by Hugh Walpole
FRAGMENTS OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY
CONTENTS
I: CHILDHOOD
II: CATHEDRAL PIECE
III: SHIPS AND SOULS
IV: LONDON, 1909-1914
V: RUSSIA
VI: GLEBESHIRE
VII: BOOKS — AND THEN BOOKS
VIII: AND NOW
I: CHILDHOOD
I
SOMETHING went wrong with the coach and, as I watched, I could see the black plumes bob above the green hedge like strange dingy chrysanthemums growing out of the holly and evergreen. Then, the wrong righted, the black plumes wrested themselves from the evergreen, and the coach moved on up the hill. I watched for the other carriages to pass the gap in the hedge — I saw them press slowly, mournfully upward — one, two, three, four — then the road was still again and the little white clouds sailed in sleepy indifferent procession across the summer blue, the only movement in all the hot world. I turned hurriedly and took a new exercise book from the drawer in the old kitchen table (I had there three new ones) and furiously wrote in capital letters across the top of the page “MRS. SEAGRIM’S FAMILY BOOK I.
THE COACH CHAPTER I. HOW CAPTAIN SEAGRIM died” and then, staring in front of me, biting my pen until the saliva ran down my fingers, saw the picture — the mourning coach pressing up the dark hill, the carriages following it, the storm coming, the thunder, the lightning, the horses breaking loose, the coach rolling over the side of the field, the coffin, the flowers.... What then? I don’t know. I don’t know. This is to be my best. I have deserted, in Chapter VIII, “Amado the Fearless” — Mrs. Seagrim, her dead husband, all her children, her fearful brothers-in-law, her guilty secret, like a flood they are all upon me...: This is to be my best.........
II
Out of the fourteen or so novels that I have published some six have been claimed by different persons at different times to be my best.... Say,1. “The Gods and Mr. Perrin”. 2. “Fortitude”. 3. “The Dark Forest”. 4., “The Secret City”. 5. “The Green Mirror”. 6. “Jeremy”. Myself I consider “The Captives” to be my best book. There for the first time in my very limited experience I got something of the effect for which I had hoped. For myself I mean. And Maggie, the heroine, existed for me. And exists.
This is of no importance to anyone in its private individual interest but it is of importance when you consider a writer’s life, any writer’s life, Shakespeare’s if you like, Balzac’s anyway. I suspect that Balzac adored “Louis Lambert” and grew as tired of hearing about “Père Goriot” as Shakespeare’s ghost must be of “Hamlet”. And little or big it doesn’t matter. I’ve got my “Captives” tucked tight under my arm and I can pat it on the head and be kind to it when nobody’s looking. It’s closer anyway to the Seagrim family than is any other book of mine.
And why “The Captives” is my best book after “Mrs. Seagrim” is just for this reason.
III
When I was nine and a half. I was sent home to England (my parents were then living in New York) and I went to a school that wasn’t all it should be. When I say that it wasn’t all it should be I mean that the food was inadequate, the morality was “twisted”, and Terror — sheer, stark, unblinking Terror — stared down every one of its passages. I had two years of it, and a passionate desire to be liked, a longing for approval, and a frantic reaction to anybody’s geniality have been for me some of the results of that time. I have been frightened since then. I was frightened in the war several times rather badly, but I have never, after those days, thank God, known continuous increasing terror night and day. There was a period, from half past eight to half past nine in the evening, when the small boys (myself with them) were dismissed to bed but, instead, spread themselves in an empty classroom that is still to me, when I think of it, damp green in retrospective color. The bigger boys held during that hour what they called the Circus. Some of the small boys (I was always one) were made to stand on their heads, hang onto the gas and swing slowly round, fight one another with hair brushes, and jump from the top of the school lockers to the ground. Every night (owing I suppose to my then unrecognized short sight) was a horror to me. I would be pushed up onto the lockers, then, “One, two three — jump!” I can feel now again, as I write, the sick dizziness at my heart as I looked down at the shining floor, beat myself to jump, pulled myself together, fell, to be caught generally by some bigger boy who would push me into the arms of someone else, thence on again, and so the round of the room. Swinging round the gas was worse than the lockers — being roasted in front of the fire (shades of “Tom Brown”) worse than the gas. Worst of all was being forced to strip naked, to stand then on a bench before them all while some boy pointed out one’s various physical deficiencies and the general company ended by sticking pins and pen nibs into tender places to see whether one were real or no — Worse than the hour itself was the anticipation of the hour. First thought on waking was that eight thirty was far away! Then, slowly through the day, it grew ever closer and closer until by teatime tears of anticipatory fear would fall into one’s cup and salten one’s husk of bread!
