SOME WRITERS
Arnold Bennett—G. K. Chesterton—Lascelles Abercrombie—Harold
Monro—John Masefield—Jerome K. Jerome—Sir Owen Seaman—A. A. Milne
Of all the famous writers I have met, I have found Arnold Bennett the
most surprising. I do not know what kind of man I expected to see
when it was arranged that I should meet him, but I certainly had not
anticipated beholding the curiously, wrongly dressed figure that, one
spring afternoon some few years ago, walked up the steps leading from
the floor of Queen’s Hall to the foyer of the gallery. I was there by
appointment. I was a friend of a friend of his—Havergal Brian, a young
fire-eating genius from the Potteries, and Brian had planned this
curious meeting. It was during the interval of an afternoon concert of
a Richard Strauss Festival, and Ackté was singing.
Bennett was rather short, thin, hollow-eyed, prominent-toothed. He wore
a white waistcoat and a billycock hat very much awry, and he had a
manner of complete self-assurance. I cannot say that I was unimpressed.
We were introduced, and he looked at me drowsily, indifferently,
insultingly indifferently. He did not speak and I, nervous, and a
little bewildered by the colour of his socks, which I at that moment
noticed for the first time, blundered into some futility.
“I don’t see why,” said Bennett, in response.
I didn’t either, so far as that went. Desperately uncomfortable, I
looked round for Brian, and saw him standing fifteen yards or so away,
grinning malignantly.
So I plunged into a new topic—with even more disastrous results.
“I notice,” said I, “that you continue writing for _The New Age_ in
spite of their violent attacks on you.”
“Yes,” he answered laconically, and he looked dizzily over my left
shoulder.
Then and there I decided that I would not speak again until he had
spoken. I had not sought the interview any more than he had. Presently:
“I have been working very hard lately,” I heard. I turned quickly
to him; he had spoken into space. I showed a polite interest and he
thawed a little. He told me something of the number of words and hours
he wrote a day, of the work he had planned for the next two years,
of the regularity of his methods, of his disbelief in the value of
“inspiration.” I seemed to have heard it all before about Anthony
Trollope. He was not exactly loquacious, but he communicated a great
deal in spite of a rather unpleasant impediment in his speech....
Soon our interview was over, for we heard the orchestra tuning up, and
we left each other with just a word of farewell and without a sigh of
regret.
His conversational powers never, I believe, reach the point of
eloquence. I remember G. H. Mair giving me an amusing description
of a breakfast he gave to Arnold Bennett and Stanley Houghton in
his lodgings in Manchester. Bennett and Houghton had not previously
met, and the latter was young and inexperienced enough to nurse the
expectation that the personality of the famous writer would be as
impressive as his work, and impressive in the same way. It is true that
very extraordinary circumstances would be necessary to make breakfast
in Manchester free from dullness, but Houghton no doubt thought that
his meeting with Bennett _was_ an extraordinary circumstance. In the
event, however, he was disillusioned.
They went in to breakfast, and Bennett sat moody and silent, crumbling
a piece of bread. It chanced that on being admitted to the house
Bennett had caught sight of a cabman carrying a particularly large
trunk downstairs, and he began to question Mair closely about the
incident, Mair explaining that a fellow-lodger was removing that
morning and taking all his luggage with him.
“Yes, yes,” said Bennett, a little impatiently, “but why should he have
such a large trunk? It was enormous. I don’t think I have ever seen so
large a trunk before. It was at least twice the usual size.”
He took a mouthful of bacon and spent a minute in mastication. Having
swallowed:
“Absurdly large,” he said challengingly. “I can’t think why anyone
should wish to own it. Besides, it’s not right to ask any man to carry
such an enormous weight. That’s how strangulated hernia is caused. Yes,
strangulated hernia.”
The topic did not prove fruitful, and I can imagine Houghton cudgelling
his brains to discover what strangulated hernia really was, and Mair
saying something witty about it. But with his second cup of coffee and
his marmalade and toast Bennett once more talked of the cabman, the
impossible trunk, and the cabman’s hypothetical hernia.
“Of course,” he remarked meditatively, “the man must have _some_ reason
for owning such an incredibly large trunk, but I confess I can’t guess
the reason. And, in any case, it is bound to be a selfish one. Now,
strangulated hernia——”
And that was all that issued during a whole hour from one of the
cleverest brains in England.
