[_To H.G. WELLS_]
I, myself, have always liked Delancey Woburn. To begin with, there is
something so endearing about the way he displays his defects, never
hiding them or tidying them away or covering them up. There they are for
all the world to see, a reassuring shop window full of frank
shortcomings. Besides, I never can resist triumphant vitality. Delancey
is overflowing with joie de vivre, with curiosity, with a certainty of
imminent adventure. If you say to him, "I saw a policeman," his face
lights up and so it would if you said "I saw a dog," or a cat, or a
donkey-cart. To him policemen and dogs and cats and donkey-carts are
always just about to do something dramatic or absurd or unexpected. Nor
is he discouraged by unfailing regularity in their behaviour. Faith is
"the evidence of things not seen."
And then, too, he is so very welcoming. Not, of course, that he makes
you feel you are the only person in the world because a world with only
one other person in it would be inconceivably horrible to him, but he
does make you quite sure that he is most frightfully glad to see
you--all the gladder because it is such a surprise. Delancey always
makes a point of being surprised. Also, though he is invariably in a
hurry--being in a hurry is one of the tributes he pays to life--he as
invariably turns round and walks with you, in your direction, to
convince himself that having met you in Jermyn Street is an altogether
unexpected and delightful adventure. And he never feels, as I always do,
that a five minutes' conversation is a stupid, embarrassing thing, too
long for mere civility and too short for anything else. The five minutes
are filled to the brim and off he rushes again, leaving me just a little
more tired and leisurely from the contact. Delancey is the life and soul
of a party--or perhaps I should say the life and body. He likes eating
and drinking and talking to women and talking to men and smoking and
telling a story. And if he does address his neighbour a little as if she
were a meeting at a bye-election, open air, he at any rate never
addresses her as if she were a duty and no one had ever wanted to kiss
her.
To Delancey all women have had lovers and husbands and children and
religious conversions and railway accidents. Old maids and clergymen's
wives adore him.
I don't know what it was that made him write originally. Perhaps it was
his name--Delancey Woburn sounds like the author--or the hero--of a
serial. Or it may have been that his exuberant desire for
self-expression had burst through the four walls of practical
professions. He had, I believe, considered the stage and the church.
Journalism would have seemed to me the obvious outlet but he preferred
literature. "Creation is such _fun_," he would explain, beaming. And, of
course, he was tremendously successful. Delancey was designed on a
pattern of success.
That was one of the obvious defects I was talking about. Delancey has
missed his failures. He has fought and been defeated but he has never
longed and been frustrated. In his case, romance is realism. He has only
known happy endings.
Naturally he is not an interesting writer. How could he be? And,
naturally, he is a successful one. How could he help it? Delancey writes
for magazines in England and America. I, myself, never read magazines,
but occasionally he sends me one and every twenty stories (I think it is
twenty) become a book. The English ones were about scapegraces and
irresistible ne'er-do-wells, ancestral homes with frayed carpets and
faded hangings in which penniless woman-haters (the last of a noble
line) sit and brood, living alone with equally gruff, woman-hating
family retainers. Sometimes, too, there was an absent-minded dreamer,
and villainous business men worked indefatigably in the interests of
their own ultimate frustration.
But this, of course, would never do for America where there isn't a
market for ne'er-do-wells, frayed carpets inspire no glamour, and
dreamers who before the war were despised as harmless, are now damned as
dangerous. No, America must have her special line and no one better than
Delancey knew how to mix the fragrance of true love with the flavour of
Wall Street and serve at the right temperature.
He wasn't proud of his writing--or, rather, he wasn't proud of it with
every one. In his heart of hearts, what he wanted was not the applause
of the public, but the faith of a coterie, to be a martyr, misunderstood
by the many, worshipped by the few. A Bloomsbury hero, a Chelsea King!
"We confess that as a writer Mr. Delancey Woburn is altogether too
rarefied for our taste. His work is far too impregnated by the stamp of
a tiny clique of rather self-conscious superintellectuals. Reading his
books, we feel as if we had suddenly entered a room full of people who
know one another very well. In other words, we feel out of it."
What would not Delancey have given for a review that began like that!
