As Berry and I Were Saying

by Dornford Yates

  “All this,” said Jill, “because you played in The Clouds?”

  “I’m afraid you must put it that way. The fact attracted attention which I in no way deserved. In the first place, The Clouds had not been performed for more than two thousand years – people came from America to see it: in the second place, the part which I played had probably been created by Aristophanes himself. I, therefore, reflected some glory and, as is so often the way, the reflection hung on for a bit, like the grin of the Cheshire Cat.”

  “I saw it,” said Berry, “for I was up at the time; and without desiring to detract in any way from the majesty of your performance, I must most frankly declare that never in all my life have I been so bored. I have a great respect for the Classics, though Aristophanes’ particular brand of humour has sometimes seemed to me to be as gratuitously broad as it is unnecessarily long; but three solid hours of nothing but Greek dialogue, of which, I need hardly say, I understood not one solitary word, proved very hard to digest. I was told that the music was superb: possibly it was: I remember a lot of men dressed up as women, yelling their guts out from time to time…”

  “That,” said I, “was The Chorus.”

  “No doubt. But when you allege that presumably responsible individuals came all the way from America to see that show, all I can say is that if, having sat through one performance, they didn’t do themselves violence, their erudition must have been that of the fanatic. I mean, there wasn’t one moment’s entertainment for the man in the street.”

  “That was not my fault. If I had had my way, you would have had just ten seconds’ entertainment in that dull show. And you ought to have had it, for Aristophanes meant you to.”

  “What,” said my sister, “do you mean?”

  “Well, I think this should be on record. You know what I mean by patter?”

  “In Iolanthe,” said Jill. “‘When you’re lying awake, with a splitting head-ache.’ I love it.”

  “That’s right. Gilbert used it. Properly done, it is truly entertaining. Well, patter’s very ancient. Aristophanes used it in The Clouds.”

  “Not the night I was there,” said Berry.

  “Nor on any other night. Now listen. The patter belonged to the part which I was selected to play. It was some twenty lines long, and all, of course, in Greek. It took me weeks to master: it was a question of the rapid enunciation of unfamiliar words: but at last I could say it, as patter should be said: every word audible, but given at lightning speed. I kept this up my sleeve. There were a lot of important people present at the first word-perfect rehearsal. When I came to my patter, I let go. They were taken completely by surprise: then there was a burst of applause. But the don who was producing The Clouds felt otherwise. I was not among his favourites. He insisted that I should say it at the ordinary speed. I begged in vain. ‘People won’t get the meaning if you say it so fast.’ Possibly not. I don’t know. True scholars are very quick. But the point is that I had delivered it as Aristophanes meant it to be delivered, and, as likely as not, as he delivered it himself.”

  “My dear,” said Daphne, “it must have broken your heart.”

  “I confess I was disappointed: but that didn’t matter at all. What did matter was that a very great number of people, who were not scholars, would have been most interested to know that patter does not date from Gilbert and Sullivan, but from 423 BC.”

  “A blasted scandal,” said Berry. “‘People won’t get the meaning.’ What filthy tripe. How many people can follow the Iolanthe patter, word for word? But it’s the pace they love. Damn it, it’s the pace that makes it. The tongue is doing its best to beat the ear.”

  “That’s how I saw it,” said I. “But there we are.”

  “That must go in,” said Daphne. “That is a sidelight on history. You must have felt very bitter.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. But I did get back on him later.”

  “How was that?”

