The Marrying Americans

by Hesketh Pearson

  As Stalin believed that everything in Russia was sacrificed to the nurture and education of the young, whereas the shooting of opponents was mere routine work, Lady Astor’s outburst as described by Shaw may have insulted him far more than her objection to Tsarist government. Both accounts are probably true, because in reviewing my book H. G. Wells, who had discussed the Shaw-Astor visit with Stalin, wrote: “I think he [Stalin] tried to argue with her and lost his temper. She certainly annoyed him thoroughly, and his memory of her rankled.”

  For the British and American journalists, more interested in gossip than in economics, the outstanding feature of the trip was that Lady Astor had been seen washing Shaw’s beard. She told me that she often massaged his head, but the origin of the beard-washing episode was given me by Shaw: “All of us needed to have our heads washed after three days and nights in the train. Lady Astor had the necessary sort of soap. When I complained that she was splashing my shirt, she said ‘Take it off’; so I stripped to the waist. Between talking and scrubbing we forgot our surroundings. When some noise made us look round, there were no reporters and no cameras, but the entire staff of the hotel and as much of the population of Moscow as could squeeze in behind them were enjoying the spectacle. No charge was made for admission as far as we knew.”

  On her return from Russia, Lady Astor met an exiled Tsarist prince, Serge Obolensky, and could not resist teasing him: “What a wonderful job they’ve done over there in such a short time!” Which of course was true, in a sense. But she could be as sympathetic as she sometimes appeared to be the reverse, and her friendship with T. E. Lawrence was due to her fellow feeling for unconventional people. He soon managed to feel at home with her, behaving naturally and discarding his various poses. She went for long trips on his motorcycle, riding behind him, and they remained on affectionate terms until his death. Another strange person who gained her regard was Gandhi, who managed to make her listen to him by implying that she talked too much. She promptly attended and was duly enlightened, later admiring the way in which he could simultaneously address an audience and hold his clothes in position.

  Her own hardihood made her appreciate that of Lawrence and Gandhi. She started the day with a cold bath, a game of squash and a hot bath, by which time she was ready to deal with three secretaries, after which she began to entertain. Since she was a fanatical teetotaller, her visitors could hardly expect drinks at all hours, and the Duke of Bedford relates that guests could only get alcohol between meals by making friends with the butler in the pantry. As a young man he had stayed at Cliveden, where the house party consisted of racing people, a gang of bright young things, and a set of grave old Americans. He knew no one, scarcely exchanged a word with a soul for three or four days, and had “never been more miserable in the whole of my life.” But his presence must have been noted by the juvenile section because they turned up in his room with the intention of making an apple-pie bed, their thoughtful action being thwarted by his brooding presence on it. Their high spirits were not due to strong spirits because no cocktails were permitted before meals, and though wine was served during the courses it was more of a ritual than a rouser.

  Lady Astor’s main object in life during her career in Parliament was to reconcile opposing factions, and she arranged meetings between Tory diehards and Labour extremists, stern Americans with unbending Englishmen. She believed that agreement could come with understanding; and this faith was the foundation of what came to be known as “the Cliveden set,” a number of people who strongly supported the League of Nations and who honestly thought that Hitler, Mussolini & Co. could be brought to reason if treated with reason, that they could be pacified by common sense and fairness, that if Great Britain disarmed, Germany and Italy would follow suit. The members of this “set” included the Astors and Lord Lothian, and their policy was reflected in The Times and The Observer, both papers owned by the Astors. Lothian was a well-meaning man who considered that friendliness was the key to sound policy; the editor of The Observer, J. L. Garvin, was an unbalanced windbag with Messianic tendencies who lulled himself and his readers with columns of imposing platitudes; while Geoffrey Dawson was a fitting editor of The Times. None of these people had the least knowledge of human nature, and all were fogged by their own theories. If they had occasionally studied life in a public house or read Shakespeare’s picture of a dictator in Macbeth with understanding, they might have learned something to the nation’s advantage. As it was, they believed until it was too late that megalomaniacs were open to argument. Since this was also the view of the Prime Minister and the majority of his Cabinet, it soon got about that the Cliveden set was influencing the policy of the country, and the communists discovered a sinister conspiracy by the Astor clique to give Hitler a free hand. In the prevailing atmosphere the reason of the Cliveden set became another word for treason, and Lady Astor, who abhorred Hitler and all he stood for, was subjected to a campaign of calumny. She, too, like her friends, believed up to the last that the madman of Munich could be appeased, and Consuelo Balsan tells us that as late, as the winter of 1938-39 Lady Astor was preaching in Florida the surrender of the Sudetenland to Germany, assuring everyone that Hitler would never encroach on the liberties of the Czechs. The usual number of truths, half-truths, lies and half-lies went from mouth to mouth as the panic increased, and the Cliveden set became a sort of national bogey. Actually their crime was not treachery but stupidity.

