About a year ago my American publishers asked me to send them some
personal material for press publicity, and I spent a hot summer
afternoon describing my parentage, my tastes, my aversions, and what use
I made of days and hours. I am now receiving by every second mail
syndicated cuttings of my confessions. I am learning quite a lot about
myself. I am, I have discovered, a methodical and industrious person.
Every Monday and Friday I go to a publisher’s office in Henrietta Street
where I read manuscripts, draft advertisements, and generally entertain
myself and my employers. During the three middle days of the week I
write.
I follow a regular routine on my writing days. I have breakfast at
half-past eight. From nine to ten I walk over Hampstead Heath. From ten
to one o’clock I write. In the afternoon I go to a cinema. From five to
seven I write again. I work at the rate of 3500 words a day. During the
week-end I enjoy myself. I dance, I play football or cricket as the time
of year ordains. I see my friends. It is, in fact, a picture of the sort
of young man who wins prizes at a Sunday school and makes good in the
business novel.
I suppose that I must have in some such way spent the week previous to
my confession. Or perhaps I felt that I needed organising, that it was
on such lines my time should be arranged, and that by the mere fact of
writing down a time-table I should “Coué” myself into an observance of
it; at any rate it is not, I need perhaps hardly say, very much like
that. I do not confine my entertainment entirely to the weekends.
Usually three days a week in summer-time are spent lazily on a cricket
field. Were I to maintain an average rate of ten thousand words a week,
I should produce some half a million words a year, and heaven knows what
I should do with them. Nor am I very often down to breakfast by
half-past eight.
A mendacious chronicle that confession. But then are we not always
drawing up schemes and time-tables. At the beginning of the year we
estimate the extent of our income. We make two columns. We put down the
items of general expenditure: rent, insurance, income-tax, club
subscriptions, clothes, and washing. And we decide how much remains over
for personal indulgence. “I may allow myself,” we say, “three or four or
five or six pounds a week in pocket money, and I will not,” we continue,
“spend one penny more than that.” Nor do we for a week or so till we
become so inflamed with a sense of merit that we adjudge our economy
entitled to some worthy tribute, and we arrange a dinner party and
twelve pounds go in a single night. It is the same with time-tables.
They always get upset somewhere, and the people who stick to them are an
infernal nuisance.
I recall a certain fellow-prisoner of war with a day curiously and
exhaustively pigeon-holed. “Come and make a fourth at bridge,” you would
say. “Sorry,” he would answer; “but in five minutes I shall be starting
on my second pipe.” And when you wanted him to walk round the square his
next drink was due. And when you wanted him to split a bottle, it was
his time for exercise. Even his romantic nature marched in fetters. He
was ordered by the irrefrangible mandate of his time-table to devote the
hour between half-past three and tea to a “siesta of sensual reverie.”
But that is the way with time-tables. There would seem to be no half-way
house. You must either scrap them or become their slave.
Habits are different, though. It is nice to know that, at a certain time
of the day, you can always find a certain person in a certain spot. E.
S. P. Haynes, for instance. You know that any day of the week you have
only to drop into the back room of a certain oyster shop at half-past
two to find him, lunching off oysters and white Burgundy and port. And
that as you enter he will wave a large, genial hand and start filling
glasses for you.
There is something essentially companionable about the man with habits.
A habit is a proof of contentment, of satisfaction. The man with habits
accepts life as essentially a good thing. Otherwise he would have made
experiments. He would have sampled new clubs, new restaurants, new
houses. I admire the old gentlemen who lunch day after day in the same
club and at the same table. It is good to hear a man say, “I have been
to the same tailor now for thirty years, and he has not made me a bad
suit.” We ourselves feel no inducement to carry our patronage to that
particular house; but in these days of change and revolution,
faithfulness, even to a tailor, is a commendable and righteous act.
Laziness? Perhaps. But then, is not laziness a philosophy, the
expression of a mellow, placid, harmonious nature. The war presented us
with few more pathetic spectacles than that of the tired, harassed
mortals turned out of commandeered hotels, adrift in a strange world,
torn from the habits that had sheltered them for twenty or thirty years.
They had grown old there, they had hoped to die there. They were trees
planted firmly and happily in congenial soil. It was cruel to uproot
them.
