by Alec Waugh
Cannan at that period lived in a windmill at Cholesbury, a few miles from Berkhamsted, where W. W. Jacobs lived. I paid it a pious pilgrimage. Cannan was not there but we were shown inside. It had been painted in the fashion of the moment with bright primary colours. It was the only time that I have seen a windmill converted into a private residence. As far as I remember there was no miller’s cottage. If there was, it must have been very small. The main rooms were inside the carcase of the mill. The tapering of the cone-shaped walls was most effective.
In the Gertler memorial exhibition in 1941 there was a picture of the windmill with Cannan walking in the garden; there was also ‘The Merry-Go-Round’, its colours as vivid as ever on that grey bomb-scarred day.
Cannan was disliked and disapproved of by many who did not know him, but he was well liked by those who did. I do not indeed see how he could have failed to be. There was nothing to dislike about him; he was well mannered and well-bred; he was never ill-tempered or impatient; he was temperate in drink; he never made scenes; he did not boast about his successes with women; he rarely discussed sex, as is often the case with men who lead full lives; he was single-minded in his devotion to the causes that he championed. As a writer he did nothing cheap.
He was a silent man. I have already described how on our way to a cricket match at Winchester, he and Siegfried Sassoon divided a third-class compartment into two groups of four. To some it may have seemed that he was haughty, arrogant and aloof. A small man can sit silent in a gathering and not be noticed but you are aware of a tall man’s presence. He did not exert himself to be amusing. Myself, I was so stimulated mentally by his company that I talked a lot, but I can imagine that he may have made a self-conscious person more self-conscious. Some people may have found it hard to be themselves with him.
Perhaps he was not only silent but impersonal—a disability that I may not have noticed because I was myself, in my admiration for his work, so at ease with him. In the Gertler letters an interesting passage describes how Mary and St John Hutchinson, when they were staying at the mill, organized a trap so that they could get Cannan alone late at night and induce him to tell them his life story.
‘As a life,’ they said, ‘it was very dull and he told it in a dull dreary voice, all even, but nevertheless it was very important to help us to understand him. You see, it is just as I thought, nothing ever really stirred him, nothing ever made a real impression. When for instance he came to the part of his life when a rich cousin comes as if from nowhere and adopts him, puts him into a rich home suddenly after his own sordid environments and then to Cambridge, he did not seem at all impressed or excited. He did not seem to feel the change and was not surprised. He told it all in the same even bored voice, and so on and so on.…
‘Many, many times we had to pull him up to prevent him from becoming vague and abstract. We would ask him, “What do you mean exactly?” or “Tell us the details”.’
Yet they finally concluded, ‘We really felt that we now understood Gilbert much more.’
His private life caused so much concern to so many strangers. Could it have been that he really was not very interested in it; that he was someone to whom things happened? Can it be that he was a temporarily embodied spirit, for whom eventually the frail fabric between two realities dissolved? His final novels were incomprehensible. He appeared to be travelling in a fog, yet with serene unawareness that bright day was not about him.
Was he overrated between 1910 and 1920? I question it. A novel has to be very good or to have very special qualities of interest to remain alive thirty years after its author’s retirement or death. A novelist who is still around, publishing a book every so often, appearing in public, writing articles, being interviewed, replying to the Toast of Literature, sponsoring the work of the younger generation, retains the public’s interest in his personality and a curiosity towards his early work. If W. L. George and Gilbert Cannan were still alive, I am confident that one or two of their earlier books would be on the book-stalls in a Pan, Penguin, or Pocket Library reprint.
My friendship with Cannan was a cause of considerable concern to my future father-in-law, W. W. Jacobs, who was very perturbed about the kind of people that his daughter would meet when she left his vigilance. Megan Rhys was a source of considerable concern to him. He refused to invite Cannan to our wedding on the grounds, so he wrote to me, of his conscientious-objector attitude during the war; but it was on moral grounds that he explained his fiat to my father. ‘There is Cannan,’ he said, ‘able to go everywhere, and this wretched girl able to go nowhere, cut off for the rest of her life from decent people.’ How that prophecy had been turned topsy-turvy within five years.