  Plymouth, refusing to join in the general scare, made Lord and Lady Astor the city’s mayor and mayoress in 1939; in the same year their friend Lord Lothian became British Ambassador at Washington; and a little earlier, with the humorous inappropriateness of such occasions, Lady Astor was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Literature by the universities of Birmingham and Reading. In March 1941 Plymouth suffered some of the worst bombing of the war, and the Astors did their utmost for the inhabitants, remaining in the city while the bombs fell. At the end of the war Lady Astor retired from Parliament, aged sixty-six, and with her husband visited the United States. Her idea of a holiday was to address public meetings on the necessity of Anglo-American co-operation. She returned to America several times in the ensuing years and caused a rumpus in 1953 by catching sight of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy sipping a cocktail at a Washington party. “Too bad it isn’t poison,” she said—although according to her standards it was. Her arrest was demanded by a newspaper editor in McCarthy’s home state, but she remained free and at a Red Cross luncheon declared that she did not wish to murder anyone, though while plunging a knife into an anniversary cake she pretended it was McCarthy.{36}

  Her old friends were now leaving her. Charlotte Shaw died in 1943, and she went with G.B.S. to the funeral service, after which she begged him to stay with her at Cliveden and got this reply: “You ask me to come for a quiet time, and you know you will have at least thirty people there, most of them women—and after all I am now the most eligible man in England. It can’t be done.” He was then in his eighty-eighth year. In 1945 Lloyd George died. She admired him more than any other politician of his time. At the age of ninety-four Bernard Shaw went “from sunshine to the sunless land,” and two years later her husband followed him. She left Cliveden and ultimately took a large flat in Eaton Square, London. But her eightieth birthday was spent with her family at Cliveden, when she played golf. “It’s wonderful to be so aged and yet so agile,” she told a reporter. Soon afterwards she became an Honorary Freeman of the city of Plymouth. At an earlier age, when supporting female suffrage, she would have insisted on the title being changed to Freewoman.

  CHAPTER 15—Managing a Genius

  Caroline Balestier and Rudyard Kipling

  It is a pleasant change to drop the subject of important positions and great possessions, and take up a case of genius.

  On a cold foggy January day in 1892 a diminutive congregation gathered together at All Soul’s, Langham Place, London, to witness the marriage of a short English author named Rudyard Kipling to a small American woman n
amed Caroline Balestier. An atmosphere of secrecy surrounded the ceremony because Kipling had become “news” and wished to avoid it. A quiet statement in The Times the following morning was all he desired. Henry James was present to give the bride away, Ambrose Poynter to act as best man, the publisher William Heinemann to satisfy himself; Mr. and Mrs. Edmund Gosse were there as friends, and their son Philip did not know why he was there, but at the end of his life remembered the occasion vividly because he was wearing an Eton collar for the first time and so was impressed by the formality of the proceedings. The clothes of the bride and bridegroom were unobtrusively normal, and no one would have guessed that the group was anything more remarkable than sightseers, though Henry James managed to handle his office with mysterious portentousness as if an Egyptian god were being propitiated. But someone disclosed the secret; perhaps Heinemann’s office boy had received the information through a keyhole; for soon after the party emerged from the church they saw a newspaper placard announcing the event. The bride’s mother being ill, the married pair separated on the steps of the church, but fortunately for them no reporter observed the parting. They were reunited at Brown’s Hotel later in the day,{37} and remained together for the rest of their lives.

