by Hugh Walpole
V
With the publication of “Fortitude” my life changed. It was a success, small, but sufficient to assure me that I might surrender myself altogether to novel writing, then as now the only art for which I have any talent at all.
Sometimes an angry critic will blame a novelist as though he had committed some monstrous crime; but if he is happy and out of harm’s way while he is at it, and if no one is compelled to read him!... But critics are right to be disappointed. Take from them their splendid ideals, and they are barren indeed!
London in those two years before the war was wonderful. I have seen somewhere that no one can really love London until he is badly in need of comfort. That is, I think, true. It is, like all great towns, a bad place in which to be lonely, but you cannot I think be lonely there very long. What you have to do is to make your own town of it. Pitch your tent, gather your barber, your bookshop, your flower shop, your place of entertainment, your restaurant, your favorite view, your group of trees, your glimpse of water, your bridge, your church, close in around you and make them your own. They respond at once, flattered and touched by your selection of them.
They are your friends for life. If, as later you will, you make another selection, your old friends will still be there waiting for your return. So that in the end you will have five or six homes....
Piccadilly on a summer evening, the Strand and the Temple and Gray’s Inn on a spring afternoon, Chelsea any time at all, Regent’s Park (most be — loved of all to me with its lakes and dirty sheep and crowds of children and policemen playing football and sudden unexpected carpets of flowers), these — and a hundred thousand other delights — win your heart with a quickness that is the most tactful affection in Europe.
And the human friends you make there!
There isn’t a puppy in Marylebone who doesn’t want you to be happy!
V: RUSSIA
I
THE funny boy with the sty in his left eye came running down to my cabin. “Go up and have a look,” he said.
I went up and suddenly, as always in life, one of the great events came quietly up and met me. One had not been prepared... one had not known... and life worked a fresh brilliant thread into the pattern.
The ship was cased in silver. That had happened in the night. Yesterday afternoon it had been very cold and the wind had come ruffling across the sea furring the grey water, “making cats’ skins out of it”, the boy with the sty had said. It had been bitterly cold but an angry noisy cold, hurting you because the wind hated you and wanted to whistle you to the horizon.
Now there was no wind — not the whisper of a breath. The ship was cased in silver ice over every part of it, silver spars and masts and boats and ropes, and the boards, although the men had sawdusted them, slipped away from you.
A silver ship sailing upon a painted sea. No, “painted” is too mundane a word — the sea, mother of pearl, glass, a vast mirror of color that quivered with hidden light as you looked at it. Nothing moved; the silence walled us in. And you could have walked from horizon to horizon across that mother of pearl translucent floor.
Miss Julie’s Crystal Box — seen by me at last. For one moment the curtains parted and I gazed through...
I was in the Arctic on my way to Murmansk and, a moment later, we were skidding down the crazy Murmansk railway, and a moment later than that Cossacks were clearing the Nevsky, women were fighting for bread on the other side of the Neva, Protopopoff was hiding in a cellar, Kerensky was standing on a tub in the Duma screaming — and the old world tumbled through a hole into limbo.
II
That Arctic moment, my first sight of the Arizona Canyon, my first visit to the Bargello in Florence, the house of Vettius in Pompeii, the first gaze at the temples at Girgenti, the first time I saw my friend publicly and loudly acclaimed, the performance of a Greek play in the Greek theatre at Syracuse... those are the moments to trust life by.
Bills, unexpected indigestion, mean things that other people have said, mean things that you yourself have said, income tax, newspaper articles, tumbling against your will out of love, a man beating a horse, a woman drunk, your best friends’ inability to appreciate your best books, sudden boredom with your own guests, desperate disgust with yourself, someone taking your seat at the play and refusing to move — these are no tests at all.
But you have to discover this for yourself. No number of copybook maxims will teach you anything. Slipping on your own piece of orange peel means more to you than all Newton’s cleverness. Quite so. You have to discover it for yourself.
I discovered just before the outbreak of the European War that I was never going to be a great writer. Before that I wasn’t sure. And what is a great writer? Homer, Sophocles, Plato, Dante, Milton, Shakespeare... Yes, and then — Great Writers, Second Class — Euripides, Virgil, Cervantes, Balzac, Keats, Shelley, Browning, Whitman, Dostoyevsky — not one of these either? And then?
Good Writers, First Class — Thucydides, Horace, Petronius Arbiter, Marlowe, Pope, Sheridan, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Chekhov, Mérimée, George Sand, Baudelaire, Kipling, Hawthorne... Lots of others. Not one of them either? And then?
Good Writers, Second Class — Suetonius, Xenophon (dull fellow), Mrs. Gaskell, Gray, Cowper, Bagehot, Gissing, Daudet, Grazia Deledda, Kuprin, Bret Harte... Lots and lots of others. What, not in this ‘ class either? Well, you never know.... You may write.... A depressing business anyway.
Then why, having been ten years at it and knowing now that you’re never to be one of the chosen, why go on? Aren’t there enough books in the world already? Don’t you really know (it was once pointed out to you by an irate critic that you didn’t) the difference between the real books and the sham ones? You can make your living in other ways — a schoolmaster, a secretary, a journalist, even a mayor of a small town.... Well? The war answered it for me.