Instead of which the best that he could hope for in "shorter notices"
would be an announcement that "Mr. Woburn's many admirers will no doubt
find his last book eminently to their taste. He provides a lavish supply
of the features they are accustomed to look for in his work."
Poor Delancey, his stories _did_ sell so well! And there was his flat in
Grafton Street with the beautiful new taffetas curtains and the cigars
that had just arrived from Havana, with his own initials on.
So from week to week he put off becoming an artist and one year (after a
four-month love affair and two lacquer cabinets) he made a lecture tour
in America.
"Was it a success?" I asked wearily (Delancey's success is always such a
terribly foregone conclusion).
"Tremendous," he beamed. "I was careful to be a little dull because then
they think they're learning something." But he was out of love, the flat
was overcrowded, money continued to pour in and he knew terribly well
that he was not making a contribution to contemporary literature.
He had always assured me at intervals that some day he would write his
"real book" but I think it was after his tour in America that the dream
became a project. He burst in to tell me about it. Delancey always
begins things with a sudden noisy rush.
"Charlotte," he said, "I have made up my mind."
"It sounds very momentous," I teased. He decided years ago that I was
grave, fastidious, whimsical, aloof and (I suspect) a little faded. I
have long given up fighting my own battle (to be known) because I
realise that Delancey never revises the passports given to old ideas.
There is always, to him, something a little bit sacred about the
accepted. "I can't go on with it any longer," he explained.
"Go on with what?"
"My damned stories."
"How ungrateful you are," I murmured, thinking of the lacquer cabinets,
"you have a market, you can command a price. Each of your love affairs
is more magnificently studded with flowers than the last----"
"Be quiet," he said. "I came to you because I knew that you would
understand."
"You are trying to blackmail me."
"Do be serious," he pleaded. "I am going to give all that up. I have
determined to settle down and dedicate myself entirely to my book."
"But," I expostulated, "have you thought of the yearning _Saturday
Evening Post_, of the deserted _Strand_?"
"I have thought of everything," he said, "I shall be sacrificing 5,000
pounds a year, but what is 5,000 pounds a year?"
I thought of the taffetas curtains and the cigars, but I answered quite
truthfully.
"I don't know."
"You see, Charlotte," he dropped the noble for the confidential, "I have
got things to say, things that are vital to me. I couldn't put them in
my other work. How could I? It would have seemed--you will think me
ridiculous--a kind of prostitution."
"Yes," I said.
"But they were clamouring for expression all the time. And I have kept
them down till I couldn't keep them down any longer. Of course, I know
my book won't be a success--a popular success, I mean--but it won't have
been written for the multitude but for the few--the people who really
care, who really understand. It may be even thought," there was
exultation in his voice, "dull."
"Well," I said, "I think it is very brave of you--and quite right. Truly
I do."
"I think I shall take a tiny cottage in a fishing village in
Devonshire," Delancey was as usual seeing things pictorially--bare
white-washed walls, blue and white linen curtains and a pot of wall
flowers.
A week later he came to see me again.
"When are you off to Devonshire?" I asked.
"I have decided to stay here," he answered, "there is a roar of life in
London, a vibrating pulse, a muffled thunder." I began to be afraid that
Delancey's book would be very bad indeed. It was, it appeared, to be a
novel. "Not exactly a novel," he explained, "a large canvas with figures
moving on a back-ground of world conditions." I thought of "War and
Peace" and was silent. It doesn't matter being silent with Delancey
because he doesn't notice it.
"I want," he said, "to picture the very earth in the agonies of labour
giving birth to a new world." Later, the theme was (to my secret relief)
narrowed down to England.
"I have changed my motif a little," he said. "I simply want to portray
the quicksilver of after-war conditions--England in transition." At this
time Delancey seemed to me the least little tiny bit depressed. The
income he was sacrificing rose (in his conversation) from 5,000 to 7,000
pounds. He dined out less, avoided his club and Christie's. Also, he
kept out of love. For ten years, Delancey had always been in love.
Managed by him, it was a delightful state, ably presided over by head
waiters and florists. It made, he once explained to me, all the
difference to walking into a room.
But everything was changed now. The masterpiece was a jealous god.