I have included a sketch of W. W. in my autobiography and my brother wrote of him at greater length in A Little Learning. The characters in Jacobs’s stories were all rebels against authority. His most famous, Bob Pretty, was a village poacher, his sailors Sam Small and Peter Russet dodged policemen, the night-watchman lived on the windy side of the law, but on the two main issues of politics and sex Jacobs was extremely bigoted.
His reputation as a writer still stands high, deservedly. Few Englishmen have understood the technique of the short story so perfectly and he had a wonderful power of compression. No authors enjoy criticism, and he was indignant with the critic who complained that the night watchman was getting garrulous. ‘If there is one thing he isn’t, it is that.’ Jacobs was right. The night watchman’s ironic commentaries on life remained to the end caustic and concise. Arnold Bennett wrote an essay on him in the New Age called ‘W. W. Jacobs and Aristophanes’ in which he gave the following example of Jacobs’s lean, bleak wit. A man offers a mistrustful wife as an explanation of his late return, the fact that he had seen a boy run over in the street. ‘How long did that take you?’ the wife said. ‘Do you think that funny?’ Bennett asked. ‘I think it very funny.’
There was another criticism that Jacobs did not relish, but of which he admitted the truth. ‘The Biter Bit.’ All his stories fit into that formula. But then that is the classic formula. A situation is set out, a character attempts to solve it, but the solution is achieved in a manner completely opposite to the plan. Most of the best stories fit that formula—those that is to say that depend on plot—and when one has written that kind of story one is wise to ask oneself whether it does or does not conform. If it does not, there may be something wrong with it.
The publisher to whom Jacobs offered his first collection of short stories, Many Cargoes, suggested an outright purchase for £60, an arrangement that was not uncommon in those days. Jacobs insisted on a small royalty and a lease to publish for three years. ‘Beatrice Harraden,’ he would say, ‘was offered the same terms for Ships that Pass in Night, and she accepted them.’
There was another story that Jacobs would recount with a chuckle in connection with Many Cargoes. A reviewer wrote: ‘Jacobs is a neat craftsman, but he works in a narrow field of which he has already exhausted the yield.’ ‘That narrow field’, Jacobs would say, ‘has already yielded fifteen books.’
It was not till late in life that he reached his tether, he then stopped writing. He was a scrupulous and conscientious writer. Editors could trust him not to drop below his own high standard. J. B. Pinker arranged for him an exclusive contract with the Strand at £350 a story for the world serial rights. He believed this to be the highest guaranteed price offered to any English writer at that time, except Rudyard Kipling.
Once, but only once did the editor, H. Greenough Smith, return a story with many apologies; explaining that it fell so much below the Jacobs standard that publication of it would harm Jacobs’s reputation. Jacobs did not want to create a precedent but decided eventually not to object and put aside the story. Three years later Greenough Smith was anxious to have Jacobs in the Christmas number. Jacobs was a slow worker and had not a plot in mind. He took out the discarded story and reread it. It seemed to him all right. He altered three sentences, had it retyped and sent it to the
Strand, saying that he had entirely recast it and believed that in its revised form it was improved. Greenough Smith was delighted, hailing it as vintage Jacobs.
‘The Biter Bit’ was the formula of The Monkey’s Paw, that untypical Jacobs story that has, I suppose, appeared more often in anthologies than anything that he has written. He had a strong vein of the macabre that he rarely exploited. Perhaps he was afraid of it. I once saw a surprising sign of it, when he was staying with us in our Sussex bungalow. The dog—a friendly mongrel—slept in the same room as Barbara and myself. W. W. woke us in the middle of the night fearful lest the dog should turn on the tap of the gas-fire with his teeth. The tap in question was not one that turned but screwed. I doubt if the dog could have turned it with his teeth, even if he had wanted to. The dog had been sleeping with us for a year. Nothing could have been more unlikely than that he should now make the attempt. Jacobs was diffident and hated to appear ridiculous. He must have suffered acute agonies of apprehension before he woke us up. We appeased him in the end by putting a tumbler over the tap.