Worst of all, perhaps, was the glee with which one would cheer on the tortures of some other little wretch because it postponed one’s own. Loneliness, grime, filth, cowardice, lies, and lechery — and ten years old at that!
There were, besides, the terrors of the complete dark. One would fall asleep quickly, tired out by the many agitations and excitements of the day; then across the blank curtains of one’s heavy slumber there would flash the forewarning of some coming terror. One is about to die, a train is crashing down a line whose steel girders hold one fast, the picket of ground on which one stands crumbles suddenly and one falls a thousand feet, a chandelier of a million gleaming facets holds one’s eye, one looks up, it comes smashing down, one hides one’s eyes. Always one’s eyes! The crash is there. The train has flung itself forward, the ground has yielded, the candelabra’s glass shivers into silver thousands — the terror of death is past. One is on the floor, cold, almost naked, and somewhere in the distance there is giggling laughter and the rows of white washing basins like dead moons meet one’s slowly wakening gaze.
But there was worse than this — there was the torture of strangulation. Still to this very day when I am overtired or anxious I have the old fear of going to sleep lest I should wake up to feel the towel over my mouth, the hands pressing down on my face, the thumbs in my eyes, the grim agony of the darkness and the struggling for breath, the dim wondering whether this is still dream or reality, the consciousness of the real world and the questioning whether, this time, perhaps they would not keep their hands on the towel too long....
One boy was especially skilful at this game. He was small and plump and rosy, with merry laughing eyes, good at all games, a favorite with all the masters and adored by the matron. I met him last year in London for the first time since those school days. He is now a successful solicitor. He looked very much the same — thickset, bullet headed, merry eyed, very English, unable to understand what “those damned French were thinking about”, proud of his boy who was captain of his school eleven.
‘ I reminded him after dinner that I had been with him at S —— — .
“No, were you really?” he said, smiling cheerfully. “I had no idea. Not a bad old spot. Remember me there do you?”
Yes I did. I told him.
“Funny you should remember me,” he mused. “I was a bit of a devil as a kid I’m afraid. None the worse for that I expect. My boy’s got a bit of the devil in him now.”
Impossible to tell him how I loathed him, standing there thick and strong in his well fitting evening clothes! Impossible to explain to him how I longed, there and then, to take my handkerchief, press it down upon his mouth, pushing my thumbs into his eyes.... Ugh! And I who never hate anyone quite enough and am even flabby in my general amiability.
These stories are all very well, I can hear someone say. We’ve all been through these private schools; a little roughing it does no one any harm.
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“You ought to have stood up for yourself.”
IV
Quite so. But I did not stand up for myself then and I’m not trying to stand up for myself now. The point is exactly that I was a miserable child, and one month at S —— was enough to make me sycophantic, dirty in body and mind, a prey to every conceivable terror, so that the banging of a door or the dropping of a book sent my heart into my cranium, sentimental, too, like a little dog fawning on anyone who was for a moment kind and — worst of all these I think — muddleheaded and confused beyond any grown human’s conception. I went to S —— with a very fair intelligence.
Mathematics I never could begin to understand (to this day I count, on my fingers) but history and geography and literature I was nosing into like a pony with a bundle of hay. Well S —— flung the hay about my ears all right and there it has stuck ever since.
Why can I now never correct my proofs, why do characters wander in and out of my books for no reason at all, why is there a Trenchard called Vincent in “The Green Mirror” when he was killed during the very first month of my writing the novel? Why is a lady in “The Captives” described once with a mustache and once, twenty pages later, without one? Ask my life at S — , ask that befogged wearness with which I woke of a morning tumbling into early school like a bat into an oven, when it was not until the afternoon that I began to see daylight clearly and then only through a beating terror because evening, with all its horrors, was approaching.
How could I grasp my verbs in mu when glances were warning me, from desk to desk, of the new “fun” preparing for the evening Circus? And, once confused, confusion was only again redoubled. Masters descended upon me, matrons swept over and through me, head masters summoned me. Finally, there was drill.