Jealous and, I sometimes thought, apt to be a little tiresome. It had to
be referred to so very deferentially, with such carefully serious
respect. Also, it cast a shadow of gravity over Delancey--Delancey who
was never meant to be a high priest, but rather a young man in white
flannels, with a cigarette in his mouth, punting a young girl with a red
sunshade--like an illustration to one of his own stories.
Friendship is a difficult, dangerous job. It is also (though we rarely
admit it) extremely exhausting. But never have my patience and endurance
been more severely tested than during the year of Delancey's
masterpiece. He finally decided that in the foreground, there was to be
the clash of two human souls and in the background, the collision of two
worlds--the old (pre-War) and the new. In fact, a partie carrée of
conflicts.
"You with your love of form," he explained to me, "will appreciate the
care I have given to the structure. It is," he added, "difficult to
mould vast masses of material."
As the months went by I began to be horribly afraid that Delancey's
novel would be very, very long indeed. And even if nobody read it
through, not even a reviewer, I should have to without skipping a word
or a comma.
"The sentences," Delancey told me, "are rather long. I find the
semicolon very useful for cumulative effects." A vast array of words
policed by semi-colons. I felt a little dizzy. Would they be able to
keep order?
"Of course," he continued, "the interest is very largely psychological,
but I regard the book mainly as a document--a social document. The
fiction of to-day is the history of to-morrow."
This seemed conclusive. The book could not have less than 700 pages. A
social document with psychological interest and a double conflict. Why,
it would be short at that. And then, one day, when Delancey's book had
become to me a form of eternity, he arrived, breathless with excitement.
"To all intents and purposes, it's finished," he gasped.
"Thank God," I murmured faintly.
"It will be an awful loss to me," he stated mournfully.
"It isn't dead yet," I said with feeble jocularity.
"It is sad to see your children leave you. To watch them step out into a
cold, inhospitable world," he went on.
"A warm, welcoming world," I amended dishonestly. "You haven't told me
what it is called yet."
"It isn't called anything. I want you to be its god-mother, Charlotte.
What about 'Whither'?"
"Too like a pamphlet," I was glad to be on firm ground again.
"I thought about 'Fate's Laboratory,' but it isn't very rhythmical, is
it?"
"Not very," I agreed.
"The question mark after the 'Whither' would look nice on the cover," he
reflected regretfully.
I brightened. This was the old Delancey. The Delancey of the _Saturday
Evening Post_ and the _Strand_, of the taffetas curtains and the cottage
in Devonshire. By my sudden glow of gladness I realised how much I had
missed him. But I couldn't say, "Dear, _dear_ Delancey, please be your
old self and never, never, whatever you do, write another 'good' book,"
so I confessed that a question mark _would_ look very nice, but that I
still thought that "Whither" sounded rather like a religious tract.
"Well, we must think it over," he said.
A week later, he announced to me in a tone which indicated clearly that
my opinion was only wanted if it was approval, "I have decided to call
my book 'Transition.'"
"I always like single word titles," I said.
"No one will read it," he said. "One bares one's soul to the public and
they throw stones at it. But at any rate, now I can hold my head high."
I didn't laugh, but it was the effort of a lifetime. Dear Delancey was
so very absurd as a self-made martyr. It was somehow impossible for him
to give an impression of having been persecuted for righteousness'
sake. His shiny, rosy face had never looked rounder, his trousers had
never been more perfect or his shoes more polished. And there were still
the same little outbursts of childish prosperity, his watch, his
tie-pin, his links were all redolent of a vitality that had ever been
just the least little bit blatant.
"Delancey," I said, "I want you to have just the sort of success you
want for yourself."
"Thank you," he said, wondering if I knew what I was talking about.
