by Alec Waugh
That was at Christmas, 1921; within three years that estimate had been reconsidered. A great deal was to happen in that short time. In the first place his new wife, Kathleen, was to make herself greatly liked, as a friend, a hostess and a wife. She had a difficult task, following upon Russet, under such conditions, and with two step-children, the elder, a boy, by a first marriage. She displayed poise and tact and friendliness. Yet she was never not a person in her own right. She was fourteen years younger than George and in a number of slight ways his life altered to meet her tastes; they became regular first-nighters, they gave bridge parties, he took up golf. His income had increased as a result of his American trips and they moved into a larger house, in Hyde Park Terrace. Their dinner parties were more elaborate but no less enjoyable. A new marriage that is going well has a contagious, cheerful atmosphere. It is a fire at which friends warm their hands. People were soon saying, ‘Kathleen is very nice. Let’s hope that it works out.’ Because of Kathleen, there was a sudden burgeoning of well-wishing towards George. During his previous marriage, devoted though he had been to Russet, he had never concealed that, while other men might hunt and fish and play golf, his sport was women. He never gave that impression after he married Kathleen.
In the early spring of 1924 he joined the board of Chapman & Hall. To our deliberations at Henrietta Street, he brought a fresh and practical point of view. He could on occasions act as an advocate for a refractory author, but he recognized that a publisher must make money. He also brought into the boardroom the sense of a larger world. On sunny days after the meetings I used to walk back with him across the park. Those walks in retrospect are the pleasantest feature of my years at Henrietta Street.
His wit and quickness of mind and general zest for life were never as keen as they were during that summer. Yet it was in the course of it that we became aware that there was something very wrong with him. His eyes had always been prominent, now they were protuberant. He had lost weight, yet the colour of his cheeks had heightened. He had shaved his moustache which gave him a naked look. He had difficulty with his speech; there seemed something odd about his hands. By the end of the summer his friends were beginning to be shocked by the change in him.
In September he published The Triumph of Gallio. It is a powerful, uncompromising novel, the story of a man who came to believe that nothing mattered, who was equally ruthless and ultimately indifferent towards success and failure, who valued nothing but his own independence. It was the best book that he had written since The Second Blooming, ten years before.
In England George now acted without an agent. He could do his own business as well himself, he said, and thus, save ten per cent, but in America he worked through Carl Brandt. Many years later I wrote to ask Brandt if he could throw any light on this sudden change in the quality of George’s writing. ‘As it happened,’ he answered, ‘I had a good deal to do with his later writing. Out of the air one day he came in to see me. I had always been an admirer of his work, except in the later years. I finally dug out of him what was the trouble. While at that time he did not disclose to me that he feared or knew of the disease he had, he did tell me that it had seemed necessary for him to make as much money as he could as quickly as he could. He therefore, quite cold-bloodedly, decided that sex paid off best, and had cheapened his work. I think I was able to prove to him that it cheapened it to the point where it had no value even in return to himself. Even at that late date he was sufficiently an artist to turn in his tracks and I think you would find in his last two, possibly three, books he was again setting sail on the course which he should have followed from the beginning.
‘It is to me interesting that this should have been a thought-out thing rather than a temperamental one. I’ve always tried to correct the impression that people had of him during the latter part of his career. He didn’t have time enough to re-establish himself in the echelon to which he belonged by right of gift and craftsmanship.’
The Triumph of Gallio made many of those who had before been hostile change their attitude; it aroused admiration where Ursula Trent had aroused irritation and contempt. His illness made him an object of sympathy.
That autumn I gave a lecture at the Lyceum Club. George who was an able speaker was invited to join in the subsequent discussion. He was at the back of the room and I could barely follow what he said. The words seemed to be sticking in his throat. The next day I met him in the Savile. He asked me if I had had any difficulty in hearing him. I told him that I had, a little. ‘I supposed so,’ he said. ‘We must regard it as my swan song.’ Each week the effort of articulation became more marked. It was painful to see him struggling for his words.
