We laughed together. Perhaps his opportunity to speak to me had been as pleasurable for him as for me: I hoped so. But as he left the room I realised that I had been caught in the web of his charm. I could easily imagine how he or someone like him might ensnare me in one of his schemes, persuading me that it was not only free of risk but perfectly legal and indeed of benefit to the world. But he would sacrifice me, throw me to the lions, without a moment’s hesitation if it would save his skin. As he left, therefore, I felt almost as if I had had a lucky escape.
My reminiscences of this man were provoked by reading a wonderful portrait of the swindler Stavisky by the French writer, Joseph Kessel, published shortly after Stavisky’s downfall and suicide (or murder, the case has never been satisfactorily elucidated) in 1934. The case brought down the French government of the day and provoked some of the most violent Parisian riots of the century, which is saying something.
Stavisky, known to many as Monsieur Alexandre or Le beau Sasha, was born in the Ukraine in 1888 and moved to France with his parents when he was 12 years old. He was one of those intelligent, gifted and ingenious people who always preferred the paths of dishonesty to those of honesty, though one feels that if only he had stuck to the latter he might have made an enduring fortune. One of the things about swindlers, however, is that they not only want to make a fortune quickly and easily without all the boring and painstaking intermediary work, but they delight to fool the world to demonstrate their superiority to it. The excitement of the moth flying close to the flame is another of their pleasures, that more solid activity would never give them.
Stavisky was a swindler for most of his adult life and once sent eighteen months in prison. But his time there did not discourage him or for that matter inhibit or disadvantage him. His next scheme was his big one, though it had humble enough origins, in the municipal pawnshop of Bayonne, a smallish town in the south-west of France.
In those days municipalities in France owned pawnshops which had the right to issue bonds according to their assets. Among other schemes, Stavisky brought the Bayonne municipal pawnshop the supposedly priceless emeralds of the former Empress of Germany, which turned out to be glass. The bonds issued by the Bayonne municipal pawnbrokers backed by such assets reached many millions in today’s money, with Stavisky taking fees for his invaluable services. He lived the life of a merchant prince and took care to weave a web of contacts with people in high places, whom he bribed and flattered. That his wealth was fraudulently obtained was long suspected and on one occasion he was arrested and charged, but obtained (thanks to his contacts) postponements of his trial no fewer than nineteen times. It was because of his contacts in high places, that had enabled him so easily and for so long to evade justice, that his downfall had such a political impact, leading every citizen from left to right with the impression that ils sont tous corrompus, they (the people in power, the system itself) are all corrupt: precisely what everyone now says in France, and where many feel that the exasperation might lead again before long to 1934-type scenes.
Kessel, who himself was of Tsarist Russian origin, emigrating to France with his parents when he was ten years old, always knew Stavisky as Monsieur Alexandre, the refined, generous, successful and charming financier who offered to back a weekly magazine to be edited by him, without demanding any editorial control whatever. In a hundred pages or so, he sketches Stavisky’s appearance, manner and character in such a way that one understands why people would have been charmed by him, why they would have trusted him, why even after his frauds were exposed they retained an affection for him. He was a genuinely kindly man, anxious to do good where he could, without malice of the more obvious kind, a devoted husband and father.
When exposure became inevitable and unavoidable, Stavisky fled. It was said he was making for Venezuela, but he never got further than Chamonix. There in a villa, surrounded by police who had traced him, and who were determined to arrest him, he shot himself. Some say the police shot him so that he could not reveal the precise nature of his contacts in high places; others that he really did commit suicide. One way of reconciling the two theories is the supposition that the police surrounded the villa and waited for so long to enter to persuade him to commit suicide.
His last letter to his wife, written before his flight is touching, and is hardly that of a wicked or evil man, much harm though he might have done:
My beloved wife,
Here for the last time you will find in these lines all my soul, all my heart and all the love I have for you. You have always been the light of my life and it is for this reason that I consider it my duty to disappear. You know with what affection I surrounded our dear children. I leave each of them a word that they will not comprehend until they have reached the age of reason. I ask them to retain all their love for you and, if circumstances permit you – human nature being what it is – to make another life, that they are understanding. It is for you, for them, that I disappear… The situation that currently awaits me will separate me from you and them for years, if not forever. It’s better that you should be free, and that I should not be an obstacle to their education and lives. What I ask of you above all is to raise them in the sentiment of honour and probity; and that when they reach the difficult age of fifteen, to be careful of their social contacts, so that they are set on the right path in life and become good people.
