Snipe and Sheikh Fouad Douaihy persuaded us to explore a melancholy bog on the flats to the north of Tripoli. I put up nothing but a venerable hare. Each of us was taken aback at finding the other in so unlikely a spot, and his astonishment lasted a fatal second longer than my own. Sheikh Fouad was enchanted at this success, and nothing would content him but that we should drive some miles to a village station on the Tripoli-Aleppo line and eat the hare with a cousin—there was nowhere he did not have a cousin—who was the stationmaster.
The stationmaster was naturally unprepared for such an invasion. He was a bachelor and lived in a room above the ticket-office, approached by a wooden step-ladder. Sheikh Fouad, however, appeared to have no doubt that he could cook a hare. I cannot even guess at his motives. He may have wished to assure this outlying member of his clan, who possibly was in trouble with his superiors, that he, Fouad, was on excellent terms with the British Army and could fix anything; or he may have known that the man had not had a square meal for weeks. Alternatively—and this is the more likely—he merely wished to give the lonely stationmaster an opportunity to entertain within his means the head of the clan.
It was seven o’clock and we were ravenously hungry. The solitary porter was sent off into the night to buy herbs and wine. The stationmaster climbed to his bedroom with the hare. We three sat upon the hard benches of the ticket-office, drinking araq to keep out the draughts which howled through the wooden walls. After an hour and a half the porter returned. By then the sergeant-major and I were owlish with araq on empty stomachs, but still keeping up our party manners.
Now fortified by bread and wine, I asked for a situation report on the hare. Sheikh Fouad explained that the stationmaster had only a frying pan and a primus stove. His tone gently rebuked my curiosity. A gentleman should not enquire too closely into the manner in which other gentlemen chose to live.
Nine passed, and ten. At half-past ten Fouad, for the first time in all our months of friendship, showed impatience. The stationmaster came tumbling down the ladder and announced that certainly we could eat the hare if we wished, but though a magnificent hare—a better hare, more exquisitely shot, there could not be in all Syria!—its extreme age deserved respect and another half-hour of cooking.
At eleven, the stationmaster descended the ladder, holding his wash-basin in his arms. Within it, smoking among olives and onions, was the hare. It was delicious, resembling hare à la Grecque, but not so oily. How he managed it I cannot conceive, although he had infinite time, the head of his clan to entertain and the native Lebanese genius for cooking. Wine and congratulations flowed. Sheikh Fouad beamed, as if he had known all along that his improbable impulse would be justified.
There were warm and idle evening flights in the Valley of Jezreel, the marshes of Lake Hula and the waters of Jericho. Once, staying at a kibutz on the Syrian frontier, I had a marvellous early morning after quail which lay so close that even I could not miss them, and once I spent two days in the tamarisk jungle along the banks of the lower Jordan after invisible pig. So back to Devon and Dorset, where my skill was just sufficient to keep a meatless and growing family supplied with rabbits—by no means a dull diet, for they were in such quantity upon the down of A Rough Shoot that there was no difficulty in picking the right age for frying, for grilling, for roasting or—should a parent intercept what was intended for its children—for goulash and rabbit loaf.
A curious disadvantage of the writer’s life is that he is not compelled to live anywhere in particular. He is commonly envied for this freedom, yet to handle it a man must either be unenterprising or have a great love for his chosen spot. Those impulses which quickly come to nothing because the breadwinner must live near his work may be too freely indulged.
In 1949 Ilona and I held a family council. Our unity in Europe makes us approach most subjects from the same direction and with the same assumptions—though I, the cold Englishman, am noisy and emphatic, and she, the excitable Hungarian, is patient and courteous. We decided that we lived too far from London, that we needed more friends, that the business would prosper if production were closer to the market. The first and third reasons were nonsense. The second was true enough, since my own friends were far too scattered over the world, and a woman who marries a foreigner is deprived of her right to contribute to marriage, except at rare intervals, her own circle of intimates and relations.
We bought a cottage at Strand-on-the-Green and had it converted to a house during six months of violently rising building costs. At least as many of my fellow citizens have been ruined by architects as by the Law or the Stock Exchange, for once the work has started there is no point at which you can get out, sell and cut your losses. But it is not fair to put the blame on the architect. He is employed to create a thing of beauty, and he would be an unlikely paragon among men if he were also an accountant. At least we added to London a house slight and decorative as a good essay, and probably—though, the builders had to scamp the job here and there—more lasting.
Now loaded with debt in the traditional manner of writers and actors, yet innocent of any extravagance, I tried to double my sale of short stories and failed. I discovered that the deliberate invention of one tale after another was beyond my powers. There was no obvious reason why this should be, for several of my most profitable stories have been built of pure imagination; but they are freaks, mere isolated efforts of the guardian angel to impress me with its industry. What I myself require for a short story invariably comes—if it is not a memory of my own—from the casual conversation of other people. It may be a single phrase, or some account of the oddity of a friend or an anecdote. The only essential is that what I hear should amuse my sense of irony. It is a good year when imagination is set alight more than twice. My made short stories, therefore, lacked the true and urgent flame, and as little first-class work came out of the spurt of energy as if I had waited for my subjects and made no spurt at all.
