The Novelist in War

I

Six months before the war broke out I bought this house on the water’s edge, looking northeast up the two miles of the Carrick Roads. It was then my intention to leave London for good. The railroad company calls our region the Cornish Riviera, but that year there was precious little Riviera about it. I was writing a novel called Fame Is the Spur, and when the war came I left London in order to finish it here in peace. There was emotional impetus enough to carry me on, and the work was ended by January 1940.

Now, I thought, I could get on with something new. I had in my mind three themes for long novels and a theme for a tale that would need only a couple of hundred pages in the telling. I would rest now, I said to myself, for a few months after the long labor of Fame Is the Spur. Then in the summer months I would easily knock out the little tale: it would be a sort of holiday task: and with the coming of the next winter I would take another long novel in hand. Nearly eighteen months have passed since then, months loaded with destiny, heavy with hopes and fears, with few triumphs and many disasters: months that have conjured up words which will never die out of hearts now living, old words with new dramatic outlines — Norway, Dunkirk, Libya, Greece, Crete, Vichy, Coventry, London, Plymouth. And as these old names, crusted with terrible contemporary significance, rose up week by week and month by month, there seemed no end to the possibility of their extension; there was no peep vouchsafed round the corner of the future; and, for me at all events, everything that had made work possible faded and shriveled till I was faced with the inescapable fact that, so long as these clouds lowered over us, I was done for as a writer.

I have never agreed with the saying — was it Stevenson’s? — that easy writing makes hard reading. It is too dogmatic, too much of a generalization. There are writers who write easily and there are writers who write with blood and tears, and, confronted by a page of each, you wouldn’t know which had done which, for both the pages would be good finished work. And similarly, two men writing, one with ease and one with labor, will each produce a result as dead as mutton. A writer writes as he writes, and that is all there is to it; and many a writer will tell you that his best work has been done with a blithely flowing pen.

Certainly in my own case, for what the result is worth, the work has been easy. I could sit down to my daily piece of writing with the knowledge that it would be done. There was no fluttering invocation of the goddess of fiction, whoever she may be. I liked the look of a clean sheet of paper; I liked the actual physical business of taking up a pen. In a word, I enjoyed my job.

Not long ago I received a letter from an American who, of all things, was a priest of the Jesuit order. Americans write to authors far more often than English people do, and their letters, as a rule, are more naïve than English letters. This correspondent said he had been reading My Son, My Son! and he went on, ‘I am anxious to write a best-selling novel myself and would be very grateful for any advice you could offer me.’

I could not answer this, because when I was writing My Son, My Son! I did not know I was writing a best-selling novel: I knew only that I was writing a novel. I rely very much on what Mr. Somerset Maugham has called ‘the amiable and useful little imp that dwells in your fountain pen and does for you all your best writing.’ There is sense in Mr. Maugham’s conclusion: ‘The prudent writer gives him his head, and, if the little fellow has a mind to write something quite different from what he intended, knows that it is only common sense to yield. After all, it is to this wily sprite that is due whatever merit the ignorant ascribe to the unimportant instrument who holds the pen.’

Never have I cast myself more completely upon the winds of chance than I did in my first novel, Shabby Tiger. Here, for a long time, I did not know where I was going to, much less how I was going to get there. I had for a long time promised myself that I would write a novel, but no grand theme, no imposing canvas, presented itself to my imagination. And I was very lazy. I was working on the staff of the most easygoing newspaper in the world. I did not appear in the office till half an hour after noon. Well, one didn’t work in the mornings. One read the newspapers and did this and that, and time slipped pleasantly by. At one o’clock one knew what the day’s work was to be; and then there was lunch to be eaten and a tranquil pipe to be smoked over a game of dominoes. It was not often that one returned to the office much before three, and then there was always someone waiting there for a game of shove-ha’penny on the excellent board which had recently been brought into the office. The public houses shut at three; there was just time to take the board to one in order to polish it before the game began. No self-respecting shove-ha’penny board is polished in any other way than by allowing beer to flow over it and then rubbing it dry. It was necessary, of course, to keep the board company, and one returned to the office in a benevolent if unworkmanlike frame of mind, to find, when the shove-ha’penny game was over, that it was high time for tea and muffins. Another game of dominoes was now a matter of course, and if, between this and seven o’clock, one’s daily offering of prose fit for the eye of the world’s most exacting editor was made — why, one was then prepared to call it a day. It was, anyway, seven o’clock: time for the nightly consortium in a near-by bar, where leader writers coming on duty and reporters going off could fittingly begin or end their respective endeavors. Then, at eight or half-past, dinner at home in that physical and mental state called mellow, averse from vigor, inimical to effort, admirable for smoking a pipe as one perambulated the suburb in summer or read a book in winter.

