I wrote the play. It did not get much encouragement. ‘Impossible to produce’ was the verdict. Charles Cochran, however, took an enormous fancy to it. He did his utmost to get it produced, but unfortunately could not persuade his backers to agree with him. They said all the usual things–that it was unproduceable and unplayable, people would only laugh at it, there would be no tension. Cochran said firmly that he disagreed with them–but there it was.
‘I hope you have better luck some time with it,’ he said, ‘because I would like to see that play on.’
In due course I got my chance. The person who was keen on it was Bertie Mayer, who had originally put on Alibi with Charles Laughton. Irene Henschell produced the play, and did so remarkably well, I thought. I was interested to see her methods of production, because they were so different from Gerald Du Maurier’s. To begin with, she appeared to my inexperienced eye to be fumbling, as though unsure of herself, but as I saw her technique develop I realised how sound it was. At first she, as it were, felt her way about the stage, seeing the thing, not hearing it; seeing the movements and the lighting, how the whole thing would look. Then, almost as an afterthought, she concentrated on the actual script. It was effective, and very impressive. The tension built up well, and her lighting, with three baby spots, of one scene when they are all sitting with candles burning as the lights have failed, worked wonderfully well.
With the play also well acted, you could feel the tension growing up, the fear and distrust that rises between one person and another; and the deaths were so contrived that never, when I have seen it, has there been any suggestion of laughter or of the whole thing being too ridiculously thrillerish. I don’t say it is the play or book of mine I like best, or even that I think it is my best, but I do think in some ways that it is a better piece of craftsmanship than anything else I have written. I suppose it was Ten Little Niggers that set me on the path of being a playwright as well as a writer of books. It was then I decided that in future no one was going to adapt my books except myself: I would choose what books should be adapted, and only those books that were suitable for adapting.
The next one that I tried my hand on, though several years later, was The Hollow. It came to me suddenly one day that The Hollow would make a good play. I said so to Rosalind, who has had the valuable role in life of eternally trying to discourage me without success.
‘Making a play of The Hollow, Mother!’ said Rosalind in horror. ‘It’s a good book, and I like it, but you can’t possibly make it into a play.’ ‘Yes, I can,’ I said, stimulated by opposition.
‘Oh, I wish you wouldn’t,’ said Rosalind, sighing.
Anyway, I enjoyed myself scribbling down ideas for The Hollow. It was, of course, in some ways rather more of a novel than a detective story. The Hollow was a book I always thought I had ruined by the introduction of Poirot. I had got used to having Poirot in my books, and so naturally he had come into this one, but he was all wrong there. He did his stuff all right, but how much better, I kept thinking, would the book have been without him. So when I came to sketch out the play, out went Poirot.
The Hollow got written, in spite of opposition from others beside Rosalind. Peter Saunders, who has produced so many of my plays since then, was the man who liked it.
When The Hollow proved a success, I had the bit between my teeth. Of course I knew that writing books was my steady, solid profession. I could go on inventing my plots and writing my books until I went gaga. I never felt any desperation as to whether I could think of one more book to write.
There is always, of course, that terrible three weeks, or a month, which you have to get through when you are trying to get started on a book. There is no agony like it. You sit in a room, biting pencils, looking at a typewriter, walking about, or casting yourself down on a sofa, feeling you want to cry your head off. Then you go out, you interrupt someone who is busy–Max usually, because he is so good-natured–and you say: ‘It’s awful, Max, do you know I have quite forgotten how to write–I simply can’t do it any more! I shall never write another book.’
‘Oh yes, you will,’ Max would say consolingly. He used to say it with some anxiety at first; now his eyes stray back again to his work while he talks soothingly.
‘But I know I won’t. I can’t think of an idea. I had an idea, but now it seems no good.’
‘You’ll just have to get through this phase. You’ve had all this before. You said it last year. You said it the year before.’
‘It’s different this time,’ I say, with positive assurance.
But it wasn’t different, of course, it was just the same. You forget every time what you felt before when it comes again. Such misery and despair, such inability to do anything that will be in the least creative. And yet it seems that this particular phase of misery has got to be lived through. It is rather like putting the ferrets in to bring out what you want at the end of the rabbit burrow. Until there has been a lot of subterranean disturbance, until you have spent long hours of utter boredom–you can never feel normal. You can’t think of what you want to write, and if you pick up a book you find you are not reading it properly. If you try to do a crossword your mind isn’t on the clues; you are possessed by a feeling of paralyzed hopelessness.
Then, for some unknown reason, an inner ‘starter’ gets you off at the post. You begin to function, you know then that ‘it’ is coming, the mist is clearing up. You know suddenly, with absolute certitude, just what A wants to say to B. You can walk out of the house, down the road, talking to yourself violently, repeating the conversation that Maud, say, is going to have with Aylwin, and exactly where they will be, just where the other man will be watching them from the trees, and how the little dead pheasant on the ground makes Maud think of something that she had forgotten, and so on and so on. And you come home bursting with pleasure; you haven’t done anything at all yet, but you are–triumphantly–there.
