by Alec Waugh
Arriving in London at the age of twenty-six, unknown, half educated, penniless, he was within two years editor of the Evening News. Very little later as editor of the Saturday Review, then a very powerful Tory paper, he was entertaining in his house in Park Lane many of the most prominent social and political personalities of the day. He went everywhere and saw everyone, and yet found time and energy both for his own writing and the conduct of innumerable intrigues. It had been suggested that his rapid progress was based like Maupassant’s Bel-Ami on his success with women, and his first wife was a wealthy woman. But he was more than just another adventurer. He was a man of immense potentialities: yet it was all ruined—or mainly ruined—by the lie within himself.
Wilde said of him, ‘Frank has dined in every house in London—once.’ He could capture ground with a sudden assault, but he could not hold it. He lost his friends, betrayed their trust—no one could rely on him; and that same noisiness, that ill-bred forcefulness that made him socially intolerable, spoilt him as a writer. His actual writing is poor. I did not realize quite how poor it was till I compared the French with the English version of My Life and Loves. His books are only readable because their subject matter is sensational. He had in The Man Shakespeare something new and definite to say. In several of his short stories he struck an exciting plot. In his Portraits he wrote intimately and indiscreetly of persons about whom one is inquisitive. Unfortunately you cannot believe a word he says.
His anecdotes about Maupassant’s priapism and Carlyle’s impotence are typical. He takes two rumours which probably have a basis in fact and makes them the subject of a confession. The men who are reported to have made these confessions are no longer in the world to contradict him or defend themselves. And who could believe the scene where he pretends to have been completely ignorant of Wilde’s inclinations until the scandal broke? His memoirs are valueless as history. If he survives as a legend, as part of a pattern, as a motif in the mosaic of literary history during the close of the nineteenth and the opening of the twentieth centuries—that is the most that can be hoped for. But his effect in 1906 on a twenty-year-old poetess must have been apocalyptic. He was then in the middle fifties. Though his political career was ruined, his literary reputation was still untarnished. He had not yet alienated many of his more worth-while friends. He was, however, conscious of the tide’s turn against him. He needed the adulation of the young to restore his self-esteem. He took trouble over the very young.
‘Did you always lunch at the Café Royal?’ I asked her.
‘Except the last time. We lunched at Kettner’s then.’ She paused, hesitated. ‘Is Kettner’s going still?’ she asked. It was very flourishing, I told her.
’Is it still the same kind of place?’
‘I suppose it is.’
‘He took me to a private room.’
‘I’m not sure if you’d find those still.’
Dinners in private rooms in restaurants went out with the modern flat. I saw the tail-end of their vogue. They would seem very unhygienic to a generation that is used to the centrally heated amenities of the modern apartment building, but there was a rakish rococo air about the whole procedure—the curtained stairway, the discreet waiters, the eighteenth-century engravings, the chaise-longue—that provided its own special stimulus; married couples got a kick out of going there and being mistaken for what they weren’t.
‘If that was your last lunch, I gather it wasn’t a success,’ I said.
She smiled, then flushed. ‘I’m afraid he must have thought me very childish; girls weren’t so sophisticated then. Ann Veronica seemed a very daring book. And besides, that room; it was tiny; I felt so big and clumsy. He was a little man, you know.’
She paused, smiled wryly.‘I must have been a disappointment to him. He never asked me out again. But he printed my poems: the poems I sent him afterwards. I was very happy about that. I should have been miserable if I’d thought he only accepted them because he had thought I was the kind of girl who might—’ She checked; there was an abstracted look upon her face. ‘Did you read My Life and Loves?’ she asked.
I nodded.
‘They say, don’t they, that the things which you regret in middle age are not the things you’ve done but the things you haven’t done. That’s not always true, you know. I was so glad I hadn’t, when I read that book. I used to wonder sometimes when I read his other books and when I read about him, whether if I had behaved differently he might not have been a different person. There was so much that was fine in him. It all seemed to be going to waste. I might have saved him. But when I read that book, oh, it was all so materialistic, all that love-making and no conception of what love might be. I realized that I couldn’t ever have made the slightest difference. It was too late, or I was the wrong person. I don’t know which. Anyhow, I was very glad I hadn’t.’
