I am sending you 12/6 and sticking to the other 10/6 for the present, and as I want to pay Frank as soon as possible I owe you now exactly £1—what ho! I am having a monopoly of the beautiful women in this house now you are gone and [the landlady] says every day ‘What a small party we are now, you will have to do all the talking for those that are away Mr. Brownfield.’ But they haven’t got much out of me yet in the conversation line. Miss Battle says she is pining for you and hopes you will soon be back.
But outside the lace curtains was the poverty of the pavements, barefoot children, the terrible bedraggled feathers of the unsuccessful prostitutes. In his notebook Eddie wrote verses which he never published, in which the muddy street-market in women is forced by the light of its own gas-lamps, “as out of steel and stone grow fire,” to confess the squalid truth.
A poet at heart, he did not expect to be one by profession. At this point he was sending out twenty contributions a week, of which one might be accepted (though payment was sometimes “overlooked”), three “held for consideration”, and the rest rejected.
Like every freelance, he could tell the sound of them as they fell through the letterbox on to the doormat. He was prepared to write on anything. The Tribune favoured political issues, the Observer wanted epigrams on Women’s Rational Dress, “which,” J. L. Garvin wrote to him, “is diverting to me.” Fiction was always a possibility, and Eddie began a novel:
‘Edward Smith stood on the top step of his house in Berkeley Square on a late November evening of 189–. He was immaculately dressed. A fine drizzling rain was falling.’
I never went further than that. There were so many reasons why. What does ‘immaculately dressed’ mean? Wasn’t I merely giving a hint to the reader that the fine drizzling rain would spoil Edward Smith’s clothes? And if so, Edward Smith ought to have called a cab. I was sick of him. I hated him.
Eddie tore up his manuscript, forswore fiction, and determined to lead his life as a truth-teller, as indeed all the four brothers, in their different ways, were to do.
Not surprisingly his digestion, always a weak point, began to break down, and he was advised to try the fashionable vegetarian régime of Eustace Miles. Ronnie, still at Eton, and up in London to see his writer brother, was somewhat disappointed to be taken to the Eustace Miles restaurant, where charcoal biscuits, grass and raisin salads, and “peptonised cocoa” were served; another hazard was the Sunshine Apostle, dressed (according to Eddie’s diary) “as John the Baptist, or even more sacredly,” who commanded the customers to eat fruit and go naked, as in the Garden of Eden. After Ronnie had been sent safely back to Bishopscourt, Eddie felt impelled to go to the Gaiety, drink too much brandy, and return to Bayswater at five in the morning.
“October 7: Started Eustace Miles diet in earnest. Feel like a cow … Went to call at Miss B.’s flat. No response to the bell. Began an ode to a bus-horse. Subject promises well. Can find no news in today’s papers. Bored.”
Punch accepted the ode. But he needed regular commissions, and if possible a job, and he began, with his distinctive mixture of modesty and dash, to try his luck at personal interviews.
“When I began to write,” he observed dryly in 1952, “it was much easier to get advice than payment. I do not know whether that is still so today.” Robertson Nichol, the fluent editor of The Bookman, warned him never to exceed three thousand words a day, advice which Eddie had no difficulty in taking. He was depressed by the hall of Nichol’s house, piled with review copies and leaving only a narrow tunnel for entrance and exit, which seemed altogether symbolic of the fate of a book reviewer. The most important introduction he had, however, was to Edward Hulton, proprietor of the Daily Despatch. Through the manager of the Manchester Guardian, Eddie was told: “You should be prepared to explain fully to Mr. Hulton what you think you could do, and ready also to volunteer a specimen of your own work.” Shrinking from the prospect of the specimen, he was ushered into the room:
To my surprise it was not a very large room. There were two chairs in it, one in which he sat at the desk, and one close beside it. I thought he would ask me to sit in the second chair and talk to me about my life and my art. He did not do this. He left me standing where I was, and pulling the second chair rather closer, placed his own feet upon it. I did not feel that I should do any good work for that paper, and the whole interview was a failure.
