My Brother Evelyn & Other Profiles Read online

  At that time he was supremely confident in his powers as a writer and he had a good-natured contempt for most of the idols of contemporary esteem. When such trivial fellows were admired, he should not find it difficult to carve his own career. He was impatient for the day when he would be free from the irksome routine of a hotelier. ‘When I’m in the very middle of a paragraph, old man, I’m called away to inspect the roof of the maids’ lavatory.’ Actually he was writing under ideal conditions. When Horizon organized a symposium on how a writer could best supplement his earnings from his books, most contributors agreed that he needed a job unconnected with literature, that he should not be a publisher’s reader, write scripts for the B.B.C. or copy for an advertising agency; he must be able to come fresh to his creative work.

  Kingsmill’s job was from that point of view ideal. He had warm and comfortable quarters. He was well-fed. He could travel. He was in touch with human administrative problems. He was meeting new people, and different kinds of people. His routine offered him constant copy and he was not overworked. He had responsibilities and he had to be on the spot, but he could have devised a programme, as he had at Mainz, which would have allowed him a regular undisturbed period. It was a pity he did not remain in his father’s business. But he left it in the later ‘twenties, when his marriage broke, and the new life which he began with his habitual confidence and high spirits was to prove a harder conflict than he had expected.

  His first book after The Will to Love contained three long short stories and was entitled The Dawn’s Delay. It was published in 1924 and bore the name Hugh Kingsmill. At that time his brother Arnold was editing for Chapman & Hall a yearly series called Georgian Stories. The 1925 volume included a story from The Dawn’s Delay—W.f. It was the last number that Lunn edited; next year I took it over and William Gerhardi was one of the writers whom I asked for a contribution. I sent him a copy of the 1925 volume to show what kind of company I was inviting him to join. In his letter of acceptance, he expressed such enthusiasm for W.J.—‘who was this genius? did I know him?’—that I sent his letter on to Kingsmill, who promptly responded by sending Gerhardi a copy of The Dawn’s Delay.

  ‘This,’ Gerhardi wrote in Memoirs of a Polyglot, ‘was the beginning of a friendship that has not been uneventful. It has survived two storms, which so dislocated our lives that each of us remains to this day, to the other’s mother, a sinister influence in the career of her son. Kingsmill’s habit, I regret to say, is to abscond and set up house with somebody in whom I have invested a good deal of emotion and then to defend the purity of their hearth against my visits, though indulgent enough to consent to meet me outside his new home.’

  Kingsmill is the hero of Gerhardi’s novel Pending Heaven and there is an excellent description of him in Memoirs of a Polyglot. Gerhardi never lost faith in his friend’s talent. There were those, he complained, who thought that his ‘literary enthusiasm for his writings are biased by friendship. The truth is my literary enthusiasm for him has inveigled me into a precarious friendship. I feel in regard to Hugh Kingsmill the satisfaction of a man who backs an outsider knowing him to be a “dead cert”.’

  But it did not turn out that way. I would not say that Kingsmill was a failure. He published a number of biographies on which his publishers did not lose money and which were well reviewed; his two anthologies of Abuse are classics; he was literary editor of the English Review; during the war he was on Punch’s reviewing staff. In any-other walk of life he would have seemed successful. A soldier who retires as a Brigadier would not be considered a failure because he did not finish as a Lieutenant-General and a K.B.E., but for authors the gap is immense in terms of tangible reward between a best-seller and an author whom a publisher is glad to have upon his list. It is not surprising that an author should grow bitter. Why-should his books sell less well than those of a man who is less well read than he, a less sound judge of values, with a less concise command of English, a man who has seen less, done less, who conversationally is less effective? It is very easy to attribute that other man’s success to backstairs influence, a capacity to play cards cunningly or to the low standard of public taste. And Hugh Kings-mill was one of the unlucky ones who never hit the jackpot.