Enough stories had now satisfied magazine editors and myself for me to insist that both my publishers should publish. They could only agree, hoping to make up their losses on a later book. They were rewarded for uncommercial kindness by no loss at all, for they sold their editions of Tales of Adventurers down to the last copy.
This is the book by which I should wish to be judged, since it could not possibly have been written by anyone else. Original work, upon which he need not even put his name or trade-mark, is all that any craftsman can claim. How far it is aesthetically pleasing he cannot know, for the eye of affection forgives too much.
Reviewers in both countries were uncommonly kind. The only charge they preferred against me, and that mildly, was of searching out and elaborating the exotic. It is true that I often take my subjects from war or very foreign parts or Iron Curtain politics or any situation which will allow me to show individual man and woman in direct relationship—that is to say, with no protection but their own character or integrity—to unfamiliar circumstance. It is all a question of taste, and my defence is that I try to write what I like to read.
The delicate story founded upon one single subtlety of human character is rarely for me. The analysis may be brilliant and moving, but the fact analysed is a commonplace which I know already. My temperament demands that it should be presented to me as an epigram of four lines, not a short story of two hundred. I would agree that much of the finest literature merely gives new life to the familiar, and that the great play or novel gathers up in its sweep the fairly ordinary actions of fairly ordinary people. But the short story does not march to that slow and magnificent time. It is a little dance of bees, pointing direction. And if there is no new flower when I arrive there, I may be fascinated as a craftsman, but as a reader I am bored.
It is, of course, the even greater boredom of the commercial short story which has frightened honest men and women into writing with the false simplicity of Wordsworth on an off day. Even so, it is not always desirable to use a sow’s ear to make
a silken purse. Between the commercial story and the stuff with a full-stop every dozen words, there is still infinite room for experiment.
Because I was for so long an amused, romantic, ironical observer of men and manners between Persia and the Pacific coast, it was natural that, when I turned from living life to imagining it, I should be attracted by the same sort of incident in fiction as in reality. What I see as a short story worth writing is more likely to happen abroad than in England; and when it does happen at home, England presents itself to me as a European country of great individuality and I am conscious of its frontiers. To a lesser extent this is also true of my novels. I cannot get away from the interaction between my country and its world.
What masters I follow I cannot analyse. I suspect that Conrad has some influence, and, the moment I write fiction in the first person, Defoe. There must also be echoes from the French and the Spaniards, for they are the story-tellers whom I most frequently re-read. But my most conscious loyalty is to the English language, and one of the reasons for my slowness is humility. I hesitate to accept my ephemeral thoughts as meriting the precise expression which I admire. In spite of mass literature I do not believe that English has yet entered so late silver an era that it should be necessary to over-simplify it or over-elaborate. The style of Hemingway’s imitators gets in my way as a reader just as annoyingly-as does that of Walter Pater, and I resent that anyone should make love to my language with perversities until all the delicious ingeniousness upon the border of convention has been exhausted. To my taste, the finest English prose of our day is Osbert Sitwell’s, straightforward to read and discreetly decorated. I question whether the future historian, comparing him to the masters of the two previous centuries, will find any marked decadence.
Tale of Adventurers was followed by the usual year or two of searching for a subject which would keep up the standard of the short stories and save me from a run before the wind with some confounded fellow meditating improbable violence. Meanwhile I turned to and enjoyed a few months of hack work, honest as that of any chairmaker who will ring the door-bell for repairs rather than produce imitation Louis XV. It was indeed a thriller, but it was true. I rewrote for children the Anabasis of Xenophon—and with a proper enthusiasm for the original author, since I myself had been over the route as far as the Kurdish mountains and I had suspected at the age of thirteen that the retreat of the ten thousand must be good reading if only one could get away from the aorist, the parasangs and the Persians with unpronounceable names.
Rather more gradually than usual my angel presented to me a faint outline of Fellow Passenger. I liked it, and took over. I was weary of the melancholy confessions of ex-communists, and it seemed to me that any of the fiery young men whom I had known in the early nineteen-thirties—when a lad of generous spirit was no more to blame for catching communism than any other intimate disease—would be far more ready to laugh at himself than to beat a dreary breast with Germanic polysyllables. And communism itself is so gloriously inefficient—the indestructible genius of the Russians continues in spite and not because of their official creed—that I can never fear it, as I did Hitler, to the point of hysteria. Among its infinite tragedies there is a gleam of comedy which Cervantes would have enjoyed—that of fallible human beings striving towards a very ancient, noble and impractical ideal by means that are preposterous to any but themselves.
In the writing of the book I was for once very near to pleasure, and those who liked it forgave the performance of acrobatics upon the very brink of fantasy for the sake of the high spirits. It did fairly well, and for the first time my English sales far surpassed the American. Across the Atlantic they were a little shocked at my cavalier treatment of the treasured bedtime bogeyman.
