Ways of Escape

I was to learn in the years that followed how dangerous the libel laws could be to a writer. In this case Priestley, I am sure, really believed that this all-but-unknown writer was attacking him; he acted in good faith. The good faith of others was often more dubious. After the moderate success of Stamboul Train I began to be regarded as a monetary mark (no libel cases are ever brought against a failure). Between 1934 and 1938 one book, Journey Without Maps, had to be withdrawn and small damages paid to a doctor whom I didn’t know even existed, twice I was threatened by libel actions for reviews written in the Spectator, and finally there was the case of Miss Shirley Temple who, aged nine, brought a libel action against me through Twentieth Century-Fox for a criticism of her film Wee Willie Winkie in the magazine Night and Day.

  In those black days for authors – they ended with the war and a change in the libel laws – there was one firm of solicitors who went out of their way to incite actions for libel, checking the names of characters with the names in the London telephone directory. An acquaintance of mine was approached at the door of his flat by a solicitor’s clerk who carried a novel which, he said, contained an undesirable character of the same name (the more uncommon the name the greater the danger, which was one reason why in my novel The Comedians I called my principal characters Brown, Jones and Smith). The solicitor’s clerk told my friend that if he wished to institute proceedings his public-spirited firm would be glad to assist. There would be no expenses if the case were lost, but he assured my friend it was unlikely to reach the Courts. Unlikely indeed, for most publishers in those days had little zest for fighting. They were always prepared to cut their losses and make a small settlement. In the case of Stamboul Train about twenty pages had to be reprinted because of Priestley’s threatened libel action, and Heinemann deducted the cost from my royalties, or rather added them to my increasing debt to the firm.

  Well, one mustn’t exaggerate the danger or complain too much of it. There are professional risks in most trades – the girls who used in those halcyon days to put the gold leaf on our books had to drink their quota of milk each day as a protection, and what more suitable risk could I run than from obscure furtive characters, lurking on landings bowler-hatted, or cooped in the office-pen leafing through scenes of adultery or corruption? They might have emerged from my own pages.

  There are, I think, a few points of academic interest in Stamboul Train. The young dancer Coral Musker had surely appeared at the Theatre Royal in Nottwich, like a character in a later book, Anne in A Gun for Sale, and I can detect in both books the influence of my early passion for playwrighting which has never quite died. In those days I thought in terms of a key scene – I would even chart its position on a sheet of paper before I began to write. ‘Chapter 3. So-and-so. comes alive.’ Often these scenes consisted of isolating two characters – hiding in a railway shed in Stamboul Train, in an empty house in A Gun for Sale. It was as though I wanted to escape from the vast liquidity of the novel and to play out the most important situation on a narrow stage where I could direct every movement of my characters. A scene like that halts the progress of the novel with dramatic emphasis, just as in a film a close-up makes the moving picture momentarily pause. I can watch myself following this method even in so late a book as The Comedians. I had long abandoned that sheet of paper – otherwise perhaps I would have written on it, ‘Scene: Cemetery. Jones and Brown come alive.’ It might even be said that I reached the logical climax of the method in The Honorary Consul where almost the whole story is contained in the hut in which the kidnappers have hidden their victim.

  More than forty years separate Stamboul Train from The Honorary Consul. Hitler had not yet come to power when Stamboul Train was written. It was a different world and a different author – an author still in his twenties. I am not sure that I detect much promise in his work, except in the character of Colonel Hartep, the Chief of Police, whom I suspect survived into the world of Aunt Augusta and Travels with my Aunt. And when I read the last chapter laid in Istanbul, and encounter the characters of Kalebdjian, a hotel clerk, and Mr Stein, a fraudulent businessman, presented with excellent brevity, the old writer can salute his young predecessor with a certain respect.

