by Alec Waugh
“Not altogether. The less I spent of the money that’ll one day be theirs, the better.”
“But now your wife is dead ...”
“Now of course I have to go back and take up my responsibilities.”
He said it in such a way that ‘take up my responsibilities’ were put into inverted commas.
“When are you leaving?”
“On the next eastbound boat.”
“That’s the one I’m taking.”
“Good, then we’ll see something of each other.”
He looked at me again with the appraising look that he had assumed at our first meeting. “I’ll enjoy that,” he said, “though it’s the last thing I could have foreseen myself as saying thirty years ago.”
Authors get used to having odd things said to them, but this was more than usually unexpected.
“May I ask why?” I said.
“That first book of yours. I disapproved of it. Subjects like that are better not discussed.” My first book I must explain, written at the age of seventeen, was a Public School story. It dealt in one chapter more realistically than was then considered prudent with the consequences of herding together in monastic seclusion boys who are almost men and boys who are almost children. It caused a succès de scandale at the time. Its scarlet passages seem very tame to-day.
“If you believe that, you’ve got one or two rather unexpected books on your own shelves,” I said.
“For instance?”
“Si le grain ne meurt.”
“Oh, so you noticed that.” He flushed. He paused. “One’s opinions alter. I said thirty years ago, remember.”
I looked at him thoughtfully. There was something odd about him, something that did not ring quite true, something that did not quite add up. That story about his coming to live in Seychelles because of income-tax. It seemed contrived. I looked forward to seeing more of him on the Kampala.
6. The Woman Who Knew Frank Harris
My Chapter The Beachcomber’s Arms’ may have given the impression that it is only males who have been “cast up as by a sudden freshet on these ultimate islands”. That is not the case; there are at least half a dozen ladies whom the tides of divorce and death and contrary fortune have stranded there. There is Miss Deakin, for example, whom 1940 found in what she insists were her late sixties—though no one would imagine from her appearance that she was more than sixty now—in the British colony in Athens, with orders issued for her evacuation.
During the next few months she was to be moved from one threatened area to the next. She is a lady with high powers of resistance. She was once a suffragette; she had political affiliations with Lady Astor. After one of her public meetings a man in the audience sent up a business card on the back of which was pencilled, “I’ll offer you five hundred a year to sell my soap.” She fought a steady rearguard action against the various consular authorities who moved her from Crete to Cyprus, from Cairo to Mombasa, thence to Mahé where the immigration authorities demanded a deposit of fifty pounds. She possessed a reasonable amount in travellers’ cheques, but she objected on principle. She was an evacuee, against her will; she was not an immigrant; she had not wanted to come here. The Government was responsible for her presence. If anyone had to pay, it was the Government. Moral right clearly was on her side. But in the end she had to pay. Not, however, until she had caused a full hundred pounds’ worth of nuisance.
She has remained in the colony ever since, and a few months ago her deposit of fifty pounds was returned to her. Her stay in Mahé has been dramatic. In the battling days of W. E. Henley and the National Observer, a journalist applying for the post of book reviewer claimed as his strong point ‘a capacity for general invective’. That is Miss Deakin’s strong point, too. I have heard her attack in the same argument the Old Testament, the Governor of the island, the morals of the British stage, Wall Street, Jewry, the Pope, modern youth, the War Office. Her loyalty to the Royal Family alone remains untarnished. I should like to describe at length and in detail the various assaults she has delivered upon the island’s peace of mind. But she is a friend of mine. Moreover, I have a suspicion that she is at work upon her reminiscences. I would not like to steal her ‘copy’.
Miss Deakin is the most original of the female beachcombers, but she is by no means the only one. There is ‘the Colonel’s widow’. I met her my third morning in Mahé. I was writing in my room when Bo Edmonds put her head round the curtain, and with her finger pressed against her lips to ensure silence beckoned me into the sitting-room. “I was sorry to disturb you,” she said later. “But I couldn’t have you miss one of the island’s characters.”