Occasionally he had a stroke of luck. A friend asked him to do the theatre notices for the Standard while he was away, and in this way Eddie saw the early appearances of the enchanting Irish Stage Society at the Court. In those days the critic had to leave by the end of the second act to get his copy in by midnight—which was why Act Three was often said to be “much inferior to the others”—and was obliged to wear full evening dress with a “gibus”, a top hat with springs, which could be folded and sat upon. This was necessary, even for wild Celtic and nationalist drama. A little later, he had an interview with the Saturday Review, but they offered only a hundred pounds a year for three articles a week, including the political column, and he would have to learn shorthand typing at once.
Desmond MacCarthy, the most genial of Irish critics, had been at King’s, and wanted to help Dilly’s brother, as he wanted to help everybody he met. He also knew everybody. Eddie must come with him and ask advice from James Barrie, who was at the height of his fame, though he could sometimes be a little disconcerting, unless the side of him which spoke to adults, and which he called “McConachie”, happened to be foremost. Buoyed up by Mac-Carthy’s confidence, the two of them called at 133 Gloucester Terrace, where they found the room empty, except for a large dog, with which Barrie used to play hide-and-seek in the Park. While they waited, Eddie in sheer nervousness hit his hand on the marble mantelpiece. It began to bleed profusely. MacCarthy was aghast. Barrie could not bear the sight of blood. They tried to staunch it with handkerchiefs, and with the cuffs of MacCarthy’s soft shirt, which became deeply stained. Barrie appeared in the doorway, took one look at them, and withdrew. Kind-hearted though he was, he was obliged to send down a message that he could not see them.
Eddie judged it was time to call upon Owen Seaman, the editor of Punch, who now reigned, heavy, scrupulous and autocratic, in the Bouverie Street office. Eddie described to him the Saturday Review’s offer. “And what did you say to this indecent proposal?” Seaman asked.
He himself did not pay high rates, but he knew that in this young man he had a writer of light verse whom he could not afford to overlook. He hinted, in a tone as serious as the Bishop’s when addressing ordinands, that there might, in time, be a vacancy on the staff. Meanwhile, Eddie succeeded in getting his first job, as sub-editor on The Pall Mall Magazine.
The Pall Mall first appeared in 1893, running stories by Hardy and Conan Doyle, Kipling’s Barrack-Room Ballads and illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley; and in 1907 it was still a “quality read”. The editor was Sir Douglas Straight, now at the end of a varied and successful career, and passionately interested, for the moment, in bicycling and in exploring the Thames in his steam-launch. Much of the work was left to his assistant. “Two vast hampers stood upon the floor, one of manuscripts coming in, the other for those to be sent back. I had to pass them from one to the other, and there was a danger that on very hot afternoons, when one was sleepy, one would accidentally reverse the process and have all the stories to read again.” Most were historical romances, “with rescued heroines and overturned wine-glasses. We were much inhibited in those days.” On the other hand, Straight would have moments of great attention to detail; when they printed an illustrated story in which the hangman “quite naturally” happened to live next door to the condemned man, he was worried as to whether a hangman ought to wear gloves. Eddie was dispatched to find out, and walked up and down all day outside Pentonville, “not liking to go in and ask.”
His own contributions, whether signed or not, were all read at Bishopscourt, and he wrote home dutifully; he knew he had justified himself in the eyes of
his father. But lodgings in London could be lonely, and in search of sympathetic companionship, Eddie would do much. For the sake of Mary Creighton, who lived with her mother, the widow of the Bishop of London, he endured visits to their terrifying house, where you had to go through the drawing room to get to the lavatory, and where the Bishop’s study was kept exactly as it had been on the day he died. Mrs Creighton crushed him, and so did Mary, because he was only a journalist. Very different was Peggy Beech, the spirited actress daughter of the Rector of Great Bealings. Her most successful part, one of few, was Beauty in Pinkie and the Fairies. She refused Eddie’s proposal of marriage, but then changed her mind. “How awkward it is,” Eddie noted in his diary, “when you have led a lady who has rejected you to suppose that you will love her for ever, and then find that you were mistaken—but she fails to realise it.” Arriving, entirely self-invited, at Bishopscourt, where the lawns were “infested with missionary garden-parties” and Mrs K. was almost at her wits’ end, Peggy threw open her travelling-bag and took out a large Bible. “I know how to behave in a Bishop’s household!” she cried. But if she was disappointed in her reception, Peggy Beech was not likely to lose heart. “LIFE interests me vividly,” she wrote, “PEOPLE—THE PRESENT—THE FUTURE—for me THE PAST IS over and done with—DUSTY AND SAD.”