‘You never saw him again, not after that last lunch?’
She shook her head. ‘Very soon after that I went out to India: my sister was married to a civil servant.’
‘You did not say good-bye?’
‘I didn’t tell him I was going. I dramatized myself. I pictured myself writing a tremendous poem on the way out. He’d be astonished to get an envelope in my handwriting with an Indian postmark. Then he’d read the poem. He’d be even more astonished. He’d feel guilty and ashamed. “I never realized she was capable of that,” he’d think. My next poems would be better still. He’d be impatient to get me back. He’d write me beseeching letters. I’d go on postponing my return. That’s how I’d punish him, for his own good. You know how a young girl daydreams.’
‘And it didn’t turn out that way at all?’
She laughed. ‘The third day out I met the man I married.’
‘And you wrote no more poems?’
‘I wrote no more poems.’
Her bungalow was only five minutes’ walk from Northolme. Most weeks I would drop in there for a gossip. Sometimes after lunch she would take her coffee on my veranda. Our conversation always came round to the same topics, the poets and personalities of the Edwardian decade. She could not ask me too many questions, about Wells and Bennett and Ford Madox Heuffer, and those ‘left-overs’ from the ‘90s—Symons, Le Gallienne, Davidson. What had happened to them all? ‘I’ve not talked in this way for forty years,’ she said.
It was probably in the main for that reason that now she talked of them so voraciously. But also it was in part, I think, because the early part of her life was now at the end becoming more real to her than the long middle section. In The Linden Tree J. B. Priestley had a moving conversation between an old man and a young girl, in which something was said about truth being found among the very young and the very old; they were nearer to ‘the way in and the way out’. Perhaps ‘the Colonel’s Widow’ was becoming again the young girl who had written Dowsonian sonnets. I began to wonder which was mattering more to her in retrospect—the long stretch of worthily spent years when she had been an irreproachable mem-sahib, or the months when she had lunched with a rake in the Domino Room at the Café Royal.
How long had it all gone on? I asked her. About a year. And how often had they met? Nine times. She was living in the country, it had not been easy for her to get up; she was closely chaperoned. Her parents would have been shocked to know that she was lunching with a married man. There was no telephone in her parents’ house. Very few private houses did have telephones. ‘But of course we wrote each other letters.’ Or rather, I fancy, she wrote him letters and he acknowledged them.
It was not difficult to picture the situation. The poems that even though imitative had a quality of freshness; that would make an editor say: ‘Well, there’s a hundred to one chance she may amount to something’; poems that were promising enough, since they were signed with a girl’s name, to make a man like Harris feel curious about their author. As she came into the office, a large wholesome-looking girl with fine eyes, fresh colouring and an engaging mixture of shyness and self-confidence, it was
easy to guess how Harris thought, ‘Yes, this is worth my time.’
He had many irons in the fire, so many plans and projects, literary, financial, amatory. But he was always ready to slip in one more iron, waiting for the appropriate moment. He was in no hurry. And then one day a mood of irritation, of loneliness, the need to rehabilitate himself in his own esteem would make him decide. ‘It’s high time I brought that thing to a head.’ So he had booked the private room at Kettner’s.
She had never been more than a sideshow; one scene in an unimportant sideshow, and when she had been ‘childish’ he had shrugged his shoulders. There were so many who were not childish. He probably barely noticed the cessation of her manuscripts and letters. Within two years if he had remembered her name, he would have found it hard with the mind’s eye to recall her features. He would have been surprised could he have foreseen that half a century hence, in 1950, the year for which he had prophesied his own apotheosis, almost the only person south of the Red Sea to whom he was still a living influence was the girl he had lunched once at Kettner’s.
