There was a story then current that when Belsen was taken a great trench was dug and the camp guards were ordered to fill it with the bodies of the dead inmates of the camp. While they were down in the trench the bulldozers, without any definite order given, swept back the earth over the guards as well. It is hard to conceive British troops taking into their own hands revenge for outraged humanity; but, if the story is true, I do not think the men concerned have any more reason to reproach themselves, merely because their court of justice was instinctive, than the jury at a murder trial. No civilised man has ever had to weigh such evidence as was presented to them.
Travel had lost the slap-dash quality which normally characterised military driving. Roads off the main axis of the advance were avoided unless the tracks of our own vehicles were plain to see. Roads where the crown but not the verge had been cleared of mines by the indefatigable sappers were taken cautiously; and trucks which a week before would have roared past each other, right-hand wheels off the metal and damn the consequences, edged by, wings almost touching, while each driver tried to avoid forcing the other on to the verge. It seemed a pity to die in the last week of the war. Though on parts of the front there was fighting right up to the cease-fire on the morning of May 5, the main objective of unit commanders was to demonstrate but not to lose a life.
For the nights of May 4 and 5 I was staying at one of the headquarters messes of the Guards Armoured Division. They provided me with a comfortable farm room, some excellent light literature and more than my fair share of the wines captured from the cellars of the Burgomaster of Bremen. I must have tried the perfection of their manners hard. I came from the War Office. I was fifteen years older than any of them. My bar of medal ribbons had fallen somewhere into German mud—so dubious a story that I was compelled to a more than English reticence about myself. And, anyway, they proposed to write the story of their own battles without the help of my department.
Yet never for one moment was I allowed to feel an intruder upon the celebrations with which they ended their war; nor, I hope, did any of them perceive a loneliness which could only have surrendered to the wines of Roumania, of Greece, of Syria and Palestine. That final experience of war at last revealed to me its true essence: loneliness among strangers. Hardly ever had I felt it. The army had been to me far more of a home than to my fellows, gathering me again to my own countrymen, permitting the outward pattern of my life to continue and providing it with the illusion of an object.
Craftsman
I AM always ready to hear a man talk shop so long as he can express himself. How he masters his material, why this way and not another, and what the conflict is between his real and his imagined purpose—though this one can but deduce from his eloquence—fascinate me in the hedge-trimmer as in Cellini. That is my excuse, for I have invariably tried to write what I myself would like to read.
I have reached in my profession only a rank equivalent to a wartime major-general—among, that is, the first two hundred, any of whom may as easily be retired to discomfort as advanced to higher authority. But at that level practice is what counts. One can leave theory to the majors and the marshals, and concentrate upon command.
The life of a writer, especially if he is a slow writer, is inert. He must keep to daily hours, yet he has not the human society of the office; and a desk is less, not more endurable when there is no boss, no subordinate, no secretary for casual conversation, never a cheerful or a difficult client. His working day is short, for no man can drive imagination more than five hours; but at the end of it he is exhausted and, until unwound by time and alcohol, a poor companion to his family and friends.
In theory he can take a holiday when he wishes; in practice he must ask the boss—himself, that is—whether so unstandardised a workshop can possibly afford it. Nor can he ever know whether idleness is essential, repaying lost time with doubled energy, or whether he is merely being lazy.
There is no one who can promote him, no one whom it is worth while to impress with his ability or charm. What the public think he is worth, that and no more he will be paid. Editor, publisher and agent may ease for him temporarily the working of the law by which they, too, are bound, but he cannot evade it.
What then is the compensation which can bind a man who is no great lover of the study and has indeed far more affinity to the printer than the librarian into a skilled trade where the working conditions are intolerable and the wage uncertain? It is, I suppose, the making of an object which, to human perception, did not exist before.
That phrase is far looser than it appears. Make a chair without any blue-print from a plank in the garage and a fallen pear-tree, and certainly you will have created an object which did not exist before; make imitation Louis XV as efficiently as you like, but it did exist before. The gradations of originality between the two are the business of the critic. That is what he is for: to remind the mass-producer that he could make as much money quite as pleasantly in commerce, and to assure the determined worker in plank and pear-tree that his chair is indeed a creation and commendable, but that he should study the anatomy of sitters.
Thus if we are to judge the self-delusions of a man who claims to make, we must know to what standard he does his making. I do not believe that there is enough compensation in merely giving the public what it thinks it wants, nor have I any excited opinion of the writer who purposefully and for the sake of forced originality gives the public what it does not. To be a craftsman is to offer your own interpretation of life and its events in an accepted form, and so to handle a familiar medium that it will carry and transmit your own taste, your own faults and your own splendours.
I try to present my goods to the passer-by with the clarity which politeness demands. Then, if he does not like them, there is no shame; and if he does, my personal satisfaction is the greater. For that reward I returned to my craft in 1945 when both economic security and my enjoyment of my fellows would have been better satisfied in Intelligence or the administration of enemy territory. I had only practised the profession for four years and never written anything but security reports for six, but even in war there were indications that my strength was in words. I learned to control my own actions and those of my subordinates as well as any other competent citizen with some experience of leadership, but where I surpassed him was in giving a clear picture of what the actions and their environment were.