The island character was a tall, plumpish woman, grey-haired, in a locally made straw hat, with a sallow skin and no noticeable features. She was, I imagined, one of those women who at twenty have the attraction of youth and health, a clear skin and supple movements, whom middle age and maternity rob of their figure and complexion, so that as early as their thirties people begin to say of them: “I can’t think what he ever saw in her.” Her eyes were bright and she had a deep, rich voice. She might have been any age over sixty.
She had called at the early hour of half-past nine to enlist the Edmonds’ support in an anti-communist campaign. She had a full morning ahead of her. “People are so unpublic-spirited,” she complained. “There’s the Attorney-General, now. He’s a Roman Catholic. He ought to be one of the first to help. He says he’s too busy. He says it’s not his business. Too busy! Not his business! I ask you.” She struck a fine note of indignation and contempt. She paused. She looked at me interrogatively.
“I know you are only going to be here for a short while, but you could help, you know.”
I excused myself on the grounds that I was unpolitical.
She sniffed. “Unpolitical. It’s not a question of politics but of principles. That’s the trouble with writers nowadays. They won’t interest themselves in the things that matter.”
In the late 1930s I should have replied that the converse was the case. But maybe she was right to-day. I retreated to a different base. “Did she think there was any real communist danger here?” I asked. I recalled my days in military intelligence when we had looked for a channel of communication. I could not see how Moscow was going to build a cell in Mahé. She had her answer ready. “If the soil is ready, then a seed may fall. We must keep the soil unfertile.” She spoke with such conviction that I almost agreed to give a lecture on my visit to U.S.S.R. in 1935. Almost but not quite.
“Tell me all about her,” I asked when she had gone.
She had arrived, I learnt, in 1937, with her husband, a retired Indian Army Colonel. Their daughters were married and they were looking for a place to settle. They were debating between Tanganyika and a cottage in Devonshire. On their way to Africa they had decided to spend a month in Seychelles. They had liked it there so much that they had lingered on. Then the war had come. Though he was much over age, the Colonel had insisted on going back to India; there must be something there that he could do. His ship was torpedoed: nobody was saved.
“And she stayed on?”
“She had no alternative at first. Later, well, I suppose she’s got used to being here. There was rationing in England and a housing shortage. She was afraid of being a nuisance. She talks, now that things are getting easier, of going back to see her grandchildren. But I doubt if she will. It’s difficult to uproot yourself at her age.”
“And is this typical? This anti-communist campaign?”
Bo nodded. “Typical but not general. Most of the time she lives quietly in her bungalow in the country. She hasn’t got much money; she does a certain amount of what one used to call good works’: sits on church committees and helps us at Home Industries. Then every so often she goes off the rails.”
“In what kind of way?”
“In the kind of way that you’d expect of an Indian Army wife. That’s what we call her, you know—‘the Colonel’s Widow.’ There was a disease among
the dogs, hardpad, some time ago. She got very worked up over that. Then she wanted to start an orphanage, but the mission authorities said it would only make the Seychelloises more casual. She wanted to hold a public meeting. Luckily her crazes don’t last long. She’s a very good-hearted creature. You’ll be seeing quite a lot of her, as a matter of fact. She lives near Northolme, and takes her lunches there.”
I was indeed to see quite a lot of her. Every day at lunch for seven weeks; under the worst conditions that is to say, with an attempt being made at general conversation by seven people sitting at solitary tables, talking across a room, each about five feet from the other; those lunches were relieved, however, by occasional visits to her bungalow.
It was a minute contraption: almost a ‘prefab’, except that it had a verandah and no labour-saving gadgets. Built of wood, roofed with corrugated iron, two-roomed, with a shower and a kitchenette, it was all she needed: it was all anyone required in the tropics. You do not need heavy upholstered furniture that damp and heat and cockroaches will eat away. You do not need pictures. You want your wall space to be windows so that every way you turn you can look out at the continually changing panorama of cloud and seascape against a foreground of palm and sand, of rock and mountain. All you need of a bungalow in the tropics is that it should be cool and clean and neat and rainproof. Hers was all of that.
