by Alec Waugh
I950
Travel Years 1946–1952
In the autumn of 1943, after the Germans and Italians had been driven out of Africa, a sense of frustration settled upon those troops who were still stationed in the Middle East. They developed a sense both of guilt and grievance. Their families and friends at home were living very different lives, subjected to different privations and to a different strain. Their own garrison life at the base was in many ways more comfortable. They thought that no one in Britain took any interest in them now they were not in action. They felt abandoned. They were afraid that when eventually they were repatriated, they would be treated as a kind of deserter, instead of being welcomed home as heroes. The letters M.E.F. were sneeringly held to stand for ‘Men England Forgot’.
Most soldiers returned with misgivings after long service in the Middle East. Myself I found on my return to London, that I had lost contact with my old friends. We had no longer the same community of interests. For four years they had travelled in one direction, I in another. There was a difference of eight years between us. In time, no doubt, those differences would have disappeared and a new base of shared experience would have been constructed. But within two months of my return, I went to New York. The life of New York had not changed during the war in the way that the life of London had, and I picked up easily the threads of my old friendships and soon made new ones. Later when I began to travel I found that my four years in the Middle East had given me a new sense of kinship with the administrators and businessmen whose careers had been based on foreign service. I felt that I was more qualified to describe their lives and problems than those of the contemporary Londoner. I arranged my life and writing in terms of travel.
My travels took me to the Caribbean, to the Seychelles and the Far East. At the start, I concentrated on travelogues and short stories, but recently I have needed a broader canvas and have written two long novels.
‘Circle of Deception’ is my last full-length short story. It was a lucky one for me. Written in March 1952, it was published in Esquire a year later. During that year my fortunes had reached their lowest ebb. I had worked steadily upon short stories. They weren’t any good. I did not sell one across the water. A novel by which I had set high store, though it did moderately well in England, flopped in the U.S.A. I wondered where I went from there. Then, to everyone’s surprise, Hollywood became excited about ‘Circle of Deception’. Twentieth Century Fox and M.G.M. bid against each other. Their bargaining left me with two years in the clear. I took a long slow breath, then started upon a long, fast novel.
Circle of Deception has taken a little while to reach the screen. The original script was unsatisfactory and it was made into a TV play in the U.S.A. starring Gene Tierney, Trevor Howard and John Williams. This version was shown as a fifty minutes’ supporting film at a few English cinemas during 1956. Sir Carol Reed then became interested in the story, and Nigel Balchin was asked to write a script. But Sir Carol, when he learnt of the TV version, threw in his hand. At the moment of writing (August 1960) it is being shot at Walton-on-Thames, starring the exquisite Susy Parker.
This film, which will presumably have been released before this book appears, is based upon Nigel Balchin’s script. Authors usually complain that film directors alter their plots and spoil their stories. I think Balchin has improved mine. He contrived a twist which I wish I had thought of myself. I was tempted to rewrite the story in terms of it, but in the end I came to feel that I had been able to put over the character of my heroine more intimately by telling her story in the first person; so I have let the original Esquire version stand.
The story went the round of English magazines for forty months before it found a purchaser. Editors said ‘Our women readers will be horrified at the idea that anything like this could happen to a man of theirs.’ I have been asked if it was based on actual experience. It very definitely was not. During the Second War I worked for three years in Military Intelligence in the Middle East, but I was not Baker Street or Broadway, and the cloak-and-dagger boys will know what I mean by that. I was employed in Defensive Security; but in a remote outpost like Baghdad where we all knew each other, I got a glimpse into what was being done in other branches. I think something like this could have happened. I do not say it did. I hope it didn’t. But it might have done. War is not a tea-party on a rectory lawn.
The Woman Who knew Frank Harris
The Seychelles Islands contain as many eccentrics as I have encountered anywhere. They are by no means only men. The colonel’s widow was far from being the least remarkable.
