Even one’s fellow passengers on this line seemed often unusual; intriguingly criminal or suggestively odd. One Sunday in December, some card-sharpers got into my carriage. Their leader, a scarlet-faced man in a check cap, opened the conversation by exclaiming heartily: ‘Well, Christmas is here!’ He offered all of us his cigarettes; stretched himself, gave a large theatrical yawn: ‘Been at the club, all night,’ he told his two friends, ‘playing with a Yankee.’ ‘What were you playing?’ one of the friends asked. The red-faced man didn’t answer directly; he smiled round at us, knowingly, tantalizingly: ‘We played for a turkey a point.’ ‘What were you playing—cards?’ ‘Cards?’ (with great scorn). ‘No! We were playing—and I beat him every round.’ ‘You were boxing, perhaps?’ the accomplice suggested; winking at us, as if to say that this was a lunatic who must be humoured. The man in the check cap laughed out loud: ‘Boxing? That’s good! No! We played two into four, four into six, six into eight, eight into ten, ten into nothing …’ ‘Come on, now,’ interrupted the other accomplice, ‘we don’t want to hear all that. We want to know what you were playing. Was it billiards?’ ‘Billiards? Ha, ha!’ Deliberately, timing his effect, check-cap produced from his pocket three greasy cards, and laid them, as carefully as if they had been banknotes, on a piece of newspaper unfolded on his lap: ‘Just take a look at these.’ We all stared, unwillingly fascinated—an elderly farmer in leggings, with his wife, a bullet-headed young man and his girl, a mild gold-spectacled bank clerk in the corner, who had been reading Our Mutual Friend. ‘This morning there’s a match between the Bakers and the Butchers: who do you say’ll win, sir?’ The red-faced man addressed me: ‘The Butchers have got more beef, but the Bakers have got more dough.’ He began to run the cards through his fingers, picking them up, showing them, throwing them down, over and over again, with a mechanical regularity which was, perhaps intentionally, hypnotic. At first, only the two accomplices betted. Three or four times, they lost. Then one of them, winking at the company, turned up the corner of a card. After this, he won, again and again. Check-cap kept trying to draw us into the game: we were all shy, except the bank clerk, who said that he didn’t want to bet, but he thought he could spot the ace. He did spot it, needless to say; and check-cap tried to force him to accept a shilling. Within five minutes, the bank clerk was betting; within ten, he had lost five shillings. He was indignant. The two accomplices soothed him by taking his side; and check-cap, as he pocketed the money, said kindly but reproachfully: ‘You’re not a crybaby, are you, sir?’ They all three got out at Maryland Point. Check-cap shook hands with the farmer and his wife: ‘Always shake hands with the old folks,’ he told us. ‘Good morning, ladies, and gentlemen. Happy Christmas!’ When he had gone, there was a general outburst of conversation and mutual sympathy in the carriage. We all congratulated ourselves on our shrewdness and consoled the bank clerk for his loss. ‘We thought you was one of them, see?’ the bullet-headed young man explained; and his girl confided: ‘We’d been warned, you know—only last night. Just fancy!’ ‘Ah well,’ sighed the bank clerk, philosophically, ‘they say it takes all sorts to make a world.’ He adjusted his spectacles and reopened Our Mutual Friend. The farmer and his wife said nothing. They just sat there, with their oblique sparkling little eyes, smiling fatly and seeming pleased.
In the afternoons, Chalmers and I would usually make an excursion to Canvey Island, or Southend. Arriving after dark, we had tea in a shop and hurried down to the pier. Almost always, there would be a thick fog over the sea, and the lowing of invisible sirens would sound from ships lost in the estuary. Out at the pier-head, the great pavilion was locked up for the winter; we tried the slot machines and peered down over the railing at the ornate iron columns which supported the framework; Chalmers found an adjective to describe them—‘necropolitan.’ Le mot juste still seemed to be the solution of most of our problems.
