“Well, for all your sakes and for your mother-in-law’s. I daresay she led a pretty dull life in England. Are you going to blame her very much because she wanted to have a bit of fun before she died?”
Mary was silent for a long time. Then she said something that surprised herself.
“I hated the old bitch. I could have killed her myself and sometimes I wonder why I didn’t. But now I know all I do know, for the first time since I married my husband I think I’ve got a sort of sneaking affection for her.”
Pasquier dying. He had a small café in one of the side streets of Nice, with a small, airless room at the back in which people danced. He owned or rented the house above the café, and you entered by a side door. He lived there, but he let the rooms for an hour or a night to the men who had picked up a woman in the café. Now that Pasquier was so ill it was being run by his son, Edmond, and his son’s wife. Edmond had married one of the women who frequented the café and Pasquier, outraged at the mésalliance, had turned them out of the house, but he was not one to let honour conflict with interest, and since Edmond was useful to him, he soon took him back. That night when I went in the place was crowded. The fleet were in and they were doing land-office business. I asked Edmond how his father was and he told me the doctor had given him up and he could not last more than a day or two longer. He asked me to go and see him. I went round, and Jeanne, the woman who showed clients to their room, took me up to him. He was lying in a huge four-poster, a little old man in a night-shirt, his face sallow and puffy, and his hands swollen.
“Je suis foutu,” he said to me.
“Nonsense,” I said, with the false cheerfulness one puts on with the sick, “you’ll get well.”
“I’m not afraid. How is it downstairs? Full?”
“Crammed.”
He perked up.
“If I had twice the number of rooms I could fill them tonight.” He rang his bell. “It’s terrible I should have to lie here and can’t look after things myself.” The maid came in. “Go and knock on the doors,” he told her, “and tell them to be quick. Others are waiting. Mon Dieu, it doesn’t take all night to do what they’ve come here to do.” And when the maid went out: “When I think of my poor wife I’m glad she’s dead; she’d have died with shame when Edmond married a tart. And mind you, we gave him a good education. Do you know what they’re going to do when I’m gone? They’re going to clear the women out and let the rooms by the month to clerks and shop-assistants. They can’t make money like that. And, why couldn’t he marry a bourgeoise, the daughter of decent tradespeople, who understood that business is business? It’s hard to lie here and know that this business I’ve built up will go to pot as soon as I’m dead and buried.” Two heavy tears rolled down his cheeks. “And for why?” he sniffled. “Because the dirty bitch wants to be respectable. Do people pay you money because they respect you? Merde.”
He died two or three days later. The hearse was loaded with flowers and quite a number of the girls who frequented the café went to the funeral. “It shows that they have good hearts,” Edmond’s wife said to me afterwards.
Romance. The Duke of York, a brother of George III, came to Monaco on his yacht and there fell very seriously ill. He asked the ruling prince to receive him and this the prince consented to do, but refused to receive the mistress whom the Duke had brought with him on the yacht. She took a house at Roquebrune and every day went out to the point to see if the flag was still flying over the palace. One day she saw it at half-mast and knew her lover was dead. She threw herself into the sea.
The other day, after dinner in Grosvenor Square, I listened to an author, no longer young, complaining of the small esteem in which men of letters are held in England today. He compared it unfavourably with the position they had in the eighteenth century when they were arbiters of taste in the coffee-houses and the munificence of patrons saved them from having to prostitute their gifts for filthy lucre. I wondered it didn’t occur to him that in the eighteenth century, if he and I had been in that house at all we should have come up the back stairs, and if we had been given a meal it would have consisted of a tankard of beer and a cut off the cold joint in the housekeeper’s room.
His name was Paul. He was a Belgian, and he murdered his wife. He was tried and sentenced to death. He took his condemnation very hard. He was terribly hysterical. He couldn’t sleep. He was pitiably afraid. Alan was told to visit him to see whether he couldn’t comfort him a little, and if not console him at least help him to be resigned to his fate. Alan went to see him every day. One day he told me that he wanted to read a book which wasn’t in the prison library and asked me if I would buy it. Of course I said I would, and asked what it was. The answer astounded me. I couldn’t think why a man should want so much to read that particular book before he was hanged. It was Sterne’s Sentimental Journey.
Hotel bedrooms. In one of them there is a man who looks upon an hotel bedroom as a symbol of liberty. He thinks of the adventures he has had in such rooms, the pleasant meditations; and his thoughts are so peaceful and happy that he feels the moment can never be excelled and so takes an overdose of sleeping-pills. In another room is a woman who has wandered for years from hotel to hotel. To her it is misery. She has no home. If she isn’t living in an hotel it is because she has shamed friends into asking her to stay with them for a week or two. They take her out of pity, they see her go with relief. She feels she can’t bear the wretchedness of her life any longer, and so she too takes an overdose of her sleeping-pills. To the hotel people and the Press the mystery is insoluble. They suspect a romance. They look for a connection between the two, but can discover nothing.