  Both Kipling’s grandfathers were Methodist ministers, which accounts for much in his nature. His father, John Lockwood Kipling, was an artist-craftsman, an extremely efficient sculptor, designer and teacher; his mother, Alice Macdonald, was a charming quick-witted woman, whose three sisters married remarkable men, the painters Edward Burne-Jones and Edward Poynter, and the ironmaster Alfred Baldwin, whose son Stanley became Prime Minister of Great Britain. Lockwood first met Alice at Lake Rudyard, not far from Hanley in the Potteries, and their first child was named after that haunt of picnickers. Rudyard was born on December 30, 1865, at Bombay where his father was head of an art school. When he was nearing the age of six, and his sister Trix three, the parents brought them to England, and on returning to India left them at 4 Campbell Road, Southsea, in the care of an ex-naval officer, Captain Holloway, and his wife, who had a boy of their own. Presumably the Holloways made a good impression on the Kipling parents, but after the death of the captain his widow and son made a bad impression on Rudyard. For five years he was brutally ill-treated by the one and bullied by the other, their behavior being described by himself at the end of his life as “calculated torture,” done in the name of religion, the hell to which they subjected him on earth being a foretaste of the hell he could expect after death, because he lied when the truth was punished and then was beaten for not telling the truth. He pictured his sufferings in a short story, “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep”; again in a novel, The Light That Failed; and once more in his autobiography, Something of Myself.

  Throughout these five years of mental and physical anguish in “the House of Desolation” his sole joy was in reading, and when Mrs. Holloway discovered this she punished him by impounding the books, after which he read by stealth in a wretched light and strained his eyes. Once a year he and Trix, who escaped ill-treatment, went for a holiday to the home of his uncle Burne-Jones, the Grange, North End Road, London, which was like heaven after Southsea, the iron bell pull on the gate that led him into paradise becoming a symbol of all the happiness he knew; and when eventually he had a home of his own, and the Grange was no longer inhabited by his relations, he asked for that bell pull and placed it on his own front door, “in the hope that other children might also feel happy when they rang it.” One of their many pleasures at the Grange, after being sent to bed for the night, was to lean over the stair rails “and listen to the loveliest sound in the world—deep-voiced men laughing together over dinner.” Though many people can think of lovelier sounds, this sentiment set the key to much of Kipling’s future work.

  At last he escaped from one horror by means of a tragedy. His eyesight suffered and his schoolwork deteriorated. The master’s reports of his lessons became worse and worse, and one of them was so certain to result in hideous chastisement that he destroyed it, saying that he had not been given it. The lie was detected, and like David Copperfield he was compelled to parade in public with the word LIAR pinned to his back. Soon he was ill and pronounced half-blind on inspection. A period of punishment for pretense followed, but deliverance was at hand. Suddenly, in the spring of 1877, his mother arrived from India, went upstairs to kiss him good night and was shocked when he “flung up an arm to guard off the cuff that I had been trained to expect.” He exchanged hell for a pair of spectacles, and went off with his mother to Epping Forest, where he roamed for some months unalarmed and fancy-free. Then they went to London, where for the first time “the night got into my head” and he rambled about the house and garden in the dark. It may have been claustrophobia, a sense of suffocation, because in later years the desire to leave the house and wander about streets after midnight frequently overcame him. He and his sister could not keep away from the South Kensington Museum, and his innate love of knowledge for its own sake thrived in that atmosphere. He still read voraciously, discovering the stories of Bret Harte and the poems of Emerson, and loving the sounds of certain passages in prose and verse so much that he learned them by heart and said them to himself over and over again.