The drill master was an old army sergeant, stout and plethoric. As I have already said, my short sight had not yet been discovered. I moved in a mist to the parallel bars, in a cloud tried to vault the horse. How the sergeant thundered, what happy moments for the rest of the class. “Make some excuse and come and see Tadpole on the horizontal!” was a favorite word in the school at that time. Afterward I crept into the cloak room and hid my head in the coats and cried — oceans! Then the shout would come down the passage. They were after some new victim. I would creep out and join the hunt. Anything to be unobserved. Were the hunt interesting enough, even someone’s remark “Tadpole’s been blubbing again” caused no comment. Wasn’t I the lucky one to escape!
V
So poor a sniveler deserves his bad time of course. But it was not all sniveling. I had my consolations.
One was a friend of mine, Jumbo, a stout boy whose incredibly romantic mind went step by step with my own. My own tendency to romance was immensely fostered by my miseries at S —— . Indeed had I gone during those two impressionable years to some comfortable “prep” school there to be indulged and fattened, I might be today the completely stern realistic “truthful” novelist who is at this particular moment (spring, 1922) all the fashion.
But the dirty background of S —— — drove me into dreams of my own, dreams thick with ropes of pearl, clusters of diamonds, unfathomable snows touched with the finger of an eternal rosy dawn, temples haunted by violet hued serpents, Aladdin’s caves and pirates’ holds. In all these dreams Jumbo shared. He, too, was at first miserable at S — . But his mind was of a more practical romance than my own. We discovered in an old writing case given to me by an uncle a letter, yellow and faded, covered with close writing of which we could decipher not one word.
Jumbo decided that the letter proved I was the rightful Earl of Orferd and that I was kept out of my Norfolk estates by the aforesaid rascally uncle. This idea was started, I suppose, as one of our romantic “games”, but it was not long before we were regarding it with the utmost seriousness. I carried the writing case about with me everywhere and bore myself, for the first time, with a certain dignity. Jumbo communicated, first to one and then to another, the marvelous secret, and his story of course lost nothing in its narration. The story led, in fact, to a certain alleviation of my unhappy state (small boys being the greatest snobs in the universe) and several of my torturers made me promise to remember them when I came into my estate.
Jumbo, although he had, imaginatively, a romantic mind, was far from romantic in his daily life. He went, I used to complain, a trifle too far on the phlegmatic side. For months he endured the most intolerable bullying (his plump body and good tempered nature offering an irresistible temptation to the managers of the Circus), and then suddenly on one never to be forgotten evening he sprang upon his persecutors and, almost literally, he tore them limb from limb. It was discovered then that he was of an immense strength, and shortly afterward he was promoted to be a leading forward in the school rugby fifteen — and glory shone upon him.
I would like to tell him now how grateful I am, at this day, to remember that he did not desert me in the moment of his triumph but rather clung to me the more stoutly, defending me on many occasions and alleviating my lot in a thousand different ways. He grew, I fancy, at the last a little weary of me and complained to me that I would not “stick up for myself” and that I was far too fond of weeping and “stuffing in the library”. He could not pull me out of my slough. Behind my own despair was a deep contempt of myself. I felt that I deserved all the tortures that the Circus flung upon me. I was bewildered, confused, inextricably involved in a network of forgetfulness, wrongly timed impulse, and sudden cowardices. Jumbo did his best for me and then when he saw that his best was no good, hung on to me as a kind of duty.
The second of my alleviations was the wife of our head master. I adored her. She was very young, had only been very lately married, and came to S —— , I am convinced, with a determination to be a mother to the boys. But she knew very little about boys and nothing at all about the grieving and rebellious little souls who then peopled the S —— —— — world.
One thing that she used to do was to visit the dormitories just before lights were turned out. In these visits she never failed, and I used to watch for her with a frantic, eager excitement. She looked so pretty standing there with her fair hair, and in her lovely evening dress; her voice was one of the sweetest in the world. She was herself no more than a child and, I am convinced, of a far deeper innocence than nine-tenths of the children under her husband’s charge.
