Noble in Reason

by Phyllis Bentley

  “I’m not going to keep them down like father kept us,” said John to me once in a tone of resentment. “Let them have a good time while they can.”

  This was after an uncomfortable Sunday tea at Ashroyd when the children had romped about the house and interrupted their elders to a pitch which had provoked a severe remonstrance from, my father. (My father, by the way, was at this stage inclined to a sentimental favouring of Robert, as his only grandson, but once Robert had the use of his limbs and tongue this had to be given up; Robert was not a sentimental type. Bob, as he soon became to everyone but myself and my father, was a strong, square, florid, hearty, rather boorish and rather handsome child, very like John indeed as was to be expected; only his fine grey eyes and something agreeable in his smile showed his relationship to Beatrice.) Altogether, in every way the phrase “a good time” became the criterion of action in John’s section of society, and by this criterion Victorian manners and customs were rated very low.

  On the other hand, for serious, thoughtful, bookish young persons of my type, this was a period of bitter disillusionment. The publication of war memoirs by various important persons, with the revelations of incompetency and jealousy, destroyed our faith in military idols; the wrangles and cruelties of Versailles destroyed our faith in statesmen; the discovery of what our naval blockade had done to enemy children almost destroyed our faith in humanity. For four years we had struggled to fight a war to end all wars, make the world safe for democracy and provide a land fit for heroes to dwell in—I quote from noted utterances of the period. We woke from these idealistic dreams to find ourselves, as Aldous Huxley’s Chelifer mordantly put it, “among the dustbins at the bottom of the area steps,” dustbins which grew more and more uncomfortable as the boom turned slowly towards slump. It was really no longer possible to see these dustbins as homes fit for heroes, however much we were exhorted to do so, and the pretences which had satisfied our fathers and grandfathers no longer blinded us—“our generation,” as even a writer so light-hearted as Beverley Nicholls remarked at this time, “has seen through things.” We thought we saw that something was wrong with the world and we were determined to find out what it was; an essential part of this process was to speak the truth about life as we saw it at whatever cost; the fashion for debunking set in. Debunking, as I defined the word to myself, meant the stripping from any institution, idea or person, all its accretions of sentiment and tradition, with a view to seeing it in its naked truth, and throwing it away if it appeared not worth keeping in that condition.

  We thus debunked war, with the aid of Capek’s Insect play. We debunked our social system—I myself did it with the aid of Galsworthy’s Island Pharisees, Fraternity and Man of Property, which I now belatedly read, rejoicing in his wish “to prick the heart of the English complacency” and his attack on property as an ideal. The Russian revolution, which at the time of its occurrence I had hardly noticed except as a collapse, a withdrawal from the common cause, now became a focus of interest and hope. (Alas, that these hopes have been so autocratically disappointed!) We began to debunk, with the aid of such Bowdlerizations of Freud as now trickled through, human motive, and learned to diagnose our mental discomforts as repressions and inhibitions—an accomplishment which gave me a good deal of relief. We debunked also, as I said, the Victorian era, and I attributed the tragedies of John and Beatrice, of Henry and of myself, to the ludicrous and excessive strictness of our Victorian upbringing. Even my mother’s tragedy, which through these years of the 1920’s slowly deepened and darkened, I charged to the account of Victorian Puritanism. I saw, of course, that her misery was due to Netta’s absence, but justly traced it to a deeper cause.

  For Netta did not return to live in Hudley. Canon Graham, broken by his son’s death, retired from active work in the Church and returned to his native Kentish village. He proved an exacting invalid and required much attention, and after the birth of her child, who was named Stephen Geoffrey Christopher, Netta remained with Mrs. Graham to help to nurse her father-in-law. After a long illness far from patiently born, the Canon died in the early 1920’s—I forget the exact year—and my mother made an effort to persuade Netta to return to us. (I have a pathetic picture of her now, sitting down to write a letter with a good deal of agitation, sending my father and myself from the room because she could not think while we were there.) But neither my father nor I, greatly though I desired Netta’s return for my own sake as well as for my mother’s, added our persuasions to hers; we felt it wrong to urge Netta to bring her son to a household shadowed as was ours. Accordingly Netta and Mrs. Graham continued to live together and bring up Stephen, and my mother to sink into the abyss—none of which need have happened, I thought with indignant compassion, if the stern Victorian ethic represented by my father had not mangled my mother’s youth.

  All these eager and bitter criticisms of my century I strove to embody in my first novel, which I began to write in 1920.

  A month after the Armistice in 1918 I found myself, in company with thousands of other munition workers, abruptly unemployed, and though I made many attempts to find another post outside the textile world, in these efforts also I was accompanied by a million or two young men returning from the Forces, and was unsuccessful. Whenever the matter was mentioned in the family Edie exclaimed: “He needs a rest after all that!” By “all that” she meant my tragic loss of my wife. At this my father sighed and shook his head, but said no more. Edie was of course more right than she knew; I felt indeed an inertia, a stupor, almost a paralysis, after “all that.” Accordingly I was still unemployed when John returned to Hudley.

