The Novelist in Training

I

A man has only to be outstanding in Fleet Street to find his name crusted with legends of brusqueness, inconsiderateness, almost downright brutality. So it inevitably was with Lord Beaverbrook. He took men up, it was said, and as casually he threw them down, hardly caring whether they lived or died. For myself, I never found this to be so. On the contrary, I had more than one occasion to discover that Lord Beaverbrook was more than usually sensitive to other people’s feelings.

I once referred in the Evening Standard to Arnold Bennett’s story, ‘The Death of Simon Fuge,’ as one of the great stories of the English language. In the Standard the next day was a brief letter to the editor, signed ‘Beaverbrook,’ tersely contradicting this opinion. Well, a man has a right to hold and to express any view he pleases, but I was nevertheless surprised that the proprietor of the Evening Standard should so shortly and publicly throw over the judgment of one of his ‘experts.’ However, I did not mind: I had expressed my view; he had expressed his; and if, in order to judge between us, people were led to read the story, so much the better.

I went down to Epsom that night, to be ready to see the Derby the next day, and I was dining in my hotel when a telephone call came through from Lord Beaverbrook. I had not left my address with anybody: he must have gone to some trouble to run me down there. And he had done this because he thought his letter might have hurt my susceptibilities. He said he hoped I hadn’t minded his letter; I replied that I hadn’t, and that I should mind it still less if I had the right of reply. ‘You certainly have,’ he said. ‘Say anything about me that you like.’ And so he gave me the last word, to the extent of considerably more than a column in the Standard. I found him again and again capable of these understanding flashes of feeling.

I met George Moore, as I met Arnold Bennett, only once, and in his case, too, it was towards the end of his life. Again it was a question of a newspaper interview. I called at the house in Ebury Street, and a message was taken up to George Moore, who agreed to see me in an hour’s time. When the moment came I climbed the stairs, and there he was in a great chair, his hair white, his face round and as pink as a new-cut ham. I suppose he had devoted some part of the intervening hour to deciding what to say, for I was hardly seated when he began: ‘A novel should be shaped like a vase.’

‘Why?’ I asked.

He had evidently settled down to trot along what I suspect must have been a familiar track, and my question seemed both to annoy and jolt him.

After this, the interview did not go too well, but we talked desultorily of this and that. He seemed surprised to find that I had read his books. A newspaper reporter, I gathered, to come up to his expectations, should neither read books nor have opinions about how a book might be written. He should be a shorthand writer, ready to make a verbatim record of wisdom bubbling from its spring. We parted with a mutual bristling of the fur.

I have never gone out of my way to meet authors, for I have a horror of seeming to ‘run after’ either people who are wealthy or those who are in any way distinguished. I can think of only one author I should have liked to meet, and that is Thomas Hardy. My feeling for his work is compounded of reverence as well as admiration. Perhaps, if I had met him, there might now be a cloud over the warmth of my appreciation, though I believe I have learned the importance of thinking of the book apart from the man. Yet, somehow, I imagine I should have found him sympathetic. Everything I hear of him helps me to believe this.

I don’t know whether there is any truth in a story I once heard, but it sounds ‘in character,’ except that I cannot conceive Hardy at a modem literary party. The story is of such a party, full of gay unimportant chatterers, filling the air with news of that superabundant commodity, the great novels that are ‘going to be’ written. In the comer was a quiet overlooked man, whom one of the party at last approached, demanding what he thought of the technique of novel-writing. He replied modestly that he had written a few novels, but really he didn’t know much about the theory of the matter. When he was gone the young man learned that this had been Thomas Hardy.

They say that he had a horror of calling attention to himself, and that when he traveled ‘Thomas Hardy’ never appeared on his luggage, but only ‘T. Hardy.’

Certainly ‘T. Hardy’ would attract little enough attention to a not very distinguished-looking person, traveling probably third class. I once came upon a man who had met Hardy, and he told me a story, not at all important, but one that somehow made me see Hardy clearly.

