A Year to Remember Page 6

  I can remember little of what was discussed at Larry Larue’s party. Most of the guests were foreign journalists, and there must have been some talk of the fact that earlier in the week, on the Sunday, Spain in the first free elections for eight years had voted for the Republicans, and on the Tuesday King Alfonso had gone into exile.

  When I read of it in the Continental Daily Mail, my first thought had been ‘What will Ruth think of this?’ She had been in Spain when Alec Moore had been the American Ambassador. They had been great friends. There is even an oblique reference to her in The Sun Also Rises, she had moved on the fringe of the court circles. She was a friend of Primo Rivera. Her eight months there had been a high point of glamour. Now the Spain that she had loved had vanished, had become an anachronism.

  How strange, I had thought, that a mere election could turn a king off a throne. How lucky England was to have a constitution and a limited monarchy that stood outside the hustings. It seemed ridiculous that the traditions and inherited culture of a sovereign state could be at the mercy of the whim of a popular vote. But the event had no personal message for me at the time. I did not foresee that in five years’ time a revolution would have broken out that would split England into two opposing factions, that would divide friends and families, that would cause enmities and feuds that would only end when Britain was under the impact of a menace to its very existence that had its roots in Alfonso’s hurried exodus from Madrid.

  If any of Larue’s other guests were more prescient than I, I do not know. Perhaps they were, but, as far as I can remember, most of the people there were anxious to hear the latest news of New York from Peggy and myself.

  V

  On Saturday April 18th, I caught a train for Villefranche. During the last eighteen months Villefranche had become a home for me. I saw it first in 1925. I was on my way back to England after two weeks in Florence. Tired by an uncomfortable night in a second-class carriage in a crowded train, I was looking with casual eyes through the carriage window when, suddenly, there it lay below me, the little land-locked harbour with the greyhound cruisers at anchor, the wide-curved waterfront, the tall painted houses, yellow, pink and blue, high-storeyed with green shutters and iron balconies. Very lovely and tranquil and self-contained it looked under the blue sky, under the amber sunlight, against the grey-brown background of its hills. In the same way that I fell in love with Tahiti at first sight, I fell in love with Villefranche. ‘I’ll be back soon,’ I thought. That was my first impression and I have yet to be betrayed by first impressions; of places as of people.

  It was not till the late summer of 1929, however, that I did get back. At the end of the cricket season I had a novel to finish. Berta Ruck was in Villefranche with her sons, also finishing a novel. She was staying at the Welcome Hotel. Why did I not come down and finish mine there, too? Why not indeed? I stayed a month. By the time the month was up, I was in love, not only with Villefranche.

  She was seventeen years old. She was called Cécile. Under the supervision of her parents she and her sister Doleen ran the Garden Bar, in the narrow Rue du Poilu that runs parallel with the waterfront, at the start of the network of narrow streets that, cutting back into the rock, clamber up the hillside to the Corniche Road. With her hair piled high upon her forehead, her cheeks full and her chin pointed, her head was shaped like a heart. Her black hair, drawn tightly behind the ears, fell in curls upon her shoulders. Her unplucked eyebrows were bright with brilliantine. Her eyelashes were long and curled. Her teeth were very small and white: her mouth unrouged and smiling. As she leant across the zinc bar of her café against a background of many-coloured bottles, she soon came to symbolise the whole spirit of Villefranche for me.

  I visited her bar most evenings. I say I fell in love with her and there is no other label for the emotion that she evoked: and for that matter still evokes; I always visit her when I go to Nice. She is now married – for the second time – to a dentist. She has an elegant flat in the Avenue Mirabeau. She is a grandmother, and I take the granddaughters to the cinema and to a café for an ice-cream afterwards. We are very close. But from the very start I realised that there could be no unplatonic outcome to our amitié. She was chaperoned to an extent that seemed excessive, even in the France of the 1920s. Her parents were Italian. Cécile had been born in Arezzo, and perhaps a distrust of foreigners accentuated her father’s vigilance, but Cécile herself did not resent it. She was, herself, extremely modest. The parents had a small property in the mountains, whose produce contributed largely to the family’s support. The narrow square at the back of the Welcome is today a garage. But it is still called Place du Marché and in 1951 it really was a market; her parents had a stall there, which was run by the younger sister, Doleen, a red-head, a very much more outgoing person. Cécile’s life on the other hand was bounded by the four walls of her bar. Her family house was fifty or so yards higher up, and for days on end she would not walk further than that fifty yards. Once a week she would go to have her hair dressed on the Corniche Road. Occasionally at four o’clock in the afternoon, she would descend to the pâtisserie in front of the market place for a cup of chocolate.

