Snobbery With Violence

by Colin Watson

  But there was another sense in which beardedness was regarded as significant. It was linked in the minds of many with social attitudes and behaviour variously described as Bohemian, cranky, faddist or arty. The beard as a tangible sign of male maturity (not, be it noted, virility, which was considered an indecent concept until popularized commercially in the 1960s) had gone out with Edward VII. George V wore one, admittedly, but as a ‘sailor king’ he was only observing naval tradition; none would have accused of Bohemianism a man whose hobby was stamp-collecting and for whom, reputedly, the only tolerable aesthetic experience was to hear In the Shadows, played by a ship’s band. George Bernard Shaw, on the other hand, lacked the excuses both of royal prerogative and maritime custom. Not even old age – he was already seventy-four in 1929 – reconciled the anti-crank public to the great wagging white bush that was flaunted by Shaw. The conservative middle class, to say nothing of the even more conservative section of the working class that had managed to consolidate craft advantages and move to nicer neighbourhoods, regarded Shaw as an argumentative upstart, a scoffer, an irreligious and unpatriotic show-off. It is interesting to reflect that loquaciousness, physical peculiarity and self-confidence, which in combination earned Shaw the active dislike of thousands when he was at the height of his powers as a performer, were the very qualities which a few years later would make the fortune, via television, of any amiable dunce.

  Sydney Horler, who regarded ‘the acceptance by the English press of Shaw at his own valuation’ as ‘one of the most remarkable oddities of the present day’, left no explicit record of his opinion of beards. He was himself chubbily clean-shaven, however, and what he had to say about hair in another context is possibly significant: ‘The truth is that the sight of Miss Gracie Fields’ fringe invariably displeases me.’ Lieutenant Colonel McNeile naturally disapproved of whiskers in excess of the orthodox military moustache. It was his Bulldog Drummond who habitually applied to a bearded opponent the witty epithet ‘fungus face’. Other authors exhibited, in a variety of ways and degrees, what quite clearly was a widespread prejudice in favour of shaving. Apart from Wallace’s Mr Reeder and his side-whiskers (which, in any case, he removed in the cause of romance before his career ended) it would be difficult to find a single English detective of the period who had been allowed by his creator to risk being mistaken for villain, crank or artist, otherwise than in the way of disguise.

  Feelings ran high. Not, of course, for or against beards as such. They were symbols only. What really engaged the passions of the populace – or of the vocal parts of it – was the affront to ‘normality’ offered by innovators. The ferocity of reaction to artistic experiment, even of the mildest kind, was in inverse proportion to the interest which the public had previously shown in the particular field of art concerned. Thus sculpture, which for most people consisted solely of the vast bronze tea cosies in the likeness of Queen Victoria that loomed behind drinking fountains or at bus termini, suddenly became the subject of hysterical acrimony with the advent of Epstein.

  Those whom John Rhode termed ‘artists who draw things as they aren’t’ were regarded with the sort of furious contempt that not long before had been reserved for Kaiser Bill and the German Crown Prince. ‘Ultra-modern’ was a term of denigration, as applied to poetry, music and painting, and readers well knew what was meant by Sax Rohmer when he described his heroes, Dr Petrie and Nayland Smith, as being in the guise of ‘a pair of Futurists’. The drastic stratagem was the only way in which they could penetrate a certain London club (Prop.: Fu-Manchu).

  ‘Coffee being placed before us, we sat sipping the thick, sugary beverage, smoking cigarettes and vainly seeking for some clue to guide us to the inner sanctuary consecrate to hashish … amongst this gathering whose conversation was of abnormalities in art, music and literature.’

  The key word is ‘abnormalities’; it expresses the unease, the disgust, the sense of outrage which otherwise harmless and quite tolerant people seem to have felt – with some encouragement from established aesthetic authorities and organs of opinion – whenever departure from tradition was threatened.