At this time, we were again much occupied with the idea of writing Mortmere as a book. But the technical difficulties, when we really began to examine them, were very serious. The trouble was that Mortmere must somehow be rationalized: we were both agreed about this. Mere Arabian Nights fantasy didn’t, any longer, satisfy us: we should never be able to keep up a sufficiently high level of surprise throughout the book. No—the exploits of Welken and Gunball must have some relation to everyday reality. And it wasn’t interesting enough to say, merely, that all the characters were mad. So it was that we came round to the idea of an Observer. Hynd and Starn should be introduced into Mortmere as a single observer-character, Hearn. Hearn is a somewhat fantastically minded young man who has had a nervous breakdown and goes to this remote village for a rest. The book opens as Hearn is on his way to a tea-party in the rectory garden. As he walks, he imagines himself writing an amusingly fanciful letter to a friend in London; noticing a few wisps of straw dangling from the louvre-boards of the church tower, he mentally begins: ‘Dear Christopher, The Rector keeps some large animal stabled in the belfry …’ This private game, once started, continues and develops, until Hearn has imposed imaginary characteristics, freak vices and miraculous attributes upon his mildly eccentric but really quite normal village neighbours. He thus creates Mortmere for his own amusement: it exists only as long as he wills it to exist. When he is tired of it, it disappears.
At first, this scheme seemed workable; but it had one fatal disadvantage—it concentrated all the reader’s interest upon Hearn himself. And who is Hearn? A fanciful invalid. Why does he create Mortmere? To escape from the boredom of a townee exiled into provincial life. No, it wouldn’t do. It wasn’t sufficiently interesting. But wait—suppose Hearn isn’t merely a bored neurotic: suppose he’s a dangerous madman? Suppose, at the end of the book, he has a violent attack, burns down the church, blows up the parish hall and kills everybody in the village? Wouldn’t this make him more significant, more exciting? No, not really. For Hearn represented nothing—beyond our own reasons for wanting to write Mortmere. He wasn’t and could never be a tragic figure. Well, never mind, then: Hearn needn’t be tragic; he needn’t be anything. He need hardly appear at all. Having introduced the letter trick at the beginning, we could drop it altogether … But, if we did that, we abandoned all attempt to rationalize Mortmere; we were thrown back on strangeness and fantasy … And there we stuck.
Thinking this all over again today, I still believe that our problem really was insoluble—provided that we were determined to retain the entire museum of Mortmere freaks and oddities. But a modified, less extraordinary version of the story could certainly have been written; if only we had seen that the vital clue to the action was contained in Hearn’s relations with the village characters as ordinary people. A young writer, neither mad nor ill, comes to live in a village inhabited by a normal rector and a typical collection of country parishioners. These parishioners are bound together by a complex of the usual relationships, based on love, jealousy, ambition, avarice, snobbery, pride and fear. The writer, being a writer, is deeply interested in these relationships, acquaints himself with all their intricacies, and starts constructing a novel, in which his neighbours are distorted into the characters of an extravagant and lurid fable, and their mild impulses, lukewarm emotions and timid half-intentions are developed into fantastically violent acts. For a time, the two worlds exist side by side—the Cranfordesque world of the real village and the Siamese world of the young man’s novel. Then comes the moment when the novelist can no longer resist the temptation to introduce his fabulous characters to their originals. Perhaps he reads the opening chapters aloud at a garden party; perhaps he only confides in ‘Gunball’ or ‘Welken’—in either case, the entire village soon gets to hear about the book. They are horrified, of course; scandalized, indignant—but also profoundly, guiltily excited. The writer continues to write; his audience wait eagerly for each fresh instalment. Mortmere begins to exercise a fatal fascination upon each member of the community: he or she begins to feel that the Mortmere personality is stronger, more vital, the Mortmere
existence infinitely more vivid and alluring than anything they have ever experienced on the plane of everyday life. And so, gradually, every man and woman in the village starts thinking and behaving, more or less consciously, in imitation of his or her Mortmere counterpart. The village becomes Mortmere. Every day, its inhabitants speak and act with increasing wildness: crime is usual, vice is commonplace, murder is in the air. And now it is the novelist’s turn to feel horrified. He makes a desperate effort to bring these madmen to their senses by deliberately altering the shape of his novel; he tones down characters and situations, invents anti-climaxes, tries to drag Mortmere back to normality. But it is too late. The original plot of Mortmere continues to work itself out among the mad villagers; it is only the novel which returns to what is sane and real. At length, when the full tragedy has been enacted, the novelist escapes from the village he has unwittingly destroyed. He alone has remained, from first to last, a quiet undistinguished ordinary young man.
