BY
ALEC WAUGH
[Illustration: colophon]
LONDON
GRANT RICHARDS LTD.
ST MARTIN’S STREET
1923
Printed in Great Britain by
NEILL & CO., LTD., EDINBURGH.
FOR
MY MOTHER
TO WHOM I FIRST SPOKE OF IT
WITH MY LOVE
I
If the majority of one’s friends live in Kensington and Bloomsbury, and
if one is fond of going out to parties in the evening, then one should
live somewhere midway between these two extremities of charm and
culture. With the acceptance of each fresh invitation, I am led
increasingly to appreciate that there is no stronger deterrent to one’s
enjoyment of an evening than the knowledge that one has at the end of it
to get to Golders Green. However agreeable the company, however profuse
the hospitality, there must always come that moment when one is forced
to weigh the expense of a taxi against the degree of entertainment
likely to be derived from a refusal to be disturbed by the sirens of the
last tube.
It is twenty-five minutes past twelve; in thirteen minutes the shutters
of Warren Street Station will be down. You rise from your cushioned
comfort. You inform your hostess that it is very late, that you are very
busy just now, that you have to be up early in the morning, that you
really feel that the time has come. But you rarely complete your
explanations. “Oh, but no, really; must you?” she says. “Surely you can
stay a little longer. I’m expecting ‘so-and-so’ and ‘so-and-so’ any
moment now. They promised faithfully they would come. They’ll be
frightfully disappointed if they find you have gone.” Your vanity arrays
itself before your prudence. You remind yourself that a taxi will only
cost ten shillings; you consider with what speed, with the writing of
how few extra words you will be able to earn that sum next morning; you
remember a copy-book platitude about a ship and a small amount of tar;
you vacillate; and whichever way you decide, eventually you will come to
regret your choice. If you stay it is more than likely that the owners
of the distinguished names that were dangled as a bait in front of you
will never come at all; or, if they do, they will arrive exhausted from
some previous entertainment, and will sit silent and unapproachable in a
corner. There is a strong probability that the last syphon will be
discovered to be finished. Certainly by half-past one you will be in no
humour to exchange with the taxi-driver those formalities of reluctance
and solicitation that are forced on everyone who lives north of the
Marlborough Road.
Wearily will you say to him “145 North End Road.” “Fulham?” will be his
answer. “Golders Green,” will you snap back at him. “Oh, sir!” and he
will tell you how late it is, how cold he is, and that he has got to get
back to Balham or Brixton or Upper Clapton. One day I think I shall say
“Fulham” for the mere pleasure of learning that taximeter cabriolets can
be parked at Barnet or Finchley or St Albans. In the end, as always, you
assure him that you will make it worth his while; and as you sink back
into the ill-sprung, ill-cushioned seat you wonder what folly has
persuaded you to stay that extra hour; you reflect on the
disinclination with which you will settle down to work next morning; you
ponder the slump of the literary market and the extreme difficulty of
making it yield sustenance; you ask yourself by what right you chose to
spend ten shillings on a journey that you could have made for fourpence;
thus you remind yourself did the hero of your last story set in motion
that process of reckless degeneration the details of which you so
masterfully exposed.
Nor, though you will be the richer by nine and eightpence, will you be
any less the victim of self-criticism, should you catch the 12.38 from
Warren Street. As you pull wearily up the North End Road, you will be
assailed by all those arguments that, had you stayed, you would in the
taxi have exposed to high derision.