I met her on my third morning in Mahe. I was writing in my room when my hostess put her head round the curtain, and with her finger pressed against her lips to ensure silence beckoned me into the sitting-room.‘I was sorry to disturb you,’ she said later. ‘But I couldn’t have you miss one of the island’s characters.’
The character to whom I had been introduced was a tall, plumpish woman, grey-haired, in a locally made straw hat, with a sallow skin and no noticeable features. She was, I imagined, one of those women who at twenty have the attraction of youth and health, a clear skin and supple movements, whom middle age and maternity rob of their figure and complexion, so that as early as their thirties people begin to say of them: ‘I can’t think what he ever saw in her.’ Her eyes were bright and she had a deep, rich voice. She might have been any age over sixty.
She had called at the early hour of half past nine to enlist my hostess’s support in an anti-Communist campaign. She had a full morning ahead of her. ‘People are so unpublic-spirited,’ she complained. ‘There’s the Attorney-General, now. He’s a Roman Catholic. He ought to be one of the first to help. He says he’s too busy. He says it’s not his business. Too busy! Not his business! I ask you.’ She struck a fine note of indignation and contempt. She paused. She looked at me interrogatively.
‘I know you are only going to be here for a short while, but you could help, you know.’
I excused myself on the grounds that I was unpolitical.
She sniffed. ‘Unpolitical. It’s not a question of politics but of principles. That’s the trouble with writers nowadays. They won’t interest themselves in the things that matter.’
In the late 1930s I should have replied that the converse was the case. But maybe she was right today. I retreated to a different base. Did she think there was any real Communist danger here? I asked. I recalled my days in Military Intelligence when we had looked for a channel of communication. I could not see how Moscow was going to build a cell in Mahe. She had her answer ready. ‘If the soil is ready, then a seed may fall. We must keep the soil unfertile.’ She spoke with such conviction that I almost agreed to give a lecture on my visit to the U.S.S.R. in 1935. Almost but not quite.
‘Tell me all about her,’ I asked when she had gone.
She had arrived, I learnt, in 1937, with her husband, a retired Indian Army colonel. Their daughters were married and they were looking for a place to settle. They were debating between Tanganyika and a cottage in Devonshire. On their way to Africa they had decided to spend a month in Seychelles. They had liked it there so much that they had lingered on. Then the war had come. Though he was much over age, the colonel had insisted on going back to India; there must be something there that he could do. His ship was torpedoed: nobody was saved.
‘And she stayed on?’
‘She had no alternative at first. Later, well, I suppose she’s got used to being here. There was rationing in England and a housing shortage. She was afraid of being a nuisance. She talks, now that things are getting easier, of going back to see her grandchildren. But I doubt if she will. It’s difficult to uproot yourself at her age.’
‘And is this typical? This anti-Communist campaign?’
My hostess nodded. ‘Typical but not general. Most of the time she lives quietly in her bungalow in the country. She hasn’t got much money; she does a certain amount of what one used to call “good works”: sits on church committees a
nd helps us at Home Industries. Then every so often she goes off the rails.’
’In what kind of way?’
‘In the kind of way that you’d expect of an Indian Army wife. That’s what we call her, you know—’the Colonel’s Widow’. There was a disease among the dogs, hardpad, some time ago. She got very worked up over that. Then she wanted to start an orphanage, but the mission authorities said it would only make the Seychel-loise more casual. She wanted to hold a public meeting. Luckily her crazes don’t last long. She’s a very good-natured creature. You’ll be seeing quite a lot of her, as a matter of fact. She lives near Northolme, and takes her lunches there.’
Northolme was a guest-house on the other side of the island where I was planning to spend the greater part of my seven weeks’ visit to the Colony.
I was indeed to see quite a lot of her. Every day at lunch for seven weeks; under the worst conditions that is to say, with an attempt being made at general conversation by seven people sitting at solitary tables, talking across a room, each about five feet from the other; those lunches were relieved, however, by occasional visits to her bungalow.