He was a successful lawyer, and it was a shock to his family and his friends when he committed suicide. He was a breezy, energetic, exuberant man and the last person you would have expected to do away with himself. He enjoyed life. His origins were humble, but for his services in the war he had been granted a baronetcy. He adored his only son, who would succeed to his title, follow him in his business, go into Parliament and make a name for himself. No one could guess why he had killed himself. He had arranged it so that it should look like an accident, and so it would have been considered except for a small oversight on his part. It was true that his wife was causing him a certain amount of anxiety. She was at the menopause and it had affected her brain; she was not mad enough to be put in an asylum, but certainly not sane. She suffered from severe melancholia. They didn’t tell her that her husband had committed suicide, but only that he had been killed in a motor accident. She took it better than was expected. It was her doctor who broke the news to her. “Thank God I told him when I did,” she said. “If I hadn’t I should never have had another moment’s peace in my life.” The doctor wanted to know what she meant. After a while she told him: she had confessed to her husband that the son he doted on, the son on whom all his hopes were set, was not his.
Bermondsey. A plumber went to the house of some retired tradespeople to do some repairs. They lived in a semi-detached house in Kennington. He was a good-looking youth and their daughter fell in love with him. They met at nights in the road. But he felt that she was deeply conscious of the distance between them and he got it into his head that she treated him as a servant. He made up his mind that he’d get even with her. He put her in the family way. Her parents turned her out. The plumber refused to marry her, but she went to live with him, and after the child was born she went to work in a biscuit factory. The baby was farmed out. At the factory one of the workers fell in love with her and asked her to marry him. She knew the plumber didn’t care two pins for her, so she left him; the plumber was furious with her, and when he found out that she was going to marry the other man he went to him and told him that he had had a child by her. The man then refused to have anything more to do with her.
Bermondsey. A man gassed in the war was living on a pension with his wife in two rooms on the ground floor of a three-storey house. They both belonged to a burial club. He had been
ill for a long time and at last he realised he was dying and couldn’t live more than a few days longer. He got his wife to consent to use the money she would get for his funeral on one last beano. They invited all their friends and had a grand supper with champagne. He died the night following. The money from the burial club was spent, but the friends clubbed together to give him a fine funeral; his widow wouldn’t hear of it, and he was followed by all of them to his pauper’s grave. Later in the day one of them went to see the widow and asked her to marry him. She was surprised, but after thinking it over for a little consented; but she felt it wouldn’t be right to marry him before the year’s mourning was out, so she suggested that until then he might come and live with her as a lodger.
Bermondsey. A man, an ex-soldier, and a girl working in a factory fall desperately in love with one another. He is unhappily married to a nagging, jealous wife. The pair elope and take lodgings in Stepney. By the papers the girl discovers to her horror that the man has killed his wife. He must inevitably be caught, but while they are hiding they give themselves over to their passion. She comes to understand that to avoid arrest he intends to kill himself and her too. She is frightened and wants to flee from him, but she loves him too much to tear herself away. She leaves it too late. The police come and he shoots her before shooting himself.
Bermondsey. Dan has been out of work for months. He is miserable and humiliated, and his brother Bert, who is in work, bullies him. He throws it in Dan’s face that he keeps him. To take it out of him he makes him do odd jobs for him. Dan is so wretched that he feels he’d like to make an end of himself, and it requires all his mother’s persuasion to get him to wait till something turns up. The mother, Mrs. Bailey, is a charwoman who works in a Government office in Whitehall. She goes out at six in the morning and doesn’t get back till six at night. One day Bert comes home and because Dan hasn’t fetched his other shirt from the laundry and he wants to go out, he swears at him. They have a fight and Dan, smaller, weaker, ill fed, gets a thrashing. Mrs. Bailey comes in and stops the fight. She roundly abuses Bert. He says he’s sick of it all and he’s going to be married. They are horrified; without his week’s money, with Dan earning nothing, it’s impossible for Mrs. Bailey to support herself, Dan and the two younger children. It means starvation. They tell Bert he can’t get married, at least not till Dan gets work; he says he must, his girl’s going to have a baby. He flings out. They are all crying. Mrs. Bailey goes down on her knees and makes the others, Dan and the two children, do so too, and she prays God to have mercy on them and help them. They are still praying when Bert comes back with the shirt he has just fetched for himself. He looks at them angrily.
“Oh, all right, all right,” he shouts. “I’ll give her ten bob to get rid of the little bastard.”
Mrs. Bailey. She was a tallish woman, with reddish, untidy, scanty hair, and when she opened her mouth you saw that two of her front teeth were missing. One of her ears was partly torn off by her husband, and there was a scar on her forehead which was the result of a cut when once he had thrown her out of a window. He was a big, strong, brutal fellow who had been badly wounded in the war, and Mrs. Bailey forgave him his violence because he was often in great pain. They had four children and they all went in terror of him. But Mrs. Bailey had a strong sense of humour, the real Cockney humour, and when she wasn’t in fear of her life was full of fun. She loved a good laugh. At last Bailey died. I went to see her after his death and she said to me: “He wasn’t a bad man really. D’you know what he said to me? They was almost his last words. ‘I’ve given you hell, haven’t I? You’ll be glad to be rid of me.’ ‘No, I won’t, Ned,’ I said to him, ‘you know I’ve always loved you.’ He gave me a funny look, and d’you know what he said? ‘You old cow,’ he said. That shows he loved me really, doesn’t it?—calling me an old cow like that, I mean.”