So the weeks went by, and the months and the years, filled with good company, admirable conversation, a creeping paralysis of the will. There are times when, if a man is to be saved, he must be taken by the scruff of the neck, hustled out of his greenhouse, and dropped into cold water. This salutary miracle was performed on my behalf.

II

I do not think I have a pennorth of superstition in my make-up. I am a pragmatic sort of person who takes things as he finds them and tries to judge them as they are. I have met many people who have seen ghosts, heard voices, been visited by intimations from outside sense; and I have never believed a word that they have told me. What happens to us, I think, is explicable within the confines of reason, if only we could get hold of the facts. Two things completely inexplicable have happened to me, but they do not alter my rational outlook.

When I was a child of five, my family moved from one small house in Cardiff to another. There was not much to move, and my father, with a hired handcart, did the job in a number of journeys. On one of these, towards the end of that winter day, he took me and my brother, a little older than me. We trotted to the new house alongside the handcart, and my father left us there when he went back for more things. He sat us side by side on an armchair in the kitchen. On our right was the lighted fire. Facing us was a window, uncurtained, looking out upon the back yard which we could not see, for darkness was now come. There we sat, and I at least was scared to the very marrow of my bones. The strange house, the blackness beyond the window that might conceal — what? — the creaking of the stairs, and then, suddenly, the banging of a drum and a great shout, ‘The blood! The blood!’ — all this left me trembling with fright. The drum and the shout, I learned later, belonged to the Salvation Army, but at the time there was no knowledge to comfort me.

It was, no doubt, in consequence of this that during the years when we lived in that house I was visited again and again by a nightmare. Always it was the same. I would be sitting in the chair, with everything as it had been: the firelight, the darkness beyond the window. It was a small window of four panes, and in my nightmare I gazed, with the hair rising in horror on my head, at the bottom left-hand pane, because I knew that something would materialize there out of the darkness. Presently the top of a head would appear, and I was aware of someone kneeling on the ground, his fingers clutching the window sill, raising himself with infinite slowness to gaze into the room. Bit by bit, the face appeared, till it was all there, fixed and unmoving, a horrible face, white, with staring bloodshot eyes. After a while, it would begin to disappear as slowly as it had come.

On the right of anyone kneeling as this apparition was kneeling there was a door leading into the scullery, and this scullery opened into the kitchen where I sat. In my nightmare, I knew that now this ghastly visitor was passing through the scullery door, that it was only a matter of time before the door between the scullery and the kitchen would open, and he and I would be face to face. Now my eyes turned to this door through which he must come, and my heart was wrung with an apprehension more deep and fearful than any I have since known, asleep or awake. The latch would silently lift, and a hand would come into the room: a long white cruel hand that I was destined never to see attached to a body. For at this point, sweating with horror, I always woke to hear my heart pounding in the darkness and to feel the comfort of my brother’s body in the bed beside me.

It is many a year since this nightmare last troubled my sleep, and, looking back on it now, it is easy to explain the whole matter by referring it back to that first night when a small nervous child shivered in darkness, in an unknown house. But here is the point of the matter which I cannot explain. I told no one of this recurrent horror till many years later. We had left the house; my brother and I were young men whose lives were filled with multifarious activities. One day we were speaking of our childhood, of that strange frightening first night in the new house, and I began to tell him of the nightmare that had been its consequence. I had only opened the story when he took me up. ‘And then this happened. And then that.’ And with perfect accuracy of detail he described the experience from beginning to end. ‘I, too,’ he said, ‘had that nightmare again and again while we lived in that house.’