  5

  To go back far in time is always a reluctant return (as one approaches death one lives a step ahead, perhaps in a hurry to be gone). I began to write It’s a Battlefield at a time of great financial anxiety. After the publication of my first novel my English and American publishers had guaranteed me six hundred pounds a year for three years which had enabled me to leave my safe job on The Times for the cottage at Chipping Campden, but in 1932 the three guaranteed years were nearly up, my second and third books had lost money, my fourth, Stamboul Train, was still in manuscript, and a biography which I had written of the poet, the Earl of Rochester, had been rejected; there was about twenty pounds left in the bank, and our first child was on the way.

  I had kept a journal during that period, and I can read in it week after week the record of sleepless nights, of depression and my attempts again and again to find a job, on a Sunday newspaper, at a university in Bangkok. Little wonder that It’s a Battlefield made slow progress1 – I was also working on a long short story called Brandon’s Acre which has disappeared even from my memory.

  One gloomy day I took a ticket for London to discuss matters with Charles Evans, the head of Heinemann, and with the representative of Doubleday, my American publisher. Evans consented to renew my contract for a year, but Doubleday only for two months while they had time to study the manuscript of Stamboul Train. And there were heavy conditions – another two-book contract and any losses by the publishers had to be recovered before further royalties were paid. In other words I returned to our cottage in the country with two months’ security, and the prospect of having to write two more novels after Stamboul Train without any payment at all. Stamboul Train saved us, but only at the very last moment. (There is another thing which my journal shows to counterbalance the sleepless nights – the courage and understanding of my wife who never complained of this dangerous cul-de-sac into which I had led her from the safe easy highroad we had been travelling while I remained on The Times.)

  It seems to me now almost an act of self-destruction to have embarked on It’s a Battlefield at this particular moment. I had no illusions that it could prove popular; indeed it remains the least read of all my books, although certain passages remain in my own memory (the interview between Milly and the murdered policeman’s widow; Conrad’s last pursuit of the Assistant Commissioner, his revolver loaded only with blanks).

  The subject, I remember, was suggested by a dream, the fruit of anxiety-ridden weeks, in which I had been condemned to death for murder, and I find a piece of rough verse written down in a diary I kept then which suggests that the opening of the novel was already coming to mind.

  This the analysis of blood-stain –

  ‘on woollen beret of a common make’;

  the experts complain

  that the fingers left no mark

  On the park chair

  or the young breast;

  microscopic stare

  at uncertain past,

  Grass inspected, note-book entry,

  ‘torn bodice and lace’;

  Over the body the solitary sentry

  of her certain peace.

  I have seldom had the courage to reread a book of mine more than once, and that immediately after publication when I check it for misprints and for small changes which I ought to have made in manuscript, typescript or proof, so that I may have a marked copy ready for another edition if one is ever required. I broke this rule with It’s a Battlefield because two passages remained obstinately wrong with the book. The most important was an episode, quite unrelated to the main theme – the injustice of men’s justice – when the Assistant Commissioner accompanies a detective superintendent to effect the arrest of a trunk-murderer in Paddington. It was monstrously unlikely behaviour for an Assistant Commissioner, and so when, six years
after the first publication in 1934, I set about revising the book for a papercovered edition, I cut the whole scene out. But when the shorter version of the book was published and I read it through yet again, I realised that, unlikely as the episode had been, it was an essential one. Without the mad murderer of the Salvation Army the battlefield of the title lacked the sense of violence and confusion. The metaphor became a political and not an ironic one.

  The other scene which has always worried me, with which I could only tinker, altering phrases and cutting wherever possible, is the meeting of a Communist Party branch attended by Mr Surrogate, an intellectual member. I had only once in my life attended a large Communist meeting, and that was in Paris in 1923, at a time when I held for four weeks a Party card at Oxford, and this experience was totally insufficient as a basis for a scene which now to me lacks authenticity.

  I have seldom employed living models in a novel except for very minor characters, but in It’s a Battlefield I was aware of Lady Ottoline Morrell’s presence in the background of Lady Caroline; my idea of Middleton Murry, whom I did not personally know, was responsible in small part for Mr Surrogate, and my uncle Graham Greene, who had been Secretary of the Admiralty under Mr Churchill during the First World War, lent a little of his stiff inhibited bachelor integrity to the character of the Assistant Commissioner. My uncle though had had no experience of the Far East – that was to be mine nearly twenty years later, a curious foreshadowing.