  Here again is Rohmer making oblique reference to ‘modern’ art as it existed in the conception of so many of his readers:

  ‘… she was wickedly handsome. I use the word ‘wickedly’ with deliberation; for the pallidly dusky, oval face, with the full red lips, between which rested a large yellow cigarette, and the half-closed almond-shaped eyes, possessed a beauty which might have appealed to an artist of one of the modern perverted schools.’

  Overtones of immorality are unmistakable. Particularly suggestive is that ‘large yellow cigarette’. Yellow was not only the accepted colour of fin de siècle corruption, it was the hue of the Eastern hordes poised to overrun the civilized world. Their conquest was being facilitated in advance by artists, or at least by those whose work deviated from standards to which people had grown accustomed. Rohmer clearly considered what he called perverts to be numerous. There were whole schools of them, apparently.

  The word ‘school’ conveyed a hint of disapproval, sometimes of ridicule, when used in popular literature. The implication was that odd people had combined to do odd and undesirable things, their main object being to annoy and scandalize the decent majority. Dorothy Sayers liked to use the weapon of satire against such offenders. ‘The cubist poet’ was one of her witticisms – a shaft at the subtler end of an armoury of humour that ranged to ‘You know Glasgow, where the accent’s so strong that even Scotsmen faint when they hear it.’ Here is her description of a gathering in 1928 ‘in a low-pitched cellar’ of the kind of intellectuals she found tiresome:

  Ethics and sociology, the latest vortices of the Whirligig school of verse, combine with the smoke of the countless cigarettes to produce an inspissated atmosphere, through which flat, angular mural paintings dimly lower upon the revellers.

  The ‘Whirligig school’ may be a reference to the admirers of T. S. Eliot, whose Hollow Men had been published three years before, to the considerable bewilderment of such ‘proper’ poetry lovers as had survived the shock of his Waste Land in 1922.

  Agatha Christie, always circumspect in matters of opinion, committed herself to no such censorious view of the new aesthetes as had Miss Sayers. If anything, she seems to have felt rather sorry for them – especially for those who contrived to stray so far afield from their own social milieu as the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden.

  He took them to be of the ‘arty’ class. The girl wore a rather shapeless garment of cheap green silk. Her shoes were of soiled white satin. The young man wore his evening clothes with an air of being uncomfortable in them … the couple had been joined by a third – a fair young man with a suggestion of the clerk about him … the newcomer was fidgeting with his tie and seemed ill at ease.

  (Thirteen for Luck)

  One might note the distinction that readers were invited to draw between the young men and woman here described and the sort of people who would have been perfectly acceptable members of a Covent Garden audience at that time. Opera-going was an approved social exercise for the eminent – opera-going at ‘the Garden’, that is; not at the Old Vic or Sadler’s Wells – and the seating was so arranged that the display of finery in the stalls and boxes could be enjoyed by the patrons of circle and upper circle. Hived off in the gallery and slips – an elevated punishment block of hard, narrow benches on terraced concrete to which admission cost three and sixpence – was the sole section of the audience free to dress as it pleased. The assertion that it comprised the only musical enthusiasts in the building was an exaggeration but not a really wild one. So many ticket holders to the more expensive seats were in the habit of arriving late that it finally became necessary to lock the doors just before the overture and to keep them locked during the whole of the first act. Sir Thomas Beecham, at whose instigation this rule was adopted, followed it up by his famous public rebuke of chatterers in the orchestra stalls as ‘savages’.

  Merely att
ending an operatic performance, then, did not carry the stigma of freakishness provided one occupied seats in the better parts of the house. Going to Covent Garden was part of The Season and to that extent obligatory upon both members of and aspirants to Society. Punch may have made occasional jokes about opera; it did not joke about opera audiences. That the three characters in Mrs Christie’s story were intruders was testified both by clothing and manner. The girl’s gown was cheap-looking and ill-cut, her shoes soiled. Her companions wore dress suits as if they were unused to them. The trio’s proper place was the gallery, amongst the rest of the ‘arty’ class.