A nightmare of vague terror, arising from an experience shared, I could understand coming to him as to me; but I cannot understand this duality of incident in those points which were not comprised in the experience itself: the horrible face, the slowly rising latch, the strangler’s white fearful hand. So I must leave it at that: a record without comment.

The second inexplicable thing that came to me came now while I was enjoying that lotus life in Manchester, watching the years slip by, watching my sons grow up, careless, happy-go-lucky, with old ambitions slowly stifling like flames beneath a bonfire too thickly piled with pleasant-smelling leaves. Round the corner from us in our suburb of Didsbury there lived a woman who was often to be found telling fortunes at local church bazaars and suchlike functions. She did it ‘for fun.’ She was not taken very seriously, and I do not know whether she took herself seriously. Towards the end of the summer of 1931 — just ten years ago from this time when I write — this woman met my wife in the street. ‘Oh, Mrs. Spring,’ she said, ‘I have a message for you. Your husband’s career is about to have a great change. He’ll stay in journalism, but there’ll be a great change — a great change.’

We had a hearty laugh over that. We were contented where we were. Life was pleasant, moderately prosperous, and, as for change, at least I was not seeking it. I had been asked more than once why I didn’t try my luck in Fleet Street, and always I made the same answer: ‘I’ll go when Fleet Street asks me to go.’ Within a couple of months Fleet Street had asked me, and after a lifetime spent in provincial journalism I found myself in London. I was fortytwo years old.

III

Let me pause for a moment to speak of my ‘ addiction ‘ to pictures. It is difficult to believe that twenty years have passed since I bought a picture from George Russell (ÆE). ‘I hope,’ he wrote from 84 Merrion Square, Dublin, ‘that it will not prove too tiresome a possession.’

Well, it hasn’t done that, though I do not think so highly of it as I did twenty years ago. It is a picture of a group of girls, some swimming in the sea, some diving from the rocks, with a dawn sky making a cool blue-gray background. It is, perhaps, a little sentimental, but I have never regretted buying it.

Russell sold his pictures literally by the yard. When I asked him how much this picture cost, he said: ‘Well, I can’t say, “This picture is small but a masterpiece, and this one is big but not very good,” so I paint on three sizes of canvas, and charge accordingly.’

He was a most prolific painter. The Dublin drawing-rooms were full of his work. He had two styles: one the presenting of things seen, like the picture I bought from him; the other the presenting of things imagined. These were a figuring in paint of the strange thoughts that crowd his book, The Candle of Vision. Creatures all flame glowed on the canvas, and, in recollection, they seem to me to have been not without splendor. I wish I had one of them, to represent to me the other side of this dual man, so practical and so apocalyptic.

Russell’s office, from which he conducted the business side of his life, was on the first floor of the house in Merrion Square. He had painted the walls — every inch of them — with the tumultuous creatures of his imagination, and in this milieu he would sit, his spectacles gleaming, his large foul pipe ejecting coltsfoot fumes from out of his large beard. One never, on calling upon him there, got the sense of intrusion. He was there to talk, and I imagine he would consider it a bad day if a disciple or two had not come and sat at his feet. But such a day he must have known rarely. He would sit in a big easy chair in the midst of the untidy disheveled room, himself untidy, kindly, careless-looking, and the soft alluring Irish voice would run on and on. It is a pity some young Irishman did not constitute himself Russell’s Boswell. He would not have lacked matter. One day, I remember, a young Indian who had come to Europe to study agricultural methods called while I was there to talk to Russell about his cooperative creameries. But the conversation — if conversation it could be called — did not stay with the creameries for long. Soon Russell was on the subject of Hindu scriptures, and discovered, to his delight, that his caller was not deeply versed in them. He proceeded to enlighten him. Exposition and quotation flowed out of him, ceaselessly, remorselessly. It was a remarkable moment to observe: as though some learned Indian sage, finding a young Englishman who did not know his Shakespeare, had taken up the task of education.

Russell once told me that he had given up reading and pondering on the Hindu scriptures because they had taken him into deeps which he felt to be dangerous. His was a strange life — ‘ ‘twixt the mount and multitude.’