I would have liked to leave you in a much better material situation [he was ruined], but you are courageous, you will be able to start a little business that will allow you to live and raise the children in a dignified way. When I think that I had so much money and that I leave you in so parlous a situation, it is yet another reason for me to disappear…
Stavisky’s son, Claude, having passed his childhood in the suite of a luxury hotel in Paris, spent much of his early adulthood in a psychiatric hospital. Then he became a circus performer and magician before taking a job looking after the boilers in the psychiatric hospital where he had been a patient. In 1974, at the age of 48, he was ejected for disorderly behaviour from the premiere of a film about his father.
32 - Coming Up Tramps
More than half a century ago (how strange it seems to me now to be able to write such a thing!), my teacher made the class learn by heart some lines by W H Davies that stay with me still and run through my mind whenever I walk past or through a field. She gave us the weekend to learn the lines and then tested us on them on Monday morning. Woe betide us if we were not able to recite them like automata. For a time poetry and fear were associated in my mind; but in the long run I gained more by the method than I lost by it.
There is no disguising the fact, however, that the method was somewhat at variance in spirit with the poem that we learnt:
What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare?—
No time to stand beneath the boughs,
And stare as long as sheep and cows…
No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass…
A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
I suppose also that the thought and feeling of this poem might seem banal and hackneyed, and yet its resonance can only have increased in the hundred years since it was written, since then the fields have receded and men are busier than ever, notwithstanding their numerous labour-saving devices. The poem expresses something akin to Pascal’s aperçu that Man’s miseries derive from his inability to sit alone in a room. In a school in a poor area of a small town in Brazil which I once visited, the teachers had tried to break the addiction of the pupils to their electronic distractions by putting pictures of the local avifauna on the walls, so that they might see that the real world was more marvellous than the virtual, which so imprisoned their minds.
We were made also to read Davies’ The Autobio
graphy of a Super Tramp, for in those days it was still thought important (bizarre idea!) that children should learn to write good prose: not that they would all do so, of course, but that those capable of learning would do so. The dog-in-the-manger, no-child-left-behind variety of egalitarianism had not yet come so completely to dominate pedagogical theory as it has now.
Is W H Davies forgotten? I daresay that, such being the impermanence of literary celebrity, you could walk down a busy street in any English-speaking city without passing anyone who had ever heard of him. But Davies was once well-known enough, as much for his life story, a remarkable one, as for his work as a poet, which was nevertheless popular. D H Lawrence derided him as a poet, or at least damned him with faint praise, saying that he had but a single sweet tone: but perhaps because I am inclined to cynicism I am easily moved by emotion simply-expressed, that is to say the one note that Lawrence said that Davies sang. (Or is it the ease with which I am moved that inclines me to cynicism?) At any rate, lines such as the following move me:
Come, let us find a cottage, love,
That’s green for half a mile around;
To laugh at every grumbling bee,
Whose sweetest blossom’s not yet found…
’Tis strange how men find time to hate,
When life is all too short for love…
Yes indeed: as I age I find myself ever more reluctant to quarrel both because life is too short for it and most quarrels grow out of bad faith on both sides, including my own.
Or again:
No doubt it is a selfish thing
To fly from human suffering;
No doubt he is a selfish man,
Who shuns poor creatures, sad and wan.
But ‘tis a wretched life to face
Hunger in almost every place;
Cursed with a hand that’s empty, when
The heart is full to help all men.
Hunger has declined since Davies’ day, of course, to be replaced by overeating which brings a form of suffering of its own, albeit self-inflicted (but not the less suffering for that), and there is still suffering enough in the world to give point to these verses. Indeed, they have become more pointed than ever, in so far as virtue has become less a matter of behaving well, which is always difficult to do, as of expressing the right sentiments towards those who suffer, which is always easy to do. This means that Sir Toby Belch’s question, ‘Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?’, is more pertinent than ever. Only yesterday, an American friend of mine told me that he once said to a neighbour ‘It’s a beautiful day,’ to which the neighbour replied tartly, not to say sourly, ‘It’s not a beautiful day in Fallujah,’ as if no good weather were to be enjoyed until it were good weather everywhere, without distinction. The implication of the reply was that my friend was unfeeling and insensitive, unlike his interlocutor, who so felt the sufferings of the world that he could not enjoy anything until they were assuaged: gross hypocrisy and dishonesty, it needs hardly be said, for he had almost certainly enjoyed his breakfast that morning, as he would also enjoy his lunch.
I am no scholar of W H Davies—no doubt such scholars exist, for in a world of oedematous tertiary education there are scholars of everything—and so it came as a surprise to me to find a book by him quite by chance that was published forty years after his death in 1940. It was titled Young Emma, and the history of its publication is a strange one.