She kept referring to him in her conversation. ‘As Frank used to say …’, ‘Frank told me once …’ All her original observations were put in that way into quotation marks.
‘The artist suffers for the eventual benefit of mankind. The crucifixion is a symbol of the artist’s treatment by the masses.’
‘That sounds like Frank Harris,’ I remarked. She flushed. ‘Well, it’s true, isn’t it? And after they’ve persecuted him all his life, they bury him in the Abbey.’
A direct echo out of Harris. He had set the imprint of his mind on her. I thought of the heroine of Hugh Kingsmill’s novel. Though he had altered all the circumstances, he told me whom he had had in mind. He showed me the letter of congratulation that she wrote him when the book was published. I have followed her career. It has brought her renown and riches, a successful marriage and proud progeny. How much of it does she owe to Harris; how often does she think of Harris, and in what way? So I brooded as I listened to her predecessor repeating sentiments whose truth had become discredited because they had been mouthed so often by one whose whole philosophy was warped with self-deception.
It was on that note of query that I had planned to end this sketch. I had half written it in my mind, during my walks along the shore, when something altogether unexpected happened; one of those storms in a teacup that make life in a small community at the same time stimulating and exasperating.
A guest at her house had noticed in the kitchen a collection of spills made out of the pages of a book. Opening out the spill he had noticed that the book in question was The Struggle for World Power—a sociological study written by John Strachey, in his pro-Moscow period. ‘That’s an expensive way of making spills,’ he said.
‘It’s all that book’s worth,’she retorted. ‘To be burnt page by page.’
Her guest repeated the incident at the club. It quickly went the rounds. Finally it reached the ears of the Librarian. ‘But that’s a book she took out of the club library. She said she’d lost it. She was very apologetic. She paid the purchase price of it. Pretty decent of her, I thought, as we’d had it for years, and it was half in pieces. She lost two other books at the same time. She paid for both of them as well.’
‘What were the books?’
‘I can’t remember now. I’ll have to check.’
They were both Left Book Club publications. The inference was obvious. She had been weeding out the Library.
‘I wonder if she’s been doing the same thing at the Carnegie?’ someone asked.
Enquiries were made; and it was found she had. Das Kapital had gone, and John Reid’s Ten Days that Shook the World.
A member of the Club Committee called on her. She made no attempt to conceal her action. She admitted it and proudly. ‘When you see a poisonous snake you kill it. Books like that should be kept under lock and key.’ The club was on the whole indignant. Who was this silly old fool to decide what they could read and what they couldn’t? That was the worst of these Indian Army people. Thought they owned the universe; all that mem-sahib nonsense.
So they argued. But something assured me that it was not the mem-sahib side of her that had turned a Left Book Club treatise into spills.
Next time I saw her I asked her what had started her on this anti-Communist campaign. ‘Their censorship,’ she said, ‘their muzzling of the artist. There’s no health in a country where an artist isn’t free to speak out of his own heart.’
Muzzling of the artist. That was not ‘the Colonel’s Widow’ speaking: any more than it had been ‘the Colonel’s Widow’ who had wanted to found an orphanage. Her resentment sprang from a far earlier training: a loud brash voice booming across a restaurant.
‘But aren’t you yourself imposing your own censorship?’ I said. ‘Hasn’t the other side a right to express its own opinions?’
She shook her head. ‘Not when it’s the voice of evil speaking.’
There was a fierce, resolute expression in her eye. At that moment she was a Colonel’s Widow. ‘They’ll expect me to resign from the club, I suppose. But I don’t care,’ she said. ‘It’ll be a nuisance and I shall miss it; but I mustn’t let myself worry about that.’ She paused, and her expression changed, became soft and tender, so that for a moment I could see a flash of the girl that she had been—the girl who had written poetry, who had listened adoringly to that booming voice.‘I don’t care whatever any of them say. I’m right; I know I am, Frank would have said I was.’