The man was a retired naval petty officer, whom I came on by chance, tending the cabbages in his garden in Devonshire. During the war of 19141918 he was captured by the Germans in East Africa, and remained a prisoner there for some years. He was one of a considerable party of Englishmen, and they were kept moving about in the forest, sick with malaria, unhappy and unwell. They had one book — Hardy’s Tess. He did not know whence it had come, but there it was, and every man read it and reread it; and, as year followed year, bits of paper frayed away, chunks of print were obliterated by thumbmarks; pages, stuck together by food, wouldn’t come apart without disaster. But, whenever a new prisoner turned up, and was given the book, someone could always help him over stiles, reciting the missing bits. ‘We all knew it almost by heart,’ said the petty officer.

After the war he visited a relative in Dorchester, an innkeeper, with whom he was walking one day, when they met Thomas Hardy. The innkeeper introduced the petty officer to the novelist. ‘He was a very simple fellow,’ the man said to me. ‘He shook hands and said, “You look very ill,” and then he went off.’

Later in the day the petty officer was eating his dinner at a farmers’ ordinary, and Hardy was sitting there, alone at a table, no one taking any notice of him —nor he, apparently, of anyone.

‘Did you tell him about the book?’ I asked.

He had not done so; but I think the old man would have been pleased with that tale.

‘I should like to have seen him,’ I said to the petty officer.

‘Why?’ he asked. ‘Was he important?’

II

My three and one-half years as a journalist in Bradford I have called my university career. I was away from family restraints for the first time; I had my own rooms; I had taken up a game — a thing I had never done before; I had the constant companionship of lively minds; I was smoking a lot and drinking a little; I was reading regularly and intelligently. During most of that three and one-half years, I devoted a month at a time to a chosen author. I began with Chaucer, came forward with Spenser, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Dryden, following the stream of poetry up to Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson, Browning. And so with the novelists. I obtained a sense of the continuity, the development, of English letters. Not that I read nothing in a given month save the chosen author of the month. There were many side lines; but I found this system of reading with continuity very important after years of haphazard absorption. Blessings upon the Everyman’s Library, and upon an age in which those volumes could be bought for a shilling each.

My work for the Yorkshire Observer was of wide variety. I was in turn reporter, subeditor, and even, at times, editor. Editor, that is, of the weekly edition, during the editor’s holidays — a not exacting job, consisting as it did of making a pie out of bits of the daily edition and adding a seasoning of short stories, serials, and articles.

I learned a lot about newspaper work. I did theatre criticisms and even, once or twice, music criticism, though I always protested that this was carrying hypocrisy too far, and at length I was, with gladness, relieved of all contact with an art which I can no more discuss than I can discuss religion.

I did much book-reviewing. The system was simple. Those who wanted to review books could do so, with the book for reward, and no other pay. I wanted to review books very much, and was enormously encouraged one day by a note from Drysdale, telling me that a review I had written ‘would have graced a great London journal.’ He allowed me much freedom so far as space was concerned. I have used a whole column of the Yorkshire Observer — a matter, in those days, of 1200 or 1500 words — to assess the merits of a single novel. One day I wrote a short review of Mr. T. H. S. Escott’s life of Trollope. I thought no more of it than of any other review, but it was one of those things that affect a man’s whole future.

And now those years that had so much endeavor and gayety — gayety whether under the winter pall of fog in Bradford or summer’s winy air on the moors and in the dales of the West Riding — drew to their ominous end. The crust crumbled under our feet; the war broke up that goodly comradeship; and all too soon ‘ the loveliest and the best’ of them were gone forever.

