they roof their bungalow with the unsold copies of Fairies and Fusiliers.’

  Graves sent me a copy of Fairies and Fusiliers inscribed ‘in hope of friendship’, accompanied by a letter which I treasure. Reading it in my dug-out, I looked forward to the day when I should be back in London, when I could meet and become friends with him and with Sassoon and Nichols. I cherished, as every other soldier, the pipe dream of an easy wound that would send me back to London with a thin gold stripe upon my sleeve.

  But I did not meet Graves till the autumn of 1963. We corresponded, we tried to arrange a meeting in 1919, but he was little in London, and our private lives took us on different roads. I have followed his career with the friendliest well-wishing. He has stayed the course and it is good to see that the youngest poets are reading him with respect.

  Siegfried Sassoon was the only one of the three whom I met with any frequency; not nearly as often as I would have liked. Our meetings were so few that we can scarcely describe ourselves as being friends, but our meetings were so pleasant that acquaintanceship is too cold a word. When the Herald became a weekly paper, Sassoon was appointed Literary Editor and I was one of his reviewers. I persuaded him to play in a cricket match against Clayes-more School; Gilbert Cannan was one of the other players. He and Sassoon had the same type of good looks, tall, thin, blondish, with Roman noses. They were both excellent company when they were in the mood, but they could both be very silent. We travelled down, ten of us, in a third-class carriage; Cannan and Sassoon sat opposite each other, in the centre. They did not speak a word the whole way to Winchester, and their barrier of silence divided the team
into two quartets.

  Sassoon has had a curious career. He started melodramatically, with questions being asked about him in the House of Commons. He was the rallying point both for the extreme left-wing pacifists, and for the men in khaki who suspected that the war was being unduly prolonged by interested parties, by the old men who were doing well out of it. It seemed to us desperately important that the realities of the war should be brought home to the civilian population. No one was bringing it home with the force and vividness that Sassoon did. He was the perfect person to argue our case for us. He was not a weak-kneed, long-haired neurotic. He was strong, handsome, vigorous, an athelete; there was no question of his courage, he had been awarded the M.C., his reckless feats in the line had become a legend. He was a case against whom it was very hard for ‘old men sitting in their clubs’ to argue.

  His start was meteoric. He stood on the threshold of infinite possibilities, and then quietly, undramatically, he left the stage. There are many poets who concentrate the essence of their work into a few years of intense production; Wordsworth was one them, Swinburne was another, though each went on writing into late old age. Poetry is the wind that bloweth where it listeth; it visits certain people for a few years and then abandons them. The fires blaze high and then subside.

  During the early ‘twenties and possibly afterwards, Sassoon had a house in Westminster which he shared with W. J. Turner. Turner was a good friend of mine. What was Sassoon doing, I would ask him? ‘I never see him about anywhere.’