It was a minute contraption: almost a ‘prefab’, except that it had a veranda and no labour-saving gadgets. Built of wood, roofed with corrugated iron, two-roomed, with a shower and a kitchenette, it was all she needed: it was all anyone required in the tropics. You do not need heavy upholstered furniture that damp and heat and cockroaches will eat away. You do not need pictures. You want your wall space to be windows so that every way you turn you can look out at the continually changing panorama of cloud and sea scape against a foreground of palm and sand, of rock and mountain. All you need of a bungalow in the tropics is that it should be cool and clean and neat and rainproof. Hers was all of that.
She had light linen curtains and fibre mats. A few photographs; a collection of shells; a three-shelf bookcase. I glanced at it. A row of Book Society selections. I ran my eye along them. It is the fashion to sneer at Book Clubs: but glancing over the choices of a dozen years, I could see few among those I had not already read that I would not be glad to read. She was apologetic on their account. ‘It’s the best one can do out here, I had quite a library once, before I married; I left all my best books in England. I didn’t want them ruined by the climate. The depository where they were stored was bombed.’
At the end of the top row was an uneven collection of volumes with stained and battered bindings—Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, the Everyman Shakespeare, the Oxford Book of English Verse, A Shropshire Lad, Dowson’s Poems.
‘I wonder how many copies of that there are in this colony,’I said.
She smiled.‘I used to think him the greatest poet of all time. I used to write sonnets in his style.’
‘Most of us have.’
‘I got mine published.’
‘Really. Where?’
‘Vanity Fair.’
Vanity Fair. That was an echo from quite a long way back. In its own way it had had a rather special cachet. But my memory could not precisely place it. The title had been used upon both sides of the Atlantic. It suggested Conde Nast. But that was in the 1920s, and in America. I could not remember when the English edition left the newstands.
‘Who was the editor then?’ I asked.
‘Frank Harris.’
I made a rapid calculation. Frank Harris held so many posts. The Evening News, the Fortnightly, the Saturday. Then just before World War I, that most improbable of ventures Hearth and Home with Hugh Kingsmill as his assistant. Vanity Fair must have been about 1906. That would place the Colonel’s Widow in the middle sixties. Well, that tallied.
‘Did you ever meet him?’ she asked.
I shook my head. ‘But I heard a good deal about him.’
When I arrived in April 1918, as a prisoner-of-war at the Kriegagefanginenlager, Karlsruhe, it was to find Hugh Kingsmill, who had been captured fifteen months earlier, a third of the way through a novel of which Frank Harris was, if not the hero, the central character. It was published later by Chapman & Hall under the title The Will to Love. It was a witty and satiric novel, and, had it been published a few years later when the public mind had been acclimatized by Aldous Huxley and Michael Arlen to flippant satire, it might have had a considerable success. It described the seduction by Harris of a schoolmaster’s daughter, and ended with Harris blackmailing the father to the extent of £2,000. The picture of Harris is so vivid that when I hear people talk of Harris, I am confused between the Harris of fact and fiction. Maybe Kingsmill’s Harris was the more real picture.
‘I met him several times,’ she said.‘I was just back from my finishing school in Paris. I sent him some poems. He asked me to call on him. Then he asked me out to lunch.’
‘Where did you lunch?’
‘The Café Royal.’
Yes, of course it would be the Café Royal, in the Domino Room, with its red plush banquettes, its mirrors, its gilt columns, its faded panels, and its frescoed ceiling; the Café Royal with all its memories of Wilde and Ruskin; and Harris, dapper and dark, declaiming in his great booming voice of the great men he had entertained there, dazzling her with his sense of power and importance, yet every now and again playing his other role of the unappreciated genius, ranting against the tycoons of Fleet Street, ‘the Penguin Professors’ who had no fire in their veins, who could never understand ‘out of what dark forests of the tortured soul the sacred fires of art are lit’; then turning to the girl beside him, identifying her with his tirades.‘I can speak of all this to you, you will understand. I can tell it from your poems.’
‘And I suppose he pointed out to you all the well-known people that were lunching there.’
She nodded eagerly.