She had light linen curtains and fibre mats. A few photographs; a collection of shells; a three-shelved bookcase. I glanced at it. A row of Book Society selections. I ran my eye along them. It is the fashion to sneer at Book Clubs: but glancing over the choices of a dozen years, I could see few among those I had not already read that I would not be glad to read. She was apologetic on their account. “It’s the best one can do out here, I had quite a library once, before I married: I left all my best books in England. I didn’t want them ruined by the climate. The depository where they were stored was bombed.”
At the end of the top row was an uneven collection of volumes with stained and battered bindings—Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, the Everyman Shakespeare, the Oxford Book of English Verse, The Shropshire Lad, Dowson’s Poems.
“I wonder how many copies of that there are in this colony,” I said.
She smiled. “I used to think him the greatest poet of all time. I used to write sonnets in his style.”
“Most of us have.”
“I got mine published.”
“Really. Where?”
“Vanity Fair”
Vanity Fair. That was an echo from quite a long way back. In its own way it had had a rather special cachet. But my memory could not precisely place it. The title had been used upon both sides of the Atlantic. It suggested Condé Nast. But that was in the 1920s, and in America. I could not remember when the English edition left the newstands.
“Who was the editor then?” I asked.
“Frank Harris.”
I made a rapid calculation. Frank Harris had held so many posts. The Evening News, the Fortnightly, the Saturday. Then just before World War I, that most improbable of ventures Hearth and Home with Hugh Kingsmill as his assistant. Vanity Fair must have been about 1906. That would place the Colonel’s Widow in the middle sixties. Well, that tallied.
“Did you ever meet him?” she asked.
I shook my head. “But I heard a good deal about him.”
When I arrived in April 1918, as a prisoner-of-war at the Kriegagefanginenlager, Karlsruhe, it was to find Hugh Kingsmill, who had been captured fifteen months earlier, a third of the way through a novel of which Frank Harris was, if not the hero, the central character. It was published later by Chapman and Hall under the title The Will to Love. It was a witty and satiric novel, and, had it been published a few years later when the public mind had been acclimatised by Aldous Huxley and Michael Arlen to that kind of satire, it might have had a considerable success. It described the seduction by Harris of a schoolmaster’s daughter, and ended with Harris blackmailing the father to the extent of £2,000. The picture of Harris is so vivid that when I hear people talk of Harris, I am confused between the Harris of fact and fiction. Maybe Kingsmill’s Harris was the more real picture.
“I met him several times,” she said. “I was just back from my finishing school in Paris. I sent him some poems. He asked me to call on him. Then he asked me out to lunch.”
“Where did you lunch?”
“The Café Royal.”
Yes, of course it would be the Café Royal, in the Domino Room, with its red plush banquettes, its mirrors, its gilt columns, its faded panels, and its frescoed ceiling; the Café Royal with all its memories of Wilde and Ruskin; and Harris, dapper and dark, declaiming in his great booming voice of the great men he had entertained there, dazzling her with his sense of power and importance, yet every now and again playing his other rôle of the unappreciated genius, ranting against the tycoons of Fleet Street, ‘the Penguin Professors’ who had no fire in their veins, who could never understand “out of what dark forests of the tortured soul the sacred fires of art are lit”; then turning to the girl beside him, identifying her with his tirades. “I can speak of all this to you, you will understand. I can tell it from your poems.”
“And I suppose he pointed out to you all the well-known people that were lunching there.”
She nodded eagerly.
“That was the fascinating thing about him, he knew everyone. Shaw, Wells, Middleton, George Moore; not only poets and painters, but politicians; men of affairs. He was wonderful company; I’ve never known anyone who could talk as he did.”
I nodded. They had all said that.
“And underneath it all, yes, whatever anyone may say, underneath it all he was so fine,” she hurried on. “He had such high ideals. I asked him once why he had written so little. He said that he did not care to publish anything that was not good enough to be set beside Maupassant and Turgenev.” She paused. She looked at me rather shyly. “What do people think of him nowadays?” she asked.