His hands also began to be affected. The top joints of his fingers turned inwards; they became claws. After the board meetings, tea was served and it was pathetic to watch him trying to double over the slices of bread and butter with his knuckles. The upper half of the door to the boardroom was composed of frosted glass. It was gruesome to hear him fumbling at the door knob, to see his shadow through the glass and to wonder what manner of spectre would appear when the door opened.
By the summer he could scarcely make himself understood. At the end of the last meeting he attended I went with him to the stairs. The stairs were steep and I wondered if he could get down them safely. I put my hand on his arm. There was scarcely any flesh, just bone within the sleeve. I started to lead him down the stairs, but he began to choke; he seemed to shrink into my arms. He cannot have weighed six stone. I led him back into the room and a chair was brought for him. He tried to say something, but only a gargle came out of his throat. He sat there for two or three moments, then he got up and made his own way to the stairs.
Next day he wrote to explain that he had not fainted but that he had been laughing because he had not been able to make me understand that he wanted me to stand on the other side of him. I never saw him again. He died in the following February, a few days before the publication of Gifts of Sheba—another fine uncompromising novel that left little doubt with critical opinion that he had returned to his best form.
It was, I believe, Parkinson’s disease that killed him. The stoicism with which he faced that illness, and the brave devotion which Kathleen showed—her black hair went white during that year—made many who had been hostile once, respect him. It was ironic that during the war he had said, even if he said it flippantly, that while he would not mind being killed, he could not face disfigurement. It was that very poison that fate chose to hand to him. He drank it unflinchingly, like an antique Roman, and left an honoured name.
9
The Bad Boy in the Georgian Nursery
GILBERT CANNAN, W. W. JACOBS
In March 1914 Henry James contributed two long signed articles to the English Times Literary Supplement on the younger novelists. The four on whom he concentrated were Compton Mackenzie, Hugh Walpole, Gilbert Cannan and D. H. Lawrence. These articles appeared on the front page, and completely filled it. James in them was at his most involved, his most diffuse. It was difficult to discover what he was trying to say, except that he appeared to discern least promise in Lawrence, whom he described as ‘hanging in the dusty rear’. On the whole his articles were welcoming and enthusiastic. It is doubtful if in the history of letters so tremendous a tribute had been paid to four young men. All except Lawrence—and he was to be later—were sponsored by the youngest and the most enterprising of London publishers, Martin Secker. There was much talk of Secker’s young men. The world’s prizes must have seemed to them ripe for gathering but the war intervened with its consequent reappraisal and reversal of reputations.
In the autumn of 1918 W. L. George published a book entitled A Novelist on Novels. It was very obviously the gleanings of a desk; the kind of book that gets compiled when a publisher says to an author, ‘I’d so like to have your name on our list. Isn’t there anything that you could let us have? Haven’t you got some magazine pieces that have never appeared in book form that you could write a pre
face to, so as to give some kind of cohesion to the whole. Do think about it.’
A Novelist on Novels is no more than that, yet I should not be surprised if more references have been made to it during the last forty-five years than any prose book, except Eminent Victorians, published during 1918. It contained a section called ‘Who is the man?’ which propounded the question ‘Who in twenty years time will occupy the position at present held by Conrad, Wells and Bennett?’ For thirty years now that section has provided a convenient lead for anyone writing an obituary of or tribute to an elder writer. ‘In 1918,’ the piece begins. ‘W. L. George was wondering.… Today, quarter of a century later, we can assess the accuracy of his judgment.’ If the lead is right, the other problems of an article fall into place, and George has immeasurably smoothed the path of his successors.
The seven contestants for the laurels were Compton Mackenzie, Hugh Walpole, J. D. Beresford, E. M. Forster, Gilbert Cannan, Oliver Onions, Frank Swinner-ton. A section was devoted to D. H. Lawrence but he was not one of the seven.