And it was in such a mood, after such a decision, on a wet, breathless
January evening that I walked homewards past the few melancholy trees
that were once part of the proud avenue down which Dick Turpin cantered
plunderwards. Why, I asked myself, had I yielded to those instincts of
economy that are the only heritage with which my Scots ancestry has
thought prudent to endow me; why, for the sake of a few pennies had I
deserted the party at the very moment when it was about to become
genuinely amusing. Parties are like bonfires: they smoulder wretchedly
for a couple of hours; they emit columns of malodorous, unsightly smoke;
then suddenly, gloriously, unexpectedly, they burst into a splendour of
leaping flame. Such a transformation had been, I now felt, about to
enshrine that party for all time in the memory of those present at the
very moment when I had decided to desert it. Harold Scott had just
arrived from the Everyman Theatre. And than Harold Scott there are few
persons who can be, when he so desires, more cheering and more
exhilarating. He had regaled himself, not inappropriately, as he had
been that evening impersonating Feste, with a stoup of wine, had been
led to the piano, and had struck the first chords of “Another Little Job
for the Tombstone Maker.” It was a song of which the fame and the
refrain had often reached me, the words never: and why, I asked myself,
had I allowed to pass so agreeable an opportunity of making their
acquaintance. In a mood, therefore, of uncomfortable self-depreciation,
cautiously, so that the dog might not bark and awake the household, I
opened the front door, to find on the hat cupboard below the window a
letter addressed to me in a bright green envelope.
There is only one person who writes to me in bright green envelopes, and
I never see that handwriting without a thrill. Whatever else may in time
pass from memory, it is improbable that I shall ever forget the
excitement which I felt when, for the first time, I saw that
handwriting, and read in the left hand of the envelope the words “Grant
Richards Ltd.” I was at Sandhurst at the time, and the day had begun
unfortunately. I had appeared on early parade without a lanyard, and had
been requested to appear after breakfast at Company Office. I was,
indeed, waiting in the passage to be marched before the Major when the
mail arrived, and among the letters flung haphazardly on the table of
the ante-room was the one telling me that my first book had found a
publisher. At such a moment I should with equanimity have accepted any
punishment with which the authorities might have thought well to chasten
me; but even then I could not help reading into my dismissal, without
the reprimand that would have suspended my week-end leave, a happy
augury for my book. And after six years a green envelope is still for me
a symbol of romance; the miracle may be repeated. I am not of a
particularly credulous nature, but I always half expect to find there
some equally sensational announcement; and on this grey January evening
my dissatisfaction was by the sight of it instantly and marvellously
removed.
The letter contained, however, no reckless offer for film rights from
America; merely an encouraging inquiry about my new novel. “Soon,” it
said, “we shall be preparing our spring and summer list. Can you not at
least give us the title of your book?” My dissatisfaction returned. My
novel was little nearer its last chapter than it had been when I had
discussed its prospects three months earlier with Grant Richards. That
is the worst of a creative as opposed to a routine publisher. You have
had an admirable lunch; you sit back in a deep and comfortable
arm-chair; you smoke a good Egyptian cigarette; a fire is blazing
merrily in front of you; your eyes are wooed pleasantly by Sancha’s
frescoed decoration, by the photographs on the mantelpiece and walls of
those whose names have from time to time appeared among your
publisher’s announcements, and among which you are pleased to observe
your own conspicuously displayed: you feel content, in harmony,
reassured. You begin to talk of your new novel. In this pleasant
atmosphere it becomes suddenly very real to you.
“Splendid! splendid!” says Grant Richards; “now, you’ll let me have that
in time for the spring, won’t you?” He stands with his back to the
fireplace, adjusts his monocle, and begins to tell you of the artist who
will design the wrapper, of the cloth in which it will be bound, of the
type in which it will be printed, of the special instructions he will
give his travellers. You leave his study feeling that your book is
finished; that in a few days it will be presented to an enraptured
world. Your imagination is already carrying you to your club and opening
newspaper after newspaper over which you bow before a volley of critical
applause. You discover through fuddled channels of mental mathematics
the extent of the fortune that is to be yours, and, on the strength of
it, you proceed to order two new suits of clothes. Then you go home, and
you accept an invitation to a party, and you play football, and you
review a book, and you read a few manuscripts at your office, and you
turn into a short story an anecdote you overheard at your club; and in
six months’ time you find your novel where you left it, your tailor’s
bill in front of you, and your royalties account crippled by a process
of diminishing returns.