‘That was the fascinating thing about him, he knew everyone. Shaw, Wells, Middleton, George Moore; not only poets and painters, but politicians; men of affairs. He was wonderful company; I’ve never known anyone who could talk as he did.’
I nodded. They had all said that.
‘And underneath it all, yes, whatever anyone may say, underneath it all he was so fine,’ she hurried on. ‘He had such high ideals. I asked him once why he had written so little. He said that he did not care to publish anything that was not good enough to be set beside Maupassant and Turgenev.’ She paused. She looked at me rather shyly. ‘What do people think of him nowadays?’ she asked.
I hesitated. I was not certain if I was the right person to be asked that question. I had just passed my fifty-second birthday, and one of the more disconcerting of my recent experiences has been the discovery that topics and personalities that once formed part of the rough material of conversation now mean nothing at all to a younger generation. I suppose this happens to everyone at fifty; but possibly it has happened to me in a more marked degree. By publishing a novel in my teens, I got off to a flying start; I found myself at the age of twenty associating with and meeting on equal terms men ten to fifteen years older than myself. Of the men I met most frequently in the early 1920s, not many are still alive. Harold Momo, Ralph Straus, C. K. Scott-Moncrieff, Luke Hansard, Norman Davey, W. J. Turner, Hugh Kingsmill, W. L. George, Stacy Aumonier, A. G. Macdonell, David Woodhouse, Edgar Walmisley—one by one they have gone.
In addition, the course of events was telescoped even more by the Second War than it had been by the first. During my last weeks in Mahe I had several lively and stimulating conversations with the wife of the new Administrator, Susan Bates. She is young, the mother of three children, vivid, pretty, with a lean, taut figure and a lean, taut mind. I was surprised at first by the contempt with which she dismissed the lighter novelists and playwrights of the 1930s. ‘They’ve nothing to say to me,’ she said. By our third meeting I had found a partial explanation for her disdain. Born in 1923, and sixteen years old when the war began, she had never known as an adult person any other world than that of rations, uniform, queues, barracks, shortages, with happiness snatched at during the thirty-six hours of a week-end leave; brought up in the col
d climate of necessity she had needed mentally something to try her teeth on, a hardier fare, a tougher nourishment than that which had sustained her seniors.
I have lived so much out of London since the autumn of 1941 that this was the first time I had met, long enough to cross swords with, an Englishwoman both of her age and mental calibre. It was an exciting experience. I had not realized how different is the young Englishwoman who grew up during the war both from her immediate predecessors and from her contemporary opposite number in America. I asked Susan how she would grade Frank Harris. ‘Never heard of him,’she answered.
Probably it would have been surprising if she had. Most books went out of print during the war; only a fortunate few have been re-issued or found their way into Pan, Penguin, and the Pocket Libraries. The only book by Frank Harris that is still obtainable—and that only overseas—is My Life and Loves, and maybe as soon as a sufficient quantity of titles plus cochon have been discovered, it will slide out of print. In a few years Harris may be a mere legend, to become possibly, in view of his frequent appearances in the memories of his contemporaries, the subject of a valedictory New Yorker profile, like the Wilson Mizner one. To have achieved as much is to have achieved something. But it is a great deal less than Harris expected for himself; or rather than what he appeared to be expecting for himself. One never knew with Harris. That was the whole problem about him. He was such a liar.
Hugh Kingsmill published later a biography of Harris, but I fancy that he got nearer to the real man in The Will to Love; he explained there not only Harris’s deficiences but also his qualities. He had Harris’s pugnacity, his brashness, his vulgarity, his pushingness, his dishonesty, his boasting, his untruthfulness. Yet he had his other side, his moments of talent as a writer—’Elder Conklin’ is a real short story—his flashes of intuition as a critic—he was one of the first to see the man Shakespeare behind the dramatist; his sincere respect for literature. Harris’s snobbery was fantastic, but he placed the artist high in his hierarchy; it was better to be a poet than a duke. There was again his disinterested desire to be of help to writers, his fits of loyalty—he was a good friend to Wilde—and above all there was his immense vitality.