At that moment writing plays seemed to me entrancing, simply because it wasn’t my job, because I hadn’t got the feeling that I had to think of a play–I only had to write the play that I was already thinking of. Plays are much easier to write than books, because you can see them in your mind’s eye, you are not hampered with all that description which clogs you so terribly in a book and stops you getting on with what’s happening. The circumscribed limits of the stage simplifies things for you. You don’t have to follow the heroine up and down the stairs, or out to the tennis lawn and back, thinking thoughts that have to be described. You have only what can be seen and heard and done to deal with. Looking and listening and feeling is what you have to deal with.
I should always write my one book a year–I was sure of that. Dramatic writing would be my adventure–that would always be, and always must be hit and miss. You can have play after play a success, and then, for no reason, a series of flops. Why? Nobody really knows. I’ve seen it happen with many playwrights. I have seen a play which to my mind was just as good or better than one of their successes fail–because it did not catch the fancy of the public; or because it was written at the wrong time; or because the cast made such a difference to it. Yes, play-writing was not a thing I could be sure of. It was a glorious gamble every time, and I liked it that way.
I knew after I had written The Hollow that before long I should want to write another play, and if possible, I thought to myself, I was going to write a play that was not adapted from a book. I was going to write a play as a play.
Caledonia had been a great success for Rosalind. It was, I think, one of the most remarkable schools that I have known. All its teachers seemed the best of their kind. They certainly brought out the best in Rosalind. She was the head of the school at the end, though, as she pointed out to me, this was unfair, because there was a Chinese girl there who was much cleverer than she was. ‘And I know what they think–they think it ought to be an English girl who is head of the school.’ I expect she was right too.
From Caledonia Rosalind went to Benenden. She was bored b
y it from the start. I don’t know why–it was by all accounts a very good school. She was not interested in learning for its own sake–there was nothing of the scholar about her. She cared least of all for the subjects I would have been interested in, such as history, but she was good at mathematics. When I was in Syria I used to get letters from her urging me to let her leave Benenden. ‘I really can’t stick another year of this place,’ she wrote. However, I felt that having embarked on a school career she must at least terminate it in the proper way, so I wrote back to her and said that, once she had passed her School Certificate–she could leave Benenden and proceed to some other form of education.
Miss Sheldon, Rosalind’s headmistress, had written to me and said that, though Rosalind was anxious to take her School Certificate next term, she did not think she would have any chance of passing it, but that there was no reason why she should not try. Miss Sheldon was proved wrong, however, because Rosalind passed her School Certificate with ease. I had to think up a next step for a daughter of barely fifteen.
Going abroad was what we both agreed on. Max and I went on what I found an intensely worrying mission to inspect various scholastic establishments: a family in Paris, a few carefully nurtured girls in Evian, at least three highly recommended educators in Lausanne, and an establishment in Gstaad, where the girls would get skiing and other winter sports. I was bad at interviewing people. The moment I sat down I became tongue-tied. What I felt was: ‘Shall I send my daughter to you or not?
How can I find out what you are really like? How on earth can I find out if she would like being with you? And anyway, what’s it all about?’ Instead, I used to stammer and say ‘er–er’–and ask what I could hear were thoroughly idiotic questions.
After much family consultation, we decided on Mademoiselle Tschumi’s Pension at Gstaad. It proved a fiasco. I seemed to get letters from Rosalind twice a week; ‘This place is awful, Mother, absolutely awful. The girls here–you’ve no idea what they are like! They wear snoods–that will show you?’
It didn’t show me. I didn’t see why girls shouldn’t wear snoods, and I didn’t know what snoods were anyway.
‘We walk about two by two–two by two–fancy! At our age! And we’re never even allowed in the village for a second to buy anything at a shop. It’s awful! Absolute imprisonment! They don’t teach us anything either. And as for those bathrooms you talk about, it’s an absolute swizzle! They’re never used. None of us has ever had a bath once! There isn’t even any hot water laid on yet! And for skiing, of course, it’s far too far down. There may be a bit in February, but I don’t believe they will ever take us there even then.’
We rescued Rosalind from her durance and sent her first to a pension at Chateau d’Oex and then to a pleasantly old-fashioned family in Paris. On our way back from Syria we picked her up in Paris, and said we hoped she now spoke French. ‘More or less,’ said Rosalind, careful not to allow us to hear her speak a word. Then it occurred to her that the taxi-driver taking us from the Gare de Lyon to Madame Laurent’s house was following an unnecessarily devious route. Rosalind flung down the window, stuck out her head, and addressed him in vivid and idiomatic French, asking him why on earth he thought he was taking those particular streets and telling him what streets he ought to take. He was vanquished at once, and I was delighted to find out what otherwise I might have had some difficulty in establishing: that Rosalind could speak French.
Madame Laurent and I had amicable conversations. She assured me that Rosalind had comported herself extremely well, had behaved always tres comme it faut–but, she said, ‘Madame, elle est d’une froideur–mais d’une froideur excessive! C’est peut-étre le phlegme brittanique.’