For the first fifty years of his life, Davies had lived as a bachelor. He was born in a pub in South Wales, and his father died when he was three. He was brought up by his father’s parents, publicans of the Church Inn (a strange name in South Wales, where church and pub then mixed like oil and water), and became a delinquent youth. He then ran away to America, where he lived for several years as a tramp. The pivotal point in his life occurred when, in the company of another tramp, he jumped maladroitly from a train in Ontario and his foot was crushed, whereafter his leg had to be amputated below the knee. Ever after, he sported a wooden leg.
His Autobiography and his books of poems brought him renown if not fame and fortune, and he mixed for a time in high society. But he grew tired of that life, and retired to the countryside with a new-found wife.
Young Emma is the story of how he found his wife. He wrote it in 1924 and sent it to the eminent publisher, Jonathan Cape, who asked George Bernard Shaw’s advice about it. Shaw had been a champion of Davies, but advised against publishing it, not because it was a bad book, but because he feared that it would do the author’s reputation no good. Davies, who had sent the manuscript and two typescripts to the publisher, asked on refusal by the publisher for the return of the manuscript, and that he destroy the two typescripts ‘as soon as he liked.’ This suggested ambivalence about such destruction; and in fact they survived. They surfaced again in 1940, the year of Davies’ death, when a woman then working for Cape, who was later to become an eminent historian, C V Wedgwood, was asked to advise on whether it should be published. She said it could not be published while Mrs Davies (the Emma of the title, whose real name was Helen Payne) was still alive. The poet, William Plomer, gave the same advice in 1972.
Mrs Davies died in 1979, after 39 years of widowhood, and the book was published the following year. It is the story of how he came to marry Helen Payne.
When he was fifty, Davies decided that he did not want any more to live alone, so he set about finding a wife in what seems to modern sensibilities a cold-blooded and deliberate fashion:
In searching for a wife, I found it no easy matter to get one to my liking. One woman, whom I thought would make a good wife, refused me on account of blood-relationship. Another, who had a great admiration for my work, and liked me personally, could not make up her mind to trust her life with mine…
There was an actress and a rich woman whom he could have married, but they would not suit him:
I wanted a woman who was worth working for, and would be dependent in my own loving kindness.
Davies continues by describing his appearance, strangely omitting any mention of his wooden leg. He was no apotemnophiliac in search of an acrotomophiliac, that is too say a man with a sexual fixation on being an amputee in search a woman with sexual attraction to amputees; he wanted merely a companion, without intellectual or literary pretensions, for the rest of his life.
To this end, he picked up women in the street and tried them out, as it were. In post-World War I London, this posed no great problem. After three attempts he found Helen Payne, a farmer’s daughter come up to London. He met her as she waited at a bus stop and in what seems an astonishingly casual way they decided to live together. She was already pregnant, though she did not tell Davies so; she had a miscarriage from which she might easily have died. He also thought it was she from whom he caught the gonorrhoea and syphilis from which he suffered shortly afterwards, though he later revised his opinion and came to the conclusion that it must have been from one of his earlier encounters. Despite her own earlier encounters, of which there must have been at least one, Helen was an innocent abroad who knew nothing whatever about venereal disease and did not understand what Davies was talking about when he mentioned it to her.
A casual encounter; the woman already pregnant; false accusations of infection with venereal disease: not a triad conducive to a happy marriage, you might have supposed. But in fact Mr and Mrs Davies were very happy; the marriage was a good one. I don’t think, if you had known the initial conditions, you would have predicted it, rather the reverse.
Yet there were positive indications as well, of a rather unromantic kind. Davies needed companionship and probably would have been regarded as no great catch himself; his wife was facing a most uncertain feature when she was waiting at the bus-stop and was in need of security. Mutual interest was at least as important as passion to the success of their marriage. But lov
e arrived: in 1935, at the age of 64, Davies addressed a book of love poems to his wife, with titles such as Let us lie closer, as lover’s should, Our love this day is ten years’ old, When I was old and she was young. These are unaffected words that remind me of an Indian friend of mine who tells the story of his betrothal under the arranged (not forced, nota bene) marriage system that led to a very happy marriage, among the best that I know.
It was time he married, in the opinion of his parents, and they selected six potential brides all over India for him, and he went on a long journey to see them all. The first four did not please him; the fifth, a thousand miles away from his home, pleased him quite a lot; nevertheless, he continued on to the sixth just in case. But in the end he chose the fifth, she consented, and now, nearly forty years later, they are still happily married.
If there is a lesson in the story of W H Davies and Young Emma it is the unpredictability of life, which is what makes life so difficult, so worth the living.
33 - The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
Threats of Pain and Ruin Page 21