That Arnold Bennett is almost painfully conscious of his own
cleverness there is no manner of doubt. He is stupendously aware of
the figure he cuts in contemporary literature. He is for ever standing
outside himself and enjoying the spectacle of his own greatness, and he
whispers ten times a day: “Oh, what a great boy am I!” I was once shown
a series of privately printed booklets written by Bennett—booklets that
he sent to his intimates at Christmas time. They consisted of extracts
from his diary—a diary that, one feels, would never have been written
if the de Goncourts had not lived. One self-conscious extract lingers
in the mind; the spirit of it, though not the words (and perhaps not
the facts) is embodied in the following:—“It is 3 A.M. I have been
working fourteen hours at a stretch. In these fourteen hours I have
written ten thousand words. My book is finished—finished in excitement,
in exaltation. Surely not even Balzac went one better than this!”
A great writer: no doubt, a very great writer: but you might gaze at
him across a railway carriage for hours at a time and never suspect it.
* * * * *
But if Arnold Bennett is the least picturesque and literary of figures,
G. K. Chesterton is the most picturesque and literary. His mere bulk
is impressive. On one occasion I saw him emerge from Shoe Lane, hurry
into the middle of Fleet Street, and abruptly come to a standstill
in the centre of the traffic. He stood there for some time, wrapped
in thought, while buses, taxis and lorries eddied about him in a
whirlpool and while drivers exercised to the full their gentle art of
expostulation. Having come to the end of his meditations he held up his
hand, turned round, cleared a passage through the horses and vehicles
and returned up Shoe Lane. It was just as though he had deliberately
chosen the middle of Fleet Street as the most fruitful place for
thought. Nobody else in London could have done it with his air of
absolute unconsciousness, of absent-mindedness. And not even the most
stalwart policeman, vested with full authority, could have dammed up
London’s stream of traffic more effectively.
The more one sees of Chesterton the more difficult it is to discover
when he is asleep and when he is awake. He may be talking to you most
vivaciously one moment, and the next he will have disappeared: his body
will be there, of course, but his mind, his soul, the living spirit
within him, will have sunk out of sight.
One Friday afternoon I went to _The Daily Herald_ office to call on
a friend. As I entered the building a taxi stopped at the door and I
found G. K. C. by my side.
“I have half-an-hour for my article,” said he, rather breathlessly.
“Wait here till I come back.”
The first sentence was addressed to himself, the second to the
taxi-driver, but as we were by now in the office the driver heard
nothing. Chesterton called for a back file of _The Daily Herald_, sat
down, lit a cigar and began to read some of his old articles. I watched
him. Presently, he smiled. Then he laughed. Then he leaned back in his
chair and roared. “Good—oh, damned good!” exclaimed he. He turned to
another article and frowned a little, but a third pleased him better.
After a while he pushed the papers from him and sat a while in thought.
“And as in uffish thought he” sat, he wrote his article, rapidly,
calmly, drowsily. Save that his hand moved, he might have been asleep.
Nothing disturbed him—neither the noise of the office nor the faint
throb of his taxi-cab rapidly ticking off twopences in the street
below.... He finished his article and rolled dreamily away.
His brother Cecil has the same gift of detachment. He can write
anywhere and under any conditions. I have seen him order a mixed grill
at the Gambrinus in Regent Street, begin an article before his food
was served, and continue writing for an hour while the dishes were
placed before him and allowed to go stone cold. Like most men in Fleet
Street who do a tremendous amount of work, he has always plenty of time
for play, and I do not remember ever to have come across him when he
was not ready and willing to spend a half-hour in chat in one of the
thousand and one little caravanserai that lurk so handily in the Strand
and Fleet Street.
* * * * *
Of poets of the younger generation I have met only three—Lascelles
Abercrombie, Harold Monro, and John Masefield. Abercrombie I remember
as a lean, spectacled man, who used to come to Manchester occasionally
to hear music and, I think, to converse intellectually with Miss
Horniman. Of music he had a sane and temperate appreciation, but
was too prone to condemn modern work, of which, by the way, he knew
nothing and which by temperament he was incapable of understanding. He
struck me as cold and daring—cold, daring and a little calculating. He
appeared unexpectedly one day at my house, stayed for lunch, talked all
afternoon, and went away in the evening, leaving me a little bewildered
by the things he had refrained from saying. Really, we had nothing
in common. My personality could not touch his genius at any point,
and the things he wished to discuss—the technicalities of his craft,
philosophy, æsthetics and so on—have no interest for me. If I had not
studied his work and admired it whole-heartedly, I should have come
to the conclusion that he had written poetry through sheer cleverness
and brightness of brain. No man was less of a poet in appearance and
conversation. He professed at all times a huge liking for beer, but I
never saw him drink more than a modest pint, and his pose of “muscular
poet” (a school founded and fed by Hilaire Belloc) deceived few.