I hesitated. I was not certain if I was the right person to be asked that question. I had just passed my fifty-second birthday, and one of the more disconcerting of my recent experiences has been the discovery that topics and personalities that once formed part of the rough material of conversation now mean nothing at all to a younger generation. I suppose this happens to everyone at fifty; but possibly it has happened to me in a more marked degree. By publishing a novel in my ‘teens, I got off to a flying start; I found myself at the age of twenty associating with and meeting on equal terms men ten to fifteen years older than myself. Of the men I met most frequently in the early 1920s, not many are still alive. Harold Monro, Ralph Straus, C K. Scott-Moncrieff, Luke Hansard, Norman Davey, W. J. Turner, Hugh Kingsmill, W. L. George, Stacy Aumonier, A. G. Macdonnell, David Woodhouse, Edgar Walmisley—one by one they have gone.
In addition, the course of events was telescoped even more by the second war than it had been by the first. During my last weeks in Mahé I had several lively and stimulating conversations with the wife of the new Administrator, Susan Bates. She is young, the mother of three children, vivid, pretty, with a lean, taut figure and a lean, taut mind. I was surprised at first by the contempt with which she dismissed the lighter novelists and playwrights of the 1930s. “They’ve nothing to say to me,” she said. By our third meeting I had found a partial explanation for her disdain. Born in 1923, and sixteen years old when the war began, she had never known as an adult person any other world than that of rations, uniform, queues, barracks, shortages, with happiness snatched at during the thirty-six hours of a week-end leave; brought up in the cold climate of necessity she had needed mentally something to try her teeth on, a hardier fare, a tougher nourishment than that which had sustained her seniors.
I have lived so much out of London since the autumn of 1941 that this was the first time I had met, long enough to cross swords with, an Englishwoman both of her age and mental calibre. It was an exciting experience. I had not realised how different is the young Englis
hwoman who grew up during the war both from her immediate predecessors and from her contemporary opposite number in America. I asked Susan how she would grade Frank Harris. “Never heard of him,” she answered.
Probably it would have been surprising if she had. Most books went out of print during the war; only a fortunate few have been reissued or found their way into Pan, Penguin, and the Pocket Libraries. The only book by Frank Harris that is still obtainable —and that only overseas—is My Life and Loves, and maybe as soon as a sufficient quantity of titles plus cochon have been discovered, it will slide out of print. In a few years Harris may be a mere legend, to become possibly, in view of his frequent appearances in the memories of his contemporaries, the subject of a valedictory New Yorker profile, like the Wilson Mizner one. To have achieved as much is to have achieved something. But it is a great deal less than Harris expected for himself; or rather than what he appeared to be expecting for himself. One never knew with Harris. That was the whole problem about him. He was such a liar.
Hugh Kingsmill published later a biography of Harris, but I fancy that he got nearer to the real man in The Will to Love; he explained there not only Harris’s deficiencies but also his qualities. He had Harris’s pugnacity, his brashness, his vulgarity, his pushingness, his dishonesty, his boasting, his untruthfulness. Yet he had his other side, his moments of talent as a writer— “Elder Conklin” is a real short story—his flashes of intuition as a critic—he was one of the first to see the man Shakespeare behind the dramatist; his sincere respect for literature; Harris’s snobbery was fantastic, but he placed the artist high in his hierarchy, it was better to be a poet than a Duke. There was again his disinterested desire to be of help to writers, his fits of loyalty—he was a good friend to Wilde—and above all there was his immense vitality.
Arriving in London at the age of twenty-six, unknown, half educated, penniless, he was within two years editor of the Evening News. Very little later as editor of the Saturday Review, then a very powerful Tory paper, he was entertaining in his house in Park Lane many of the most prominent social and political personalities of the day. He went everywhere and saw everyone, and yet found time and energy both for his own writing and the conduct of innumerable intrigues. It has been suggested that his rapid progress was based like Maupassant’s Bel Ami on his success with women, and his first wife was a wealthy woman. But he was more than just another adventurer. He was a man of immense potentialities: yet it was all ruined—or mainly ruined—by the lie within himself.