It is a long time since I last saw Merrion Square. I do not know whether it has survived in the charming form I knew, or whether Dublin has been as reckless with its things of beauty as London was. Certainly Merrion Square was a thing of beauty, and in later years as I walked through the London squares with my ears deafened by the hammers of the housebreakers, as I watched Berkeley Square disintegrating and St. James’s Square taking hard knocks, I used to think that perhaps in time to come pupils in architecture would go to Merrion Square in order that they might see with their own eyes what a Georgian square in London had looked like.

Now that German bombs have reduced to dust and ashes so much that was lovely in London, I hope we shall be more inclined to treasure what may chance to be left. We raise a ready outcry about the aerial vandals who have spoiled or destroyed so much of our cultural heritage; but we were destroying it ourselves hand over fist. Let us hope this will make us call a halt. The old squares, during the ten years I lived near London, were savaged — there is no other word for it — with a ruthless disregard for amenity and propriety. Now that so much has gone in the flame of war, what would we not give to have Nash’s regency crescent once more in Regent Street? And, as we look at the wreckage of the Wren churches, does a blush visit our cheeks when we recall that, not so long ago, a number of them were in the market? They were ‘superfluous.’ No regard was had to beauty then. Treated like so much brick and stone and mortar, standing on so many sites, they were there to be bought by any merchant who cared to raze them and build a concrete warehouse.

These metropolitan monuments were not all. In the twenty years between the two wars we ran riot, trampling and ruining the irreplaceable monuments of our past. Quiet village streets were smashed overnight by the march of arterial roads. A cinema had but to ask for the site of a manor, and there was no one whose business it was to say, ‘No. There are some things in England that money can’t buy.’

Money, in those days, could buy anything, destroy it in an hour, and cause to spring up, where some beauty of our race had been, the cheap and spurious simulacrum, common to cheap and spurious men everywhere. Our woods and forests were cut down, our choicest agricultural land was gashed with roads and smeared with houses whose ugliness was an offense to earth and heaven. ‘There’s one good thing about all this bombing. It’s clearing away rubbish that ought to have been cleared long ago.’

True enough; but it’s an expensive method of slum clearance, and not a kindly one to the slum dwellers; and it makes a queer comment on our ‘vested interests ‘ when something so cataclysmic as this is needed to do what should have been done without it. But most ironic of all to me is the thought that we have, for the last twenty years, been destroying the loveliest country in the world in order to cram upon it the sort of building which, in measurable time, will belong to this class which we now thank God for destroying by the scourge of war. If we had gone about it with brains in our heads, we might have devised a method of cleaning up Limehouse and Whitechapel without destroying the Temple.

The last time I saw George Russell was on a January night in 1922: a fateful night in Ireland. For years Irishmen, united against the English, had waged the fight that opened on an Easter Day during the Great War. The shame of the ‘Black and Tans’ had been loosed on the country. It was not so much warfare as a murder campaign on both sides — vendetta, revenge. Men were surprised and shot in their beds. Masks and disguises played a greater part than uniforms. Arson, sudden death out of the night — this had gone on for years, engendering feelings more bitter than any that are created in the confrontations of warfare.

And now there were those who said it was time to make an end, to come to an accommodation with England. A treaty had been drawn up, and on this January night Dail Eireann, the Irish Parliament, was to decide whether or not to ratify it. It was the last day of many days of bitter wrangling and debate, there in a great hall of the new Irish University buildings. I watched them throughout, these men who had fought so sturdily together and who soon, unsated with warfare, were to turn their arms upon one another. Not many of them were notable to the eye. Beyond a certain bluff emphasis of character in Michael Collins, who had the masterly physique that boys love, — a big burly body, a massive head adorned with plentiful black hair, — and a subtle blend of loving-kindness and relentlessness in Eamon De Valera’s face, there was nothing to raise any one of them to the distinction that calls for a second look.

Charles Burgess, who had been De Valera’s War Minister, was the most implacable and unpitying figure there. Unlike Collins and De Valera, he had no gift of speech. His words were halting, and pitched on a single unsonorous note. He was a small man with a face that became impressive from its lack of expression. You looked at him the first time, and your glance wandered on to find something more interesting. But watch him, as I did, through a morning and an afternoon, and again through a morning and an afternoon, and there began to be something uncanny in the masklike immobility of his features. They seemed to me to be like a portrait which you wouldn’t mind seeing occasionally in the house of a friend, but which would make you scream if you had to live with it. The face was extraordinarily dry and empty of emotion. The skin was dry; the very hair had the dry sapless look of a wig.