It is through our habits that we strive at harmony. They are the feelers
that our timidity flings out towards an illusion of permanence in an
impermanent and fleeting world. There is a rhythm in the recurrence, day
by day, of simple tastes indulged, of prejudices flattered. It is only
the superficial people who have no habits; the rudderless, inconsequent
people and those fortunate few who carry in the stability of their own
temperaments a balance, a sense of continuity; and because it is towards
that state of poise that we are aiming in literature and life, because
it is pattern, because it is rhythm that we are seeking in our lives and
in our work, we draw up time-tables and describe ourselves in interviews
as persons of routine and method.
One Saturday last November I made the discovery on a football field at
Tonbridge that the human head is a far more solid object than the human
knee. For a fortnight I stayed indoors, my leg supported by a bank of
cushions. In some such way, I told myself, in four or five, in six or
seven years’ time, I should make an end of Rugby football. Not many
people play Rugby much after they are thirty. How many were left, I
asked myself, of the odd forty-five or fifty who had turned up for those
first post-war trials at the Old Deer Park. How many of those who had
played in the 1919 A sides were still playing? Half a dozen? Barely
that, perhaps. You do not notice them as they slip out. A side alters so
little from one week to another, from one season to another. You always
seem to be playing with the same people. But when you compare the team
photograph of 1919 with the team photograph of 1923, then you realise.
Where have they all gone, you ask yourself. Have they gone abroad, or
have they married or taken up golf? Usually the end comes abruptly.
There is no gradual retirement. Rugby is a game that you play every
Saturday, or not at all. You cannot pick it up and drop it, and pick it
up again as you can cricket and golf and tennis. You go on playing till
a knee goes, or an ankle, or a shoulder, and your doctor tells you that
rugger is a young man’s game.
That is why, perhaps, we value it so highly: why we are ready to
sacrifice for it so much that tempts us. We know that it is an
excitement that will be soon taken from us. I am twenty-five. It is nine
years since I spent a day in bed. But already I am beginning to find
football something of a strain. The stiffness that used to last rarely
over Sunday is still with me on Tuesday night. And as I pondered this, I
began to realise to what an extent football, during the last four years,
has given pattern to my life. For four years I have been unable during
the winter to accept any invitation to lunch on Saturday. I have never
been able to go away for a week-end. Saturday evenings I have striven
hard to keep free from parties; and I have done my best for Friday
nights as well. I have never been able to go away anywhere between
October and the end of March for more than six days on end.
But this, you will say, is folly, a supreme example of the perverse
slavery of habits. So be it: but there is only one way of playing Rugby
football, to play it regularly, to come on the field fresh, and not to
worry during the last five minutes, when so many matches are lost and
won, whether you will be able to catch the only train that will allow
you to change in comfort for that dance. And you have to decide whether
or not the thing is worth it. It is an affair of personal preference.
Myself I know that for myself rugger has a thrill, a sensation for which
the equivalent can be found in no other sport, nor in any other
interest. On a cold October day, when ball and ground are greasy with a
morning’s rain, and the halves and backs have to go down to it if they
would stop a rush, life is for the forward a very rich, a very splendid
thing. It is a fine thing to feel a half-volley on the very drive of
one’s blade, to see cover dive for it and miss it. It is a fine thing to
run fifteen yards backwards and sideways in the deep, to feel that hot,
tingling stab as the ball lands within one’s palm, to know that sudden
beat of the heart that says, “It’s there, you’ve held it.” It is a fine
thing to see a man play forward and miss the pitch of it, to watch the
ball pass between the bat and leg, to hear the rattle of stumps. Fine
and noble things, with life at such moments marvellously rich. But it is
a finer thing that dribbling on a wet day of a slippery, bouncing ball;
a finer thing that hard-won sense of battle, as your shins crash against
the half who falls in front of you. His fingers clutch at the ball. You
kick blindly at them; you stagger; but the ball is free; it bounces into
the open; you follow, panting, a singing in your ears. The back is
rushing at the ball. Your feet are heavy with mud and a long day’s
shoving. Somehow you get to the ball before him. You kick just clear of
him. The wing three is coming up behind you. He is fresher, he is faster
than you are. Ten yards; will the ball bounce right for you? Your toe
turns it ever so slightly to the left; the line is muddily white beneath
you. You dive forward, flinging yourself upon the ball, your arms close
over it. The three-quarter crashes over you, half-stunning you. You do
not care. You hardly notice. You have scored a try.