This idea is largely cribbed—as many of my readers will recognize—from Gide’s Les Faux-Monnayeurs, which we both read about a year later. The plot of this novel, as described, so thrillingly, suggestively and misleadingly, by E. M. Forster in his Aspects, excited our imagination beyond all bounds; indeed, the novel itself came as something of an anti-climax. In our impatience, we both bought copies and began reading simultaneously. We even reported our progress to each other on a series of postcards. Chalmers wrote: ‘Have just finished chapter seven. The idiot has ruined everything.’ But later: ‘Page 359. Gide is the greatest. Whatever he does, he can’t spoil it now.’ What our final verdict was I forget. In fact, I have almost entirely forgotten what Les Faux-Monnayeurs was actually about. What remains, immense, vague, profoundly exciting, is my conception of Forster’s conception of Gide’s original idea. One day, I shall attempt the nearly hopeless task of fixing it and writing it down.
About the middle of January, Chalmers went down to Cornwall, to start work as a tutor at the house of some people who lived near St Ives. And soon his letters began to arrive:
A very steep road leads up from the station to the front gate of the house. From the summit of the hill one can see the entire bay. A white-funnelled tug has the appearance of a lighthouse on a rock. Every morning one glimpses Colonel Shagpennon at his red baize table, slightly elongated, like a shape seen beyond a screen of falling water. His long flax-coloured moustaches seem to wave vaguely towards me through the dimness—like the feelers of a lobster imprisoned in an aquarium …
I am a shape in a stained yellow mackintosh and a new plus-four suit. It is always raining here, not continuously but four or five times a day. My view of the surrounding country is blurred by occasional Schoolboy’s Apprehension. The unreal world of evening preparation for next day’s Latin and mathematics.
I teach the children in a small hut or summer-house at the bottom of the garden. Close to this hut is another and larger one into which they disappear for a quarter of an hour every morning. They live in a peculiar Mortmere of constructing model ships. Or so I imagine. I haven’t yet been into the larger hut.
I work in the mornings only.
The front door of this lodging house opens above the bay. The food is good and seldom adulterated either with frog’s viscera or prunes. Several old men live in a room which is separated from mine by a mere lath partition. They are all scholars and readers of the Times Literary Supplement. I met one in the hall today. He apologized for having cataracts in both his eyes.
The lath partition acts as a kind of amplifier of all conversation. One of the old men is Ibsen. He said at lunch:
‘Well, we are half-way through another day.’
I have travelled by bus to St Ives and Penzance. Fortunately, I saw no artists at St Ives. Seagulls drop their dung on a church tower whose top is level with the top of the hill which leads down to it. There is a stone jetty, and the pilchard-fishing fleet is drawn up on a semicircle of white beach. I noticed some clay-coloured and bluish rocks slashed with scars at all angles. The scars were always straight lines and had the effect of making the shapes of individual rocks seem doubtful, like changing forms seen through a slight mist. This is the true cubism. But Penzance is better. It has the supreme provincial flavour—with white-faced bank clerks comfortably smoking pipes in the street after tea and trees spraying the air vaguely above the Corinthian pillars of banks. Also there is an unusually large esplanade, and this is appropriately invisible from the high central part of the town …
Just back from St Ives quay. Two hours’ sun today. It drops from the sky in cubes and almost tangible rectangles. Like the rocks I mentioned. Brightness falls from the air … At Penzance the esplanade lashes the sea to tall boiling plumes like white cypress trees. At low tide when there is a wind the sand streams towards my feet like writhing mist or like innumerable snakes gliding at sixty miles an hour. The sun changes the land utterly. I know now quite definitely that I am sentimental to the bone. Let me admit once and for all that I prefer a wall with ivy on it to a wall without ivy. I prefer purple to grey and sun to rain. I prefer downs to crags …
The St Ives Art Club: the Poshocracy over again, but with a certain ratsness due to the fact that they are most of them old. Death always assists at their charades. I have collected from among them six new characters for Mortmere. But this eternal blazon may not be in a single letter. I’ll content you with naming the chief of them—Mr Corner, a potter who works on a hill above St Ives. He has spent most of his life in Japan. His pottery unites the English ballad with Japanese folk-lore. He has designed and built a gate in this style which—from what I saw of it—opens directly on to the edge of a cliff …