I went on, I go on, because I can’t help it. Because! LOVE it. Because I simply adore it. Because nothing on earth can stop me.
III
It? What is it?
Writing stories.
Standing beside some carts in a Galician lane, my knees trembling with terror, the wounded moving restlessly on their straw, the afternoon light like the green shadow of a dried up conservatory, I found a pencil and, steadying my shaking body against the cart, I wrote part II. chapter I....
I licked my pencil and ducked. The shell was nowhere near me — it never was. I continued. The green light faded into mud — I wrote still, my fingers trembling....
I had nothing else to do — only to wait with the carts. They set a house on fire quite close to me, and by the light of that I continued to write.
IV
We are told that just now we must not talk or write about the war — there is a kind of conspiracy of “Hush”, and in some curious way it does seem that the after war troubles of these recent years have kept us in the war with a kind of against-our-will disgust. We had hoped by now to have some perspective — We have less than we had two years ago.
But perspective or no perspective I can see already I think what will always be the war’s crucial moment to myself — perhaps one of the crucial moments in the history of the world — namely the attempted Korniloff-Kerensky coup d’état in Petrograd three months after the first revolution.
Had that coup d’état succeeded — and had it been properly attempted it would I am convinced have succeeded —— there would have been no Bolshevism. All that Russia at that moment was waiting for was ruthless control. Korniloff could have given it. He was prevented. Lenin gave it instead.
For three days in Petrograd we knew that the attempt was coming; for three days the whole town, knowing, eagerly waited, panting to consent. It did not come. There was treachery somewhere, weakness somewhere else, vanity over all, a plausible villain in the offing — and the world’s history turned a new corner.
Russia sinks back and away from me. My time there was so short, my knowledge of the language so slight. I wr
ote two books for my own sake that I might capture an atmosphere that would I knew escape me afterward. Those books have made many friends and did at the time I think lead certain people to think more kindly of Russia than they would otherwise have done — but they have pulled down upon my back a cartload of troubles!
On one side there have been all the kind people who have demanded from me a knowledge of Russia that I never of course for an instant possessed. “But you have written books and lectured about Russia — you must know!” — and then when I tried to explain that the books and the lectures were simply the experiences of a foreigner who stayed for a moment in the country, loved it but never even learned its language, heads were shaken and there were murmurs about “false modesty” and the rest.
Very irritating on the other hand for all those who had a real knowledge —— Bernard Pares, Harold Williams, Maurice Baring, Aylmer Maude, and the others — to hear me quoted and applauded, knowing, as they all well did, my ignorance. I here take off my hat to them for their kindness to me and their forbearance; if I at times caught the merest whisper of an echo of their irritation that was not their fault!
All the same, why should I be so modest? I am trying to tell the exact truth in these papers and the exact truth is that I think “The Dark Forest” and “The Secret City” not to be bad books. They are not bad books because, as records of a foreigner’s apprehension of a country at its most critical time, they are true. And as to “The Secret City”. I was the only foreign novelist in Petrograd at the time. It has that interest. The background of “The Dark Forest” until the last twenty pages is literal truth. As to the characters, well, Semyonov is not so far away from the truth as some people have thought and he certainly is not Dostoyevsky. “Dostoyevsky! Dostoyevsky! Dostoyevsky!” shouts everyone as soon as anyone writes about Russia.
But Dostoyevsky is Russia. They are like that. “The Possessed” is the most marvelous prophecy in the fiction of the world. Read it and see whether the whole of Bolshevism is not there. Chekhov too. Wonderful genius! The last act of “The Cherry Orchard”, the third act of “The Three Sisters” acted by the Art Theatre in Moscow before the revolution, the greatest art in the world today.
There is a scene in “The Three Sisters” when two middle aged lovers sit at a table looking at one another while excited friends crowd the windows at the back of the room to watch a fire on the opposite side of the street. As acted by Stanislavsky and Mme. Knip-per, Chekhov’s widow, it must be the perfection of the actor’s craft. Nothing to do. They sit and look at one another. He hums a little tune, she catches it from him, half tenderly, half mockingly smiling. The blaze of the fire, the noise of the crowd in the street, the excited comments by the window — all these go by them imprisoned in their hopeless affection.
The genius of the people lies in this ironic protest against the life to which they are condemned. Ironic protests; no action. That flood of talk that swept the country during the first months after the revolution — who that witnessed it will ever forget it? Talk, after the first day or two, overweighted with pessimism and foreboding. The worst would come because the worst always does come; and when those grim presences Lenin, Trotzky, Radek, and the others rose out of the dust they had only to lift their long hands over the landscape and the country was like a dead man. So for the time...
V
I remember once in Galicia a day when it seemed that we should most certainly be captured by the Austrians. How strangely we of a sudden all lay down and waited.
We had been pushing along dusty sun baked roads for weeks in the first confusion of a retreat that, had we but known it, was to last for months to come — and we had pushed with all the desperate energy of a nightmare. And now suddenly the springs broke and we lay down like broken dolls on the dirty floor and went to sleep.
