apply your blue pencil to it, and erase that phrase about the sad guild
in its dingy uniform. It is unworthy of you, for you can fizz very
prettily, at times.
I forget the name of the first play which I was ever called upon to
criticize, except that it was a worthless ‘comedy’ in the West End by
somebody who was evidently not fit to produce even a one-act sketch.
But with what infinite conscientiousness I attacked my task! I went
armed with pencils, one of which I produced from time to time in order
to scribble furtively on the back of the programme, trying not to be
seen and yet half hoping that somebody would see me, and realize that
I really was a dramatic critic. However, it was exceedingly difficult
to work under such conditions. One had rather to bend down and crumple
one’s waistcoat (which would bring one perilously near the condition of
‘sad uniform’), or else content oneself with a few desultory scrawls
which were usually illegible at the end of the performance.
From such scraps, at first, was the criticism written, late at night,
while the echo of the drama still seemed to hover in the air. But
after a time I learnt that far the best criticisms were written
entirely from memory, at least a day after the play. Sometimes, if
there was a première on the night in which we were going to press, it
would be necessary to dash into the office and write half a column in
twenty minutes, surrounded by the buzz and clash of great machines
printing late editions. But criticizing in those circumstances
was dangerous--very dangerous. So elating, so intoxicating is the
atmosphere of the theatre, that a good actress seems transfigured, for
the moment, into a great genius. Not until the morning comes do we
realize only too often that she is just--good.
For every capable play I saw--not great, but well-constructed and
interesting--I must have seen, at a very charitable estimate, twenty
bad ones. A mysterious thing the theatre. Entirely incalculable, one
would imagine, for the average run of men. I have asked myself time and
again, during the last year or so, by what dark process certain plays
have ever been born at all. I have sat back in my stall, in wide-eyed
innocence, listening to the sort of dialogue that, one imagines, takes
place during the meat-teas of our lesser lunatic asylums, endeavouring
to be interested in situations that contain nothing new, nothing
dramatic, nothing vital in any way whatever. And I say why? Why?
I ask myself the same question during the _entr’acte_ in the bar,
with its warm humanity, its grotesque barmaids, its sparkling taps
and glasses. Here, where life is throbbing and intense, where the
presumably evil passions of those who have not drunk are offset by
the soft desires of those who have, the drama which one has just been
observing seems infinitely petty--the _dramatis personæ_ as ghosts
blown willy-nilly across a desolate stage by the winds of nonsense.
Again I wonder why?
Before I endeavour to answer that question let me say that when I see
a real play I do not go to the bar. I either remain attached to my
seat in a state of trance, or else I go out by myself into the street,
collide violently with the stomachs of large fat men, get splashed by
motor-buses, and creep back, like a worshipper, just as the lights are
being turned down.
We have still not answered the question, Why do such bad plays get
produced at all? The chief reason, I believe, is that one of the most
important people in the theatre is still paid rather less than the
ladies who sweep the carpets. That person is the play-reader. Mr.
Edward Knoblock was a play-reader before he wrote _Kismet_, and told
me that he used to read something like three thousand plays a year,
working all day and a good deal of the night, for some fantastically
small sum, like two pounds a week. Yet, on his decision (and very often
on his extra work in re-writing them), depended the expenditure of
thousands of pounds, and the making or losing of a small fortune.
We have recently had a very illuminating illustration of the mentality
of the play-reader. A woman who for twenty years has been reading plays
for London managers (who, presumably, have been guided by her advice),
suddenly wrote a play herself, in collaboration with a man whose name I
forget.
The play was duly produced, and it ran, by a miracle, for a week.
It was a farce, in both senses of the word. No adjective in any
language can describe its dreariness. (I believe there is a word in
Russian, which deals with a particular mental disease known only among
grave-diggers, but I have forgotten it.) If a nonconformist father and
a Baptist mother had produced a daughter of the lowest intelligence,
who had sedulously been kept from entering the theatre until she was
thirty, at which date she had been to a pierrot performance on a small
sea-side pier on a rainy day at the end of the season, and had then
returned with a splitting headache to record her impressions, that was
the sort of play she would write. Ten sentences of it, in typescript,
would have given the average reader a feeling of desolate despair that
the human brain could conceive such banalities.
