Delphi Collected Works of Hugh Walpole (Illustrated)

by Hugh Walpole

  I pulled paper toward me and began to write. People were moving, shops were opening, cabs were tottering along, children were crying, dogs were barking. I could not write fast enough to keep pace with the pictures. The lamp was brought in — I did not notice it. I went to bed in the early hours of the morning, ecstatic, triumphant. It was so easy. One had only to watch the people, to listen to their voices; it was so easy. Thank God, I was a real novelist at last.

  I had no more plan — than that. I wrote, through that winter, twelve chapters, and then found myself in a terrible state of confusion.

  I could not go anywhere nor do anything without dragging all my characters with me. And how many characters I had, and how many different things they were all doing, and how impossible to draw them all into any common movement! Moreover, when I had listened to them it had seemed to me that I heard their voices; but now when I read the dialogue it was as though only one character were speaking and that character myself!

  I looked at the pile of manuscript and felt proud that I could write so much — but how to continue? I must begin again, and this time I must have a plan and only so many characters as were needed. And destroy all these beautiful pages? Yes, destroy all these beautiful pages.

  And so I had my first lesson in novel writing — a lesson, I may add, that to this day I have never properly learned.

  It happened that at the very time of this literary crisis I was summoned by the chief.

  He explained to me with a good deal of hesitancy — because he was a kindly man and a tender — that he was not satisfied with my work, that I was absentminded and unpunctual (!), that I did not visit the ships that I ought to visit, and did not reprimand when I ought to reprimand. He hated to tell me this but — did I feel that clerical work was my vocation?

  I had nothing to urge in my defense. What could I say? I was absentminded and forgetful. I was divided in my interests. Even as he talked to me the figures from “The Abbey” came flying into the room — buzzing with their chatter about my ears. “What are you going to do with us?” they cried. “You’ve left us in midair.”

  I went out and down to the Mersey and there, looking at the river, I had one of the most important hours of my life. That foaming flood tossing in grey froth and spume out to the sea was invincibly strong and mighty. Ships of all sizes were passing; gulls were wheeling with hoarse screams above my head — the sun broke the clouds and suddenly the river was violet with silver lines and circles.

  At that moment I knew. The ferry arrived from the other side; people pushed out and past me. The life and bustle and beauty of the world was everywhere about me. I loved it; I adored it; but not for me to try and change it.

  Looking out to sea where a great liner slowly took the sun like a queen, I vowed that I would be a novelist, good or bad, for the remainder of my earthly days.

  I went back, there and then, and resigned my position.

  IV: LONDON, 1909-1914

  I

  WHEN I came up to London in 1909 and planted my umbrella in Chelsea the town of the early ‘nineties was only just behind me. On every side of me were men who had lived in it, made it, destroyed it — it was not romantic at all.

  Now it is more distant and perhaps more romantic than the reign of Queen Anne.

  The before-the-war London which was, when I was living in it, the most matter of fact and platitudinous of towns is now in its turn being pushed back into the romantic color of history. I am not at all sure indeed that it will not, before the end of this century, become the most interesting period of all London’s modern post-Napoleonic life. Already that moment of the outbreak of war has, with its terrible and prophetic gesture, pointed everyone to the careless tranquillity of those preceding years. A hundred novels have already made August fourth the thrilling crisis of their little chronicles, not one I think successfully. We are still too near.

  Too near to 1914, but what a distance from 1910! I am thirty-eight years old, not a septuagenarian age, but already I find that youngsters are interested when I tell them that every day I rode from Piccadilly Circus back to my rooms in Chelsea on a horse omnibus and leaning over the front discussed matters with the friendly old driver; that I have driven continually in hansoms; that I often watched Fred Farren in the Empire Ballet from the shocking and demoralizing Promenade; that I heard from Robert Ross’s lips the true account of the last days of Wilde in Paris; that I saw Dan Leno in pantomime; that I watched the flight of the first aeroplane at Hendon; that I had tea with Thomas Hardy’s first wife; that I was at the first night of Stephen Phillips’s “Herod”; that I dined with Aubrey Beardsley’s sister; that I was at the first performance of Elgar’s Violin Concerto; that I heard Ternina in Wagner; that I read Conrad’s “Lord Jim” from month to month in “Blackwood’s”....

  II

  Of course that world was easier to live in, but it was not a perfect world for all that. For a year I lived in Chelsea on a hundred pounds and was as happy as a king; it would be really difficult now to be happy on a hundred pounds a year in London.

  I had great luck from the first. I secured almost at once a good reviewing job on a London paper, had my first novel accepted at once by a good publishing firm and, better than these, secured the friendship of two of the greatest personalities in modern letters. People accused me in those days I remember of being a literary snob but I was very naïve in my snobbism. I simply worshiped men of letters and went for them direct as a kitten goes to a saucer of milk.

  My real life began I suppose when a kind friend gave for me a little luncheon at the Reform Club to celebrate the success (a very tiny success) of my first novel. The men who came to that luncheon were Max Beerbohm, H. G. Wells, Clutton-Brock, Reginald Turner (the wittiest talker in the whole of London), and Robert Ross.