The most suggestive of all technical terms: ‘The Theory of Tensors.’ Like a symphony in the iron tunnel of a colossal telescope. And the opening bars of course are: ‘Genus humanum ingenio superavit.’ But I have left out a few illuminating words: ‘… for this purpose we employ an instrument of higher mathematics commonly known as the Theory of Tensors.’ This is accidental beauty and reminds me chiefly of the almost sinister geometrical atmosphere of Dürer’s Melencolia. ‘A mathematical hint seldom known as the lustreless compasses and aqueous horizon …’
In the yellow-papered room with its fretworked piano, obscene curtains, torn theological books, vases and communicative historic smell—soupçon of rancid ova, whisper of metallic-voiced prayers in double beds, ooze of self-pitying tears—I put on my slippers for the night. The cold maddening drone of an indistinct prayer penetrates from the room above. In the armchair opposite me an invisible paralytic sits wearing my outdoor shoes: the corkscrew watcher who, every night, puts on the clothes that one has thrown off in disgust. A shadow crosses the clock’s face. ‘No, I will never let you in! Not tonight.’ Madness like a mandarin is standing outside the pane in the slanting moonlight, foot-firm on the drenched, quiet forget-me-nots. His brittle hand lifts from beneath the waving kimono and perishes briefly in a sickly dust. The wind begins to come up from the sea. I bite my thumbnail to the quick …
Day by day, the coiled obsession grows: I must write The Market Town. The plot is utterly changed and most of the characters have gone, but it is the same town. It is always the same town. Whether they wear surplices or corduroy breeches or black velvet coats, whether they live in Kensington, Cambridge or Cornwall—the same boiling fraud hangs like an exhalation on tile and tree. O boy, I have the vision at last. I see the enormous calm disaster and the pouring tears. I stand by the matchwood scoring board in the sun and watch the awed fielders as they carry away the dead boy from the wicket. Ninety-nine runs. His white flannel trousers have grass stains at the knee … Far away a paddle-steamer is stuck in the afternoon sea …
I am standing on a white heap of sand above Tallwater Estuary. Dusk rises like a grey sweat from the hills and the shore. Two moorhens vanish wildly beyond the granite paw of a jutting cliff. From the depths of the land the windows of a golf club-house throw out feelers of light against a spinney of nak
ed birches. It is too late to go home. I try to pass unnoticed by the black entrance of the cave. But the overhanging grasses stir with a dry hushing sound, and a grey mammoth-like shape protrudes its trunk from the dark hole. It is going down to bathe in the estuary. I notice its hideous lobster eyes and its puffed dewlaps soggy in the sand. The trunk lifts slowly and I peer down the aperture. Men are moving about inside, some in bowler hats, others in bathing dresses, and one, I particularly notice, in complete polo kit. It turns sadly and wallows onward into the increasing darkness …
At Easter, I travelled down to visit him. In my suitcase were the first six chapters of a new novel called, provisionally The Summer at the House. It was a curious by-product of Romer Wilson’s The Death of Society, stiffened with undigested chunks of Henry James: it was inspired, vaguely, by my vision of the life of the Cheuret family. I didn’t show it to Chalmers: I wanted, I said, to write more of it first. Actually, I was ashamed. I knew already that it wasn’t much good.
Cornwall was exactly as he had described—except that he had forgotten to mention St Michael’s Mount and the shafts of the abandoned tin-mines. The bare hillside was pitted with them; they looked like shell-craters, surrounded with barbed wire. We walked over the moors to Zennor, because D. H. Lawrence had lived there; and Chalmers told me about the novel he wanted to write—The Market Town. His description of the plot seemed to me, at the time, to promise an obvious masterpiece: today, I have forgotten it almost down to the last detail—deliberately, perhaps; since I was later to steal several of the best scenes for myself.
But more exciting, even, than Chalmers’ schemes for The Market Town were his new theories about novel-writing in general: ‘I saw it all suddenly while I was reading Howards End … Forster’s the only one who understands what the modern novel ought to be … Our frightful mistake was that we believed in tragedy: the point is, tragedy’s quite impossible nowadays … We ought to aim at being essentially comic writers … The whole of Forster’s technique is based on the tea-table: instead of trying to screw all his scenes up to the highest possible pitch, he tones them down until they sound like mothers’-meeting gossip … In fact, there’s actually less emphasis laid on the big scenes than on the unimportant ones: that’s what’s so utterly terrific. It’s the completely new kind of accentuation—like a person talking a different language …’
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