I did not become a writer until the far end of my youth, though I showed some promise of it at the beginning. I had a classical education and, from the age of sixteen on, enjoyed it. A sense of style in writing the dead languages I never possessed—a curious failure for one who in later life would pick up the feel and sentence rhythm of a modern language as naturally as a parrot—but in the translating of them I found my only discipline. I was never content until I had rendered into living English what I conceived to be—frequently on inadequate evidence—the thought of the Greek or Latin author. To this carefulness I added that of writing poetry, with a preference for the sonnet or any other verse form so long as it was sufficiently difficult. These led me to the rhyming dictionary and the over-poetical adjective, and the best productions of my melancholy muse were about as bad as the worst of Matthew Arnold. For the rest, my education left me an empty rather than an angry young man, with an indifference to religion, to self-discipline and to any authority, and a respect only for scholarship. Life has gently tempered the latter, but restored my ethical sense. I have a fascinated interest in even the wildest of heresies which will explain some aspect of apparent purpose, a liking for hierarchy in the government of men and an erratic sternness in government of myself.
At Oxford I turned to English literature. When I had some success in my final schools, it is odd that it never once occurred to me to become some sort of literary man. My impatience for the life of commerce or action was quite certainly right, for, though I knew very well what words could be made to do, I had nothing whatever to put into
them. Never was a youth more ignorant of the motives and emotions of his fellow human beings. Under a pretence of worldly wisdom too emphatic to be easily exposed, my conception of the world was unreal as that of a woman’s weekly, and only in language more urbane. My own son at twelve was a far more satisfactory social animal than I at twenty.
Once in Roumania this waste ground of ignorance was filled as fast as a rubbish tip. Some pieces of it were levelled off, but of value only as playing fields. I became a tolerable and understanding companion for men; indeed the self of today would be delighted to be invited to dinner by the self of then. But to women I could give no companionship at all. Either I ignored them or I was intoxicated by the slight and enchanting physical differences between them and the very considerable physical difference from myself. Except for poems to girls—a more admirable subject for the short lyric than nature study—I had nothing to write about and did not try.
It was at the age of twenty-nine, eager to achieve a financial independence which would allow me to follow Marina, that I first hurled myself at writing. By then I was familiar enough with Geoffrey Household to dislike him, and the mood of self-pity at least led to a deeper sympathy with my fellows. My working attitude towards them—my conception, that is, of reality—was solid enough to be put into the waiting words.
I chose the short story, going straight for the hardest form. I never even considered the novel. Whether I was merely impatient of its length or felt instinctively that I was not ready for such large responsibility I do not know. I am still inclined to think the novel an artless form—or at any rate a lot more artless than we practitioners like to claim.
It is curious that a man changes far more as a thinking and interested organism than he ever does as a craftsman. In those early stories, written in the brown and violet mausoleum of my Spanish flat or the clean pension bedroom which succeeded it, my aim was much as it is today though I could not have explained the target. Money was the driving force, yet I never attempted to tailor my stories to the requirements of the commercial magazine; on the other hand I could see no virtue in the self-conscious imitations of Chekhov and Katherine Mansfield which were the uncommercial fashion, and it seemed to me that the experimenters were all jammed together in a blind alley. Hemingway burst through the end of it taking the walls with him, but even if I had known the work of that magnificent artist I doubt if I should have admired it as I do now—an admiration well this side of idolatry, for I can seldom feel affection for his characters. They would be easier company if the painful accidents so liable to affect their virility were permanent.
Those first stories of mine had no solidity at all. The beginning and the end might pass, but one led to the other through too undisciplined a middle. I was getting under the skin of my characters, not under that of any reader. One tale, I remember, was dressed with whole garlic cloves of Spanish dialogue to give it atmosphere. So, for me, it did; and if the reader were to find my atmosphere merely fog I did not care. In that I was closer than I believed to the school which esteemed fidelity of self-expression and little else. Whether you make the emotional interplay of your characters so obscure that the story means nothing unless verbally explained, or whether you lard it with blasphemies in foreign tongues, you have failed in the first demand of your craft: to make your meaning clear not only to your own literary set, but to a well-educated stockbroker. You are not entitled to assume that he is an amateur psychiatrist or that he speaks Spanish.
One of the tales found a market in the old London Mercury. I undid the wrapper, pleasurably anticipating the feeling of triumph which should caress the beginner at the first sight of himself in print. What actually I felt was more like the shock of a cripple, brought up among the beautiful and good, at the first sight of himself in a mirror. The images which at the time of writing had thronged into and out of my mind were not there. Of course they were not. One cannot distil the scent of a hyacinth and have the hyacinth itself. But I was not accustomed to the cruelty of print and unjustly disappointed.