  Think of it! For a boy, fresh from the country, crude, ignorant, and eager, to have at once the chance of such companionship! And soon after this I met Galsworthy, Arnold Bennett, Edmund Gosse, Sidney Colvin and, best and greatest man of his time, Henry James.

  Those were really the days of the novel. The veterans — Meredith, Hardy, Kipling, Moore — were in the background, proved and sure of their immortality, and Wells, Bennett, Galsworthy, Conrad were still spoken of as young men of whom anything might be expected.

  Everyone talked then of the novel — it had a great and wonderful new period of efflorescence; a push and masterly realism might take it anywhere. H. G. Wells had made his now historic speech at the Times Book Club declaring that the time had now come for the novel to admit everything into its generous embrace, Henry James was showing in “The Wings of the Dove” that there were entirely new fields in psychology to be discovered, Conrad was showering down upon us pages of incomparable prose, Arnold Bennett flung with a careless, indifferent gesture that masterpiece “The Old Wives’ Tale” at the feet of the public.

  It was a great time — a great time when you are at the beginning and everyone expects good things from you and you have no past works to be dragged up in evidence against you.

  It is certainly the easiest thing in the world for any young man or woman of ordinary talents to make a first little splash as a novelist. Your little personality is fresh to the world; you are presenting your vision of life from an angle just a little different from the angles of other people. Everyone is waiting eagerly for the signs of a new talent; everyone is only too ready to see proofs of unusual merit in something fresh and young; no one is more eager for this than the publisher who is longing to have a fresh horse in his stable — unless it be the reviewer who is positively aching for a new stick to beat the old hacks with!

  Yes — it is easy to begin; it is the staying the course that counts.

  And here it is I think that both in England and America the mistake is made — we are all too eager for something new. The young author who has something fresh to say finds himself almost at once surrounded by a crowd of supporters who are pushing him eagerly forward, generally against some other writ
er with whom he has not the slightest ambition of rivalry. He may keep his own head, feel that he is only at the very beginning of an arduous and ungrateful art, but he is not human if he does not react to the kindness and praise and attention.

  The very talk that follows leads his audience to expect more of him than he is as yet able to give. His fifth or sixth book is disappointing, repetition or an attempt in a new vein that does not suit him. His friends, having dug him up by the roots every five minutes to see how he is growing, are surprised to find that there are few signs as yet of blossom and fruit; they hurry off to another young tree.

  Like Chiappino I have already seen “four and twenty leaders of revolt”. I have seen Wells and Bennett and Galsworthy torn to pieces by their once most ardent admirers. I have heard a thousand times that Conrad is not what he was and that Hardy is a far greater poet than novelist. I have heard a million youths declare that they cannot read Meredith and a flock of young critics deride Henry James. I have seen the young prewar novelists sink and fade and give way to the war poets and I have seen the war poets, in their turn, surrender before the battalion of women novelists — and that battalion too will vanish before some new advancing cohort — perchance of Freudians, of scientific botanists, of poetic mathematicians!...

  III

  There is only one way of safety for a young artist — to be so deeply absorbed in life, in art, in both life and art, that he can have no eyes for the fluctuations of fashion.

  I knew in that prewar London two men, one H. G. Wells to whom life and the conduct of it was of infinitely greater importance than art, the other Henry James to whom life was of value because of the beautiful things that art could make out of it. To Wells the great question was, and is, how can life be made more effective, more practically ordered for the good of the human race? And to James — what are you doing with it? Here’s your subject — how are you fashioning it, are you getting the very most out of it? Life is the huge block of marble, you are the sculptor — work. To Wells it is perpetually amazing that human beings should be so clumsy in the art of living, to James it was perpetually amazing that human beings should be so clumsy in the pursuit of art.

  “Let art go”, Wells is today forever crying, “if only we can put our house a little more in order.”

  “Take”, James would say were he alive, “your disordered house as your subject and see what you can make of it.”

  And yet, with all that absorption, there was perhaps no human being in the whole of Europe during the first years of the war who felt so poignantly, so directly, so personally the agony of it all as James. It would be true enough to say that the war killed him.

  I was fortunate enough during the years 1910 and 1911 to go up on Sundays to. Wells’s house in Hampstead and share those long Sunday walks that are now historical and almost traditional. After a time he lost interest in me but, before that sad inevitability, I had a splendid time. One had the sense with Wells that he was forever traveling on a magic carpet, kicking his heels in the azure air and scarcely waving a hand of farewell to one fair country before his eyes were eagerly scanning the faint horizon of the new kingdom. One walked, on those Sundays, like a puppy breathlessly at his heels. One discovered very quickly that he was but little interested in individuals or rather that he discarded them one after the other like pocket handkerchiefs, hoping that they would return from the general wash cleaner and straighter and more symmetrical, but not very confidently expecting it. His ironic comment conflicted with his natural kindliness and his point of view as he always readily confessed changed from hour to hour. Gaily we danced in a trail behind him over the fields and ditches of Hampstead and suddenly he would stop for a game of cricket or sit under a tree and mop his brow or take a train or an omnibus that had strayed in some lost English fashion into the country.