She liked to stand there at the window near my bed and talk about the stars, asking whether we knew their names and describing to us what she fancied to be the state of the moon (desperately unastronomical her description I fear!). The boys, of course, laughed at her and called her “Old Mooney” and worse names than that. To myself she was everything that was wonderful and in all my stories she figured. Again and again I rescued her, from dangers, from emperors, from giants and magicians, from witches and serpents, and even, I fear, from her husband whom I had good reasons for detesting. I am glad that she never knew what little wretches we really were. I hope that, to this very day, she does not know.
My third alleviation had nothing to do with S —— — and I must presently describe it in greater detail; but before I leave S —— — forever I would like to say two things.
First, my parents were far away from England and had no notion of my condition. Like all small boys I lied freely in my letters home, acting I suppose from a strange twisted kind of loyalty. So soon as they discovered the truth, I was at once removed to another school.
And secondly S —— is now an admirable place, excellently conducted, most wisely supervised. I fancy that my two years there marked the end of an old, careless, ignorant régime. Schools are not in existence today, I fancy, where such things are possible. The world does not seem to change very much but in that respect, in England at least, it has changed.
VI
I discovered, I think at a very early age, that I had neither an accurate nor deeply penetrating mind. My brain was “soppy”, soft at the edges, wrapped in folds of cotton wool. My memory was s
hocking and is so, with certain quite useless exceptions, to this day. I discovered also another thing about my thoughts — that they were never either new or original. Certain perceptions I had, a feeling for atmosphere and an eager passion for whatever seemed to me beautiful in any shape or form, but when I had seen my beautiful thing I could not translate it into something “rich and strange” — and I cannot today. My envy of certain poets of my time — Walter de la Mare for example — and of certain prose writers — Hudson for instance and, in a very different genre, Katherine Mansfield — for their wonderful, sharp, poignant perception of the beauty and strangeness of everyday things, is sharp almost to bitterness. And yet “envy” is not the word nor “bitterness” either. Their gifts give the world great happiness, and if one has not got them one can still do the best with what one has. But there is nothing I think more pathetic in the arts than the thousands and thousands who have so much aspiration in their hearts, so much “smudginess” in their fingers. Physically I cannot make even a decent sailors’ knot with my hands, I cannot knock a nail straight into the wall, cannot turn a simple screw with efficiency — in my art it is the same.
Perception, ardent if uncritical, was always there and it led me to Miss Julie (a Miss Julie how strangely unlike Strindberg’s terrible heroine!). During those years when my father and mother were in America I spent many of my holidays as a kind of paying guest in different families. Two holidays were thus spent with a very fatherly clergyman in the Midlands. He had in his house a queer old sister known to the servants and the neighborhood as Miss Julie. She was little and bent, with a hooked nose and shaggy eyebrows; and she liked to dress in bright silks, green and purple and blue. She always wore a lace cap on her head, wore loose flat slippers that tapped after her when she walked, and spent her day forever knitting innumerable shawls. She never went out that I could see, but sat by the window nodding her head over her stitches. She was one of the originals, I fancy, for my Aunt Aggie in “The Green Mirror”; not that she was cross or spiteful, but sometimes when she was interrupted or startled by the loud banging of-the door or irritated by the children of the house, she would look up with a frown, in which her forehead came down like a “pent house lid” over her mouth and nose. I was terrified of her and for a week or two she did not address to me a single word. Then suddenly one day I, peeping into the drawing room to see whether anyone were there and whether I might go to the glass bookcase and steal one of the Dickens in safety, heard myself summoned by her in a strange, cracked, and exasperated voice. I went over to her, trembling. She bade me sit down beside her and then words suddenly darted from her like sparks from a firework. Whether from terror or stupidity, I missed a good deal of her conversation. She told me I think about her youth and how gay a time she had once had and how stupid the world was now and that there was no one worth troubling about. She finally dismissed me but patted my shoulder which showed that she approved of me. After that she often summoned me, and I think that the family were surprised that she noticed me and thought that “there must be something in me after all”. Then finally came her great secret. There was somewhere she told me a most wonderful Crystal Box. It belonged to her and she was going to leave it to me in her will. This Crystal Box had once been her dearest possession but she had lost it and although she knew that it was in the house, or possibly in the garden, she could not put her fingers on it. The great thing was that one must not deliberately look for it. That was not the way to find it, but one day it would suddenly appear. She never, she confessed to me, went up to her room at night without expecting to find it there on the bed.