  I once from my bedroom in the hotel took a film of her with a ciné-Kodak. It was in April: the day was chilly. She was wearing a dark coat and skirt. Her hands were thrust into her coat pockets, her head bent forward. She gave the impression of someone hurrying through a hostile city. Which in a way she was. She felt unsure of herself outside her bar; in that dark, cool room she could relax. She was among friends, in her own setting. She was like a princess holding court. She had a smile for everyone who came there, for the fishermen from the quay, the masons from the upper town, the Chasseurs Alpins from the barracks, sailors on leave, tourists such as myself; we were all her guests. She moved like a hostess from one table to another, talking now to this one, then to that. Occasionally she would offer an apéritif to a special friend. She herself never drank, except when she was thirsty; and then it was a Vichy or a peppermint. When the fleet was in, and hospitable clients grew insistent, she had recourse to a brown unlabelled bottle. ‘It is my own liqueur,’ she would say, and charge four francs for it. It contained, of course, water and brown sugar.

  I had written to Cécile after I had left Villefranche. In the spring I returned after a sea trip to East Africa. In the summer again I had returned for a three week visit. We had exchanged letters and postcards during my winter in New York. My heart beat quickly, as the train came out from the tunnel after Beaulieu and I saw the cluster of houses along the waterfront and the blank wall facing me with its Dubonnet sign. Cécile knew that I was coming, but she did not know the exact day. How excited she would be when I came into the bar. ‘And this time I’ll be able to tell her,’ I thought, ‘that I’m to stay two months.’ Which was about the time it would take me, I believed, to write the novel that I had in mind.

  One of the first questions that novelists are always asked is ‘Do you know the end before you start? Do you change your mind as you go along? Don’t your characters sometimes take control?’

  I have answered those questions with a simile. ‘It is like going for a walk,’ I say, ‘you see a house on a hill. It is fifteen miles away. You walk at four miles an hour. You will have to take a rest every now and again. You can expect to take four hours. You cannot be sure, though, of the exact road that you will follow. There is a good deal of dead ground between the house on the distant hill and the point where you are standing. There may be a valley that will force you to make a detour: or there may be a charming orchard where you will want to linger: there may be a ruin worth examining. You cannot foresee your exact route. But you know where you are headed. You know how long it will take you to cover fifteen miles.’

  That is the answer that I give from the lecture platform, and it is mainly true, with this one modification that I have usually found that I break down after I have been writing for three weeks. The story stops. I have to take a rest. I may have begun in the wrong place;
or I may have got one of the characters out of focus; in Island in the Sun for instance, I started by making Julian Fleury, rather than his son Maxwell, spurred into jealousy by detecting in the lavatory the smell of a strange cigarette. It would have been a fatal mistake, because a man of over fifty would not have been jealous in that way about the indiscretions of a woman of his own age, his wife for thirty years. At any rate that kind of husband. He would have felt pity, a need to help, ‘Poor old girl, I’ll have to see her through this mess.’

  I took a six week rest and then started in from a fresh angle. That has happened with nearly all my novels. Once I have got my second wind, the simile of the house on the hill holds good. I know where I am bound and I know how long it will take me to arrive – a 70,000 or a 90,000 or a 130,000 word book.

  When I started on this novel at Villefranche, I anticipated a book of around 130,000 words, and I anticipated writing around 15,000 words a week. My prophecy was fulfilled. I began writing on April 20th. I was due to leave on June 24th in order to get back to England to see the first day of the Lord’s Test Match. I finished the book on June 20th. This book was exceptional in the one respect that I did not have the traditional breakdown at the end of the third week. I have kept the manuscript. It is written by hand on squared French cahiers, and the pace does not falter. I could not have foreseen that I would break my rule, and carry on without a pause; but then in spite of my experience I have always been surprised when that break has come. I have always started off calmly confident that I will stride straight to the house on the far hill.

  I have never written a book with greater confidence and greater enjoyment. And it was as much as anything the enjoyment in its writing that made 1931 such a happy year for me. The book was published in England in late November and in New York in January, and throughout the remainder of the year, I had the warm feeling of a worthwhile job completed. I cheerfully anticipated a warm public reception for it. Nor was I disappointed: the book was well received and its sales in view of the monetary problems with which the world was then afflicted were far from unsatisfactory. Yet to me, now, in retrospect, it seems that in my fifteenth year as a novelist I was making as many mistakes as the most modest tyro.

  I was planning a novel that would both present a picture of contemporary New York and tell the story of my romance with Ruth. My introduction to New York had been in its own way as profound an experience as the love affair in which ‘my honour rooted in dishonour stood.’ In each case I had been introduced to a world of new sensations. In neither case could I be the same person again.

  In order to write this story I had to make the hero a man with a great deal of leisure. It had to be possible for him to cross oceans when his inamorata raised her finger: and if the situation became intolerable he could solve it, temporarily, by catching a ship to England. Moreover, if the book was to present contemporary New York it had to be possible for the hero to spend a good deal of time there. It was hard to see how the hero could be anything but a novelist. I could not make him an international playboy because a reader cannot be interested in a man who does nothing, in whose life nothing is at stake. The hero must be positive. He must stand for something, strive for something. It is not till he has been shown in terms of his ambition that the reader is prepared to be interested in his domestic trials. If not heroic, he must show resolution in a crisis. A boardroom can be as ruthless as a battlefield, the floating of a company as hazardous as the launching of a frigate; a group of directors watching the ticking of a tape machine can be shown as the twentieth-century equivalent of the last Spartans at Thermopylae. The hero has to be a man of action: he has to have a profession. And who but a novelist could get himself involved in the way that I had with Ruth. That was my first mistake; for there is one infallible rule for the writing of fiction: ‘Never choose a novelist for your hero.’ I was given that advice by Ralph Straus when my first novel was in the press and I myself in my nineteenth year. I have followed it dutifully except on this one occasion.