We had taken refuge I remember in the half ruined chateau of some Galician nobleman; this lay on the outskirts of the little town of T-. We lay down in the baronial hall and looked up at the naked Juno and Jupiter, the cupids with their rosy posteriors, the brown fauns and the marble fountains painted on the sky blue ceiling. Much of the plaster had tumbled from the walls and lay in flakes about us; the floors were thick with dust; there were some broken gilt chairs and a great organ with tarnished pipes, a picture hanging crooked on a cord of a lady in a white hat and a little dog....
It was very hot and I slept, a sweaty sticky sleep in which I moved through a sea of glue toward a shore of toffee. Suddenly I woke, and woke with a certainty, sharp and almost pleasant in a kind of acid coolness, of imminent death. I lay and stared at the pink chested Jupiter and knew that very soon, within an hour perhaps, I would die. I was even sure of the manner of my death, and I saw quite clearly that the Austrians would blow up the bridge near us and ourselves with the bridge. One loud bang, the sensation following of a violent hit on the chest, and then — nothing. I had no doubt at all. The strange thing was that I had been on many occasions during that year in much danger; I had been, several times, in a shaking quiver of fear; and yet I had always been sure that I would not, that I could not, die. Now I knew that I was going to die and I had no fear at all, no anxiety.
What followed was perhaps the most important half hour of my life. Lying there in the sunny dust I knew that my approaching physical death was a matter of no importance to myself at all. I had my own personal conviction, not sought for by me, that the failure of my body to continue was for my personal identity a matter simply of moving from one room into another.
Now in my life many people had assured me that this was so and many equally good (and perhaps cleverer) people had assured me that it was a ludicrous notion. Until this moment I had had an open mind and had only noticed how easily I was overcome by the arguments of the materialists, did I ever attempt to argue; how extremely foolish many of the experiments and statements of the spiritualists sounded, and how beautiful and unreal the dogmatic religion of my father and mother —
And now I had, for the first time in my life, a little piece of conviction all to myself! I remember that that was my chief feeling, that now at last I was sure of something. I looked round at the others; two of the doctors were awake and squatting beside a wooden box were playing cards with a very dirty pack. One of the younger men was lying with his mouth wide open and flies were walking in and out of it. Two of the sisters huddled together asleep were like a pile of grey hay; the smell of iodine, chloroform, and bad sausage that accompanied us everywhere was heavy in the air.
How different they all looked from half an hour ago! How different the room and how alive and interesting the world! I thought that I would tell them about my conviction. They were always instantly interested in any religious or philosophical question, however trite — yes, the very stupidest of them.
And then I realized that I had nothing to tell them, nothing at all. Had I seen Jupiter descend from the ceiling and had he introduced Juno to me and were I able to-present them both to the assembled company, that were indeed something to wake them for! But to say that I had had a sudden conviction! No use to anyone else at all.
I lay back and waited. The sensation of imminent death came closer and was very curious indeed. It was something like the sinking under an anæsthetic but not quite that; something like the frozen constriction of a nightmare, and yet not that either; something like the fear of making some awful bêtise before an assembly of clever persons; something like bathing in a warm sea under a heavy shower of rain...
Then I was suddenly restless. I moved about. I went and felt the pipes of the organ. I watched the two men at their cards. I picked up a book lying face downward on the gritty floor— “Thelma” by Marie Corelli in a Polish translation. I tried to think of something — my friends, my sins, my virtues, of a lady who had sent me a letter from London saying I was a coward because I was not in the English army, of a dog I had at home, of a friend...
Bang! The report came. The plaster fell in showers, the picture came down with a crash, the
re were cries and exclamations, everyone awoke.
Another bang. A third!
I waited.
Nothing more. Our chief appeared to say that the Austrians had blown up the bridge behind us. We were to move on at once. We had plenty of time.... I had not died. But I had my conviction. My life would never be the same again. As we moved on once more along the dusty road I carried with me a fine carelessness, a magnificent bravado.
Of course I lost that soon afterward. But I still have my conviction.
VI
How trite and platitudinous in actual statement that (for oneself) tremendous experience becomes. We Anglo-Saxons have a shyness and awkwardness in speaking of religious experiences that is foreign, I think, to all other nationalities. It is not always so even with us as Bunyan and John Wesley and Christina Rossetti and Richard Jefferies and Mark Rutherford and Barbellion bear witness; but in the masterpieces of English fiction how seldom any real religious sincerity is achieved! I can think at this moment only of “John Inglesant” and “Tanner’s Lane” although there are I suppose others. Richardson, Fielding, Scott, Jane Austen, the Brontes, Stevenson, Meredith, Hardy, James — in the works of none of these are spiritual experiences discussed or analyzed. Colonel Newcome and Adam Bede are I am afraid of the “prig” family. Think of the clergymen of Jane Austen and Anthony Trollope! One would not suppose from their authors’ accounts that they had ever in their life’s experience uttered a single prayer....