  “What have you learned then, Chris, while you’ve been away?” said he, on hearing from my father of my lack of employment.

  I stammered out an account of my wartime activities.

  “None of that is any use in real business,” said John in a kindly tone. “You’d better stay at Hilbert and take over all the figures and writing and such.”

  With mingled humiliation, despair and relief I acquiesced in this proposal. Escape was evidently impossible; I resigned myself to my fate. The work, to one who had supervised the clerical side of a factory employing thousands, was simple to a degree and I soon had it well under control. I did not attempt to intrude upon the other departments unless directly asked to do so, I took no decisions, I did not attempt to impose myself upon the personnel; I remained voluntarily and determinedly subordinate in all the firm’s affairs. By these means I dissociated myself, as I thought, from John’s commercial ethics, which were those of an unabashed capitalist. I had been an employee before, knew their probable reactions and suffered as I watched John’s careless disregard for these—it wounded me to discover that both the office staff and the operatives preferred him to myself. However, this preference set me even more free than before, I thought, from responsibility in Hilbert Street; I kept exact hours, but was not at all over-worked; my energies were by no means fully employed. Thus, encouraged by my small wartime successes in journalism, I soon embarked upon fiction.

  It was with the highest contemporary ideals, the most ruthless determination to present life exactly as it really is, that I began to write Modern Instances. I judged myself entirely capable of presenting the relentless, undiluted, bitter truth; I was sophisticated, disillusioned, in the best post-war style; I had experienced such a betrayal as few men had to suffer; the familiarity of my environment did not deceive me, I viewed it (I thought) with a stern, level, piercing eye. As I sat writing in my small back bedroom, I felt a deep happiness, wrestling to put my dissatisfaction with society into words. I took pains to keep this literary activity secret from my family; it was a world completely my own to which each evening I retired.

  It is not my purpose here to describe my adventures, whether early or late, in the literary world, except in so far as they contribute to the history of my self-mastery. Accordingly I shall not enter upon the details of my early struggles, which were certainly long, hard and bitter. The joyous
writing of Modern Instances, the additions, subtractions, revisions and final rejections to which it was subjected by various publishers; the much less hopeful (and less amateur) composition of Not in Entire Forgetfulness, the acquisition of a worn-out typewriter from Hilbert Mills, the entire re-modelling and re-typing of both works—all these, with their alternations of hope and despair, filled five years of my life but taught me lessons about only the form and composition, not the content, of my work. I therefore jump to the moment when, at the age already of thirty, I rushed upstairs to my parents’ bedroom (where my father was standing at my mother’s bedside) waving a letter and exclaiming excitedly:

  “They’ve accepted my novel! ”

  “Well done!” exclaimed my father, beaming.

  “Poor Chris!” said my mother softly. She put out her arms and drew me down to her, kissed my cheek and fondled my shoulder. “Poor Chris!” she said again.

  This reversal of my parents’ traditional rôles perplexed me. I perceived, of course, that they knew more of my literary ambitions than I had guessed, but could not see any reason in this hour of triumph for my mother’s pity, which I should have accepted as my due at almost any previous moment.

  “Well, think of that! Who would have thought it? I am glad,” said John heartily when I announced my success to him next morning.

  He seemed genuinely pleased, and showed this pleasure by talking far and wide about the forthcoming novel, and by introducing me to customers as “our author.” I squirmed and shrank beneath this enthusiasm, so Philistine and uninformed.

  The next few weeks, which I had thought would be entirely happy ones, gave foretastes of troubles to come. A contract arrived. John on reading it thought its terms ungenerous and wished to suggest alterations. I was horrified, not only by this proposed intrusion of the commercial into the literary sphere, but by an instinctive knowledge that he was wrong from ignorance of its conditions; in any case I would not brook the interference of my family into my precious realm of literature. The defence of this realm was, now as always before, the only stimulus which could animate me with courage; I signed the contract and despatched it without John’s knowledge.

  “Let’s have another look at that contract, Chris,” said John cheerfully at the end of that afternoon.

  “We can’t. I’ve posted it.”

  “You’ve signed it?” exclaimed John.

  “Yes,” said I, colouring.

  John’s face darkened and he turned away.

  The proofs arrived. These, again, which should have been unmitigated joy, brought me some uneasiness, for I now began to envisage my father and John reading the published work. Such parts of it as they could understand, I felt, they would dislike. The nature of the public ordeal to which I was about to expose myself now for the first time dawned on me; I watched its approach with mingled joy and terror.

  By one of those mistakes which to the publisher is a mere clerical error but to the young author a major disaster, my complimentary copies did not reach me until the day after publication. I did not know enough of literary custom to realize the omission, and was sitting at tea with my parents in a dreary condition, reflecting that a publication day was not after all very different from any other day, since nothing whatever seemed to have happened, when John burst in.

  “Why, Chris! Why didn’t you tell us it was today? You might have told us!” he cried, throwing down on the table a copy of my chef d’œuvre.