1950
A Bunch of Beachcombers
Many years before the Vicomte Moreau des Seychelles assumed control of Louis XV’s finances, there had been periodically washed up on the shores of western India and the Maldive Islands large heart-shaped nuts weighing as much as forty pounds. When the husk was removed there was revealed a double coconut, formed like the unlegged extremities of a woman—mulieris corporis bifurcationem cum natura et pilis representat.
So detailed and exact was this reproduction that the nut was held to have magic properties. As no one knew its origin, it was called coco-de-mer. Not until the end of the eighteenth century was it discovered that the parent tree grew wild in a horseshoe-shaped valley in the island of Praslin, twenty miles from Mahé. The tree from which it falls is a very straight, thin, tall palm; its growth is very slow, and as some of the trees rise to a height of a hundred feet, it is impossible to compute their age. The male palm reproduces with accuracy, but with considerably increased proportions, the masculine apparatus. Nowhere else in the world is this tree found.
General Gordon, a literal-minded man, was convinced in view of these facts that the coco-de-mer was the original tree of good and evil, and produced an ingenious genealogical argument that the Colony of Seychelles was part of a submerged continent, and that the Valle de Mai must be the Garden of Eden. He even found there an unusual serpent.
A few years later an equally literal-minded gentleman, a Monsieur M. Murat of Mauritius, opposed this theory on the grounds that Eve could not have climbed so high, that the husk was too tough for her to have broken, and that Adam would have found the taste of the nut insipid. This final argument is not in my view convincing; the nut when green contains a white jelly that is palatable in itself and excellent when mixed with brandy. Whether of divine origin or not, the nuts remain a source of profit to the island. Though the Indians, now its origin is known, can no longer regard it as holy, some three or four hundred nuts are annually exported. The kernel is ground up to form the basis of nux medica, while the shell serves a variety of purposes. The Moslems on their pilgrimages to Mecca are not allowed to take manufactured articles, and the double nut is a useful and unique receptacle. It is also used for baling out canoes.
Close though Praslin is to Mahe, the days are not so many on which from the hills behind Victoria its outline stands out clearly. Cloud and rain intervene. And the journey there is not one to tempt the unadventurous. You make it in a fifteen-ton motor-lau
nch that presents every appearance of discomfort. A gale was blowing when I set out at seven in the morning in company with the new C.I.R.O., the officer in charge of income tax. As I watched the launch rock against its moorings, I recalled the villainous Moneka in which, two years earlier in the Caribbean, I had suffered so grievously between Montserrat and Antigua; luckily this time I was supplied with dramamine. It was the first time I had had occasion to take this much-vaunted drug, and when I arrived at Grande Anse three hours later, rested and refreshed, I felt that a whole new world was opening for me. Never again need I feel nervous of small boats. Cruising in the Caribbean, an activity I had previously avoided, would now hold no qualms for me. I am grateful for the trip to Praslin for that lesson. The launch rocked and rolled: everything and everyone was soaked: the groans of the suffering were louder than the creaking of the woodwork: children lay supine in their vomit. But I was ready on landing for a three-mile walk along the coast. It was well worth the journey to learn that.
But I should have been glad, anyhow, that I went to Praslin. Though it rained consistently during my four days’ visit, I would not have missed the Valle de Mai, where the great coco-de-mer trees tower in lofty ranks: I would not have missed the three or four new acquaintances I made there. I would not have missed the chance of drawing comparisons between Mahe and its sister isle.
In rain and under cloud Praslin is a melancholy island, and even in the sunlight I suspect that it must seem forlorn. Though much less mountainous than Mahe, it has the same appearance—coconuts and granite and a succession of white-sanded beaches. There the resemblance ends. The bathing is not good. There is no club; there is no social life; there are no motor-cars. There is an administrative centre and a hospital, but the plantation houses are sufficiently far apart to render calling difficult. There is something, if not eccentric, at least out of the ordinary, about everyone who lives in Mahe: the types in Praslin are even more distinctively individualized.