  All his friends thought he would; as a biographer if not as a novelist; if not with this book, then with the next. He had so many qualifications; he had humour and warmth, a human approach to his subject: he wrote well; he was widely read; he worked hard; he was ambitious. There is a big market for the topical biography. It was surely only a question of time before he hit on the right subject. But he never did, and the demands upon his purse were heavy; he was in constant financial difficulties; and he was a generous openhearted man who needed good fellowship and wine. If a man is tidy and goes to a good tailor, he can look smart when his clothes are threadbare. But Kingsmill had never been tidy. He went to a run-of-the-mill tailor; he began to look shabby, and he was conscious of it. Douglas Goldring described him in his autobiography as being ‘A shade embittered by the trials and tribulations of the literary life’. ‘Shade’ is an understatement. As the ‘thirties ran their course, he became quick to take offence. I once asked him to dinner without inviting any other guests. It was some time since we had seen each other and I wanted to have a gossip. His feelings were hurt. He was not good enough, he supposed, for my smart, successful friends. I found that I had to be on my guard with him, the very last thing I should have expected.

  We met for the last time in September 1941 at a large cocktail party at which Hamish Hamilton was celebrating his tenth year in publishing. On the following day I was sailing for the Middle East. It was for me an occasion of dramatic irony. I was certain to be away for a long time, but I could not, owing to military security, make an occasion of my sailing. There were a hundred people there, several of them friends I had not seen since the war began; we welcomed each other warmly. I took their telephone numbers. We agreed that we must get together soon. I would write to them from the ship, I told myself.

  Hugh Kingsmill was the one I was most glad to see there. He was his buoyant, warmhearted self again. Things were going reasonably well for him. He had as much journalism as he could find the time for. Paper was rationed and books were selling as many copies as the publisher was in a position to print. The 1930s ballyhoo of publishing with its high-pressure methods and double-column advertisements across the Sunday papers was at an end. When the country’s existence was in peril, professional jealousies had no place. As Kingsmill’s great laugh boomed across the room, I could fancy myself back at Mainz.

  I heard of him several times during the war, in my father’s letters. I promised myself that on my return he would be one of the first people with whom I would get in touch. But that was the kind of promise that it was easy to make three thousand miles away.

  Only Londoners know how hard it was immediately after the war to keep in touch with friends; there was rationing both of food and petrol; everything you did involved an effort; you had to queue for this and fill out forms for that and await priorities. You did one thing at a time, and you concentrated upon seeing the very few friends who were special to you and relied upon running into the other ones by chance; which you rarely did, unless you belonged to the same club. Rarely have London clubs been such a refuge and a home as they were during the war and the immediate post-war years, but I did not belong to the same club as Kingsmill.

  I saw him once from the top of a Number 11 bus. He was hatless, walking with his familiar roll along the Strand, a pile of books under his arm. It sent a nostalgic wave along my nerves. I must get in touch with him; but I was going abroad in a few days.

  He died before I returned.

  Whenever I hear it argued that sooner or later a good writer must strike the public fancy, if only with a single book, I have my answer ready—Hugh Kingsmill never did.

  What went wrong? Was he without that point of timing that is so essential an ingredient to success or did his books lack in their act
ual composition that sense of moving towards a climax that carries the reader along from page to page? Had he, as a writer, the complementary defects of his qualities as a conversationalist so that he visualized his books in terms of mots and repartees; writing in terms of sentences and paragraphs instead of chapters building to a final chapter? In his company it was impossible not to believe that he was a person of high consequence. Did he express himself so completely in conversation that only a pallid residue was left to him at his desk?

  After his death Malcolm Muggeridge and Hesketh Pearson, with each of whom he had collaborated, wrote one another a series of letters about him which they published under the title Hughie. It is a volume that any friend of Kingsmill’s would welcome upon his shelves, but the average reader might well have asked why he was being asked to accept with such veneration and without supporting evidence the opinions of a man of whom he had scarcely heard.