Regretfully I replaced the letter in its bright green envelope. There
were still a few coals glowing in my study grate; the room was warm and
kindly and sympathetic. The sky-blue walls with the deep black line
running round the door and beneath the ceiling, the long low tier of
bookshelves which had wooed me so often from my work, the black framed
etchings of Nevinson and Wadsworth, the two water colours by Prout, the
patterned tiling of the fireplace, and that dazzling screen by Roger Fry
which I had bought at the Omega workshop sale with such thrilled
misgiving and which has since taken its place so unobtrusively against a
background of many coloured volumes; every book and ornament and picture
in the room where I had wasted so many hours seemed to welcome me with a
smile of affectionate indulgence. “It does not matter,” they seemed to
say. “You have been very happy among us--all those hours passing from
one book to another, from one chain of memories to another. You have
idled away, doubtless, a deal of time in our company, but it was so that
we would have you be, and for all we know you may be the richer for that
idleness, richer than if you had pursued, as you had intended, with eyes
riveted on the green baize of your desk, the fortunes of your really
rather dismal heroine!”
Our study, because it is an expression of ourself, our taste, our
personality, becomes at times as reassuring, as persuasive, as that
rascally confidante of introspection--a friend whom we can persuade to
view our failings through our own eyes and in terms of our own
conscience.
I made up the fire, turned up the switch of my electric-lamp, drew my
arm-chair within the narrow circle of its light, and paused to wonder
with what book, with what companion, I should spend the hour or so
before I should be tired enough to go to bed. At such an hour one cannot
choose a book from the shelves haphazardly and allow it to evoke its own
particular series of emotions. The book must suit the mood, must fit it
as the words of a song fit the accompaniment. The varied incidents of
the day, the people we have seen and spoken to, the words we have
written and read, have created little by little the nature and intensity
of the state of mind that is upon us at this late hour.
Slowly I ran my eye along the shelves. There in the corner of the wall
were the novels, marshalled like soldiers on parade, an even row, with
their plain cloth bindings and ink lettering--serviceable stuff for the
most part; fashioned to supply a want; strong enough to resist a six
months’ battery on the shelves of Smith’s and Boot’s and Mudie’s, and
flimsy enough to sink afterwards, without too great resistance, into
coverless, dog-eared decomposition. Next to them the taller, prouder,
more exclusive demy octavos; the gleaming white backs of the George
Moore limited edition; the slim, calf-bound Maupassants; the heavy,
formidable works of reference and criticism; and beyond them the gay
adventurers; the many sized, the many coloured, the many covered; plays
and books of verse, and volumes of essays; “Jurgen,” Max Beerbohm, and
Petronius; anthologies, large and square and squat and oblong; personal
books whose shape and format have been the result of much thought; for
whose sake many specimen pages, many bindings have been returned to
their artificer; and on the extreme left, in the shadow of the screen,
the cricket books, a shelf of reminiscence and exhortation; and below it
a long row of battered _Wisden’s_, and beside them the faded rust-red
_Lillywhite’s_. A small library, not more than a thousand books
probably; but I would rather have a few friends than many acquaintances,
and there is hardly a book there that has not some personal
significance.
And yet on this particular evening I found the choice of a book by no
means easy. I felt in no mood for a book that should deal exclusively
with any one subject; and I searched unsuccessfully for the book that
should pass casually, irresponsibly as conversation does, from one theme
to another. I recalled the many evenings I have spent, tired after a
day’s work or an afternoon’s football, talking, in a studio in Edwardes
Square, of cricket and poetry, of life and literature and love; thinking
how quickly the hours had passed as I lingered talking there. And there
came back to me the memory of one particular evening when we had
discussed the prospects of a new paper shortly to be presented to the
world, in which we were jointly interested: Clifford Bax as editor,
myself as publisher; I had been asked how happy I considered to be its
prospects. But I disclaimed the rôle of prophet.
“One can’t begin to guess,” I said; “a magazine is like a novel: it’s
the expression of the editor’s personal taste. If the editor starts to
include work he doesn’t like because he thinks it may succeed, he will
fail as surely as the good novelist would fail if he tried to write a
pot-boiler. It would be insincere. Think of _Tit-Bits_. There was a
paper produced by a man who stated a fact and asked himself a question.