* * * * *
Harold Monro I used to see occasionally in the Café Royal, and I
met him a few times at the Crab Tree Club. I remember going with
him, early one morning in June, 1914, after sitting up all night, to
the Turkish baths in Jermyn Street. We swam a little in a tank and
were then conducted to a cubicle, where I wished to talk, but Monro
was heavy with sleep and soon began to breathe stertorously. A few
days later he received me rather heavily at his office at The Poetry
Bookshop, read some of my verses, and told me quite frankly that he
did not consider me much of a poet. A sound, solid man, Monro, and he
has written at least one poem—_Trees_—as delicate and as beautiful as
anything done in our time.
* * * * *
But neither Monro nor Abercrombie, greatly gifted and earnest in their
work though they be, fulfils one’s conception of a poetic personality.
There is no mystery about them, no glamour; they do not arouse wonder
or surprise. John Masefield, on the other hand, has an invincible
picturesqueness—a picturesqueness that stamps him at once as different
from his fellows. He is tall, straight and blue-eyed, with a complexion
as clear as a child’s. His eyes are amazingly shy, almost furtive. His
manner is shy, almost furtive. He speaks to you as though he suspected
you of hostility, as though you had the power to injure him and were
on the point of using that power. You feel his sensitiveness and you
admire the dignity that is at once its outcome and its protection.
There are many legends about Masefield; he is the kind of figure that
gives rise to legends. And, as he is curiously reticent about his early
life, some of the most extravagant of these legends have persisted and
have, for many people, become true. But the bare facts of his life are
interesting enough. As a young man he grew sick of life, of the kind
of life he was living, and went to sea as a sailor before the mast. He
had neither money nor friends; or, if he had, he relinquished both.
The necessity to earn a living drove him into many adventures, and I
am told that for a time he was pot-boy in a New York drink-den. Here
his work must have been utterly distasteful, but the observing eye and
the impressionable brain of the poet were at work the whole time, and
one can see clearly in some of Masefield’s long narrative poems many
evidences of those bitter New York days. How Masefield came to London
and settled in Bloomsbury, becoming the friend of J. M. Synge, I do not
know. For six months he was in Manchester, editing the column entitled
Miscellany in _The Manchester Guardian_, and writing occasional
theatrical notices. I have been told by several of his colleagues
on that paper that Masefield’s reserve was invulnerable; he quickly
secured the respect of his fellow-workers, but not one of them became
intimate with him. He lived in dingy lodgings, he worked hard and, at
the end of six months, withdrew to London on the plea that he found it
impossible to do literary work at night.
But if the circumstances of Masefield’s life are little known, his
spiritual history is more than indicated in his work. Here one sees
a stricken soul; a nature wounded and a little poisoned; a nervous
system agitated and apprehensive. His mind is cast in a tragic mould
and his soul takes delight in the contemplation of physical violence.
His personality, as I have said, is furtive. He shrinks. His intimate
friends may have heard him laugh. I have not.
It must be nearly six years since I visited him at his house in Well
Walk, Hampstead. It was a miserably cold afternoon in February,
and though it was not yet twilight the blinds of the drawing-room
were drawn and the lights already lit. Masefield’s conversation was
intolerably cautious, intolerably shy. In a rather academic way he
deplored the lack of literary critics in England; the art of criticism
was dead; the essay was moribund. He expanded this theme perfunctorily,
walking up and down the room slowly and never looking me in the eyes
once. It was only when, at length, he had sat down—not opposite me,
but with the side of his face towards me—that, very occasionally, his
eyes would seek mine with a rapid dart and turn away instantly, and at
such moments it seemed as though he almost winced. Such shrinking, such
excessive timidity, whilst arousing my curiosity, also made me feel no
little discomfort, and I was glad when a spirit kettle was brought in,
with cups and saucers, and Masefield began to make tea.