I may have suggested that because of the narrowness of his opinions in terms of politics and sex, Jacobs was uncongenial company. That was far from being so. He was affectionate, under his reserve; he appreciated the pleasures of the table and his mordant wit gave a sharp keen flavour to the talk. In early days I often found myself arguing with him, and he got impatient when he argued, but I soon learnt not to challenge his provocative statements and to steer the talk into calm waters. Had he married a worldly woman who ‘took life easy’, he would, I believe, have been a contented and benign family man, but perhaps if he had done so his wit would have lost its edge; ‘The wife’ in his stories was always an adversary. Perhaps it was constant domestic friction that kept his wit so sharp. If another kind of woman had made him happy, the night watchman might have become garrulous.
10
The Nail in the Coffin
HUGH WALPOLE
The 1914–18 war caused a reappraisal and sometimes a reversal of literary reputations. When the race began again, the various contestants were entered under different handicaps. No one’s prospects at that point seemed brighter than Hugh Walpole’s. The war had consolidated his position. Bad eyesight unfitted him for the army, but he went to Russia in a Red Cross Unit, acquiring an O.B.E. and a Russian decoration. In his spare time he wrote two novels about Russia in the Russian manner. He also in January 1918 published The Green Mirror—a very English novel on which he had been at work before the war. With The Green Mirror he changed publishers, leaving Secker for Macmillan. Macmillan did not and do not take up a writer unless they are satisfied that he has a long and honourable career ahead of him. Their imprint was the imprimatur on Walpole’s reputation. He was then thirty-five and the ball lay at his feet.
I never knew Walpole well, but I met him fairly often over twenty years, particularly during the 1920s. He was at that time an effective personality with his forces impressively disposed. He had a large house near Regent’s Park where he housed his library and pictures and entertained his friends. He was a familiar figure at first nights, at publishers’ parties and at ladies’ clubs where dinner was followed by short speeches by seven or eight writers. He had a cottage in Cornwall to which he retired for quiet and concentration. He went to America most years.
Everything was going well, everything promised to go well. Each book sold better than the last. His lectures were a great success; to American audiences he seemed the embodiment of all that was best in Britain. He was tall, broad with a bulldog chin. Incipient baldness accentuated his high-domed forehead. He was fresh complexioned; one interviewer nicknamed him ‘Apple-cheeked Hugh’. He had a boyish eagerness; he looked thoroughly wholesome; no ‘flim-flam’ about him; he had an easy forthcoming manner. His father was an Anglican bishop and he had an inherited aptitude for oratory. He took trouble over his lectures. He phrased his sentences well. I heard him lecture once in Brighton, and I can well remember the spontaneous outburst of applause that greeted an eloquent tribute to Walter Scott. He enjoyed lecturing. He appeared to be sorry when his time was up.
He was active in literary politics. As a critic he was generous in his appreciations: always ready to introduce with a preface an American writer to the British public; on such occasions he would often contrive a compliment to one or other of his friends. His preface to Cabell’s Jurgen is an example of this, with its dragged-in reference to J. D. Beresford’s Signs and Wonders. He was anxious to have his friends share in his own good fortune. He was worried at the difficulties young writers were experiencing in getting their work published, and in the autumn of 1919 he wrote a letter to the Times Literary Supplement that started a long correspondence on first novels. Feeling that there should be closer contact between authorship and the trade, he founded the Society of Bookmen, where authors, publishers and booksellers discussed their separate and joint problems at monthly dinners. The Society, I believe, still flourishes. Its first secretary was Maurice Marston, then one of the partners of the now defunct publishing house of Leonard Parsons. Later when the National Book League was formed Marston was its organizing secretary. It is very possible that, but for Walpole, the League would never have been formed.