And yet, the author, for twenty years, has been (and to the best of
my knowledge, still is) a form of despot before whom all aspiring
young playwrights must make obeisance. She is the gate through which
they must pass, the play-doctor who must pronounce them sound. It is
all wrong. She may be a good mother, a brave woman, with a positive
passion for dumb animals. But she never has, never will, and never can,
be qualified to judge of any matter even remotely connected with the
theatre.
With one notable exception--I need not name him--we know practically
nothing about ‘scene’ in the sense that Mr. Gordon Craig uses the word.
We use a lighting system as casually as we switch on a light in our
own bathrooms. We stick chairs higgledy-piggledy all over the room,
not realizing that in a play a chair is a perpetual _note_, a monotone
perhaps, but still playing its part in the general harmony or discord.
We have had one or two attempts at significant scenery in England
lately, but the scenery was so significant that it entirely dwarfed the
actors, who themselves were none too strong that they should be robbed
of even a little of their personality. One had a sense of infinite
sideboards, one was caught in the rapture that belongs to a really
seductive sofa. And the play went to pot.
It has needed an American to show us what scenery can be. Need I
say that I refer to Mr. Robert Jones’s designs for John Barrymore’s
production of _Hamlet_? It is the most superb scenery I have seen in
any part of the world--the soaring arch, lost in gloom, brooding,
sometimes outlined in a sudden fretted splendour, tremendously aloof,
like the gesture of some genius who alone fully comprehended the
recessed mysteries of Hamlet’s soul. If I know the smallest thing about
the theatre, that was great scenery--as great, in its way, as the play
itself.
Writing of Robert Jones--who, as one of the most important men in the
modern theatre, ought to be as well known in this country as Bernard
Shaw is in America--makes me want to ‘have you meet him,’ because
hardly anybody over here seems even to have heard of him at all. He
is exquisitely erratic. I have spoken of the marvellous arch which he
made for _Hamlet_, but I did not betray the secret of its inspiration.
That came from Mont St. Michel. And this was Robert Jones’s method of
getting to Mont St. Michel.
He was going to Paris with an old friend. By some strange freak they
entered a train which was continually stopping at stations. After an
hour or so it stopped at a tiny station, surrounded by fields of blue
flowers, with hills beckoning in the distance.
‘Let’s get out,’ said Robert.
‘Let’s,’ replied the friend, who, with geniuses, always acquiesced.
They got out, seized their luggage. Outside was an old Ford car. The
luggage was placed upon it.
Robert took out a map. ‘It is only a few hundred miles from here,’
he said, ‘to the sea. If we go straight across country we shall
reach Mont St. Michel.’ He made a rapid calculation. ‘We should
arrive at dawn. The towers will be rising out of the mist.’ (To the
coachman)--‘Drive to Mont St. Michel.’
And by that fiery spirit was created the scene which, to me, is the
only setting worthy of _Hamlet_.
It would be interesting to know the extent to which the censor has
contributed to the present state of affairs. I think he is more
objectionable as a distasteful symbol than as a functioning official.
The obvious and natural idea that censorship in any form whatever is
more immoral than the most indecent work that can come from a human
brain has not yet penetrated our still medieval intelligences, but it
is gradually becoming evident.
Professor A. M. Low, that brilliant young inventor, once said to me
that in a few hundred years an umbrella will seem as monstrously
absurd to our descendants as witch-burning seems to-day. The idea
of censorship will, I believe, share the fate of the umbrella. If a
dramatist wishes to express an idea by filling his stage with naked and
debased creatures, it seems to me amazing that anybody should have the
impudence to stop him. You are not forced into a theatre, any more than
you are forced to observe the antics of dogs in the streets. You can
stay away. You can....
But there. This is not 2125. It is 1925. One must wait--like the
witches.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
In which William Somerset Maugham makes a Delicate Grimace
William Somerset Maugham has no public personality. Although _Lady
Frederick_ has been prancing about the stages of the world for nearly
twenty years--dear thing--although the ‘leaves’ still ‘tremble,’ and
although ‘Rain’ is apparently never going to cease showering golden
drops into the pocket of its creator, William Somerset Maugham remains
William Somerset Maugham. He does not, like other successful authors,
suddenly develop piercing eyes, or a villa in Capri, or a pony, or a
rose garden, or any of the usual accompaniments of fame.