  “Well, I wasn’t in favour of a Greek Play, for it meant that some of the best amateur actors in the University were washed out, because they couldn’t speak Greek. But when the Vice-Chancellor, Jowett of Balliol, gave the OUDS their charter, he stipulated that every four years they should produce a Greek play. And so we had to do it. Well, when I was Secretary, this fellow came to me and said that The Clouds had been such a success that the four years must be cut to two. As an Officer of the Club, I told him where he got off. ‘You mean you won’t do one next year?’ ‘That,’ said I, ‘is precisely what I mean.’ ‘All right,’ he said, ‘we’ll do one. I’ll see to that. And we’ll do it at the Town Hall, during the week in which you do your play. And we’ll see who makes the most money.’ The threat was serious. The Club cost a lot to run, and the state of our finances was not too good. I tried to think what to do. Then I went down to St Aldgates’ and saw the Town Clerk. I didn’t tell him anything. I simply retained the Town Hall for the week in which we should be doing our play. I paid him a fee of two guineas, which, when they had heard my story, the Committee immediately passed. And now it’s Berry’s turn.”

  “Nice work,” said Berry. “I suppose it’s too much to hope that he remembered you in his prayers. But let that go…

  “It is not generally known that Her Most Gracious Majesty, Queen Victoria, once visited a man’s Club.”

  “I don’t believe you,” said Daphne.

  “Yes, she did. And I don’t have to tell you that it was all above board. The Queen was driving down St James’s Street, when the last of the scaffolding was being taken away from the facade of a fine, new building close to the bottom of the street on the right-hand side. The Queen asked what it was. The equerry told her that it was the new house of the Conservative Club. ‘It’s very handsome,’ said the Queen. Then she added thoughtfully, ‘I’ve always wished I could see the inside of a Club. I’m told they’re very comfortable.’ A few hours later the equerry informed her that the Chairman and Committee of the Conservative Club would count it a very great honour if Her Majesty would care to visit their new house before the members were admitted. The members were to be admitted at mid-day in a few days’ time. One hour before that, Her Majesty arrived. And she went all over the Club from bottom to top. In memory of her visit a very fine bust of the Queen commanded the landing halfway up the magnificent stairs.

  “The Conservative was a very old-fashioned Club. When I became a member, with two or three exceptions, I was the youngest member by many years. The spittoon and the goutstool were still in evidence, though I must confess that the former was never used. Old gentlemen used to wear their hats – silk, of course – in the morning-room. Only in three rooms was smoking allowed. The grates were huge, and the blocks of coal were sometimes so large that it required two servants to put one on. Except for the hall-porters and one or two servants in the coffee-room, all servants always wore breeches, black stockings and buckled shoes. And the service they gave was impeccable. Perhaps I should add that they were, one and all, immensely proud of the Club. When they retired, they were always handsomely pensioned, for so long as they lived. The food was cheap and the kitchen extremely good. The cellar was renowned. The peace within those walls, I shall always remember. All was so quiet and dignified. A footfall on a tessellated floor, the gentle closing of a tall mahogany door, the sudden, sprightly tick of the tape-machine – those seem to me, looking back, to have been the only sounds. But then, you know, it was an old-fashioned Club.”

  Jill was looking at me.

  “You put the groom of the chambers in Period Stuff.”

  “That’s perfectly true,” I said: “and his name and all. The picture I drew was strictly accurate.”

  “There was someone in Blood Royal.”

  “Something, not someone,” I said. “One night I was dining in Curzon Street, at a well-known physician’s house. He had attended the old Duke of Cambridge, who had died the day before. When the women had left the table, he called me to sit by his side. ‘Would you like to know,’ he said, ‘what were
the last words of the Duke of Cambridge?’ I said that I should – very much. ‘They were, Where the hell’s the barber?’ So I toned them down and put them into the mouth of the dying Prince in Blood Royal.”

  “And Duke Paul?”

  “Duke Paul was founded on the picture presented by a man I once came across. It was not, of course, a portrait. But, placed asDuke Paul was placed, he would, I am sure, have done as Duke Paul did.”

  “In every particular?” said Berry.

  “In every particular.”

  “I gather,” said Berry, “that he was unattractive.”

  “I found him so.”

  “Rogues,” said Daphne. “You haven’t met any rogues.”

  “I’m afraid all my rogues belong to my imagination.”

  “They work all right,” said Berry: “the reason, of course, being that, as nobody else knows what a rogue is like, people have to take your word for it.”