I never met Lawrence, but I have been on friendly terms with the other seven. Oliver Onions’s wife, Berta Ruck, has been for many years one of my dearest friends; the only one, however, whom I knew on any terms of intimacy—by that I mean spent a certain amount of time alone with, entertained or been entertained by—was Gilbert Cannan.
His name is rarely mentioned nowadays, but like George’s it occasionally appears in current autobiographies. Ivor Brown calling him ‘the comet of a few seasons’ reminded his readers that in Shaw’s preface to Fanny’s First Play Cannan was the supercilious critic, Gunn. In the early ‘twenties his nerves gave way; he suddenly became violent and in, I believe, a transatlantic liner, seized Horace Liveright by the throat, forced him to his knees and exhorted him to prepare to meet his maker. Kindly hands led him to a sanatorium where he spent the last thirty years of his life; contentedly, believing that he was a guest in a country house, and relieving his literary needs by inditing to politicians long letters that were never posted.
Cannan was raised in Manchester, under squalid conditions; then a rich cousin adopted him, and sent him to Cambridge, where he was at King’s, one of that brilliant many-sided group that included Rupert Brooke, Lytton Strachey, E. M. Forster, John Maynard Keynes. His early novels had a sombre Manchester background. He translated Artzibasheff’s Sanine—presumably from the French—and his first successful novel Round the Corner was greatly influenced by Sanine.
Mendel—my own favourite of his novels—is quite separate from the main current of his work. It is the story of Mark Gertler, a young Jewish painter—his parents had brought him over from Austria at the age of three—of great charm and of good looks, who earned a startling early success, was befriended by Edward Marsh, and whose portrait of his mother, painted when he was still a boy, hangs in the Tate. His success was too meteoric not to be followed by a reverse of fortune, and he died by his own hand in 1939, at the very moment, so some critics maintained, that he was evolving a style of painting that would have justified and fulfilled his promise.
Gertler when still quite young became a close friend of Cannan, stayed with him in the country and told him the story of his early years. Mendel is a direct transcription of those confidences. The book contains portraits of Augustus John, C. R. W. Nevinson, Sir William Rothenstein and Dora Carrington, later Lytton Strachey’s consort, with whom Gertler was in love for many years. Recently Carrington’s brother Noel edited Gertler’s letters. There were constant references to Cannan, and Oliver Edwardes reviewing it in the London Times suggested that Mendel might be well worth reissuing. I myself re-read it recently and was held and moved, but it is difficult when one re-reads a novel to know whether one is moved by the book itself or by the memory of oneself reading it in one’s teens.
At the time, because of its portraits of living people, it did not add to Cannan’s popularity. And Sir William Rothenstein was deeply offended not with Cannan but with Gertler. How could Cannan have known those things unless Gertler had told him?
Cannan’s obituary in The Times was headed ‘Promise unfulfilled’, but in several ways he was the most gifted of the Georgians. Henry James said in his Times article, ‘The charm of Mr Cannan is that we can take him at his word. His guarantee, his straight communication of his general truth is a value and values are rare.’
Douglas Goldring described him in Reputations as ‘the bad boy in the Georgian nursery’ and by the time I met him in January 1917, he had done much to deserve that label. As a young man he had been befriended by J. M. Barrie, but later Barrie was forced to divorce his wife on his account. Mrs Barrie was many years older than Cannan and the marriage soon broke up. When conscription was introduced in 1916, he registered as a conscientious objector. In the last year of the war, he fell in love with a very attractive young South African, of good family, with whom he set up house.
In youth one needs an unpopular cause to champion. Cannan was mine. I fought many verbal battles on his account. I championed his pacifism. I championed his advocacy of free love. They were the easier to champion, because I sincerely admired his novels and because he lent a glamour to misdemeanour. ‘What a world, what a set!’ Matthew Arnold exclaimed in an amusing if priggish passage about Shelley’s London group of Hunt and Hogg ‘with Godwin preaching and holding the hat… one gets sickened for ever of the subject of irregular relationships’, and it must be conceded that the inward eye’s contemplation of certain advocates of licence practising any form of active love evokes discomfort, but Cannan was tall and young and handsome and the lady with whom he shared a studio in Elm Tree Road was as radiant as a bird of Paradise.