The dead years in America passed and I was well into my thirties, still without a profession or the beachcomber’s temperament which might have compensated for its absence. Hack writing had no bad effect, for there was no temptation to fall into the clichés and imprecise vocabulary of the journalist, both inseparable from speed and flourishing in the first draft of every writer. The encyclopedia and the broadcasting plays were for children and demanded simplicity. So I did not form any vicious habits—except perhaps to condemn the whole literary craft because its more commercial practitioners seemed to obtain no satisfaction whatever to make up for the uncertainty of income.
By now life had equipped me well with experiences and fairly well with the power to relate one to another, so that my world, right or wrong, was a consistent whole. All which had been left out was content, and that was amply provided in my missionary journeys for John Kidd. When I returned to London from South America, I had little fear of not finding a reasonable living in the largeness of the world. I had no ambition, and it was late to look for one.
It may be that we cannot avoid fate—though I refuse to believe in so human and Old Baileyish a conception as Karma. But I see no reason at all why I should ever have become a craftsman if the managing director of John Kidd had not appointed a nephew of his to travel the Dominions instead of waiting for me to be free. The result was that when Europe and South America had been visited there was nowhere else for me to go.
The firm told me to hang on for six months, and meanwhile to call on the big London printers to whom their regular travellers had never been able to sell. Since I, no more than they, was permitted to offer bribes to the machine-minders I was not expected to bring in many new customers, nor required to give a close account of how I spent my time. When I felt that I had worked long enough at the impossible, I carried on negotiations for an agency to import Spanish wines. I also wrote The Salvation of Pisco Gabar, spreading the essence of Peru upon the foundation of a character who could have lived there but did not, and of two stories of the high Andes which I had heard in the Argentine.
The typescript went off to America, whence some three weeks later a shower of gold and compliments descended upon me. The latter I accepted cautiously—not that I was to develop for another twenty years the self-protective armour of the writer against success and failure, but I could see no convincing reason for the effect of what I had done.
The Salvation of Pisco Gabar was quite unsaleable. It had no women in it; the end was strongly religious; its length was over twelve thousand words. That it should collect a jackpot after a mere six days in the office of Brandt & Brandt was due not to the cams of the commercial fruit machine but to the interplay of sympathetic personalities. Bernice Baumgarten gave it to Ted Weeks of The Atlantic Monthly, exacting a promise that he would read it on the train from New York to Boston. Ted recommended it to his editor-in-chief, Ellery Sedgwick, who took it, demanded more and offered to finance the writing of a novel. The wind was fair, and for once I did not try to sail against it.
It is perhaps forgivable that when a man has entered a new profession he should model his behaviour upon his own romantic idea of its practitioners. In December 1935 I went down to the south of Spain to start the novel, and rented a mill-house at Torremolinos, then happily unknown to the tourist agents. Indeed my house would have had little appeal to the motor-coach traveller. The terrace overlooked the club-house of the local fascists and was occasionally occupied by the militant left-wing whose armed leaders would politely knock at my door late at night and request permission to man the defences of the Republic. Equally politely I would grant it, set out refreshments and go, or not, to bed.
I acquired an excellent old cook, and explored the local cellars for Montilla, which on its home ground I prefer to sherry. I had no patience with any Bohemianism where my belly was concerned, and I proposed to indulge the budding genius with rather more freedom than I should ha
ve allowed to the commercial traveller. I set up my typewriter upon the tiled terrace which overlooked the Mediterranean as well as the forces of reaction, and wrote the opening chapter of a novel which was to deal—though how I was far from clear—with the lives and thoughts of intelligent, but not necessarily educated outcasts bound together by a community of tastes.
And all was well, one would think. But when a man sets out to live a life unrestrained by the common conventions, he must expect the disorder also to be uncommon. Released from the respectability of the businessman, I proceeded to mismanage my life as loudly and eccentrically as some pot-careless squire of the eighteenth century. The unchristened novel, later to be The Third Hour, progressed little further than its opening. Emotional storm was responsible. Had I been more experienced, I should never have allowed it to shock me out of work, for production is less easily halted by distress than by the slightest fever or a late night. While I have always been able to do a long and satisfactory day’s work in office or army with a hang-over, I cannot write at all. The life of a craftsman was leading me to moderation long before it was reinforced by advancing middle age.
I returned to London just before the Spanish Civil War broke out. I was strongly tempted to run away from domesticity and the difficulties of writing, and to join the Republicans; and yet was infuriated by the fact that volunteers were engaging themselves for the sake of democracy or communism or some confounded panacea for the toiling masses, and not one of them for love of Spain. The democracy of Spaniards is so absolute that they do not need its more punctilious forms of political expression. Indeed, it would not work at all, either at home or in the Americas, if they had not brought the art of revolution to such a pitch of efficiency that it is quite as effective as a general election and usually costs no more in lives.
Against the Wind Page 19