Arthur Griffith was there, short, stocky, bulldoggy, his pince-nez gleaming as he defended the treaty-makers against incessant assault; and Erskine Childers, the Englishman who had given his life to Ireland, a thought-haunted gray wreck of a man, so physically weakened that not long before this I had seen him fall off a bicycle in Merrion Square.

There they were — these and so many others — in that big room which became, as the days wore on, so hot with the public breath, so foul and stale with tobacco smoke, all trying patriotically to speak in Erse and finally breaking down into the plain uncompromising English in which they were at home. There they were, with doom and death hanging over so many of them once the final rupture had come, once the treaty was accepted, and those who would not accept it turned in a madness of civil strife upon those who did. In measurable time now this phlegmatic little Charles Burgess will fall, riddled with his old companions’ bullets, as he runs from a blazing hotel; Collins will be shot mysteriously as his car makes its way through the Irish countryside; Childers, who gave so much to Ireland, will face an Irish firing squad that will relieve him of his remaining tenuous vestige of life; Arthur Griffith will die in harness.

But we do not see their doom that January night as we wait for the voting on the treaty. It was accepted by 64 votes to 57 — a margin too narrow, too narrow by far, for safety. I shall not forget the great hubbub that broke out when the figures were declared, or the sight of De Valera collapsed, his arms along the table, his head buried in his arms, or of Michael Collins standing dominant and erect, looking about him with flashing eyes — Collins who was soon to be so low, De Valera who was soon to be so high.

It was in that moment that I last saw Æ. We were jammed together in a great press of people passing out into the night, He was very deeply moved. ‘We have opened a door,’ he said. Yes, indeed; and it was opened upon strange things whose end is not yet seen. ‘ I am sure you will be in Ireland again,’ Æ wrote to me soon afterwards. ‘We are hardly the spiritless folk who make no history to interest our neighbors. But I hope the history that brings you will not be military history.’ Now Æ has joined so many others who were ‘in’ at that historic moment. What history will take Englishmen back to Ireland is not yet apparent. But, to a discerning eye, the outlines begin to clear.

IV

George Russell has led me a long way from the interest in pictures with which I began. By a coincidence, that very morning when I began to write about pictures an exciting-looking flat parcel arrived from Manchester, and I knew before I opened it that these must be the drawings by L. S. Lowry that I had asked a Manchester friend to send on. I have long been fascinated by the work of this artist, and shall use this chance to pay him tribute. Manchester has produced greater artists. They leave the city and go away in quest of color and clients. Lowry has chosen to stay in Lancashire, and if he is not Manchester’s greatest artist, he is at any rate the one who can evoke the drab streets, the hard-beaten patches of earth called ‘crofts’ on which the children play, the gray smoke-filled sky with the mill chimneys soaring against it, the street-corner pubs, and the pale pathetic artisans as no artist, to my knowledge, has done before. More than this: his pictures evoke for me the whole tragical sense of frustration that the Industrial Revolution clamped upon the land. All that men and women have been defrauded of, all that they are not, are here implicit in the stark statement of what they have and are.

Here it is, whether you like it or not; here it is, the stricken field on which the fight for Britain’s industrial supremacy was fought and won. And those who most often tell us they don’t like it are those who benefit daily from its existence; as Karl Marx, building his vision of a new world, was helped to keep body and soul together by Friedrich Engels, toiling here amid the immediacy of Lancashire grit and grime.

These are the matters of Lowry’s paintings and drawings. He crowds his pictures with small human figures after the fashion of Brueghel, but how different is the emotional impact of a picture by Brueghel and of a picture by this faithful delineator and interpreter of the contemporary industrial scene! A Brueghel picture always fills my heart with joy and hope at the infinite variety and color of life. All those little people — skating, shooting, working in the fields, walking down their village streets — are distinct and individual. Each one has a quirk and a twist, a humor, something to cheer and enlighten his brief days under the sun. But Lowry refrains from bestowing upon his people any vestige of individuality. They are, almost always, flat silhouettes, moving against their drear background with the automatism of mechanic men.

