My Brother Evelyn & Other Profiles (16 page)

The publisher to whom Jacobs offered his first collection of short stories,
Many Cargoes
, suggested an outright purchase for £60, an arrangement that was not uncommon in those days. Jacobs insisted on a small royalty and a lease to publish for three years. ‘Beatrice Harraden,' he would say, ‘was offered the same terms for
Ships that Pass in Night
, and she accepted them.'

There was another story that Jacobs would recount with a chuckle in connection with
Many Cargoes
. A reviewer wrote: ‘Jacobs is a neat craftsman, but he works in a narrow field of which he has already exhausted the yield.' ‘That narrow field', Jacobs would say, ‘has already yielded fifteen books.'

It was not till late in life that he reached his tether, he then stopped writing. He was a scrupulous and conscientious writer. Editors could trust him not to drop
below his own high standard. J. B. Pinker arranged for him an exclusive contract with the
Strand
at £350 a story for the world serial rights. He believed this to be the highest
guaranteed
price offered to any English writer at that time, except Rudyard Kipling.

Once, but only once did the editor, H. Greenough Smith, return a story with many apologies; explaining that it fell so much below the Jacobs standard that publication of it would harm Jacobs's reputation. Jacobs did not want to create a precedent but decided eventually not to object and put aside the story. Three years later Greenough Smith was anxious to have Jacobs in the Christmas number. Jacobs was a slow worker and had not a plot in mind. He took out the discarded story and reread it. It seemed to him all right. He altered three sentences, had it retyped and sent it to the
Strand
, saying that he had entirely recast it and believed that in its revised form it was improved. Greenough Smith was delighted, hailing it as vintage Jacobs.

‘The Biter Bit' was the formula of
The Monkey's Paw
, that untypical Jacobs story that has, I suppose, appeared more often in anthologies than anything that he has written. He had a strong vein of the macabre that he rarely exploited. Perhaps he was afraid of it. I once saw a surprising sign of it, when he was staying with us in our Sussex bungalow. The dog—a friendly mongrel—slept in the same room as Barbara and myself. W. W. woke us in the middle of the night fearful lest the dog should turn on the tap of the gas-fire with his teeth. The tap in question was not one that turned but screwed. I doubt if the dog could have turned it with his teeth, even if he had wanted to. The dog had been sleeping with us for a year. Nothing could have been more unlikely than that he should now make the attempt. Jacobs was diffident and hated to appear ridiculous. He must have suffered
acute agonies of apprehension before he woke us up. We appeased him in the end by putting a tumbler over the tap.

I may have suggested that because of the narrowness of his opinions in terms of politics and sex, Jacobs was uncongenial company. That was far from being so. He was affectionate, under his reserve; he appreciated the pleasures of the table and his mordant wit gave a sharp keen flavour to the talk. In early days I often found myself arguing with him, and he got impatient when he argued, but I soon learnt not to challenge his provocative statements and to steer the talk into calm waters. Had he married a worldly woman who ‘took life easy', he would, I believe, have been a contented and benign family man, but perhaps if he had done so his wit would have lost its edge; ‘The wife' in his stories was always an adversary. Perhaps it was constant domestic friction that kept his wit so sharp. If another kind of woman had made him happy, the night watchman might have become garrulous.

HUGH WALPOLE

The 1914–18 war caused a reappraisal and sometimes a reversal of literary reputations. When the race began again, the various contestants were entered under different handicaps. No one's prospects at that point seemed brighter than Hugh Walpole's. The war had consolidated his position. Bad eyesight unfitted him for the army, but he went to Russia in a Red Cross Unit, acquiring an O.B.E. and a Russian decoration. In his spare time he wrote two novels about Russia in the Russian manner. He also in January 1918 published
The Green Mirror
—a very English novel on which he had been at work before the war. With
The Green Mirror
he changed publishers, leaving Secker for Macmillan. Macmillan did not and do not take up a writer unless they are satisfied that he has a long and honourable career ahead of him. Their imprint was the imprimatur on Walpole's reputation. He was then thirty-five and the ball lay at his feet.