And then, one day, a proof copy of Delancey's book arrived. I looked at
the paper cover. It was bright orange with "Transition" slanting upwards
in immense black letters. "Very arresting," I could hear the publisher
saying. Gingerly I unwrapped it. Underneath, it was sober black linen,
with bright blue lettering still on the cross. I sat with it in my
hands, feeling limp and will-less. But, at last, I pulled myself
together. I read the dedication, "To those who died." I saw that there
were 600 pages, big pages crowded with words. And then, saying to
myself, "It is no good putting it off," I began to read. Delancey's book
was certainly not at all like his stories. It was very nearly rather a
good book and it was quite extraordinarily dull. The social structure
played a rôle of deadly relentless magnitude. It began (before the War)
as an immense iron scaffolding and ended sprawling in the foreground,
torn up by the roots. In the clutches of this gigantic monster, the two
chief characters not unnaturally reduced by comparison with their
surroundings to the proportion of pygmies in their turn, worked from
happiness to the self-conscious misery which is the only true state of
grace.
"I have chosen a man and a woman, neither of them in any way
exceptional," wrote Delancey in the preface and though this was
undoubtedly so, they seemed to me truer to fiction than to life. No, the
merits of the book had nothing to do with the characters, they lay in
the descriptions of the English countryside, of village life, of London
traffic, of the Armistice, of an Albert Hall meeting. There was a close
observation of detail and that pictorial sense which is Delancey's one
gift and which he relentlessly suppressed whenever he could,
nevertheless forced its way out here and there. The canvas seemed to me
immense. Politicians and preachers, workers and capitalists, artists and
philistines, "good" women and prostitutes, soldiers and conscientious
objectors jostled one another in the mêlée. Bloomsbury, Westminster,
Chelsea and Mayfair each had its appointed place, while race-courses and
night-clubs alternated with mining villages and methodist chapels. But,
unlike Delancey's other stories, the soldiers had no V.C.'s and the
workers didn't touch their caps. My eyes ached and my brain tired as I
read on, but I forced myself forward with the thought that no one else
in the world would reach the end.
Then the reviews began. I felt a little nervous but one seemed more
glowing than the last. Finally, a notice appeared two columns long
entitled "A Social Document" which ended with the words, "We venture to
predict that this book will be read 100 years hence as a truer picture
of the England of to-day than most of the histories that are being
written." Delancey was frightfully pleased, naturally. With child-like
joy he showed me cuttings from intellectual literary papers. His book
was even mentioned in a leading article and formed the topic of a
sermon.
"Think of reaching a pulpit," he exclaimed exultantly. "Of course, I
know I've lost my old public but I've found my soul."
"People talk to me of their work now," he told me another time; "in old
days, they never thought me one of themselves. I was a story teller, not
an artist."
And then it was that an extraordinary thing happened--"Transition" began
to sell. It was quoted and talked about until the snowball of fame,
steadily gathering momentum, started rolling down-hill to the general
public. The sales went up and up and up. The circulation reached
100,000 and soon after, 150,000. Why people bought it and whether they
read it, I don't know, but Sydney (the heroine) and Mark Allison (the
hero) became household words and soon they were used as generic terms--a
Sydney, or an Allison, without so much as an inverted comma!
Delancey hardly ever came to see me. I imagine he was in a very divided
state of mind! He had so dreadfully wanted to be an intellectual, to be
able to rail at the base imbecile public in exquisitely select
Bloomsbury coteries, he had so resolutely determined to be a martyr, to
sacrifice himself on the altar of pure art, and somehow Mr. T.S. Eliot
and martyrdom were as far off as ever. After all, he had given up 5,000
pounds a year and V.C.'s and happy endings. Was it his fault if he was
making more money than ever and the inner circles of the unread elect
seemed more firmly closed than ever?
At this time, Delancey avoided me, but I heard that "Transition" was to
be dramatised and that the film rights had been bought. How the endless
chaotic mass, loosely held together by semi-colons, was to be moulded
into a drama or a movie was quite beyond my imagination, but evidently
some enterprising people had decided to call their play "Transition."
"Delancey must," I reflected, "be getting very rich indeed." But still
he didn't come near me, until one day I sent for him. He looked, I
thought, just a tiny bit care-worn. The all conquering light had gone
out of his eye. His boots were a little dusty and he wore no tie-pin. He
had, I suppose, become rich beyond the symptoms of prosperity.
"Well," I smiled at him to reassure him.
"It has all been very surprising, hasn't it?" he said with an
embarrassed expression.
I didn't know whether to say "yes" or "no," that I was glad or that I
was sorry.
"But it doesn't alter the quality of your book," I consoled him.