Why there are so few tales about him, I can’t imagine, for his life
abounds in the sort of ‘copy’ which would bring a flush to the cheeks
of even the weariest Press agent. The story of his early struggles, for
example. He told it to me on one evening full of hope, when the first
adolescent strawberries had been discovered in the Café Royal, and were
blushing at the last oysters, the like of which they would never see
again, it being the last of April’s days.
I can see him now, one cheek pink by the light of the red lamp by his
side, the other pale by the light of nature. His black eyes sparkled
like sloes dipped in wine, and, had a hundred others not forestalled
me, I should have said that ‘the eyelids were a little weary, as
though this were the head upon which all the ends of the world were
come.’ Maugham’s eyelids always are a little weary, but his mouth is
invariably on the verge of a smile.
‘When I came to London,’ he said, ‘I had £3,000. I was twenty years
old, and I made up my mind that I should write for a living. For ten
years I wrote, but I hardly lived. Nobody would put on my plays, and
though my novels were published, nobody appeared anxious to read them.
‘When I was thirty I had reached my last hundred pounds. I was mildly
desperate. And then, somebody suddenly decided, in a moment of
aberration, that they would produce a play of mine. The play was _Lady
Frederick_.
‘I knew that if _Lady Frederick_ was a failure I should have to give
up the idea of writing any more, and should spend the rest of my days
in an office. I had no particular hope that it would be anything but a
failure, especially as the producer came to me, a few days before the
first night, and told me that there weren’t enough epigrams. “We want
at least two dozen more epigrams,” he said. I blinked at him, went away
to have a cup of tea, and put in the epigrams with a trembling hand,
rather as though I were a new cook sticking almonds on to the top of
her first cake.
‘Well, I arrived at the theatre on the first night, knowing that I
should leave it either as an accomplished dramatist or an embryo bank
clerk. I left it as the former. I knew, from the very beginning that
the play was a success, because they began to laugh almost as soon as
the curtain had risen. I think it’s a great thing to get a laugh in
one’s first few lines.’
The adjective which is always used as a sort of sign-post when Maugham
is under discussion is the one word in the English language which I
thoroughly detest. I mean, of course, ‘cynical.’ It is the sort of
word that is used by speckled young women at tennis parties, when
one attempts to vary the monotony of the game by making a few gentle
reflections to one’s partner on the futility of existence. I once met
somebody (this is terrible, but true), who said to me the meaningless,
damning words, ‘I’m an awful cynic, you know.’ That person went to
prison. I understand the warders were so kind to him that he is now a
raving sentimentalist.
We will, therefore, if you please, rule out this epicene adjective
from our discussion of William Somerset Maugham. Let us say, rather,
that he has the honesty to admit that he finds life quite meaningless,
seeing it merely as a procession of grotesque, painted figures winding
out of the darkness into a momentary patch of light, and then drifting
into a deeper darkness still. But he does not beat his breast, in the
manner of Thomas Hardy, and rend the clouds over Bryanston Square with
blasphemies. He lies back, lights a cigarette, beckons to a few of
the more ridiculous persons in the procession, and sets them dancing
on the stage of his own imagination. And I can quite believe that the
substantial royalties which result are far more satisfactory than any
misty philosophies.
I am not speaking without the book. He summed it all up once by saying
to me, ‘I think that life has a great deal of rhyme and absolutely no
reason. I entirely fail to see that it means anything whatever. It
justifies itself only by the amusement it gives one.’
The occasion on which these bold and bad words issued from his
lips was, if I remember rightly, at a party where he, in the velvet
smoking-jacket which he wears on all possible occasions, was lying
gracefully against the back of a sofa. H. G. Wells was sitting bolt
upright in an arm-chair, while I sat most appropriately on the floor.
Thus I was at the feet of two masters at the same time. A sensation
which, had I been an American tourist, would probably have resulted
in apoplexy. H. G. Wells had admitted to a completely open mind on
the whole problem of existence, which, I presume, was the cause of
Maugham’s confession.