I never knew Walpole well, but I met him fairly often over twenty years, particularly during the 1920s. He was at that time an effective personality with his forces impressively disposed. He had a large house near Regent's Park where he housed his library and pictures and entertained his friends. He was a familiar figure at first nights, at publishers' parties and at ladies' clubs where dinner was followed by short speeches by seven or eight writers. He had a cottage in Cornwall to which he retired for quiet and concentration. He went to America most years.

Everything was going well, everything promised to go
well. Each book sold better than the last. His lectures were a great success; to American audiences he seemed the embodiment of all that was best in Britain. He was tall, broad with a bulldog chin. Incipient baldness accentuated his high-domed forehead. He was fresh complexioned; one interviewer nicknamed him ‘Apple-cheeked Hugh'. He had a boyish eagerness; he looked thoroughly wholesome; no ‘flim-flam' about him; he had an easy forthcoming manner. His father was an Anglican bishop and he had an inherited aptitude for oratory. He took trouble over his lectures. He phrased his sentences well. I heard him lecture once in Brighton, and I can well remember the spontaneous outburst of applause that greeted an eloquent tribute to Walter Scott. He enjoyed lecturing. He appeared to be sorry when his time was up.

He was active in literary politics. As a critic he was generous in his appreciations: always ready to introduce with a preface an American writer to the British public; on such occasions he would often contrive a compliment to one or other of his friends. His preface to Cabell's
Jurgen
is an example of this, with its dragged-in reference to J. D. Beresford's
Signs and Wonders
. He was anxious to have his friends share in his own good fortune. He was worried at the difficulties young writers were experiencing in getting their work published, and in the autumn of 1919 he wrote a letter to the
Times Literary Supplement
that started a long correspondence on first novels. Feeling that there should be closer contact between authorship and the trade, he founded the Society of Bookmen, where authors, publishers and booksellers discussed their separate and joint problems at monthly dinners. The Society, I believe, still flourishes. Its first secretary was Maurice Marston, then one of the partners of the now defunct publishing house of Leonard Parsons. Later when the National Book League was formed Marston
was its organizing secretary. It is very possible that, but for Walpole, the League would never have been formed.

He had a full and happy life. I recall a lunch party of St John Ervine's at the Garrick Club in 1926. It was a mixed party, eight of us at a round table. Walpole was in high spirits. He did not monopolize the conversation, but the talk centred round him. I cannot remember anything he said. He was not a witty talker; he was good company not because he said clever things but because he was interested and enthusiastic. It was a small room and we took our coffee where we sat. We were still at table when a club servant announced that ‘Mr Walpole's car was waiting'. As soon as he left the room we started to discuss him. We agreed that he was the happiest man we knew. St John Ervine wondered if he had ever had an unhappy hour. We were still discussing him when the door opened and he reappeared. There had been a mistake; it had not been his car after all. Conversation ceased.

Walpole looked round the table. ‘Well, what were you saying about me behind my back?'

The pause continued. It was a little awkward. Then Mrs Theodore McKenna spoke. She was the senior person present, and one of his best friends. ‘As a matter of fact Hugh, we were saying how happy you were, and how glad we were about it. We were wondering whether you have ever been unhappy.'

It was said on a note of genuine affection, but for a moment Walpole seemed disconcerted. I fancied that I knew what he was thinking. Dostoevsky's stock stood high. The man who had not suffered, had not lived. Art sprang from suffering. Walpole did not relish the suggestion that he had not suffered. At the same time he did not want to disparage his own good fortune. He had had bad times, he said, times he would not care to live again, but
during these last ten years, well he had to admit that those years had been very, very good. He had been happy pretty well all the time.

That was in 1926. And he was not able to say that much longer. When he died fifteen years later, he was an unhappy man.