  “I suppose that’s so. At least, I’ve had no complaints.”

  “I always love Punter,” said Jill.

  “He’s an old friend,” said I, “as he once pointed out himself.”

  “Brevet,” said Berry, “gave me peculiar pleasure.”

  “So he did me. I shouldn’t say that; but he did.”

  “Had he run straight, he might have dined out in London almost every night of his life.”

  “I quite agree.”

  “His scornful appreciation of Pope when he was virtually standing on the scaffold was a brain-wave.”

  “The ruling passion,” said I, “is strong in death.”

  “Oh, I know,” said Daphne. “Proofs. Don’t you hate correcting your proofs?”

  “I can’t say I enjoy it,” I said, “for it’s most exacting work. If I can possibly help it, I never do more than, say, two chapters a day. It demands very high concentration, because the author knows his stuff so well that it is extremely easy for him to miss a mistake. Not a big mistake, of course. He’ll see that at once – as nobody else will see it. If a sentence is omitted, for instance – he’ll never miss that. But ‘literals’, that is to say, misprints, he may easily miss. ‘That’ for ‘than’, for instance, or the omission of inverted commas, or letters misplaced, or ‘man’ for ‘men’ – little things that matter.

  “I know I’m particular, but I can see no point in doing your best to write the best English you can, if the reproduction of your prose is to be faulty. And so I get down to it.

  “There are two sets of proofs which the author should always read. The first are called the ‘galley proofs’ or ‘slip proofs’. These are accursed things to handle. They’re about six inches wide by twenty-seven inches long, and the paper is usually vile. But the value of the slip proof is this – that you can alter it as you please. If you want to cut out fifty lines, you can: if you want to add fifty lines, you can. You can do anything you like – to the slip proof. Well, you correct or alter your slip proof and send it back. Then you receive a ‘page proof’. Except that the page proof is bound in brown paper, instead of in cloth, it almost exactly resembles the book in its finished form. Title-page, fly-leaves, preface – all are there: and all the pages are numbered. In that page proof should be embodied all the corrections or alterations which you made to the slip proof. Well, you read that: and you are fortunate indeed, if you find no more mistakes. In fact, you find a great many. Some are mistakes which you missed in the slip proof. Others are mistakes, because your instructions upon the slip proof have not been carried out. Others are new mistakes – don’t ask me why, but they are. But the main thing is this – that, except in an emergency, no page must be upset: so that any correction or alteration must be very slight.”

  “Emergency?” said my sister.

  “Well, supposing that by the carelessness of a compositor, a whole paragraph has been omitted. Well, it’s got to go in. That may upset sixty pages. It may upset the rest of the book. But that can’t be helped. Blind Corner was a case in point. I was never sent any slip proofs, as, of course, I should have been. When I was reading the page proof, I found that the well-digger’s statement, which I had marked to be printed in italic, had been printed in type so small that it could hardly be read. Now, as the whole tale was founded on that statement, it was of great importance that it should be at least as easy to read as the rest of the text. Well, it was up to the printers, for I, of course, declined to pass the proof. It meant rearranging about forty pages. But it had to be done.

  “What drives an author quite mad – at least, it drives me quite mad – is to find that some reader or other has amended what I have written, because he prefers his amendment to the original.”

  Berry was bristling.

  “Look here,” he said, “if any imitation scholiast presumes to ‘improve’ any of my monographs—”

  “That’s all right,” I said, laughing. “I’ll see they don’t. But now you understand how I feel. As I always say, query the stuff by all means. Shove your queries down in the margin, and I’ll be grateful to read them: but never alter something, without my consent.”

  “Are they ever right?”