You get at rugger something that you can get nowhere else. It is the
game of youth, the supreme expression of youth, and it is taken from us,
not unfittingly, perhaps, in early manhood.
To give up football is to change the pattern of your life. You will drop
suddenly a whole series of habits. Someone will invite you down to
Winchester for the week-end; there is an admirable train from Waterloo,
they will tell you, on Friday night. Without thinking you will begin to
excuse yourself. You are very sorry, but Saturdays ... and then suddenly
you remember--that is all over now. You can go when you like, and where
you like. And you are appalled by the enormity of your liberation, and
hastily begin to form other habits, to fling out fresh feelers, to take
up golf, or to join dining clubs that meet on the second and fourth
Wednesdays of the month; to be once again entangled in the pattern of
recurring engagements; once again to be the lackey of custom, the
creature of use and wont.
There is always cricket, though; and summer weaves of its four short
months a surer, clearer pattern than the winter does. There is cricket
every day, and there is the county championship. And if you follow
closely the fortunes of any county, as I follow those of Middlesex, you
have a firm framework for your personal peradventures. I find it
difficult, even now, at this early date, to place with immediate
accuracy the date of any given winter circumstance. “When did that
happen?” I ask myself. I try and build round it a frame of associations.
What else was happening at about that time? What book was I reading?
What suit was I wearing? What friend had I just seen?
And gradually, detail by detail, I re-create the scene. But it takes
time. And football only occasionally helps me. There are no
championships in rugger. There are no figures, no individual scores, to
help one. One game is so like another. Season after season one plays
against the same teams, on the same grounds, and with only slightly
varying results. It is difficult sometimes even to place offhand any
particular game in its right season. And anyhow, football is only a key
to week-end associations. It is of small assistance in the dating of a
meeting that took place in the middle of the week.
It is different, though, with cricket. People tell me sometimes that I
have an uncanny memory for dates. “Did you ever,” they will say, “see
that film ‘The Old Nest,’ that was on at the Alhambra about two years
ago?” “Yes,” I will answer, “I went there the last Monday in August
1921--the 29th, I think it was.” But it is not “The Old Nest” that I
remember. I only remember it through its associations of Lord’s and the
second day of that wonderful Middlesex and Surrey match; the morning of
inexplicable failure; Donald Knight’s magnificent innings in the
afternoon; tea-time with Surrey in an impregnable position. Two fifty
runs ahead and eight wickets still to go. And then afterwards that
startling, that glorious collapse. Nigel Haig taking wicket after wicket
from the nursery end. Fender trying to play for keeps, and being taken
by Murrell wide on the leg side off Hearne. The match a match again.
And I remember that evening riding on a bus down Oxford Street and
reading the red placards of the newspapers that had been printed while
Knight and Shepherd were in. I remember the shriek of the paper boys:
“Surrey making sure. Paper! Surrey making sure!” And because it was the
climax of an unforgettable day I remember afterwards dining with my
mother at the Spanish Restaurant and taking her to “The Old Nest” at the
Alhambra.
But that, you will say, is an exceptional occasion. There have only been
three such matches since you went first to Lord’s, in a sailor suit, in
the May of 1904, and cried when Plum Warner’s wicket fell. But in a
lesser way of lesser things; I remember the books I have read, the
friends I have met, the parties I have been to, by the matches that were
then in progress. Should I, for example, be able to fix the date of the
inaugural banquet at the Connaught Rooms of that ill-fated League of
Youth, had I not read on the way there in the evening paper the score of
the tie-match between Somerset and Sussex; and were I to hear two people
wondering in what year and in what month Compton Mackenzie’s _Rich
Relatives_ was published, there would be to guide me the picture of a
sun-drenched day at Lord’s with Greville Stevens asking me what I
thought of the bright red volume that lay unopened on the seat before
me. I have never kept a diary. I shall have no need to as long as
_Wisden’s Almanack_ is published--during the summer, at any rate. There
is always some association. You have met a person for the first time.
You walk down Bedford Street towards the Strand. A newsboy rushes past
you with the first issue of the late night special. You read in the
stop-press column that Fender has taken eight wickets at Trent Bridge.
The date and hour of that first meeting is in your memory for ever. And
when you come to write your reminiscences, you have only to turn for
verification to the _Wisden_ for 1921.