  If the reception of this book, which added to my failure in the eyes of my publishers, did not discourage me, it was for three reasons: the best review I had yet earned came from V.S. Pritchett, a kind phrase from Ezra Pound, and some words of praise from Ford Madox Ford. What did it matter after that, the opinion of the popular reviewers or the indifference of readers? I had received my spurs. I still think the last sixty pages are as successful as anything I have written since.

  6

  I have always had a soft spot in my heart for my fifth published novel, England Made Me (a feeling which has not been shared by the general public), yet of the circumstances of its composition I can remember very little. I think of those years between 1933 and 1937 as the middle years for my generation, clouded by the Depression in England, which cast a shadow on this book, and by the rise of Hitler. It was impossible in those days not to be committed, and it is hard to recall the details of one private life as the enormous battlefield was prepared around us.

  When the story came to me, when Anthony and Kate, the twins in the novel, clamoured for attention, and their incestuous situation (which was yet to contain no incestuous act) for exploration, I knew nothing at all of Sweden. I think it is the only occasion when I have deliberately chosen an unknown country as a background and then visited it, like a camera-team, to take the necessary stills. (Many years later I visited the Belgian Congo for something of the same purpose, but the Congo was a geographical term invented by the white colonists – I already knew Negro Africa, in Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Kenya, the hinterland of Liberia.)

  The photographs I brought back from Sweden were, I think, reasonably accurate, reasonably representative, and yet, now that I know Stockholm well in winter, spring, summer and autumn, I am a little afraid when I come to reread the book. That midsummer festival at Saltsjö-Duvnäs, a New Year’s night when lead was melted over the fire to tell the future and the piece I threw in the pan formed a perfect question mark – such impressions are not to be found here, nor the swans gathering on the ice outside the Grand Hotel, the taste of akvavit in the Theatre Grill, the lakes of Dalecarlia, nor that island in the archipelago from which in that later time I would row every morning to fetch water for cooking and where a lavatory seat stood like a surrealist object all alone in a mosquito-loud glade. These impressions are Sweden to me now, and it might be as distressing to reread this novel as an ancient letter containing some superficial critical estimate of a woman whom twenty years later one had grown to love.

  I have few memories of that visit with my younger brother Hugh in August 1934; the clearest, because they have not been overlaid by the later memories, are attached to the speckless miniature liner which brought us up the canal from Gothenburg to Stockholm (and which I imagined falsely would prove a background for the novel), of waking to the soft summer brilliance of midnight and the silver of the birches going by, almost within reach of my hands, and the chickens pecking on the bank. I remember that my brother and I carried on a harmless flirtation with two English visitors of sixteen and twenty; we went for walks in separate pairs when the boat stopped at a lock, and once, for some inexplicable reason, considerable alarm arose because my brother and the younger girl had not returned to the little liner at the proper time, and the mother – an intellectual lady who frequently won literary competitions in the Liberal weekly Time & Tide – was convinced that both had been drowned in the canal. One evening in Stockholm, on the borders of the lake, my companion of the canal slapped my face in almost the same circumstances as those in which Loo slapped Anthony’s in my story, for I had told her that I believed she was a virgin. Afterwards we sat decorously enough in Skansen, Stockholm’s park, among the grey rocks and the silver trees. (Her reaction was the only characteristic she had in common with Loo.) But August is not the best time of year to see Stockholm for the first time – what with the heat and the humidity, and the extreme formality of one dinner which we attended at Saltsjöbaden, we decided to move on to Oslo. I am amazed now at my temerity in laying the scene of a novel in a city of which I knew so little.