  It was all immensely exciting and stimulating and, at the end, unsatisfying. I am sure that there is no company in the world today quite so good as his, but for those who thirst for finality he is not the companion. I returned to Chelsea on Sunday evening like Alice after her game of croquet; the beastly birds, however tightly one might fix them under one’s arm, would turn round and look at one.

  Henry James, on the other hand, was all rest and tranquillity. The day would never be long enough for the perfect elaboration of those marvelous sentences that wound like a conjurer’s ribbon out of his mouth before his patiently expectant audience.

  Of the many personal impressions of him that appeared after his death, by far the best in my opinion was a page in “The New Statesman” from the pen of Desmond MacCarthy, an extraordinary little portrait that will, I trust, be one day reprinted.

  But the obvious things about Henry James were so striking that they have been repeated again and again. With the thick stocky figure, the broad map-like face, the careful, absolutely neat clothing — he gave the effect of racing man turned French abbé. His courtesy was eighteenth century, and to every incident or character he applied a vastly tender and elaborate humor that often enough enclosed some small personality as the dim Duomo in Florence gathers in around an investigating tourist.

  He was above all, I think, an immensely lonely man. He had of course many who dearly loved him, hundreds who adored to be his friends, and around all of these he expended an enormous fund of attention and self-sacrifice. But I doubt whether any single one of them truly rested in the depths of his soul — no, not even his brother William whom he so passionately loved. He adored his friends; for his own family he would have done anything in the world or gone anywhere; and for women like Edith Wharton and Mrs. W. K. Clifford and for men like Percy Lubbock and Howells and Julian Sturgis there could be no sacrifice too great. And yet... And yet... There was always a wistfulness, an isolation that remained. Partly it was, I think, an isolation of the brain.

  I remember once when some friends whom he dearly loved had been to luncheon with him he said something ironical about them. I deprecated that and he answered as though to a little child: “My dear boy, don’t you know that when one’s friends are with one one’s heart is fully engaged but so soon as they are gone one’s brain comes into play?”

  But it was not only the subtlety of his intelligence that kept him apart; it was also, I believe, the loneliness of the exile. Dearly though he loved England, proudly as he proclaimed her his country at the time of her trial, he was, to the last, an American. Certain phases of modern American life he detested but it was curious to see how, in the company of his brother William or of Howells or of Mrs. Wharton, a sense of almost homely ease descended upon him. He was American too to the last in his attitude to Europe — quite unconsciously using his notebooks as though he might be called back to his country at any moment.

  When I first met him I was at my very crudest state of adoration of life in general and London in particular. I think it was this very crudity that won his affection. The soil was so fresh that some fine seed must come to flourish there. My naive prattlings about the art of writing he received always with a kindly benignancy, rather as a Christian missionary would listen to a native who was repeating for the first time the Apostles’ Creed.

  He liked at first my eager appreciation of everybody and everything, but I remember one awful occasion when I had written a letter to “The Nation” arguing that the English novel of the moment was not in so bad a way. I can see him now, standing, his legs a little apart, watching me as though he would say: “What imbecility grosser than this is there yet to appear?”

  For the most part he tried very gently to show me that looseness and carelessness and untidiness were of the Devil!

  “Subject! Subject! Subject!” he would wail at me. “Where’s your subject?”

  “Well, there,” I would feebly try to reply. “Old generation passing away typified by the tyrannous duchess...”

  “Then stick to it! Stick to it! You haven’t stuck to it anywhere at all. You haven’t done anything with it. You’ve left it and wandered off....”

&
nbsp; I tried for a time to follow; then there came a day when he compared a not very successful novel of Edith Wharton’s with one of the very greatest of Joseph Conrad’s. The comparison was entirely in Mrs. Wharton’s favor. Conrad was loose, rambling, disconnected. Mrs. Wharton was tight, fine, worked-on, the subject was drained....

  “But there are other things—” I ventured.

  IV

  No one who was not happy enough to experience it will ever realize what his tenderness of heart was. His published letters, so admirably selected by Percy Lubbock, reveal that a little but one must hear the cadence of the voice, see the benignancy of the eye....

  I remember once when I was staying with him at Rye that we went for a walk and that a gate was opened for us by two very young round eyed children. He felt in his pockets for some pennies, found them, presented them, and then began a long elaborate oration to the children about sweets and how excellent it was to buy sweets and what sort of sweet was the best — all in his kindest, most ornately humorous manner.

  The children listened for a long time, mouths wide open, gazing up at him. Then suddenly they dropped their pennies and ran screaming and crying across the fields. This upset him terribly; for days he continued to recall it — how had he hurt them, what had he said?

  But enough. There is just now I fancy a certain reaction against his work. That will of course pass. Of his early period “Roderick Hudson” and “The Portrait of a Lady”; of the middle period “The Awkward Age” (that most marvelous and tragic of social comedies), “The Spoils of Poyn-ton”, “What Maisie Knew”, and many of the short stories; from the later period “The Ambassadors” and “The Golden Bowl” — these are sure of their fame so long as the English’ novel lasts: sure for the great, superb nobility of character that runs, like a golden thread, through them all; sure for their splendid art; sure for their interpretations of a curious and complicated time....