But I begin to detect in the reader an ominous stir of irritation. “Has
this man,” he is beginning to ask himself, “no sense of proportion? Does
he think that a book or a picture or a romantic episode is of less
importance than a game of cricket? Does he seriously discuss in the same
breath an innings by Knight and a novel by Mackenzie? Cricket and
football! what do they matter, anyway?”
Little enough, no doubt; but then in the face of eternity does anything
matter so very greatly? What are we and our works, our triumphs, our
ambitions, our disasters, but accidents in the long process of effect
and cause. We talk of the eternal verities, but the flowering of art is
as temporal as the enjoyment we draw from it. In sixty years we shall be
no longer here to admire El Greco’s painting. And in six hundred years
its colours will have faded, the canvas will have lost its beauty. It
will be valueless. And in the presence of eternity what is six years, or
sixty, or six hundred?
Already we are ceasing to read the classics. The Latin and Greek
quotation has passed from the leading article and the debate in
Parliament. The past is being rapidly immersed in the ever-widening
flood of modern literature. The past and present are always at war with
one another. China has produced no poetry for two thousand years. “There
is already,” they say, “so immense a collection of excellent work that
it would be a folly to attempt to add to it.” In China the past has
stifled and killed the present. Here in the western world we are busy
making an end of Greece and Rome. Will anyone be reading Virgil in the
nineteen-eighties? And of Shakespeare as of Virgil.
We are always asking ourselves, “Who will be reading what in 1980?” We
have always in our minds that unborn generation that we would influence
and address. But either way, does it matter very much? These buildings
of ours, these restaurants, and shops, and cinemas, that we are flinging
up on all sides of us so recklessly, so haphazardly for purposes of
convenience and display, they will speak of us far more distinctly to
the men and women of the twenty-second century than these poems and
plays and pictures, this music and these novels that we are producing in
such profusion.
Contemporary political thought, and its resulting bills and measures and
defences, will be as obsolete as is to-day the policy of Gladstone. Our
points of issue in religion and morality will doubtless be the occasion
for music-hall derision. But our buildings will be there; and as, to the
majority of us to-day, the sense of Augustan repose and polish and
formality is most easily suggested by the rectangular windows and low
lines of London squares; and as the vulgarity, and the pretentiousness,
solemnity, and solidity that were the worst characteristics of the Early
Victorian age are forced continually on our attention by the elaborate
porticos and columns, the theatricality of over-decoration that obscure
for us so much that was at that time excellent and that make us exclaim
contemptuously, “How typically Victorian,” so shall we too in our turn
be judged.
As I am carried on the top deck of a bus down Oxford Street, and see at
the end of that avenue of brightly decorated windows the majestic façade
of Peter Robinson’s emporium, and consider how it dwarfs the circus it
surveys, and when I see from the top of Regent Street, far down beyond
the jagged row of roofs and chimney stacks, the lovely low-roofed curve
that the demands of utility are busy condemning as a piece of
unserviceable decoration, I grow a little wistful, not so much because a
beautiful thing is being taken from us, but out of a distrust as to what
manner of buildings will take its place. I look nervously into the
future. I see a young man, his coat and waistcoat flowered with the
brocade of early twenty-second century fashion, passing here in whatever
means of locomotion the young blood of that period elects to honour. I
see his eye resting contemptuously on this jagged mosaic of
ill-assortment. “They made that mess,” he will say to his companion, “in
the beginning of the twentieth century.” I am afraid that of the
Georgian poets and novelists he will be as ignorant as the majority of
us are to-day of the obscure contemporaries of Wordsworth; that he will
find a history of our political practices as tedious and as corrupt as
those of the other periods with which he has had to acquaint himself for
the satisfaction of his university examiners. He will be merely
interested, casually, in his spare time in the form life took in 1923
for the average man and woman, and, as he will have inherited from us
the amiable quality of laziness, he will favour the short cut; he will
be content to contemplate, to absorb the atmosphere of our public
buildings, and I am more than a little afraid that, as he passes through
Regent Street to Oxford Circus, he will shudder, as we do when we wake
from a bad dream, with the shudder that becomes a smile, with the slow
reassurance through familiar objects of an averted evil. And he will
laugh and point to the façade of Peter Robinson’s, “Typical Twentieth
Century!”
But will it matter? Will it affect us how people live on this earth in
1990? We shall not be here to see them. They will be unable to distract
and confuse and harass us with their intelligence or stupidity. It is
only our egotism that makes us humbly prostrate ourselves before them.