  I snatched it, fondled it, opened it, examined its cover and its jacket. “But where did you get it?” I stammered, in a whirl.

  “I bought it in a shop,” said John sardonically. “I saw some copies in a window. Haven’t they sent you any, then?”

  “Not yet. Which shop? I’ll go and look.”

  John caught me by the arm.

  “We’ll see them as we go down to the theatre. I’ve got some tickets for us all—we ought to celebrate. Hurry up and get ready,” he said.

  His intention was so kind that I forced a smile and pretended enthusiasm for the outing, but in fact I felt wretched at the prospect. The piece being played at the Hudley theatre that week was a musical comedy of the most banal type, which an intellectual such as I prided myself on being would not wish, to use a slang phrase of later date, to be seen dead attending. But John had secured a box and there all the adult Jarmaynes sat, full in the public eye, watching this outlay of cheap sentiment, a smear which I was ashamed to inflict on my beautiful book; I only hoped my publisher would never hear of it.

  Next day my parcel of copies arrived. I inscribed them suitably to my parents, John and Edie, and Netta, wrote my own name in one and was then at a loss what to do with the other two copies.

  “Bob ought to have one, Chris,” said Edie reproachfully.

  Since this suggestion would involve the use of the word son or father in the inscription, I found it exceedingly difficult to comply with. I saw, too, that it was only the beginning of a long line of similar difficulties. I walked about my room for some time before I could bring myself to realize that my decision on this matter had been taken at the time of Robert’s birth, years ago. It was useless, and might be dangerous to family happiness, to shirk its consequences now. In a large, bold, jagged hand, utterly unlike my usual quiet calligraphy, I inscribed the book to Robert from his loving father.

  It was a searing experience, but at least I had the consolation of feeling that I had behaved well. No such consolation mitigated the anguish of watching my father reading Modern Instances. I see him now, holding the book in his hand at the odd angle of the unaccustomed reader, his crest of hair erect as if bristling with indignation, the vertical frown strong down the centre of his forehead, his expression one of perplexity and displeasure, turning a page with a quick vehement gesture and then turning back as if he could not credit what he found there. The reviews of the book, however, though few and short were kindly, and I showed him one or two of the precious cuttings. He perused them in silence, then handed them back quickly as if rejecting them.

  “Well! They seem to think well of it,” he said in a perplexed tone. “I suppose I just don’t understand it, that’s all.”

  John’s reaction was more definitely hostile. I did not ask his opinion of the book for it was a point of pride—the pride, I thought, of genuine humility—never to ask anyone’s opinion of any of my work; and he did not volunteer any comment. But one day when a rather blustering and tiresome customer had called at Hilbert Mills about an unsatisfactory piece of cloth and John had had some difficulty in smoothing him down, thinking to show sympathy I remarked that the said customer was a stupid and unreasonable man.

  “But then you don’t think much of anyone in Hudley, do you, Chris?” said John quickly.

  I took this as his comment on Modern Instances, and that I was right was shown by his next remark.

  “Edie’s trying to read it now,” said John in a grim tone.

  My first novel was financially a devastating failure, the second even worse. I was able to buy a typewriter from the proceeds of Modern Instances, and with a small supplement from my Hilbert salary, a gas fire—I had now moved into a larger bedroom—from Not in Entire Forgetfulness, but that was all. I considered this failure to appreciate me on the part of the general public an honourable tribute to the original and penetrating quality of my work, but my family took other views.

  “I don’t see much good in going on with it, really,” said my father with a considering air, handing the royalty statement of Not in Entire Forgetfulness to John.

  With an involuntary exclamation of pain I snatched the statement away and turned aside.

  “If you take things so hard, you’re going to let yourself in for a lot of disappointment, Chris,” said my father severely.

  “Don’t be silly, Chris,” said John.

  2

  Looking back on my first two novels now, I give them a humorously affectionate but also somewhat painful smile. Promising had they been written by a lad of twenty, for a m
an of thirty they now appear deplorably immature.

  Instead of the ruthless, relentless, powerful attacks on modern industrial society which I believed myself to be writing, I find now a couple of mild little stories—perhaps feeble would be a better word—certainly very earnest, but more than a little neurotic and exceedingly jejune. A mixture of my grievances and my undigested reading, they are stilted in style, unsophisticated in outlook, self-pitying in tone. Indeed I remember feeling a resentful discomfort when I read, in Aldous Huxley’s Chrome Yellow—the Bible of the early 1920’s—the scene between the young hero Denis and Mr. Scogan, when poor Denis confesses that he has written a novel.

  “My poor Denis!” exclaimed Mr. Scogan. “What about?”

  Denis felt rather uncomfortable. “Oh, about the usual things, you know.”

  “Of course,” Mr. Scogan groaned. “I’ll describe the plot for you. Little Percy, the hero, was never good at games, but he was always clever. . . . He is bowed down with melancholy thought; he carries the whole weight of the universe upon his shoulders. He writes a novel of dazzling brilliance; he dabbles delicately in Amour and disappears, at the end of the book, into the luminous future.”