I know that in Lancashire you will find as much individuality as can be come by anywhere on earth. It is a county that has thrown up more than its share of comedians and singers, artists and writers, to say nothing of many unknown men who are all compounded of wit and oddity. Was there not one Manchester business man who proceeded from home to office on roller skates, wearing a topper with the best of them? Nevertheless, Lowry is right in depicting anonymous men, men without faces, men crushed and obliterated; for thus he expresses with a sure instinct the general and inevitable drift of man under his acceptance of the machine as master. We have good reason today to know what the individual may hope for when matched against the machine.

I am but an amateur and dabbler where pictures are concerned, and I am prepared to be told by the learned that my notions are nonsense. Nothing has ever surprised me more than to be asked to open an exhibition in the Manchester City Gallery, where so often I have beguiled an hour with beauty. The reason was a rather strange one. The invitation came from a man who had read my first novel, which has a painter for its chief character. He convinced himself that this painter was based upon observation of a well-known Manchester artist, and he argued that a man interested enough in a painter to make him a character in a novel would be interested enough in painting to assemble the few platitudes necessary for ‘opening’ an exhibition. From the painter in my book he went on to deduce a whole gallery of Manchester identifications, thereby making me tremble with apprehension of the laws of libel.

He was wrong. There is no one in that book, there is no one in any book I have written, who is ‘taken from life.’ What a widespread obsession there is that writers put their friends and acquaintances into their books! It goes back and back. It troubled Ben Jonson greatly. The charge was always being laid at his door, so that in the ‘Induction’ to Bartholomew Fair he takes it up. ‘It is finally agreed by the foresaid hearers and spectators that they neither in themselves conceal, nor suffer by them to be concealed, any state-decipherer or politic picklock of the scene, so solemnly ridiculous as to search out who was meant by the gingerbread woman, who by the hobby-horse man, who by the costermonger.’

There is, indeed, something ‘solemnly ridiculous’ about these adventures in identification. I have heard people say to journalists, ‘How on earth do you fill the paper every day?’ With all the world’s doings to draw on! With that vast well of life there forever, and the little bucket of a daily sheet for dipper! The everlasting struggle is not what to put in but what to leave out. Go into the sub-editors’ room at the end of the night and consider the ‘spikes,’ madam; look upon the wastepaper baskets, sir.

So it is with the novelist and dramatist. A man with any eye for the human comedy cannot exist long in this world without being aware of fathomless resources of character and incident. There is an alphabet of passions and obsessions, fears and hopes, loves and hates, that can be endlessly combined, competently by most of us, and into startling newminted form by the masters. True, there are those who lazily dip into their immediate shoals and eddies, with no refashioning, or too little; and these are they whom the voracious seize upon and wring through the mangle of the libel laws. But there is no need to do this. In the abundance, the superabundance. of the deep sea of human comedy, we can steer clear of the personal imputation.

V

The Germans have got hold of Mr. P. G. Wodehouse, and what a fuss that is causing! Mr. Wodehouse, it appears, was in a concentration camp and was thence transported to the luxuries of the Adlon Hotel in Berlin, and from the Adlon he has been broadcasting, announcing an invincible feeling of nonbelligerency. This has caused a grave scandal. My morning newspaper, day after day, has letters from authors and clergymen and what not, all denouncing Mr. Wodehouse and some vowing never again to read his books.

The whole hullaballoo seems to me to be nonsensical and wrong-headed. Naturally, we should all prefer that Mr. Wodehouse should do nothing to help our enemies; but which of us can confidently declare what he would do with a revolver at his head or a knife at his neck? We might take the way of sacrifice; but don’t let us too vociferously damn those who don’t. And I should imagine that if not physically, at least psychologically, this compulsion is behind the situation.

So much for that side of the matter. As to whether we should or should not read the books of one whose conduct we dislike, where are we to draw the line? Will the canon who exclaims ‘ Good-bye, Jeeves’ renounce the Epistle of Saint Peter because its author on a celebrated occasion was also guilty of a denial? No; you can’t intelligently stand by this doctrine of damning books because you don’t like their authors. Where do we get to? Do we cut out Wordsworth and Dickens for their illegitimate children? Carlyle for his vile temper? Rousseau for what I suppose the canon would call ‘ flagrant immorality ‘ ? Pepys because he chucked chambermaids under the chin? Indeed no. If Jeeves was ever funny, he is as funny today as he ever was; and what an author is to be judged by is what appears between his covers, and nothing else.