  Would I have written the book any better now when I can easily find in my memories a model for Krogh, the industrialist, who so obstinately at that time refused to come alive? I doubt it. In most of my books, however well I might know the scene, there is one lay figure who obstinately refuses to live, who is there only for the sake of the story – Krogh in England Made Me, the barmaid in Brighton Rock, Wilson in The Heart of the Matter, Smythe in The End of the Affair, the journalist Parkinson in A Burnt-Out Case. The sad truth is that a story hasn’t room for more than a limited number of created characters. One more successful creation and like an overloaded boat the story lists. This was the unexpected danger I encountered in England Made Me.

  I was quite satisfied with my portrait of Anthony. Hadn’t I lived with him closely over many years? He was an idealised portrait of my eldest brother, Herbert, and I had myself shared many of Anthony’s experiences. I had known Annette, the young tart whom Anthony loved. I had walked up those forbidding stairs and found with the same emotion the notices – ‘No milk this morning,’ ‘Gone out. Be back at—’ (no hour which would ever be recorded on the dial of my watch). I was satisfied too with Kate, Anthony’s sister, who seems to me the woman I have drawn better than any other, with the possible exception of Sarah in The End of the Affair. Anthony and Kate were the heart of the book; Krogh was only there to manipulate their story, and the others, Loo, Hall, Hammarsten, Young Andersson were background figures; no one else was needed. Then suddenly the boat listed because Minty stepped on board.

  He was entirely unexpected when he emerged from the pre-conscious – this remittance man who woke up one morning in his Stockholm lodgings watched by a spider under a tooth glass – a late-comer at the end of Part Two. I suppose, for the purposes of Anthony’s story, I had required, as a minor figure, some fellow outsider who would recognise – as only a fellow countryman can – the fraudulent element in Anthony, who could detect the falsity of the old Harrovian tie, but I had no intention of introducing into the story a sly pathetic Anglo-Catholic; a humble follower, perhaps, of Sir John Betjeman, who would steal all the scenes in which he played a part and have the last word, robbing even Kate of her curtain at Anthony’s funeral. Oh yes, I resented Minty, and yet I couldn’t keep him down.

  The subject – apart from the economic background of the thirties and that sense of capitalism staggering from crisis to crisis – was simple and unpolitical, a brother and sister in the confusion of incestuous love. I
found it odd to read once in a monthly review an article on my early novels in which a critic disinterred this theme. He wrote of the ambiguity of the subject, how the author himself feared or was even perhaps unaware of the nature of the passion between brother and sister. He quoted examples to show how the dialogue between the two broke suddenly at a dangerous moment into irrelevancies – I was shirking the true nature of my subject, so he wrote.

  How dangerous it is for a critic to have no technical awareness of the novel. Surely the great prefaces of Henry James have marked one novelist’s route indelibly – the route of ‘the point of view’. There was no ambiguity in my mind; the ambiguity was in the minds of Kate and Anthony whom I had chosen for my ‘points of view’. They were continually on the edge of self-discovery, but some self-protective instinct warded off, with false or incomplete memories and irrelevancies, the moment of discovery. Kate was nearer to knowledge than Anthony and both used their superficial sexual loves, Kate with Krogh and Anthony with Loo, to evade the real right thing. The cowardly evasions were not mine; they belonged to the doomed pair.

  7

  A friendship can be among the most important events in a life, and a way of escape, just as much as writing or travel, from the everyday routine, the sense of failure, the fear of the future. Certainly my meeting with Herbert Read was an important event in my life. He was the most gentle man I have ever known, but it was a gentleness which had been tested in the worst experience of his generation. The young officer, who gained the Military Cross and a DSO in action on the Western Front, had carried with him to all that mud and death Robert Bridges’s anthology The Spirit of Man, Plato’s Republic and Don Quixote. Nothing had changed in him. It was the same man twenty years later who could come into a room full of people and you wouldn’t notice his coming – you noticed only that the whole atmosphere of a discussion had quietly altered, that even the relations of one guest with another had changed. No one any longer would be talking for effect, and when you looked round for an explanation there he was – complete honesty born of complete experience had entered the room and unobtrusively taken a chair.