Theirs was the first big evening party that I went to. It was given in December 1918, in honour of Mark Gertler. The studio was large, with a stairway leading up to a balcony from which the bedrooms opened. I shall never forget my first sight of her, standing at the stairway’s head; she was fragile and pale-cheeked and small, with blonde hair, cut below the ears, so that it swung loosely like a bell; she was wearing a tight bodice and a terraced skirt, three-layered in pink and mauve and white; her legs were very slim and she wore pink shoes. I shall never forget the timbre in her voice as she waltzed past Cannan who was in a group of talkers, ‘Dance, darling, dance.’
For me she symbolized all that vie de Bohème I had dreamed of in a prison camp. Cannan had met her in the Charing Cross Road, in the Bomb Shop—it is called Collet’s bookshop now—where old Henderson, with his red tie and red beard dispensed revolutionary literature as well as the best avant-garde plays and novels. In addition he published an occasional volume of belles-lettres. His shop was a kind of club. His son Frank was one of Michael Arlen’s first friends in London. It was in the Bomb Shop that Arlen read the volumes of modern poetry that he could not afford to buy. Gilbert Cannan was there, with Miles Malleson, when ‘she’ arrived. As the story has it, they stood there incredulous and dazed, then emerging simultaneously from their trance, they hurried to opposite corners of the shop and, taking down copies of their own books, signed them for her.
I had noticed as I arrived, outside the studio, a very young couple standing in a coign of the wall, enlaced in decorous courtship. Other guests had remarked upon their presence. They were always there, Cannan said, no matter what the weather. On subsequent visits throughout that winter I saw them still, in rain and frost. They seemed like protective spirits, guarding the fortunes of the house. How long did they stay, I wonder? As long as romance itself did, possibly, for so rare a bird was unlikely to remain perched for long on so precarious a bough. Within two years ‘she’ had winged towards wider meadows. I have not met her since, but I have watched with affectionate well-wishing her passage in a larger world.
I met Cannan through my former schoolmaster, S. P. B. Mais. Mais used to write to authors he admired, telling them that he had read their poems and novels to his pupils. Little pleases a writer more than to be told that he is read by the young generation; such
letters led to friendship; they did in Cannan’s case.
Mais was staying with my parents over Christmas, and I cajoled him into including me in an invitation. I can remember little of what was said that evening. Cannan was a silent man. I presume that Mais did all the talking. We went on to the Café Royal afterwards. It was my first time there and the Domino Room was crowded with men back on leave; several groups were in fancy dress and the party at the next table wanted us to go on with them to a dance. I longed to, but I was a cadet at Sandhurst receiving no pay, and my weekly parental allowance of a pound was not doing much more than pay my bus and tube fares. In four months’ time, I told myself, I should be gazetted, with money of my own; then I could accept that kind of invitation.
We talked that evening, naturally, of Mendel. Mais wanted to meet Gertler and see his pictures, so Cannan wrote him a note of introduction. Gertler lived then in Hampstead. ‘We’ll go and see him tomorrow,’ Mais said to me.
We breakfasted early, at Underhill, at eight o’clock. Mais ate, as he did everything, quickly. By quarter past he was on his feet. ‘We’ll go over to see Gertler now,’ he said.
Walking across the heath at Mais’s speed, we reached the studio before nine. It did not at the time seem to me an extraordinary hour to pay a social call, but it must have to Gertler who was not yet up and whose breakfast table was being laid. He concealed his surprise, however, and very courteously showed us round his studio. ‘The Merry-Go-Round’, with its strident orange and red canopy that later was the chief feature of the London Group Exhibition in the Mansard Galleries, was on an easel. I had never before realized how colours could sing.