  The contempt and hatred aroused by protagonists of new forms of artistic expression flowed like vitriol through the correspondence columns. Theorists of all kinds were condemned promptly and with a violence that can still chill after forty years. A naval officer who claimed to hold the Distinguished Service Order was inspired by one of Sydney Horler’s books to write to him personally: ‘There are far too many b.f.s in this world, and a lethal chamber in every parish would be an excellent idea. I am sick of this veneer of so-called culture which goes by the name of education.’ Horler’s own views were generally expressed with similar forcefulness either by himself or through his character Tiger Standish, but he did manage on one occasion to summarize them temperately: ‘The final estimate of anything – art, music, the drama, literature – is invariably made by the man in the street; no reputation worth a twopenny damn can be established without his approval.’

  Proclaiming themselves, as always, to represent the interests of that same man in the street, the newspapers of the early 1930s found time in the midst of a circulation war to write in defence of aesthetic decencies. When Epstein’s ‘Genesis’ was exhibited at the Leicester Galleries in 1931, the Daily Express cried out like a poetic spinster who had mistakenly entered a men’s lavatory: ‘O you white foulness!’ In the same year, the Morning Post apologized, with elaborate irony, for ‘publishing even a photograph of the least objectionable of Mr Henry Moore’s statuary’. Poor Epstein again incurred editorially stimulated wrath with his ‘Ecce Homo’, roundly described by the author of the Father Brown stories as ‘an outrage’, but at least the Press forbore from inciting the public to violence as it had done, if only obliquely, in 1925. Then the Daily Mail had let the condemnation of ‘Rima’, Epstein’s memorial in Hyde Park to W. H. Hudson, the naturalist, with ‘Take this horror out of the Park!’ Subsequent defacement of the sculpture had been announced by the Morning Post with undisguised satisfaction: ‘The inevitable has happened … she has been ingloriously daubed with green paint.’

  Jacob Epstein and his detractors must have had mutually forgiving natures. Among his commissioned works were portrait busts of Lord Rothermere and Lord Beaverbrook.

  Next to ‘artiness’ in the sins proscribed by middle class orthodoxy and condemned in the parables of crime fiction came ‘faddiness’.

  By ‘fad’ is not to be understood preference for rich food, rare vintages, expensive cars, model gowns and so forth. These came under the heading of connoisseurship and were deemed altogether praiseworthy and enviable. Fads were the despicable prerogative of cranks, of queer (the word had not been narrowed then to have an exclusively sexual meaning) and awkward people. A fad was an unreasonable, perhaps even a sinister, partiality. At best, it was excusable on grounds of ignorance; at worst, it was symptomatic of alien loyalties and evil intent.

  Crime novelists had considerable fun at the expense of characters credited with odd beliefs or strange tastes. The comic spiritualist was one such stock figure. She – almost invariably a spiritualist was a woman – would talk a good deal about auras, vibrations, and other laughable curiosities to which she alone was sensitive. A variation on the theme was the setting up of a seance in the course of which the plot would be thickened by the mysterious outbursts of a medium. It was not beneath the dignity of Hercule Poirot to fake a ‘spirit’ appearance in order to trap a murderer. Despite the advocacy of spiritualism by a number of famous people, including the scientist, Oliver Lodge, and the journalist Hannen Swaffer, it never became respectable. Newspapers included it in their list of perennial dependables, along with famous murders, white slavery and ‘Was This Man a Woman?’ but most of the people who read so avidly about allegedly psychic phenomena were glad of the abiding suggestion of fraud which helped them feel sensible and superior. Writers of crime fiction who permitted a ghost to survive materialist explanation were very rare indeed and were considered to have let the side down pretty badly. Black magic, on the other hand, was sufficiently exotic an affectation to escape ridicule. Dennis Wheatley was later to profit by making it his speciality.