That for a writer is a fate by no means unusual. Fashions change; writers lose their talent and appeal; they are lucky if they saved money in their good years. Walpole's fate was different. Charles Morgan has told in
The House of Macmillan
that Walpole worked on a ten-year schedule and right to the end he kept to his programme. The last half of the ‘twenties and ‘thirties was a period of solid industry.
The Hemes Chronicle
, a series of four long novels, sold very well. Between each volume he published shorter but creditable books. He made a great deal of money. He was knighted. To a foreigner, to anyone outside London and New York literary society, he must have seemed to occupy a highly enviable positon. In a sense he did. But he had lost the respect of the only people whose respect he valued. He had become a joke to the intelligentsia.

It has been said that no man has ever been written down by anyone except himself. That was not Walpole's case. A far better writer with a casual, almost a left-hand gesture collapsed his reputation and self-confidence with the portrait in one book of a minor character. As Alroy Kear in Somerset Maugham's
Cakes and Ale
, Walpole was presented and made ridiculous as a literary careerist busily grooming himself to be the G.O.M. of the English novel. His technique and tactics were explained, his motives were exposed. He was made ridiculous.

From Walpole's point of view, the timing of the book could not have been more unlucky. The Athenians wearied of hearing Aristides called the Just, and writers
who were suffering the occupational hazards of a profession peculiarly subject to ups and downs, had begun to be irritated by Walpole's perpetual geniality. Need he always look as though he were the guest of honour at a party at which Life and Literature were the host and hostess? In 1926 Beverley Nichols in his
Twenty-Five
was amusingly malicious at his expense. After referring to his ‘appearance of complacency' Nichols concluded ‘he was born middle-aged, but he is rapidly achieving his first childhood'. Walpole was able to parry that attack. He asked Nichols to lunch and a recantation duly appeared in the
Sketch
. But the number of people who chuckled over that particular chapter was an indication of the way the wind was blowing.

Walpole again looked too well. Actually he suffered from diabetes and had to give himself daily injections of insulin. He drank little alcohol but he had a ‘sweet tooth', and to correct his indulgences in candy he frequently increased his dose, a practice that ultimately undermined his health. Morbid streaks were detected in his work, in
Portrait of a Man with Red Hair
particularly. He remained unmarried; gossip did not link his name with any woman's; people began to wonder. ‘That kind of thing' was all very well for willowy young men at Broadcasting House but it was scarcely appropriate to ‘Apple-cheeked Hugh' and ‘the roast beef of Old England'.

It was only an affair of whispers and if nothing more had transpired, such a temporary recession would have provided an effective background for an adulatory welcoming of
The Herries Chronicle
. ‘In the later ‘twenties,' so might the encomia have read, ‘there were not lacking those who questioned Sir Hugh's qualities, but now incontestably the proof is here.…' That is how it might have been. But instead these whispers became a pedestal for the ‘Aunt Sally' absurdities of Alroy Kear.

It is honourable to strive for fame, the pursuit of money is venial not venal, but to write in order to become ‘a person of importance' is not a creditable objective. That is a goal for politicians. A professional writer could not be exposed to a more damaging attack, and the power of
Cakes and Ale
was accentuated by a complete absence of ‘hatred, malice, and uncharitableness' on its author's part. Maugham has admitted that
Cakes and Ale
is the book he enjoyed writing most. It is told in the first person, and ‘Ashenden' throughout is in the best of tempers. The atmosphere is sunny and good-natured. There is no suggestion that Maugham is trying to get his own back. He is just ‘having fun'.

It must be admitted that Maugham drew several red herrings across the trail. He made Walpole a good golfer, which he was not, he attributed his celibacy to unrequited love, and there were a number of minor points of dissimilarity. J. B. Priestley, who collaborated once with Walpole, was dining with me shortly after its publication. One of my guests, my school-friend H. S. Mackintosh, whose ballades and light verse have recently received a more than cordial reception, but who was then no more than ‘somebody in trade', referred to the caricature of Walpole. Priestley asked him why he assumed that it was Walpole. ‘Walpole would never order a lunch like that,' he said. ‘But who else could it be?' Mackintosh replied.