It is considered unworthy in a writer to address himself to the men and
women of his own generation. But surely it is more sociable in us to
wish to be of service and entertainment to our friends than to their
grandchildren, who may develop, for all we know, into singularly
unpleasant persons. Personally, I would much prefer my books to be read
now by my contemporaries, by people I know and like, than by strangers
when I am dead, with my books incidentally out of copyright.
George Moore has protested that each man finds heaven in his own way,
claiming characteristically that he himself discovered it in the bedroom
of that mistress who was so faithless and so constant. And I could
produce, as a witness in his defence, a parson of my acquaintance who
has discovered heaven in the gallery at Lord’s. A small, wizened,
weather-beaten parson, in a long chesterfield coat that looks in the
sunlight sadly green; a guinea-pig, I suspect. For if he has a flock it
can be rarely shepherded.
A familiar, an unmistakable figure; I do not know his name, though we
have chatted together once or twice. He carries always with him a little
black notebook in which he enters every score of over fifty that he has
ever watched. When a wicket falls and a new batsman walks down the
pavilion steps, he takes out his book, verifies the newcomer’s identity
with the aid of the scoring card and telegraph and proceeds to examine
his record. “Ah, yes,” he says to his companion, “Miles Howell; a number
of good innings he has played. Let me see--99 against Kent. I remember
it; the silly fellow! Ran himself out: an impossible run. I don’t think
he will ever make a hundred for Surrey; he gets so nervous in the
nineties. Just the same at Lord’s in that big innings of his. He could
have got the record easily; only another two runs. Then he flings away
his wicket. After being missed, too, three balls earlier.”
An old man he is, nearly eighty. During the war I used to wonder if I
should ever see him again, whether he would be able to survive, at his
age, four years of rationing and air raids and overwork. And no cricket.
Very lonely, very much at a loose-end he must have been. Very many hours
he must have spent studying that small black book of his, wondering
whether the good days would ever return in his lifetime.
But he was there on the 16th of May, on the first morning of the Notts
_v._ Middlesex match at Lord’s. And his little black book was in his
hand. “Ah, yes,” he was saying; “A. W. Carr--now the last time I saw him
play was against Surrey on the Tuesday before the war. Thirty he made,
if I remember. And out to a remarkably good catch, too, in the slips.
They brought a telegram to him while he was batting, recalling him to
the colours, I expect. A month later he was wounded.”
I think that more than anything else, the sight of that old man in that
Armistice summer, reassured me of the changelessness of the human heart,
of its stability under altering conditions. And I think it was on that
day I first appreciated the native wisdom of that old man.
Before the war I had always felt that he was sadly neglecting his duty
to his congregation. He watched cricket all the week; he thought cricket
all the week; what could he find to say to his flock on Sundays? But I
learned on that first day of post-war cricket that as long as you see
life steadily in terms of something, you can acquire a true sense of
human values, and that county cricket is as serviceable a spade as
literature if you would unearth the absolute.
Someone, I half think that it was Flint, had just missed Saville rather
badly. The old man shook his head. “Poor, poor,” he muttered, “and they
were a bad fielding side in the eighties.” Suddenly I saw the parson’s
life in relief. He had seen life in terms of county cricket. He had seen
in the varying fortunes of the field as surely as has the historian in
the rise and the crash of empires, the arrogance and impermanence of
success, the courage of despair, the vanity of ambition. He had seen men
rise to fame and sink into mediocrity. Counties had had their hour.
There had been the years of Surrey’s domination, then of Yorkshire’s,
then of Kent’s. Middlesex was now the rising power. There was all
history in his recollection of “Nottingham’s weak fielding in the
eighties.” And I felt that he would be able to give true wisdom to his
flock on Sunday; he would not be easily misled by the shouting in the
market-place; he would have a sense of values. He would have a norm with
which to judge the traffic and confusion of modern life. We are
children, he would say, with the child’s right to choose such toys as
please it; or rather, perhaps, we are in search of some trumpery
half-crown clothes-peg on which to hang the sixty guinea fur-lined coat
of our immortal natures. One must have a peg; but it is the coat, and
not the peg, that matters.
And so back upon my traces. Habits are good things; a framework gives
purpose to one’s life, and cricket and football make as good a hat-rack
for literature and romance and friendship as the routine of a civil
servant or a bank clerk or an income-tax surveyor. There must be a
background for bright colour, and that is mine.