  Two of the most doughty champions of ‘common sense’ as construed by a middle class contemptuous of artiness, fads, cranks and cults, were both writers of detective stories, both converts to Roman Catholicism. One was Gilbert Keith Chesterton, the other, Ronald Arbuthnot Knox, Catholic Chaplain to Oxford University from 1926 to 1939. ‘Father’ Knox’s story, Solved by Inspection, is a richly illustrative example of the writing of current attitudes into a piece of popular fiction.

  An eccentric millionaire, Herbert Jervison, is found dead in bed, apparently starved to death. Miles Bredon, inquiry agent, investigates on behalf of an insurance company which retains also a doctor called Simmonds. Simmonds says:

  ‘This Jervison had pottered about in the East, and had got caught with all that esoteric bilge – talked about Mahatmas and Yogis and things till even the most sanguine of his poor relations wouldn’t ask him to stay. So he settled down at Yewbury here with some Indian frauds he had picked up, and said he was the Brotherhood of Light. Had it printed on his notepaper, which was dark green. Ate nuts and did automatic writing and made all sorts of psychic experiments …’

  ‘He probably choked on a Brazil nut or something’ jokes Bredon, and Simmonds confirms that Jervison was one of ‘these people who go in for Oriental food-fads,’ adding:

  ‘And then he goes and kills himself by refusing his mash. Mark you, I’m not sure I wouldn’t sooner starve than eat the sort of muck he ate …’

  The investigator learns that the millionaire died while locked, with a supply of food, in an old gymnasium, but is assured by Simmonds that

  ‘There was nothing queer in that, because he was always shutting himself up to do his fool experiments … Probably thought his astral body was wandering about in Thibet.’

  A local doctor, Mayhew, refers to Jervison’s corpse as

  ‘parked up at the Brotherhood House, ready to be disposed of when it’s finished with … Yes, they’ve got to bury him in some special way of their own, tuck him up with his feet towards Jericho, I expect, or something of that sort. Hope these niggers’ll clear out after this … The neighbours don’t like ’em, and that’s a fact.’

  By discovering clues in the gymnasium, Bredon solves the mystery of how Jervison starved to death (his bed had been hauled 40 feet aloft on ropes by the four Indians). Simmonds tells him:

  ‘Your friends the police have been round, and they’ve just taken off the whole Brotherhood in a suitably coloured Maria.’

  ‘I am going to do my best to see these four fellows hanged,’ proclaims Bredon. ‘If I had my way with them, I would spare them the drop.’

  CHAPTER 16

  Driving like hell

  The social historian learns to assess a community’s ideas and manner of living partly from the material possessions it is known to have valued. The things themselves are evidence where they have survived, but evidence of a kind that might need to be guessed about, and the guesses even of expert interpreters can be pretty wild. The significance of some objects made less than a lifetime ago can be more difficult to decide than that of relics from households in the Bronze Age; for instance, either personal memory or brilliant deductive powers would be needed to infer musical fastidiousness from a tiny lathe-cum-grindstone marketed in the early 1930s. It was for sharpening the thorns that gramophone enthusi
asts used instead of conventional steel needles.

  Somewhere in the vaults of the enormous literature of crime there must be a reference to just such a machine. So handy an accessory for the complete blowpipeman cannot possibly have been ignored. Crime fiction has a thoroughgoing objectivity. It may generally be weak in characterization, unconcerned with ideas and sparing of scenic effect, but it must needs accommodate all material things likely to prove useful to the plot. The writers of thrillers and, especially, detective stories, need more props than does the straight novelist. Ivy Compton-Burnett managed to write brilliant if somewhat disconcerting books that gave virtually no hint that their characters had any corporeal relationship with an outside world. What would have become of Sherlock Holmes in her hands, or, for that matter, in those of Virginia Woolf? Neither would have permitted him to hail another hansom, send one more telegram, or ever again to heat a test tube. All he could have expected of Miss C.-B. was an infinitely subtle embroilment with brother Mycroft and possibly some incestuous cousins over a legacy; and from Miss Woolf perhaps an interior monologue (certainly not a monograph) on the one hundred and forty kinds of tobacco ash.