I said hurriedly that I was quite sure that it was le phlegme britannique. Again Madame Laurent assured me that she had tried to be like a mother to Rosalind. ‘Mais cette froideur–cette froideur anglaise!’
Madame Laurent sighed with the memory of the rejection of her demonstrative heart.
Rosalind still had six months, or possibly a year, of education to put in. She passed it with a family near Munich learning German. Next came a London season.
At this she was a decided success, was called one of the best looking debutantes of her year, and had plenty of fun. I think, myself, that it did her a great deal of good, and gave her self-confidence and nice manners. It also cured her of any mad wish to continue the social racket indefinitely. She said she had enjoyed the experience, but had no intention of doing any more of that silly kind of thing.
I raised the subject of a job with Rosalind and her great friend, Susan North.
‘You’ve got to choose something to do,’ I said to Rosalind dictatorially. ‘I don’t care what it is. Why don’t you train as a masseuse? That would be useful later in life. Or I suppose you could go and arrange flowers.’
‘Oh, everybody is doing that,’ said Susan.
Finally, the girls came to me and said they thought they would like to take up photography. I was overjoyed; I had been wishing to study photography myself. I had been doing most of the photography on the dig, and I thought it would be useful for me to have some lessons in studio photography, about which I knew little. So many of our objects had to be photographed in the open, and not in studio conditions, and since some of them would remain in Syria it was important that we should have the best photographs of them possible. I enlarged enthusiastically on the subject and the girls went into fits of laughter.
‘We don’t mean what you mean,’ they said. ‘We don’t mean photography classes, at all.’
‘What do you mean?’ I asked, bewildered.
‘Oh, being photographed in bathing-dresses and things, for advertisements.’
I was horribly shocked, and showed it.
‘You are not going to be photographed for advertisements for bathing-dresses,’ I said. ‘I won’t hear of anything like that.’
‘Mother is so terribly old-fashioned,’ said Rosalind, with a sigh. ‘Lots of girls are photographed for advertisements. They are terribly jealous of each other.’
‘And we do know some photographers,’ Susan said. ‘I think we could persuade one of them to do one of us for soap.’
I continued to veto the project. In the end Rosalind said she would think about photography classes. After all, she said, she could do model photography classes–it needn’t be for bathing-dresses. ‘It could be real clothes, buttoned up to the neck, if you like!’
So I went off one day to the Reinhardt School of Commercial Photography, and I became so interested that when I came home I had to confess that I had booked myself for a course of photography and not them. They roared with laughter. ‘Mother’s got caught by it, instead of us!’ said Rosalind.
‘Oh, you poor dear, you will be so tired,’ said Susan. And tired I was! After the first day running up and down stone flights of stairs, developing and retaking my particular subject, I was worn out.
The Reinhardt School of Photography had many different departments, including one on commercial photography, and one of my courses was in this. There was a passion at that time for making everything look as unlike itself as possible. You would place six tablespoons on a table, then climb on a stepladder, hang over the top of it, and achieve some fore-shortened view or out of focus effect. There was also a tendency to photograph an object not in the middle of the plate but somewhere in the left-hand corner, or running off it, or a face that was only a portion of a face. It was all very much the latest thing. I took a beechwood sculptured head to the School, and did various experiments in photographing that, using all kinds of filters–red, green, yellow–and seeing the extraordinarily different effects you could get using various cameras with the various filters.
The person who did not share my enthusiasm was the wretched Max. He wanted his photography to be the opposite of what I was now doing. Things had to look exactly what they were, with as much detail as possible, exact perspective, and so on.
‘Don’t you think this nec
klace looks rather dull like that?’ I would say. ‘No, I don’t,’ said Max. ‘The way you’ve got it, it’s all blurred and twisted.’
‘But it looks so exciting that way!’
‘I don’t want it to look exciting,’ said Max. ‘I want it to look like what it is. And you haven’t put a scale rod in.’
‘It ruins the artistic aspect of a photograph if you have to have a scale rod, It looks awful.’
‘You’ve got to show what size it is,’ said Max. ‘It is most important.’ ‘You can put it underneath, can’t you, in the caption?’
‘It’s not the same thing. You want to see exactly the scale.’
I sighed. I could see I had been betrayed by my artistic fancies into straying from what I had promised to do, so I got my instructor to give me extra lessons on photographing things in exact perspective. He was rather bored at having to do this, and disapproving of the results. However, it was going to be useful to me.
I had learnt one thing at least: there was no such thing as taking a photograph of something, and later taking another one because that one didn’t come out well. Nobody at the Reinhardt School ever took less than ten negatives of any subject; a great many of them took twenty. It was singularly exhausting, and I used to come home so weary that I wished I had never started. However, that had gone by the next morning.
Rosalind came out to Syria one year, and I think enjoyed being on our dig. Max got her to do some of the drawings. Actually she draws exceptionally well, and she made a good job of it, but the trouble with Rosalind is that, unlike her slap-happy mother, she is a perfectionist. Unless she could get a thing perfectly as she wanted it, she would immediately tear it up. She did a series of these drawings, and then said to Max: ‘They are no good really–I shall tear them up.’
An Autobiography Page 61