A paper, he said, is a thing that a man wants to read when he’s tired at
the end of the day. And the question he set himself was this: ‘What
should I myself like to read under similar circumstances?’ He decided
that _Tit-Bits_ was the sort of thing that he would like to read; and as
he was the average man to the extent that he was miraculously in tune
with the taste of the average man, _Tit-Bits_ was a big success. In the
same way the success or failure of your paper will depend on the number
of people who are sufficiently in harmony with your standard of taste to
be prepared to increase their annual expenditure to the extent of one
guinea. It is, it must always be, a pure gamble.”
And I remember thinking that it was doubtless for this reason that the
career of the literary periodical is so invariably short-lived. It is
always the same thing. The paper is launched, fresh painted, with flags
gaily fluttering. At the oars are to be seen renowned sailors: men who
have ventured on noble hazards in the cause of letters. There is a shout
of acclamation from the shore. “Never,” they say, “has a ship been
launched under happier auspices. See how it cuts the waves! See how the
oars rise and fall together! Of a surety it will win through safely to
the fortunate islands.”
But before the ship is many miles from land, the watchers from the land
observe signs of disquiet and dissension. The flags begin to droop. The
sails are slack. The oarsmen no longer work in harmony. Some of them
have indeed ceased to row at all and others are making arrangements to
put back to shore while the waters are still smooth. The bright speed of
that first passage is forgotten. The ship sways in midsea at the mercy
of tide and current. The faithful few are hard put to it to keep the
boat afloat. They can make no headway, and the watchers from the land
lose interest and give their ears to the tales of some newer seaman who
brings tidings by another route of merchandise and treasure and perilous
journeyings.
A sad story, but one whose details have grown so familiar as to cease
almost to sadden us. We talk of the literary market. How, we ask, can a
private enterprise hope to enter the lists against the vested interests
of printer and publisher and bookseller. If the editor has a number of
friends, he can produce two or three good numbers. But if his
contributors are paid at all, they receive remuneration at a rate so low
as to amount practically to insult. And however much the artificers of
the new world, the evangelists of the dawn of brotherhood, may speak of
the sacred trusts of art, a man is loath to sell for three guineas a
commodity for which elsewhere he can obtain fifteen. The editor of such
a paper receives from an “established author” only those compositions
that cannot be satisfactorily sold in the open market. For two reasons
may such compositions be unmarketable. Either they are bad, or they are
unsuited for family consumption. Indeed, the student of literary history
will find that most of the contributions to such periodicals of a
lasting æsthetic value are of a nature to justify their inclusion in
“the index”; which is unfortunate commercially; for one does not
particularly care to spend six shillings on a production that cannot be
decently left about the house.
Unquestionably this is one of the main cross-currents that hinder the
progress of the brave adventurers. But there are others, and I am not
certain that the greatest of them is not the lack of harmony between the
editor and the public. The magazine is a thing with which to pass the
evening hours of half-past nine to eleven; and the man whose day has
been spent among books, whose eyes are tired with the sight of print,
would prefer, when his work is finished, to dance or play bridge or go
to a theatre or a party. The dinner-jacket and white shirt into which we
change after our evening bath is the symbol of a change of atmosphere.
We have put away the traffic of the day’s business; and those of us
whose livelihood depends on letters find it difficult to establish
contact with the civil servant and the bank manager who is content after
dinner to settle down happily before a solid scholarly review.
The editor has put his paper to bed; he leans back exhausted in his
chair. “Thank God, that’s over,” he says; “and thank God,” he adds,
“that I haven’t got to read it.”
That is the problem for an editor. If he prints what he would himself
like to read at such a time, his choice will, as likely as not, fail to
satisfy the man who has spent his day beside the telephone and whose
ears are weary with listening to applications for an overdraft; while,
if he prints what he feels his public would like to read, if he
substitutes a standard of decision other than “I like” or “I don’t like
it,” his paper will cease to be an expression of his own personality,
and will be insincere. The ideal editor shares the tastes of the public
that he is addressing.