This making of tea, a most solemn business, reminded me of _Cranford_.
The poet walked to a corner of the room, took therefrom a long
narrow box divided into a number of compartments and proceeded, most
delicately, to measure out and mix two or three different kinds of tea.
The teapot was next heated, the blended tea thrown in, and boiling
water immediately poured on it. And then the tea was timed, Masefield
holding his watch in his hand and pouring out the fluid into the cups
at the psychological second.... He ought, I think, to have taken a
little silver key from his waistcoat pocket and locked up the tea-box.
He ought to have taken his knitting from a work-box. He ought to have
asked me if I had yet spoken to the new curate. But he did none of
these things....
Though for an hour he continued talking, he said nothing—at least,
he said nothing I have remembered. The extraordinary thing about him
was that, in spite of his timidity, his seeming apprehensiveness, he
left on my mind a deep impression of adventure—not of a man who sought
physical, but spiritual, risks. I think he is a poet who cannot refrain
from exacerbating his own soul, who must at all costs place his mind in
danger and escape only at the last moment. I believe he is intensely
morbid, delighting to brood over dark things, seeing no humour in life,
but full of a baffled chivalry, a nobility thwarted at every turn.
* * * * *
A man of a very different type is Jerome K. Jerome, whom I met at the
National Liberal Club and elsewhere in the early days of the war.
Like all humorists, he is an inveterate sentimentalist; his belief
in human nature is as wide-eyed and innocent as that of a child. He
is an untidy, prosperous, middle-aged man—very kindly, but a little
intolerant. His mental attitude is that of a man sitting a little apart
from life, alternately amused and saddened by the things he sees. In
the drawing-room of his flat at Chelsea he seemed a little out of
place; he did not harmonise with his surroundings. But in the Club he
was easy, natural, at home. More than twenty years ago I heard him
lecture in Manchester; the Jerome of to-day is the Jerome of those
far-off years, a little mellower perhaps, a little quieter, a little
more sentimental, but essentially the same in appearance, in manner and
in his attitude towards life.
* * * * *
I have met other humorists, but of a type very different from that
represented by Jerome. Sir Owen Seaman I met at a little dinner given
by the Critics’ Circle at Gatti’s to a colleague of ours who was on
the point of leaving for the Front, and who, alas! is now no more. Sir
Owen was made both by nature and training for a squarson—that useful
but fast-dying gentleman who combines the duties and responsibilities
of squire and parson. His personality, rather beefy and John Bullish,
confirms one’s expectations. He made an excellent chairman at this
particular dinner.
* * * * *
His very brilliant assistant, A. A. Milne, I once interviewed for a now
defunct Labour paper. I was invited to the office of _Punch_, and met a
tall, slim, yellow-haired and blue-eyed youth, who was so inordinately
shy that, after half-an-hour’s perfunctory conversation, I discovered
that I had not sufficient material for a paragraph, whereas I had
orders to make a column article of the interview. I knew instinctively
that Milne must find, as I do, a good deal in W. S. Gilbert’s writings
that is in deplorable taste, and I did my utmost to induce him to say
something very rude about Sullivan’s collaborator. But he would not
“bite.” He nodded and smiled at, and appeared to agree with, all the
savage things I said of Gilbert, but he would say very little—and
certainly not enough for my purpose—on his own account. I tried other
subjects, but without success; finally, I got up in despair, thanked
him for the time he had given me and prepared to depart.
“But,” said Milne, eyeing me, a little distrustfully, “I must see a
copy of your article before it is printed.”
“Why, certainly,” said I, and that evening posted it to him, expecting
to see it back with perhaps one or two minor alterations.
But when my poor article arrived back (really, I thought it an
excellent piece of work) I could scarcely recognise it, so heavily
was it scored out, so numerous were the alterations. And Milne’s
accompanying letter was scathing. I remember one or two sentences.
“I cannot tell you how thankful I am,” he wrote, “that I insisted on
seeing your article before it was printed. It does not represent my
views in the least; your talent for misrepresentation is remarkably
resourceful.”
When the article was finally passed for publication at least
seventy-five per cent. of it was from Milne’s pen. He wrote one or two
other stabbing sentences to me, from which it appeared that, however
numerous his virtues may be, he is unable to suffer fools gladly.