I did not remain in Bradford long after the war had begun. All sorts of queer activities broke out. I was not at first passed for the army, and found myself one of a group who imagined they were somehow helping our country by shooting on a miniature range. But, with so many friends so quickly gone, it was all very unhappy, very unsatisfactory, and I welcomed a chance to leave the city. I went, in the spring of 1915, to the Manchester Guardian, served my apprenticeship there, and then discovered an unheroic niche in the army after all. If we include the three and one-half years when I was absent in France, I served the Guardian for fifteen years. These were the most momentous years of my life. I came to know and to love Manchester as I have known and loved no other city. When I began to write books it was natural and inevitable that Manchester should be their focus. I was steeped in the place to the eyebrows. I am still touchy with anyone who runs it down or fails to understand its enormous significance in the life of Britain. I am often referred to — especially by American writers — as a ‘ Manchester man.’ I do not deny it, for I am proud so to be in all that matters — love and, I think I may claim, understanding. From all over the world I receive letters from exiled Mancunians, nostalgic homesick letters, thanking me for giving them the taste and smell of their native city.

Manchester is about as big a city as one can take to one’s heart. I never, in London, had any sense of citizenship or of civic pride.

You couldn’t take a place like that to your heart. I didn’t know who was the chief of our local governing authority. I never saw our Member of Parliament, whoever he may have been, and I do not to this day know in what ecclesiastical diocese we were situated and who was our bishop. Most of the residents went up daily to their work in London; and all round London, making a circle of ever-widening extent, there were similar places which once had been villages and now were God knows what. ‘Londoner,’ in short, was ceasing to have its old meaning. It was becoming increasingly difficult to find a Londoner. What were called Londoners were people who knew the way from some London underground station to the office, knew very little else about London, and hastened home at night to these new raw places which were almost devoid of culture and association. Hardly one of these had a theatre; many had not a church. On the credit side it may be added that they caused to develop an enormous interest in gardening and a fair knowledge of horticulture. But essentially they were without soul or a focus for civic endeavor. The cinema was the highest point of public entertainment, and the golf club the centre of social life.

The same sort of thing was happening about Manchester, but the place had not reached the proportions which are amorphous and destructive of individuality. You could still be a Manchester man in the true sense that you lived in Manchester and knew, and were interested in, all that appertained to the city’s well-being. I think there can hardly have been a citizen who did not know who was his Lord Mayor and who were the councilors and aldermen representing his civic ward. The Bishop was our bishop and the cathedral was our cathedral, still intimate and familiar enough to be called by many ‘t’owd church.’ We knew our Members of Parliament and watched their ways pretty closely, and expected them to be often among us to give an account of themselves. The Guardian was our own great local paper, which, to us, was something more distinguished than a ‘national organ.’ We knew our town clerk and our chief constable; and our university was ours indeed, scintillating with great and well-known names, held in local affection: Miers and Alexander, Tout and Herford. The theatres were ours also, and even the music halls had a domestic and indigenous flavor. In a word, we were a community, keenly aware of the existence in our midst of those men and those institutions which represented our mundane and spiritual and cultural essence and well-being.

Such was the Manchester I went to in 1915, and such, in the main, it is today.

III

The chief reporter of the Manchester Guardian, when I joined the staff, was William Haslam Mills. Like the deputy chief, George Leach, Mills was a barrister-at-law. He and Leach had once put up a joint brass plate on some obscure office door in Manchester, but neither made progress in the law. They had long since given up legal ambitions when I knew them. These two men — and Mills in particular — had a great influence upon me.

It was Mills who made the appointment, and it was characteristic of him that his decision was affected by two points which might not have appealed to other men. Necessarily, when applying for the job, I submitted examples of my work. I made them up on foolscap sheets into three folders labeled ‘Descriptive Reports,’ ‘Theatre Criticism,’ ‘Book Reviews.’ Mills told me afterwards that the neatness of the folders first attracted him, and that he was finally decided by a sentence or two in a review of T. H. S. Escott’s book on Trollope.

This was characteristic of the man. He himself was the very picture of neatness. Everything about him was neat. He wrote a beautiful firm neat hand, and so disliked the look of even one erasure that I have seen him more than once rewrite a whole page of copy because he had altered a word on the last line. His clothes were neat, though worn with an air. He always carried a malacca cane, always wore a bow tie or a stock, and in winter always had a muffler twisted about his neck with an effect both careless and considered. He was strikingly good-looking in a histrionic way.