These are a few of the notes I made when I intended to write a novel about the people of Bermondsey.
1940
I got into conversation the other day with a French officer, and of course we talked of the collapse of France. “Et dire que nous avons été battus par des imbéciles,” he said. His remark dismayed me. The French seem incapable of understanding that if they have been so shamefully defeated, it is not in spite of the Germans being stupid, but because on the contrary they are clever. Because the French were well-educated, good and witty talkers they were silly enough to think that they alone were intelligent. Their self-conceit, which led them to despise everything that wasn’t French, made them the most insular people in Europe. When they were in a mess they really believed that a bon mot could get them out of it. But when something goes wrong with your car it isn’t a sound knowledge of the classics or a neat quip that’ll make it go right; you want a mechanic for that, and in such a juncture his intelligence is the only one that counts, yours is stupidity. Was it so witless of the Germans to make themselves familiar with the methods of modern warfare and to provide themselves with modern armaments? Wasn’t there cleverness in their organisation of the war machine so that it should function with efficiency? Didn’t they show acumen when they informed themselves accurately on conditions in France so that they were able to take advantage of its disunity, unpreparedness and emotional instability? No, it isn’t the Germans who were imbeciles in this war, it’s the French; but what hope can one cherish for the restoration of France when the French, overcome by such a catastrophe, still entertain so inept a vanity? The Allies can talk till they’re blue in the face of the necessity of restoring France to her place as one of the great powers; they will never succeed till the French learn to look the truth in the face and see themselves as they are. And the first thing they must learn is not humility, that can do them no good, but common-sense.
1941
New York. H. G. has been here. He was looking old, tired and shrivelled. He was as perky as he has always been, but with something of an effort. His lectures were a failure. People could not hear what he said and didn’t want to listen to what they could hear. They left in droves. He was hurt and disappointed. He couldn’t understand why they were impatient with him for saying very much the same sort of thing as he had been saying for the last thirty years. The river has flowed on and left him high and dry on the bank. The writer has his little hour (if he’s lucky), but an hour is soon past. After all, he’s had it and he ought to be satisfied. It’s only reasonable that others should have their turn. One would have thought it would be enough for H. G. to reflect on the great influence he had on a whole generation and how much he did to alter the climate of opinion. But he has always been too busy to be anything of a philosopher.
She feels in a terrifyingly commonplace way the most obvious emotions not only with sincerity, but with an almost unbelievable assurance that no one has ever felt them before. The ingenuousness of this middle-aged woman of the world is so ridiculous that it is not absurd but touching. She is as clever as she can stick, and so stupid that you could beat her.
One fusses about style. One tries to write better. One takes pains to be simple, clear and succinct. One aims at rhythm and balance. One reads a sentence aloud to see that it sounds well. One sweats one’s guts out. The fact remains that the four greatest novelists the world has ever known, Balzac, Dickens, Tolstoi and Dostoievsky, wrote their respective languages very indifferently. It proves that if you can tell stories, create character, devise incidents, and if you have sincerity and passion, it doesn’t matter a damn how you write. All the same it’s better to write well than ill.
Sentimentality is only sentiment that rubs you up the wrong way.
The world has always been a place of turmoil. There have been short periods of peace and plenty, but they are exceptional, and because some of us have lived in such a period—the later years of the nineteenth century, the first decade of the twentieth—we have no right to look upon such a state as normal. Man is born unto trouble as the sparks fly upward: that is normal, and we may just as well accept the fact. If we do, we c
an regard it with that mingling of resignation and humour which is probably our best defence.
Why is it that when you hear a young man talking arrant nonsense with assurance, being dogmatic and intolerant, you are angry and point out to him his foolishness and ignorance? Do you forget that at his age you were just as silly, dogmatic, arrogant and conceited? And when I say you of course I mean I.
He would be astounded if you told him he was a crook. He honestly looks upon a fifty-fifty proposition as seventy-five for himself and twenty-five for the other fellow.
Fundamentally man is not a rational animal. It is this that makes fiction so difficult to write; for the reader, or the spectator of a play, demands, at all events today, that he should behave as if he were. We feel dissatisfied when the persons of a story do not act from motives that we accept as sufficient. We expect their behaviour to be rational, and if it isn’t we say: “But people don’t act like that.” Our demand for probability grows more and more stringent. We balk at coincidence and accident. We expect the characters that are presented to us invariably to behave like themselves.
The behaviour of the persons in Othello, of Othello himself principally, but to a less extent of almost everyone in the play, is wildly irrational. The critics have turned themselves inside out to show that it isn’t. In vain. They would have done better to accept it as a grand example of the fundamental irrationality of man. I am quite ready to believe that contemporary theatre-goers saw nothing improbable in the behaviour of any of the characters.
I don’t know why it is that the religious never ascribe common-sense to God.
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