He had a full and happy life. I recall a lunch party of St John Ervine’s at the Garrick Club in 1926. It was a mixed party, eight of us at a round table. Walpole was in high spirits. He did not monopolize the conversation, but the talk centred round him. I cannot remember anything he said. He was not a witty talker; he was good company not because he said clever things but because he was interested and enthusiastic. It was a small room and we took our coffee where we sat. We were still at table when a club servant announced that ‘Mr Walpole’s car was waiting’. As soon as he left the room we started to discuss him. We agreed that he was the happiest man we knew. St John Ervine wondered if he had ever had an unhappy hour. We were still discussing him when the door opened and he reappeared. There had been a mistake; it had not been his car after all. Conversation ceased.
Walpole looked round the table. ‘Well, what were you saying about me behind my back?’
The pause continued. It was a little awkward. Then Mrs Theodore McKenna spoke. She was the senior person present, and one of his best friends. ‘As a matter of fact Hugh, we were saying how happy you were, and how glad we were about it. We were wondering whether you have ever been unhappy.’
It was said on a note of genuine affection, but for a moment Walpole seemed disconcerted. I fancied that I knew what he was thinking. Dostoevsky’s stock stood high. The man who had not suffered, had not lived. Art sprang from suffering. Walpole did not relish the suggestion that he had not suffered. At the same time he did not want to disparage his own good fortune. He had had bad times, he said, times he would not care to live again, but during these last ten years, well he had to admit that those years had been very, very good. He had been happy pretty well all the time.
That was in 1926. And he was not able to say that much longer. When he died fifteen years later, he was an unhappy man.
That for a writer is a fate by no means unusual. Fashions change; writers lose their talent and appeal; they are lucky if they saved money in their good years. Walpole’s fate was different. Charles Morgan has told in The House of Macmillan that Walpole worked on a ten-year schedule and right to the end he kept to his programme. The last half of the ‘twenties and ‘thirties was a period of solid industry. The Hemes Chronicle, a series of four long novels, sold very well. Between each volume he published shorter but creditable books. He made a great deal of money. He was knighted. To a foreigner, to anyone outside London and New York literary society, he must have seemed to occupy a highly enviable positon. In a sense he did. But he had lost the respect of the only people whose respect he valued. He had become a joke to the intelligentsia.
It has been said that no man has ever been written down by anyone except himself. That was not Walpole’s case. A far better writer with a casual, almos
t a left-hand gesture collapsed his reputation and self-confidence with the portrait in one book of a minor character. As Alroy Kear in Somerset Maugham’s Cakes and Ale, Walpole was presented and made ridiculous as a literary careerist busily grooming himself to be the G.O.M. of the English novel. His technique and tactics were explained, his motives were exposed. He was made ridiculous.
From Walpole’s point of view, the timing of the book could not have been more unlucky. The Athenians wearied of hearing Aristides called the Just, and writers who were suffering the occupational hazards of a profession peculiarly subject to ups and downs, had begun to be irritated by Walpole’s perpetual geniality. Need he always look as though he were the guest of honour at a party at which Life and Literature were the host and hostess? In 1926 Beverley Nichols in his Twenty-Five was amusingly malicious at his expense. After referring to his ‘appearance of complacency’ Nichols concluded ‘he was born middle-aged, but he is rapidly achieving his first childhood’. Walpole was able to parry that attack. He asked Nichols to lunch and a recantation duly appeared in the Sketch. But the number of people who chuckled over that particular chapter was an indication of the way the wind was blowing.
Walpole again looked too well. Actually he suffered from diabetes and had to give himself daily injections of insulin. He drank little alcohol but he had a ‘sweet tooth’, and to correct his indulgences in candy he frequently increased his dose, a practice that ultimately undermined his health. Morbid streaks were detected in his work, in Portrait of a Man with Red Hair particularly. He remained unmarried; gossip did not link his name with any woman’s; people began to wonder. ‘That kind of thing’ was all very well for willowy young men at Broadcasting House but it was scarcely appropriate to ‘Apple-cheeked Hugh’ and ‘the roast beef of Old England’.