That a phrase in something I had written should have clinched the matter in Mills’s mind was characteristic too, for he was a lover of good phrases in others and a maker of them for himself. Slipshod writing was abhorrent to him and was never passed over without reproof. One night he called me into his little room, opening off the reporters’ room, and handed me a sheet of copy. ‘Look at that!’ he said. ‘Look at that!’ Someone had written: ‘Owing to the fact that — ‘ Mills carefully put his pen through it and substituted ‘because.’ ‘Owing to the fact that!’ he groaned.

‘Tut-tut! Like a mouthful of sand.’

He loved to talk, and he talked as he wrote and as he dressed — with a slightly theatrical affectation. It came off because he knew how to do it; but he was a dangerous model to copy. The office was overrun with dangerous models. Any man who worked there long was in danger of his life as a writer. If you followed Mills you were at the risk, not having his resources, of developing a style which was all bloom and no peach. If you followed Allan Monkhouse, who had worked out a monkish style from which adjectives were banished as sins and adverbs as backslidings, the result might easily be all stone and no plum; and C. E. Montague was the most dangerous of all. Monkhouse once told me that Montague had said to him that a good writer should be aware of an improvement in his style every month — which goes a long way towards explaining why I, at any rate, can never read a Montague novel without being aware of the incessant clicking of the brain behind the pen. In my golfing days I used to play, most Monday mornings, with a parson who, on every tee, murmured half-aloud: ‘Eye on the ball. Don’t press. Slow back — steady — swing!’ so that I was constrained to cry in agony one day, ‘For God’s sake, stop studying golf and play it!’ Not thus, I felt, did Braid and Vardon soar to the heights; and not, I feel now and ever shall feel, by style obsession shall a writer enter into the kingdom. Preoccupation with the rules of the game there must be; but it should no more show when the game is in progress than bread and beef show in a muscular arm lifting a weight.

The Guardian was perhaps a little style-mad; and that, one may at least say, is better than the gay carefree sanity that produces ‘owing to the fact that’ and avoids repetition of the word ‘potato’ by writing ‘the aforesaid tuber’ — another circumlocution which one day afflicted Haslam Mills to the soul.

Mills, more than any other man in the office, affected the direction of my own writing at that time. To ‘write like Mills’ seemed to me to be the thing to aim at; and, at that time and in the circumstances, a very good thing, too. How excellently he himself could use his resources may be judged from a book called Grey Pastures, which he published through Chatto and Windus. It is a series of short studies of the people he knew, and the conditions in which they lived, during his boyhood in Ashtonunder-Lyne, and it reproduces the atmosphere of provincial Liberalism and nonconformity with a tender and whimsical appreciation that I have not known equaled. It is Thrums without treacle.

Mills was still there as chief reporter when I came back from the war. C. P. Scott had declined to guarantee my job, but Mills had said, ‘If the paper’s still here, and if I am still here, you shall come back.’ He was as good as his word.

When he left us it was to take a post with a Ministry in London. On his last Sunday night in the office, I happened to be reporter on late duty. On a weekday that was a dull job enough — hanging about for what might happen; but on a Sunday it was lugubrious and depressing to an inconceivable extent. Manchester yawned with blackness and emptiness. It was a moment, above all others, to stay in the office and talk, if Mills could be induced to talk. He sat in his little cabinet of a room, I in the big, desolate reporters’ room; and as he now and then passed through I could divine in him the excitement and melancholy of that farewell moment. He was no longer a young man; he had served the paper from his youth up; and now he was engaged in that saddest of tasks: sorting, burning, running through drawers and desks in which the years had accumulated their significant and reminding trifles. At last he came out into the room and announced : ‘ I shall go in and say good-bye to Mr. Scott.’ Most of the men in the office would have said ‘the Old Man’; but Mills, in speech, preserved always an almost Arthurian punctiliousness.