I was eager that the public should take to this book just sufficiently to allow me to move over into the territory of the English and Spanish picaresque. Fellow Passenger was already in the tradition—far nearer, say, to Defoe than to Buchan. There was no violence, but enough speed to persuade the reader who only took me out of the library for excitement that he had had his two-pence worth. The narrator, too, belonged in the class of rogues rather than rogue males, and his character allowed him to tell his story with such irreverence as I chose to give him.
I have always had a strong preference for throwing a story into the first person. Through entering the mind of too many characters clarity is diffused, and the novelist finds himself commenting and explaining when he should be recording. The narrator may be the hero, or he may be an intelligent observer. On the whole I have a liking for the first in a novel, and the second in a short story. But, from the moment the word ‘I’ is on the paper, speech, thoughts, what the narrator may see, what he implies and what he suppresses are his, as absolutely as in a play, and no longer the writer’s. Somerset Maugham’s insistence that the ‘I’ must be himself forces him into too arch a modesty—for he cannot claim for himself all he might claim for a Marlowe—with the result that the apologies and dinner parties of the first pages go on too long. That, I think, is the only reason why this superb master of the short story will never be as popular with the critical as he is, and rightly, with the fireside reader.
When I wrote The Third Hour I was joyously ignorant that there was any problem at all to be solved in the use of the third person. Fortunately the bulk and vitality of a first novel swamped any awkwardness which there might have been in the transitions between the mind of one character and of another. In Arabesque, again in the third person, I was too conscious of the difficulty and fussy as a vicar’s wife experimenting with chrysanthemums upon the pulpit steps. I compromised by allowing action to be seen only through the eyes and in the presence of hero and heroine; and when I needed one short and satirical chapter in which neither of them could be present I set it as a division in the middle of the book and called it ‘Interlude.’
The use of the first person at once does away with the problem of whether the novelist and the readers may know more than the characters and, if so, how much. But it substitutes two other troubles. The first is the reason why the narrator should tell his story at all. I am sure it is unnecessary to answer this question, and I tell myself that I am not going to bother with it; yet every time I feel a lack of urgent reality until I have bothered with it. The second trouble is style. The narrator may—indeed must—use basic Geoffrey Household, but upon that he may only embroider within the limitations of his character and his probable powers of self-expression. The limit of realism is quickly reached. For example, I could not allow a Civil Servant to tell his tale in Civil Service English. But sometimes in a short story I will let the English read as if it were a translation from a foreign language—a most dangerous tour de force, for the pitfall of the comic foreigner yawns wide open.
The narrator of Rogue Male was a highly educated man, packed with class traditions and suppressions. He was fully capable of thinking anything I could think, but the words had to be dragged out of him. He would never have admitted his sufferings to any but himself, and his suppressions are also for himself. In fact he was using the conventions of the diary. There was no room for any fireworks. The ornaments of language had to be confined to simple flashes of agony.
To Eric Amberson in The High Place I could allow far more fluency. The consciousness of his personal tragedy working upon a man who had all the sensitivity of a frustrated craftsman gave him the right to let himself go and to construct sentence and paragraph as well as his creator could manage. A Rough Shoot, however, was too easy to give much aesthetic pleasure, for it was told by a plain Dorset businessman. To him language was a vehicle for facts; in the realms of the spirit he would be as incoherent as the rest of us. I could not write the complex, commercial-letter sort of English which he would in life have written—once in the naughtiness of an after-dinner mood I tried it, and ten pages would have been enough for any reader—but the nearer I held him to basic, the more real he would be and the faster the story would go
.
The hero of Fellow Passenger was a man after my own heart. Half English, half Ecuadorian, he could look at our manners from the outside and enjoy them. There was no limit except that set by propriety—mine, not his—on what he might think and what he might do; and when he loved the beauty of woman or landscape or wine, his dancing style could fairly be allowed to sparkle with appreciation.
Fellow Passenger did what I asked of it, setting me free to move towards the pure picaresque with reasonable certainty that I would not also be moving to bankruptcy. On the plane of daily life I was also more at ease, for we had got rid of that dainty and ruinous mistress, the Strand-on-the-Green house, without a loss. All was set fair for leisurely story-telling.
But the angel was in her most feminine avatar. She would have nothing to do with this simple, virile and practical programme; nor would industrious persuasion move her, for the picaresque is not so simple as it appears. An original character will, it is true, stroll through the imagination with all necessary impudence; and, once he is established, his adventures, his loves and the shape of the society upon which or in spite of which he lives may be invented with generous ease. The element of suspense which must carry the reader through to the end is far more troublesome to discover and develop. It may be danger, but then the story runs too close to the thriller. It may be, as in Tom Jones, the course of true love. But my characters are never creatures of social convention; I could not outrage probability by keeping them out of bed until the end of the book.
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