  The novelist is a fate-favoured person; at a first glance he would seem the perfect hero for a novel. He is as free as air. He can work where he likes, when he likes, under conditions of his own choosing. No one bosses him around; he carries his office with him. The circumference of his world is drawn by the radius of his interests. It is indeed possible that he might be the good hero of a picaresque novel; travelling around with a letter of credit and letters of introduction, meeting a variety of adventures, amatory and otherwise; yet it will be hard to present him as anything but a playboy, because it is impossible to present his writing as anything more serious than a profitable hobby.

  In itself writing is undramatic. Flaubert’s picture of himself seated at a window in a dressing gown watching the Seine flow past, waiting for the inevitable word, is a caricature of the average novelist, but it bears a recognisable resemblance. No career could involve less drama. His problems are worked out in privacy; they involve no personal relationships; there are no directors to be conciliated, exposed or shouldered out of office; no refractory cabinets to be cajoled or over-ridden. His interviews with publishers and editors are of a social nature. His battles are fought out in his own mind.

  Yet altogether apart from ‘the agonies of composition’ a novelist does have to be very ruthless in the conduct of his profession. Many, many Septembers ago, a lady to whom I had been paying not unassiduous court during a London season told me that her doctor had warned her against the rigours of an English winter. He had recommended the South of France. She had been lent a flat in Cannes. Why should I not find the equivalent of ‘a willow cabin at her gate’? She would be alone there. I could spend the mornings on my manuscript. We would have the rest of the day to ourselves. She suggested that my patience and devotion would not go unrewarded.

  It was what I appeared to have been praying for all through the summer. But I had made plans to take a long trip to the West Indies. I was curious to see Martinique. A French island as far north of the line as was Tahiti south should present interesting aspects of comparison. An instinct told me that it was important for my writing that I should go there. I set my trip there in the balance against a winter on the Côte d’Azur. It would, of course, be wonderful to be alone with a person to whom I, at the age of thirty, was considerably attracted. But what should I do the rest of the time? Cannes out of the season? November is a rainy month. Gambling bored me. I did not like frittering away money that I had earned with difficulty. There would be no amusing parties. The only foreigners around would be impoverished expatriates who could not afford to get away. There was my manuscript, of course, but it only needed another month. What should I do when it was finished? Wait for ideas to come? It would not, of course, have been all that dreary. I have more than once, since the Second War, spent October, November and December in the South of France. Cannes out of the season is infinitely better than most places in it: and on this occasion there would have been the dividend of a long-sought romance: but an inner voice was counselling me not to cancel my sailing to Martinique. And that inner voice – the daemon that guided Socrates – should never be denied.

  It was for me as a novelist a genuine moment of crisis, but one that it would not be possible to present convincingly in a novel. Many, many years later, not so very long ago in fact, the lady whom I had not joined in Cannes asked me the real reason for my negligence. ‘You can surely tell me the truth now.’

  I told her the truth. A look of incredulity came into her face. ‘You went there to get material for a book? I thought you had a real reason. I thought that that girl of Margaret’s was getting troublesome. I know she wanted you as a son-in-law! I’ve always wondered. You say you went to get material for a book. I’ve never heard anything so silly in my life.’

  That is, I believe, how any reader would feel about the issue: how could the man who has to spend forty-nine weeks a year at an office desk feel any sympathy for one who has to choose between the alternatives of a winter accompanied by a l
ove affair in the South of France and a five month cruise among the Caribbean islands. No one, he would think, has the right to so good a life. And as for the youngish woman, with a wandering eye, whose husband returns home each evening from the city exhausted by the tapping of the typewriter and the screeching of the telephone, whose potential admirers are equally imprisoned within the walls of a forty hour week, who must so often think, ‘If only I could really be alone with him: the only consolation is that he must be thinking that every bit as much himself.’ What contempt would she not have for the hero who lets up a chance like that.

  Yet the fact remains incontestably that that daemon, that inner voice, gave me the correct advice. That trip was decisive, in a way that I could not have foreseen. I went to the West Indies, so that I could draw comparisons between Tahiti and Martinique, but before I had been there three weeks those comparisons had become unimportant. I had become absorbed in the West Indians themselves, in their history, their problems and their future. I had found in fact the subject I had been looking for. Now, at the end of my writing life, I am known, and am happy to be known, as the author of Island in the Sun. Had I spent the winter of 1928—29 in dalliance, my writing career might have petered out in the 1930s and I might have lacked the faith to start again after the Second War. The ‘daemon’ is always right.