  The other day I re-read The Dawn’s Delay. It has not worn well. When Kingsmill was writing through the mind of a man in liquor or half-asleep or on the verge of a mental breakdown, he could produce an occasional flash of wit, such as Polmont’s: ‘“A good fellow,” he remarked, as Glayde left the room. “A good fellow. Kind hearts are more than coronets. More numerous or more valuable? Tennyson is not explicit on this point.”’ But the stories have no particular point; there is no originality of plot, character or treatment. Why was Gerhardi so impressed by ‘W. J.’? Is it too fanciful to suggest that by a process of telepathetic divination he recognized, turning its pages, that here was the friend whom he had missed. ‘Although I had had school friends in my time and was in the army and at Oxford, Hugh Kingsmill I realized was the first whose mind exhilarated my mind and exercised it to the full; that is, a being to merit the term “friend”.’

  I had said very much the same thing about him in a book I published in 1932. ‘Gerhardi,’ I wrote, ‘maintains that he is a genius. Certainly he has genius. I have liked only two men as much. I have never been so stimulated by any company. He is like the sun shining on you. You become happy. The present is rich. The future radiant. You talk well. He has the supreme gift in personal contact not only of entertaining you but making you entertain him. You find yourself talking as fast though not as loudly as he does. He envelops you with warmth and friendliness.’

  I closed the section with this paragraph.

  ‘I do not know if he will ever write a great book. Gerhardi maintains that he already has. But, myself, I feel that a man who expresses himself with such abundance in the ordinary contacts of life does not need the substitute of writing. I feel that writing is for him what living is, for Gerhardi probably, for most big writers certainly, a side show.’

  7

  Ralph Straus

  In January 1919 I started adult civilian life with a minute nucleus of friends, but by the end of the year I had assembled quite a number; most of them men older than myself. The success of The Loom of Youth placed me at the age of twenty in a position that most writers do not reach till they are thirty. My opposite numbers at the Savage were all several years my senior. Ralph Straus, the first professional writer to become a personal friend of mine, was at least twenty years older than myself.

  I met him first in March 1917, through Ian Mackenzie, a fellow cadet at Sandhurst who died of Spanish flu on Armistice night. He might have been a considerable poet had fate spared him. Between us there had sprang up one of those quick eager friendships that are only possible between two young men of high ambitions. We were without rivalry and jealousy as we declaimed our poems to one another, knowing there were ample kingdoms for each to conquer. We shared everything; not without boastfulness we produced our separate friends. Gilbert Cannan and S. P. B. Mais were my contributions, Harold Monro and Ralph Straus were his.

  There was an outbreak of mumps that spring at Sandhurst and the college closed down for three weeks. Much of the time Ian spent at Underhill, and he arranged a meeting with Ralph Straus, at a lunch given for us by Ralph’s uncle, an M.P.

  Ralph was then in officer’s uniform, of a kind; with a red cross instead of a star upon his shoulder. He was employed in some administrative capacity in a hospital. He walked with a stick and a limp and his leg was bent. He was clearly unfit for military service. It was a curious complaint. Before the war he had played fives for Harrow; as soon as the war was over his knee straightened so that he could play cricket, of a casual nature, regularly, and court tennis with some skill. His limp was a strictly war-time liability. We are now assured that all illnesses, except appendicitis, are mental.

  In 1917 Strauss was living with his parents in an ample house in Craven Road, near Paddington. He had a large study booklined to the ceiling, with a high rounded window. He took us back to this room after lunch. He walked round his shelves, taking down book after book; he had an anecdote to tell about each one. Many had been signed by their authors and the title pages of H. G. Wells’s were decorated with amusing drawings. Straus seemed to know everybody.