If we are to pursue Mr. Wodehouse, do we go on to pursue that solid phalanx of British novelists who have taken care, by timely removal to the United States, that they shall not find themselves in his predicament? I used to think we should, and I have said so publicly. I don’t like this great Recessional. Authors are in the habit — and they should be in the habit — of claiming some nobility for their calling. Very well then. Noblesse oblige. That was, and is, my feeling; but I am not prepared to make a case of it. Let them settle the matter with their own consciences. We do not know all the circumstances of those cases, any more than we know what, behind the deep veil of this war’s mysteries, has happened in the case of Wodehouse.

I am not trying to make out a case for a friend. I do not know Mr. Wodehouse. I have met him only once, and then spent no more than an hour in his company. Nor do I write because of excessive admiration for his books. Much nonsense about them, it seems to me, has been written by Hilaire Belloc and others; and if ever the University of Oxford made a fool of itself it did so when it conferred on Wodehouse the degree of Doctor of Letters. Wodehouse is a ‘funny man’ rather than a humorist, and even as a ‘funny man’ his range is narrow and shallow. But, I repeat, however funny he ever was, he is just as funny as that still.

The flaw in the thinking of those who now damn Wodehouse — as so many damned the King of the Belgians before he was vindicated — is that they seem to have expected the creator of Bertie Wooster to floor the Gestapo with a sally. But the author out of his study, away from his desk, off the job, is rarely the man who addresses us when we get within the covers of his books. Happy they who leave their commerce with authors at that; but few people are willing to do so. ‘I should love to meet the author of So-and-so!’ they exclaim; and they are unaware that the author of So-and-so is a secret being not to be met, someone who does not often emerge into the light of day. It would, I think, be generally admitted by those who have met many authors that the experience has few compensations and many disillusions.

I suppose I have met as many authors as most people, and I have found them to be divided roughly into two classes: the plain dumb who might as well be grocers, and those who seek to live up to their reputations and, in every word they utter, to twinkle, twinkle like little stars. It is only a personal idiosyncrasy, but if there is one type of conversation I cannot stand it is that of the man who hopes he is minting the epigrams that Oscar Wilde forgot.

I have met only one great novelist who impressed me as being also a great personality, and that was Arnold Bennett. Here, indeed, was a man to whom I paid the sincere tribute of wishing I could know more of him. It was merely a business occasion. Bennett had come to Manchester for the production of one of his plays at the Rusholme Theatre. I was sent by the Manchester Guardian to interview him. Bennett always had a high opinion of the Guardian. In one of his earlier short stories, ‘The Death of Simon Fuge,’ — one of the best short stories in the language, as I think, — he causes a character to say that the Guardian is not just a great newspaper: it is the greatest newspaper in the world. Perhaps it was this old feeling of affection for my paper that caused him to receive me so well at the Queen’s Hotel. There I met him, waiting in the lounge, with those somewhat prominent front teeth, that wave of hair which then, towards the close of his life, was nearly white. He was well dressed, and there was something big, solid, and, above all, dignified in his appearance and bearing.

I found him of an exquisite courtesy, treating a provincial reporter with a consideration that reporters do not always receive. We had tea together, and he talked of what he had been reading, of the plays and films he had been seeing; and he talked sensibly, with no greatman assumptions, seeking my own opinions and receiving them as though they were worth listening to. After tea, he said he would like to walk about the town a little, and invited me to accompany him. We perambulated, he with a slow heavy dignity, for three quarters of an hour. Then he said that he was tired, and I saw him back to the door of his hotel. Nothing momentous had been said on either side; but that brief contact remains curiously sharp in my memory. I have never before or since had so strongly the sense of being in the company of a man above the ruck of his fellows. How could either of us guess that afternoon that within a couple of years he would be dead and I should have succeeded him as the writer of the Evening Standard book page which he had made so famous?

(To be continued)