It was Winnie, the most loyal of sisters, who had to entertain the colourful visitor, for Eddie suddenly found himself called away. Wilfred was at student camp that summer. Dilly, lingering at Talgarth Road, had news from Cambridge of Headlam and his imaginary ailments. He was convinced that he was dangerously ill, but his pupils had contrived to steal his medical dictionary, after which he had been perfectly happy again. He had flirted mildly with the young Virginia Stephen, had chalked a young lady’s nose in a billiards-room, and had appeared at the college ball to dance the post-horn gallop. In June 1908 Dilly was hoping to meet him in London; he was coming up for a conference.
Headlam reached London without mishap, which in itself was a matter for congratulation, but that night he collapsed in his hotel bedroom, and died. He was forty-two, and he had not yet edited Herodas.
Dilly went up to King’s for the rest of the summer vacation, and was given the room directly under Maynard Keynes, now a lecturer in economics. Shortly afterward, Keynes moved into Headlam’s old rooms, and the faded crimson curtains were rapidly cleared away, with the familiar muddle of years. George Thompson, another of Headlam’s pupils, inherited the notes on Aeschylus; John Sheppard and Dilly set to work on Herodas. Dilly became a Fellow in the following year, 1909.
Ronnie, in an affectionate attempt to please everybody, went to camp (which he hated) with Wilfred, then to Blackpool to help with the Mission, but he was not quite in a settled frame of mind. He was reconciled to Balliol, though he still regretted its great days under Jowett:
My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow over Balliol Hall,
As though the Cosmos were controlled
By Dr Jowett, after all …
His academic career, however, had met with a slight but noticeable setback. He had got only a second class in Honour Mods, not because, like Dilly, he had lost interest, but because he had been so confident of his knowledge that he had not bothered to re-read his texts. No one doubted that he was an exceptional scholar, but the second class distressed him. He would have preferred, like Newman, to fail altogether.
His faith was undisturbed—it was necessary for him, he said, to believe either everything or nothing—but he had come to feel the need not only for ritual but for private confession and absolution. He had told his father, who had not forbidden it—but how long would it be before the situation at home grew unendurably painful?
In other ways he must, at twenty years old, come to terms with his emotions. At school he had felt, like most sensitive boys, intense affections. On this subject A. C. Benson wrote: “I do not fail to ask the younger boys, especially those that are likely to be exposed to temptation and who make friendships easily and widely, two or three times in a half whether they are on the right path.” But he need not have been disturbed about Ronnie, to whom these innocent obsessions had been part of “youth all round you and within you, and the river flowing through it all to remind you of transcience and eternity.” Now at Oxford he still made friends “easily and widely”, and his mantelpiece was invisible beneath his many invitation cards to conferences, lectures and debates. He did not see Wilfred as much as before—as he put it to Mrs K., “there have been less meetings of the Oxford branch,” partly because they no longer believed the same things, partly because Wilfred looked with some reservations on the “carriage folk”—the golden generation, charming and spirited, but undisputably “other”, who were Ronnie’s closest circle. Julian Grenfell and Charles Lister, Lord Ribblesdale’s second son, had been at Eton with him and had come up to Balliol in the same year; though Ronnie certainly did not cultivate these people—they loved him unreservedly and wanted him for a friend—it was still true that he romanticized them, just a little.
What was he to do with his life? He had to work for his Finals, but already there were suggestions of a Fellowship at Balliol or Trinity, and both Balfour and F. E. Smith had conveyed hints that he would be acceptable as a private secretary. That would mean a glittering future in the world outside Oxford, and outside the Church. The idea of the priesthood, in fact, had scarcely occurred to him as yet.