  Before the war Straus had led the life of an industrious dilettante. He had had a private printing press on which he had published an edition of Petronius, with the Latin text facing a translation and with a number of illustrations by Norman Lindsay. It was a subject particularly suited to Lindsay’s talent. I have never seen obesity portrayed more faithfully and more revoltingly than in his picture of middle-aged patricians standing round a swimming pool. He wrote a weekly bookpage for the Bystander. He was not highly paid for it, but the sale of the review books was his perquisite. Every other year he published a novel, on both sides of the Atlantic, that received good reviews and respectable sales. He did occasionally a specialist’s book; there was one on Baskerville, the printer, another on stage coaches. He made possibly eight hundred pounds a year and that sum went a long way in 1913. Living with his parents, he had no overhead expenses. He could travel, he could entertain and he was a generous and skilful host.

  Straus was small, stocky, bald, with a thick short black moustache. He was unmistakably a Jew. Anti-Semitism is, in England, practically non-existent, but it was one of Ralph’s idiosyncrasies to deny his race. His family, he explained, had backed the Young Pretender and after Culloden had deemed it prudent to change its name. Many affectionate jokes centred round ‘the Straus tartan’.

  His novel The Unseemly Adventure was dramatized. One of the characters was a duke. The part was taken by a somewhat common actor who objected to one of the phrases that was put into his mouth. ‘Dukes don’t talk like that. I know dukes,’ he said. ‘As though I didn’t,’ was Straus’s comment, in repeating the episode.

  It was amusing to watch the devious route by which he would inform his friends that he played squash racquets with the Prince of Wales.

  ‘You know more than I do about the prices newspapers are paying now. What should I get for seven hundred words on “The Game the Prince Plays”?’

  ‘Five, six guineas. What is it by the way?’

  ‘Squash racquets.’

  ‘Is he any good?’

  ‘Not bad, not bad at all.’ Then after a pause, ‘I can give him three points but not five.’

  Court tennis is, I am assured, one of the finest hardball games in the world, but I am sure that it was not the game’s intrinsic quality but its aristocratic connections that made Straus take it up. He had an invariable ploy, as Stephen Potter would put it, when a man mentioned that his game was tennis. His face would light with interest. ‘Indeed. Where do you play—Lord’s, Prince’s, Queen’s?’

  On learning that his friend played on grass with a soft ball, his features would register a superior disappointment. ‘Oh, you mean lawn tennis.’

  In 1919 psychoanalysis became news in London. I heard about it first from Straus. He claimed to take private patients, unprofessionally. He talked with oracular solemnity on the interpretation of dreams. ‘I was staying in a country house, the other week-end. As a matter of fact it was at Willie Mount’s—you know who I mean of course, Lord Art
hur Mount. A young girl came down to breakfast and described in complete innocence a dream that made me blush. I took her aside afterwards and warned her, “Never tell your dreams, my dear. Someone may know what you are talking about.” ‘ I pressed him to tell me what the dreams had been but he shook his head. ‘No,’ he said, ‘no. I really couldn’t. The subconscious plays strange and rather terrible tricks at times.’

  Where psychoanalysis was concerned he had little sense of humour. Describing an occasion on which he had found himself in medical disagreement with a stranger, ‘Little did he guess,’ he said, ‘that he was arguing with the greatest living authority on masturbation.’

  We all made gentle fun of him but always unmaliciously. I have never heard anybody speak against him, just as I never heard him say a mean, unkind, or spiteful word. He liked in conversation to hold the stage, he was a snob and he allowed distinguished names to drift into his talk, but he never betrayed a confidence. If I had ever found myself in a trouble that required discretion, he was the first person to whom I would have turned.

  He seemed a fate-favoured mortal in 1919 when he left the hospital at Tunbridge Wells, returned to his booklined study, resumed his literary career with a psychoanalytical novel Pengard Awake and became again a dilettante. As president of the Sette of Odde Volumes he brought to its monthly dinners half a dozen guests. His favourite wine, he explained to them, did happen to be champagne, but of course if they preferred burgundy or claret.… Many of us envied him, but not in an envious way. He was not overbearing: he did not flaunt his fortune; nobody grudged it him. Then the blow fell.