  “In one case in twenty they are. A curious thing happened once. Quite early on, Ward Lock always sent me what is called a ‘specimen page’, that is to say, two or three pages, for me to approve the lay-out; for these appear as the book itself will appear. They did this, as usual, with – well, one of my books. I thought it looked very nice, and idly enough I began to glance down the first page. After three lines I stopped. A sentence of mine had been altered – that I knew. (You must understand that so far I’d seen no proofs.) I read on rapidly. Sentence after sentence had been altered, entirely destroying the rhythm and generally wrecking my prose. I wrote to Ward Lock there and then, to ask what it meant, for Wilfred Lock knew very well how very particular I was. He was horrified – and went into the matter at once. And this was the explanation. The head of the firm of printers to whom the book had been entrusted had not long succeeded to that position: and he was very anxious to do a first-class job. So he thought he’d begin with the MS and get that right. And so he had been right through it himself, from beginning to end, amending and correcting my English, as best he could.”

  “God in heaven,” said Berry.

  “All this, with the utmost goodwill. And then he had given it to the compositors. Of course the whole book had to be scrapped and set again. I had a spare copy, and so they set from that. But one couldn’t be angry, for the head of the firm had meant so terribly well. God knows how long it took him to do: but his one idea was to do a first-class job.”

  “Poor man,” said Daphne. “He must have been so mortified. But what an extraordinary outlook.”

  “It had us all beat. In fact it didn’t matter, for they cleared the decks and did a fresh book at once – of course, at their own expense. But it was a queer business. The mercy was, of course, that they’d sent me a specimen page. Otherwise, we should have known nothing until I received the slips.”

  “One moment. ‘Entirely destroying the rhythm.’ What does that actually mean?”

  “I always think that rhythm is very hard to define. Either you’re good at rhythm, or you are not. It’s really a matter of ear. When I began to write, I used to read what I’d written over aloud, to see if it was rhythmical. Now I know whether or no it is, without doing that. If, when read aloud, the prose seems to be effortless, then it is rhythmical. If it doesn’t, it isn’t. That’s a very rough definition: Fowler the Great deals with rhythm in his usual, masterly way: but he takes two pages to do it.”

  “And when you’ve passed the page proofs, that is that?”

  “Yes. Then the corrections are made, and the book goes to press. The next time I see it is when I receive an advance copy. That’s properly bound, of course. I always go carefully through that – and if corrections have been missed, I go off the deep end. And I don’t think you can blame me. But they very seldom have been. Sometimes there are two or three ‘literals’ that I h
ave missed myself. These things are put right in the second edition.”

  “Edition,” said Daphne. “That’s what I want to know. I’ve always wanted to know, and I’ve always forgotten to ask. You often see an advertisement of some book, saying ‘Now in its third edition – or fourth or fifth.’ How large is ‘an edition’?”

  “An edition, my sweet, can consist of five hundred copies or of fifty thousand copies or of any number in between. Unless you know the size of the editions printed, the information that a book is in its third or fourth edition means nothing at all. And only the publisher, the printer and, sometimes, the author know the truth. ‘Now in its third edition’ may mean that over a thousand copies have already been sold, or that over a hundred thousand have already been sold. Without that information, the statement is valueless.”

  “God bless my soul,” said Berry. “And how many poor fools know that?”

  10

  “The other night,” I said, “I mentioned Valerie French. I had no idea of writing that book, but my publishers were greatly upset by the end of Anthony Lyveden and put great pressure upon me to alter it. This, I refused to do. But they were so insistent that I said, ‘Well, I’ll tell you what. I’ll write a sequel. And at the end of Anthony Lyveden, print these words, To be followed by Valerie French.’ With this, they were quite content, and you can see those words in the first edition today.”

  “Did you ever alter the end of any book?”

  “Once, when the book was appearing in serial form. This Publican appeared in serial form in Woman’s Journal, and the Lady Editor begged me to change the last few words. ‘They’re absolutely true to life, but they’re too savage.’ So I laughed and rewrote the last few sentences – only for the serial, of course. The book stayed as it was.”

  “Very interesting,” said Berry. “She knew her public, and she knew it would shrink from the truth.”

  “Something like that.”

  “‘True to life’,” said Jill. “It was because it wouldn’t have been true to life that you wouldn’t…you wouldn’t…”