But I don’t wish to give the impression that he strikes one merely as
a facile, elegant figure, skating on the surface of things, cutting
arabesques on the ice. His polished agnosticism is the result of a
deeper thought than the hearty optimism of many tiresome philosophers.
He told me once of the lasting emotion he experienced when, in a
remote cave in Java, he discovered frescoes, a thousand years old, of
peasants, using almost precisely the same instruments as were used in
the fields of Devonshire and Cornwall to-day.
For a moment he looked entirely serious. ‘It gave me an overwhelming
realization of the changelessness of man,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t so much
the fact that they were using the same sorts of spades and hoes. One
saw beyond that into the essential sameness of their personalities.
Nothing is ever altered.’ And then the smile came back again. ‘I can’t
make out whether it depresses me or not.’
His style, in the same way, is no airy stringing of words, no naïve and
unstudied grouping of language. Like his philosophy, it has emerged
from many experiments. ‘I think I have at last got down to the bare
bones of style,’ he said. ‘I try to say what I have to say with the
greatest possible economy of language. I used to be terribly elaborate
and ornate. Now I write as though I were writing telegrams. And when I
have finished, I go over it all again to see what can be deleted.’
Maugham, I think, is eternally surprised that people find him shocking.
It is odd, but not so odd as the fact that _The Circle_ (which was
regarded in London as so innocent that hardly a single bishop fell
out of his pulpit about it) was found so hideously immoral in Paris
that the great majority of managers refused to take the responsibility
of putting it on. I was even more amazed when he told me that _Lady
Frederick_, which the Edwardians so genteelly applauded, caused a
great many heads to be shaken in Germany, and apparently provided the
Teutonic race with an excellent proof of the decadence of English
society.
Speaking of the translations of his plays reminds me of a good story. I
once asked him what sort of sensation one had when one heard one’s work
played in a foreign language; if it made the author’s breast swell with
pride, or if it was merely irritating.
‘I once found myself in Petrograd,’ he said, ‘and I was excessively
bored. I hardly understood Russian at all, but I decided that the only
way in which to cheer myself up was to go to the theatre. I went to the
theatre, choosing the largest and cleanest-looking one I could find,
and sat down to watch the play.
‘It was a comedy, and, as far as one could judge, the audience seemed
to find it amusing. It did not amuse me in the least, because I
couldn’t understand a single word of what it was about. But towards the
end of the first Act it seemed to me that there was something vaguely
familiar about the situation on the stage. I had a sense of listening
to something I had heard in a dream. I looked down at the programme to
discover who had written it. The author’s name was Mum. And the name of
the play was _Jack Straw_.’
It was at Wembley, strangely enough, that he made the most provocative
statement which I have ever heard him make--the sort of statement
which sticks uncomfortably in one’s mind, like a burr. It was really
my fault, because Wembley, as usual, had depressed me to distraction.
To wander through halls of bottled gooseberries, called ‘Canada,’ and
bottled peaches, called ‘Australia’; to drag one’s feet past hideous
engines, labelled ‘Industry,’ and to listen to the indecent shrieks of
young women on toboggans, called ‘Amusement,’ strikes me as one of the
grimmest jests which life has to offer.
There was only one thing to do in this sort of environment, and that
was, to talk about love. To talk at it, rather. I began to mutter
platitudes about love being a condition impossible of attainment, an
alchemy that had never been discovered. That no two people ever loved
each other with an equal fire. That the only possible love implied the
most rigid and exacting fidelity, in thought as well as in deed. And
that nobody (except bores and half-wits) ever achieved this condition.
Then suddenly Maugham cut through these gloomy clouds with one
shattering sentence. ‘_I don’t see why one shouldn’t love people
flippantly_,’ he said.
‘Flippantly!’
There danced before my eyes the ghosts of light ladies on broad
terraces, terraces which only knew the moonlight and were always
mysterious with the heady scent of dark roses. Flippantly! So many
difficulties solved, so many problems blown, like a puff of smoke, over
the thick forest in which I was wandering. If only one could recapture
the age in which those remarks really expressed a mode of life.
Here, in the British Empire Exhibition, the idea of ‘loving anybody
flippantly’ sounded almost like treason, as though one had stolen into
the Australian pavilion by night, and had extracted one of the bottled
gooseberries to see if they really tasted as nasty as they looked.