This moment of going in to say goodbye to Mr. Scott must have been to him, to whom the paper was a religion and the editor its prophet, a high moment; and he was a man who instinctively dramatized even moments that were not particularly distinguished. I went on with my reading in that dreary reporters’ room, with the uncurtained windows giving upon the black Manchester night, and awaited his return. He was back sooner than I had expected him, and he looked stricken. He was without George Leach’s skepticism, his ability to clothe a bad moment in a cynical disregard. His face always betrayed him. He came up to my desk and said: ‘He didn’t even say, “We’re sorry to lose you, Mr. Mills.” He shook hands and said, “I think you’re making a wise decision.” ‘ Mills then turned in his quick eager way and went back to his own little room, where he sat for a long time in silence and solitude. I think he felt it hard to take up his stick and hat and do all that now remained to be done — walk out of the office which he had served for so long with a rare devotion and distinction. A few words might have made it easier for him, but they were not spoken.

By the time I myself appeared in London, death had taken Mills off too early: a brilliant journalist; a character of great originality, if lacking a little in the qualities that we mean by force; to me, a friend and mentor whose memory has forever a seat by my private hearth. On the title page of a book he wrote about the Manchester Guardian he placed these words by Edmund Burke: ‘To bring the dispositions that are lovely in private life into the service and conduct of the commonwealth; so to be patriots as not to forget we are gentlemen.’ That was Mills’s conception not only of the patriot but also of the journalist.

IV

When I was engaged by Haslam Mills to serve the Manchester Guardian he handed me over to George Leach, and as we were returning from the Thatched House inn too long afterwards, Leach remarked that there now remained nothing to be done save the laying on of hands. Thus he admirably crystallized the sacerdotal relationship in which C. P. Scott liked to stand to his staff.

It would be pleasant to be able to join my voice with many voices which have praised the virtues of this great editor, and, indeed, I can do so freely and with conviction insofar as it is of the editor I speak. But I never liked the man. ‘Scarcely,’says Saint Paul in his Epistle to the Romans, ‘scarcely for a righteous man will one die; yet peradventure for a good man some would even dare to die.’ Scott was righteousness incarnate, and this I say not as a sneer but as a simple statement of fact concerning the man as I knew him. Righteousness, in all conscience, is a quality so rare that only a fool would make its ascription a sneer. But it has been my own lot in life, because that is how I am constructed, to be moved more readily by human feeling than by intellectual assent; and Scott lacked more completely than most men I have known the human touch that turns a partisan into a devotee. I cannot think of a man that I would die for; but, in any list of possibles, C. P. Scott’s name would be near the bottom.

Saint Paul is right in this analysis of the qualities which attach man to man. Even so dry and unemotional a spectator of the human scene as Mr. Somerset Maugham backs Saint Paul’s opinion. Having examined, and turned down as of little worth, most of what we prize in men and things, he pronounces in The Summing Up for ’lovingkindness’ as the quality that preëminently gives significance and beauty to human relationships.

I was once paying a half-term visit to my boys’ school, and E. T. Scott, C. P. Scott’s son, was there. The boys of the school came up and talked to us with the unrivaled freedom of modern youth, and E. T. Scott said to me: ‘I like that, you know. I like the way these youngsters talk to their elders nowadays. But, my word, I wouldn’t have dared to talk to my father like that!’

This seemed to me a revealing moment. Grant, if you like, that what was in question was not the attitude of an individual but of a whole generation; but it was C. P. Scott’s generation, and in him the authoritarian and autocratic qualities of the generation were hardened to an unusual degree.