“I have had a romance,” he wrote to Mrs K., in June 1908; he had been bicycling with an Oxford friend, Guy Field, and had had a puncture:
We coasted into the next village, called Oakley, and asked a cart if there was a pub about. The cart said that there were five. When it had gone a little way, two people out of it came back and said ‘Wouldn’t we like to mend the puncture at the Vicarage?’ They were the Vicar’s two daughters. We said ‘Delighted’. So I mended the puncture very efficiently, while they held lanterns and conversed with us.
True, an impartial critic could not call either of them extremely beautiful. True, also, that we left without any exchange of addresses. True, that a young man helped me remove the mud-guard, whom Guy Field takes to be a fiancé of one. But who shall say it was not a romance, because the threads were broken?
Such things, of course, had to be treated light-heartedly, in the style of the fragrant Edwardian tales of summer which Eddie was still putting into his hamper of rejected manuscripts. But it shows Ronnie delicately poised, in spite of all his achievements, between this way and that. God speaks to us through the intellect, and through the intellect we should direct our lives. But if we are creatures of reason, what are we to do with our hearts?
IV
1907–1914
Knoxes and Brother
IT WAS SUGGESTED MORE THAN ONCE that the sons of Bishop Knox, like the sons of Bishop Benson, ought to form some kind of firm or co-operative with their intelligence as capital; in that case, Wilfred said, it would have to be called Knoxes and Brother. He was acknowledging the tendency to think of him as the most reliable, quietest, but least brilliant, and so forth. This was a misconception, but certainly, in the decade before the First World War, Dilly and Wilfred seemed as far apart in their spheres of life as it was possible for the family temperament to be.
Dilly was very happy at King’s, where Monty James was now the genial Provost (the Lodge door was never locked, and whisky, cards and tobacco were always ready in the hall). True, James was said to be disturbed by intellectualism and to rap sharply on the table with his pipe: “No thinking, gentlemen, please!” and Dilly blamed him for the intrusion of ghosts, mysterious footfalls and general peering into the Beyond which was to disturb the college in future years. But the atmosphere, even without the irrecoverable charm of Headlam, was lively. Maynard Keynes, now in impetuous pursuit of reform, pressed for a higher dividend for the Fellows, reorganization of the catering, enquiry into the working conditions of the staff and the resignation of the Bursar. Dilly was one of the “Young Turks” in s
upport of Keynes against what was said to be the leading principle of King’s—never to do anything for the first time. Although he found it almost impossible to be in time for the Councils of War, held before the college meetings, he attacked the Bursar through the columns of Basileon. In successive numbers he appealed to the Bursar to inspect the rats in the Fellows’ bedrooms, then to come to the rescue of the rats because the rooms were now so damp that they were being driven out by water rats, lastly to provide better care for the water rats whose “nasty cough” kept the younger Fellows awake at night. At the same time he felt a deep, though cautious, admiration for Keynes’s insistence that money, including the college funds, was there to be spent. Keynes had succeeded in pushing up the Fellows’ dividend from £110 to £150, ensuring, as Moore would have recommended, an increased distribution of what is intrinsically good.
Cambridge was still, as a contemporary put it, suffused with the golden glow of homosexuality in its most creative aspect, a source of emotion and art, and a relief from hard thinking. The amiable abstracted figure of Dilly, among many shifting intrigues, impressed Lytton Strachey, with his highly developed sense of comic structure. He had not objected to Dilly’s presentation of him as Screachey in The Limit; he had been certain, in 1906, that Walter Lamb, Henry’s brother, was in love with the “divine ambiguous Knox”. “Knox very graciously asked me to lunch on Sunday,” he wrote to Duncan Grant. “Lamb and Keynes were there too. I was of course too timid to say much, and Keynes and I soon departed, leaving the lovers, or quasi-lovers, nose to nose upon a green velvet divan. I hoped for at least a declaration; but alas! they merely talked (as I learnt afterwards from Walter) about the Cambridge Review.” The following January Dilly appeared “wonderfully décolleté” (which probably meant that, as occasionally happened, he had forgotten his tie) at one of the evening “salons” held by the amiable classicist John Sheppard, who later became Provost. “Sheppard remained a block. Good God Almighty!” But Dilly, as his letters show, had only come to discuss the gross errors in the Crusius edition of Herodas.
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