And yet, I believe it is the right attitude.--No, I don’t. I believe it
is the most comfortable attitude. It is neither right nor wrong, it is
simply a matter of temperament. If, however, there were a little more
flippancy in the world, there might be a few less wars. Swords cannot
be unsheathed flippantly. Poison cannot be made with an airy gesture.
Notes cannot be flicked across the Channel from one ambassador to
another, like blowing kisses. If they could, they might not cause so
much trouble.
That is, I think, the tremendously important function that Maugham
plays in the world to-day. He says to the world, ‘I know no more
about things than you. I have not the faintest idea where I came
from, whither I am going. Yes, I quite agree that we are in a very
distressful condition. But, just a moment ...’ (and here he takes one
by the arm), ‘if you look over in that direction, you will see a man
with an extraordinarily amusing face. He is talking to a woman who is
pretending to be in love with him. How tragic? Not in the least. If you
only realized, it is exceptionally amusing. Now listen, and I will tell
you a story....’
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
In which Michael Arlen Disdains Pink Chestnuts
In 1870, had you chanced to be walking over one of the rough and
alarming roads that stretched across the Balkans, from Roustchouk to
Constantinople, you might have met a young man driving a bullock cart.
He would have been tall and dark, with a certain weariness round his
black eyes, and what might be described as ‘a grim determination’ round
his lips. (Yes--we will get to Michael Arlen in a moment.)
The young man was setting out to make his fortune. And he made it. Not
all at once, it is true, for the road from Roustchouk to Constantinople
is long, and I should imagine, in 1870 it was even longer. And one
cannot make a great fortune quickly when one has only £20 with which
to buy Turkish delights, even when one sells them at double the money.
Bandits, too, who emerged from the forlorn countryside and attacked
one in the rear, were apt to make great inroads into one’s fortune.
However, in time, the young man had saved £50, at the age of 19. (Yes,
Michael Arlen is getting nearer and nearer.)
When the young man had made his £50 he bought a beautiful coat of blue
velvet, with a scarf of coloured wool, and he was the beau of the
village. All the Armenian girls cast their black eyes in his direction.
His weariness, in consequence, was slightly alleviated. (I can hear
Michael Arlen chafing in the next paragraph.)
One Sunday, this fine young man put on his velvet suit and went for a
drive round the town in an open cab. Apart from the open cab, it was
perhaps the greatest day in his life. For as he was passing under a
certain high window, he looked up and saw a girl who was fairer than
any girl he had ever seen. Their eyes met, and they were in love. She
drew back from the window, and cried, as all true lovers should. He
frowned, told the cab to drive him home, and went in his blue velvet
coat to demand her hand from her father. And as soon as her father had
said ‘yes,’ the first line, one might say, was written of _The Green
Hat_. For the young man was Michael Arlen’s father.
I have introduced Michael Arlen in this manner because it seems in some
way to heighten the romance of his career. They had a great deal in
common, his father and he. They both treated life as an adventure, and
doing so, gained a rich reward. The only difference being that Arlen
senior went into business, whereas Arlen junior kept out of it. Arlen
senior lost his money in the war. Arlen junior made his money in the
peace.
A very dainty young man I thought him, when we first drank wine
together at an hour when the last silk hat has drifted shamelessly
home in the Mayfair dawn--(which is as no other dawn). I use the word
‘dainty,’ not to indicate effeminacy, but to convey a certain nicety of
manner, a delicacy of tact. A very charming young man, it seemed, after
the third glass of wine. A very brilliant young man, I was convinced,
after the sixth. And I keep to the latter opinion, now that I am sober.
So few people know him. He has such a tiresome legend attached to
him--a gilt-edged legend. He has been dehumanized in the popular
imagination by his success. I hate writing biographies of anybody but
myself and so, if I scrawl down a few disjointed lines, it is all the
information that you will get. But it is more than most people will
give you.
Eleven years ago--a pound a week--alone in London. ‘So lonely I was,’
he told me once, ‘I had nobody to speak to but my landlady. And even
landladies, after a time, lose their charm. They are the last people
who do, but still, it is inevitable.’