And it was, I think, on that same evening that Clifford Bax asked me how
the paper that I should myself most eagerly welcome would be
constituted; and I answered that the paper would have to take the place
of a friend, and that I should wish for such a paper as would reproduce
the essence of the evening that we had spent together.
“We have talked,” I said, “much of cricket, of the great matches that we
have seen and read of. We have wondered how we could persuade the M.C.C.
to arrange a single-wicket match between Hearne and Woolley. We have
fought old battles again, and have drawn weapons that have long lain
rusty on the shelf. And we have spoken of our own achievements as may
with complete propriety two such indifferent performers as ourselves. We
need make no display of modesty. Our figures prove conclusively enough
our quality. We do not apply to our cricket the standards that we apply
to Hendren’s. We deal kindlily with one another, as reviewers do with
those friendly, worthless little volumes of verse that do no one any
harm and may quite conceivably cause innocent entertainment to their
authors and their friends. So in my paper there could be some such talk
of cricket.
“And as we have spoken of the technique of writing, and of the literary
market, on these subjects should I commission articles. We have
repeated a number of anecdotes, slightly scandalous ones for the most
part, and the short story in my paper would not be sophisticated or
obscure or modern: a piece of straightforward, concrete narrative that
would aim less at vigour than at charm. I would have it a pretty,
sentimental thing, with here and there a suggestion of wantonness, of
riot. There would be personalities; for the peeping Tom that is in all
of us clamours for satisfaction. And we pass a great deal of our time
discussing the peculiarities of our acquaintances.
Each number should contain a character sketch of some public figure, and
I should not object if it were malicious. It is a sign of vulgarity, I
am told, to feel curious about the routine of other people’s lives. A
number of critics dealt very harshly with Mrs Watts-Dunton’s little book
on Swinburne. He was a poet, they said, a great poet. His work remains.
That is all that matters. What purpose is served by this trivial gossip
about boots and comforters and garters. Personally I found her book
admirably entertaining. I felt, after reading it, that I knew Swinburne
better than I had before. Routine is, after all, the framework of a
man’s life; and it is interesting for a writer to learn how others work;
at what time they write; how many words they write a day; whether they
work steadily throughout the year, or in short bursts of intense
concentration. It may dispel the illusion to watch a play from the wings
of a theatre instead of from the stalls. But there are some things about
the showman that can be only learnt behind the scenes. At any rate, that
is the sort of stuff that I would like to read in my paper.”
The fire had begun to burn merrily in the grate; the warm light fell
caressingly in a glowing haze on books and chairs and pictures; and I
turned towards it from the book-shelves that had become to me
inhospitable, wondering why one’s interests should be kept separate in
literature if they are not so kept in life; why one book should be
devoted exclusively to fiction, another to criticism, another to
reminiscence, and another to sport. Would it not be for a change amusing
to find unity of theme and subject abandoned for a unity of tone. And
suddenly I knew in what words I should reply to Grant Richards in the
morning.
“My dear Richards,” I should write, “I am afraid that I have no news for
you about my novel. But I shall be sending you quite soon, I think, a
book that you will, I hope, like a very great deal better. It will not
be fiction, though there will be short stories in it, nor a sporting
book, though there will be there both football and cricket: there will
be much talk of books, but it will not be literary criticism. Indeed, I
do not know to what shelf the librarian at the _Times_ Book Club will
consign it.”
It would be a sort of cousin to my dream paper; one feature only would
be omitted. There would be no malicious personalities. There are some
things that one may like to read, but does not care to write. For the
sake of a few pennies and a few paragraphs, I would not run the risk of
injuring a friendship.
And, lying back in the depths of my arm-chair, watching the dusky
shadows of the firelight move over the ceiling as waves do on a calm day
in mid-channel, I thought how pleasant would be the writing of such a
book that would pass as conversation does from books to life, and from
life to cricket, and so back to books again. How pleasant to let the pen
follow the fancy of the anecdote, to let impression flow into
impression, to snatch away the blinkers of the technique of formal
narrative and criticism. Tired and well content and drowsy I let my
thoughts wander out of my control on their lazy, haphazard journey.