  At the age of twelve he was fit enough for a further spell of education, and as a great friend of his family, Cormell Price, had recently been made the first headmaster of a new school called the United Services College at Westward Ho! in Devonshire, Rudyard was dispatched thither. He later revived his schooldays in Stalky and Co., and like other writers made the commonplace rough and tumble of school life and his own place in it far more remarkable than the reality. The disillusionment of age tends to make people enhalo their youth. From reading his own account we get the impression of a tough boy who could hold his own in physical combats with his fellows, in verbal encounters with his masters. But a close schoolmate of his named George Beresford, pictured as M’Turk in Stalky and Co., gives us a totally different impression. Beresford described Kipling as “a cheery, capering, podgy little fellow” with a broad smile partly hidden by a pair of spectacles, and an embryonic mustache. His short sight and lack of muscular development prevented him from fighting and saved him from games. He was careful not to quarrel with any boy unless he were backed by allies; he avoided physical violence by cordiality and cunning; “he was always noticeable for his caution and his habit of ‘getting there’ by diplomatic means”; and he could disarm potential opponents by lifting his glasses and gazing at them with large humorous blue eyes.

  His excessive precocity in the matter of reading and turning out verses helped him to popularity with masters and boys, and by plying one master with questions he commenced a course of rifling other folk of their specialized knowledge which lasted a lifetime. The close friendship he formed with the headmaster displayed another characteristic which he found useful in after years: an ability to get on well with people in important positions. He read intensively and could quote from memory long passages in the works of Emerson, Carlyle, Poe, Whitman, Ruskin, Browning, Landor, Mark Twain, all of whom he could imitate and parody with some skill. Toward the end of his time at the United Services College he edited the school magazine and actually got a guinea for an article in some London paper. Funnily enough, in view of their somewhat disparate views and careers, a set of verses he published was almost a crib, both in title and content, of a poem by Oscar Wilde which had appeared a year before.

  In his fifteenth year he fell in love with a girl named Florence Garrard, and when he left school for India two years later he managed to convince himself that they were engaged to one another. But this was the usual schoolboy’s illusion and it was doubtful whether she shared it. In September ‘82 he sailed for Bombay, and in November started work as assistant editor of the Civil and Military Gazette at Lahore, where his father was professor of an art school and curator of the museum, and as a friend of the paper’s proprietor had got Rudyard the job. The lad lived with his parents, and being de
voted to both was happy. As the white staff consisted of himself and the editor, he had a great deal to do and worked from ten to fifteen hours out of the twenty-four. Apart from a month’s holiday each year at Simla or somewhere in the hills, he slogged away at his job in appalling heat and through various attacks of fever for five years. It was a grueling experience, but it taught him a lot, and his hunger for knowledge was insatiable. Not content with the social life at the club and in military messes, he sometimes wandered through the native quarters, visiting the places where men drank, gambled and smoked opium, storing up information for future use and dreaming of the stories he would write. He does not appear to have been popular with his contemporaries, many of whom looked down on him as a mere journalist, and on one occasion he saved himself from an organized ragging by threatening the raggers with a revolver.

  In his twentieth year he began a series of sketches for his paper called Plain Tales from the Hills, and soon after that a collection of verses to be known as Departmental Ditties. These aroused controversy, and in 1887 another of his father’s friends gave him a job on The Pioneer of Allahabad, where he could spread himself with longer stories, many of which were soon seen in paper-backed editions on railway bookstalls, later appearing in more durable volume form. His talent as a writer being recognized, he became socially popular, and people began to observe him closely. One lady described him as looking about forty and getting baldish, though only twenty-two, but she added that he was well informed and animated, telling his stories vividly and keeping his listeners either spellbound or in fits of laughter. From Allahabad he traveled all over northern India, collecting material for his paper and himself. Some of his finest work was suggested by Indian sights, scenes, sounds and smells. Two of the greatest short stories ever written, “The Man Who Would Be King” and “Without Benefit of Clergy,” we owe to Kipling’s imagination working on his experiences of these years, their economy of presentation being due to his habit of reciting all his work aloud to himself over and over again, whereby the language was made easy and the meaning clear.