He lacked the common touch —which makes a good or bad epitaph as you read it. When my second son was born, my wife was desperately ill, and when the boy was a few months old the two had to be parted. My wife was sent away into the country, and the child was put out to nurse in a Manchester institution, while I lived with the other child under the hospitable roof of my colleague Leach, to whom I say now that the kindness of himself and his wife is never forgotten in this household. Before my child could be admitted to the institution, some guarantee was demanded as to the respectability and status of the parents. I asked C. P. Scott if he would provide me with this, and he did so readily. But thereafter, although I had occasion to see him almost daily, he never once inquired how my wife and child were progressing; he showed no apprehension whatever of the anxieties of a man passing through one of the darkest times of his life. Pardonably, perhaps, my mind automatically recalls the incident in assessing his human worth.

Scott was never guilty of spending money with vulgar ostentation. A relay of journalists of the most distinguished ability passed through the office in my time, all leaving in quest of better pay. There was a reason for Scott’s attitude. I have been told that, when he inherited from his relative, John Edward Taylor, the paper which he had already edited for many years, the property was burdened with debt. In clearing off that load, he made never one concession to the growing demand for a ‘popular’ paper — that is to say, a paper that fell below his own magnificent conception of what a newspaper should be. I can admire that struggle, and the resolute adherence to principle behind it, all the more because his conception of what constitutes a great newspaper is mine also; and to this day the Manchester Guardian is the one paper I would not be without. It reaches me by post, sometimes a day, sometimes two days, late; and I know no higher tribute that can be paid to a daily newspaper than this: that one can read it with pleasure and profit two days after publication. Scott’s great work remains.

These facts should not be forgotten in assessing this side of Scott’s character. It was a righteous struggle, and he won it; but it left him oversensitive to petty cash.

The ambition of all proper young men on the Manchester Guardian was to write that first column on the last page known as ‘the back-pager.’ We were paid three guineas a time, and were glad enough to get it. On one occasion, returning from a prolonged stay in Ireland as the Guardian’s representative, I wrote a back-pager on an Irish topic. When the cheque for it reached me, there was enclosed a note in C. P. Scott’s firm handwriting, pointing out that the office had been paying my expenses during the time when I accumulated the experience which made the back-pager possible; ‘and this being so,’ the note proceeded, ‘I suggest that we go fiftyfifty.’ The cheque was for a guinea and a half. No one could quarrel with the justice of such a decision, but it did not help me to love the man who made it, nor did it inspire in my heart a zeal to serve him well. Whatever I wrote for the paper, so long as Haslam Mills was there, I wrote in the hope that it would please him rather than that it would please Scott.

What may have been the fate of others I do not know; but, for myself, during the eleven years of my service to the paper I never knew whether my work pleased Scott or not. On no occasion did he either say or write a word of commendation or dispraise. For all the human appreciation there was, one might as well have been working for a marble statue. Month after month, and in the long run, year after year, I was in relationship with Scott the editor; but not once did he show even the flicker of an understanding of human need. I cannot recall a word — not so much as a comment on the weather, a topic which in Manchester provides ample opening — that was not concerned with the paper’s routine.

The last work I did for the Manchester Guardian was in connection with that general election which destroyed the Labor Party and created the ‘National’ Government. The articles I wrote then brought me letters of appreciation from journalists and private persons in many parts of England, in the United States, and on the Continent of Europe. The one region which was dumb was the editorial department of the Manchester Guardian. C. P. Scott had then, in theory, ceased to be editor, and had been succeeded by his son Edward. But the ‘old man ‘ continued to attend the office, and there were few who believed that he was not editor still in all but name. Neither the de facto nor the de jure editor broke the silence.

I resigned, writing a brief note which contained no more than the intimation that I should cease to be a member of the Manchester Guardian staff in a month’s time. I was told later that this caused some offense; and of course it was customary to express regret at going, pride at having been associated with a great editor and a great paper. But I make no concealment that I was in a hurt and bitter mood. I remembered Haslam Mills saying to me years before: ‘He didn’t even say, “We’re sorry you’re going, Mr. Mills.’” My pride at having served the Guardian for so long was, in fact, great and will not diminish; but I should have been prouder of having worked for C. P. Scott if his prophetic soul had shown deeper symptoms of kinship with a human heart.