My Brother Evelyn & Other Profiles (17 page)

That was the point. The character was too lifelike not to have been drawn from life; too much in it rang true; too much could be confirmed; too many ageing novelists recalled the flattering tributes to their work from a young writer, which were followed a few months after by the advance copy of a novel graciously inscribed ‘from a pupil to a master'; too many reviewers who had written in a lukewarm way about Walpole's work, had received if not invitations to lunch, at least long letters expressing
gratitude for the review, interest in the criticisms made and a resolve to profit at a next endeavour; too many literary ‘punters' had noted how his apparently disinterested concern for his fellow writers—his letter to the
Times Literary Supplement
about first novels for example—had in fact provided Walpole with wide publicity without particularly benefiting the objects of his concern.

The red herrings, by and large, made the situation worse. Where so many traits could be recognized, every touch of the palette knife was accepted as direct portraiture. Anthony West, reviewing Rupert Hart-Davis's biography was to write (twenty-two years later) in the
New Yorker:
‘Everything was there; the appealing charm that Walpole could lavish on those who were successful and might be useful, and the bland indifference with which he could treat old friends who had betrayed him by being neither, and most unkind of all his almost complete lack of talent.'

That is unfair. Alroy Kear was based on Walpole but it was not completely Walpole. It is not true that Walpole dropped old friends who had ceased to be successful. He was on the contrary generous with his loans of money, and many writers now established stand in his debt for kindness and encouragement. Nor was he by any means without talent. He was industrious and ambitious. His novels had both theme and plot. He was not afraid of melodrama: he could evoke curiosity and maintain suspense. He could build up a background. He rarely created a vivid character, but he so enjoyed telling a story, he was so excited by what he had to tell that the reader became anxious about the outcome and was sufficiently ‘held' not to be worried by the flatness of the actual writing.

Alroy Kear is a composite creation, and a cruel but genuine portrait with ‘warts and all' would have done
less damage.
Cakes and Ale
ruined the last ten years of Walpole's life.

The story has been told that he began to read it while he was changing for dinner, as a guest in a country house. He had propped the book on the mantelpiece. The story opens with Kear and before he had read ten pages he had identified himself. In fascinated horror he read on; he forgot his dressing, he forgot dinner, he went on reading. When his host finally came up to see if anything was wrong he found Walpole standing before the mantelpiece, his shirt-tails flapping about his knees and his unbraced trousers in a coil round his ankles. His own account of the incident in his diary is less dramatic, but it was the embroidered story that went the rounds.
^*

‘How was Hugh taking it?' Everyone was asking that, and Edward Knoblock was reported to have earned a diploma for tact by having asserted at a lunch party in Walpole's company that it was ‘a little caddish of Willie to have written quite so cruelly about poor John Drink-water'.

How was he taking it? How should he take it? The worst human misfortune had befallen him. He had been made to look an ass; and what was there that he could do about it? The days of duelling were past. He could not have assaulted in public a man fifteen years his senior and six inches shorter. He could not have addressed a letter to
The Times
. Ninety-nine times in a hundred it is wise to ignore attack; Walpole in that respect was wise. Unfortunately he overdid it. He not only behaved as though nothing had happened, but went out of his way to insist that nothing had happened.

A year later Elinor Mordaunt published anonymously
a novel of which Maugham was undisguisedly the central character. It was called
Gin and Bitters
in America, and
Full Circle
in England. Maugham brought an action against the book in the English courts and obtained its suppression.

On the book's appearance in America, Walpole attacked it violently. The book was published there by Farrar and Rinehart, and for many years there hung in the firm's office a cartoon by Will Dyson entitled ‘The noble art of Self-defence'. It showed a small frail woman, holding a book before her face to protect herself from the assault of a man twice her size. Her assailant is umistake-ably Hugh Walpole. The book in her hand is
Gin and Bitters
and the caption reads, ‘Now no one can say that
Cakes and Ale
was meant for me.'

The caricature of Walpole is lethally vindictive. The name of Dyson may not convey much today. The reputation of a political cartoonist is fugitive. But his gift was great and individual. He worked for the extreme left wing, and no one could have rendered more bestially the profiteers of the First War and the moneyed worldlings of the ‘twenties. He drew them half-animal, half-human, sometimes as pigs in overtight morning coats and over-tall top hats, their fingers dripping blood that became gold sovereigns as they reached their moneybags.

It was with that technique that he drew Walpole. He posed him in a Rupert Brooke style open shirt posturing as the incarnation of careless youth; but you saw at once that he was middle-aged; there was a glandular obscenity about his retarded adolescence; his fingers were heavily ringed; they were long, pointed, pudgy; the fingers of a decadent. It exposed a basic unwholesomeness underlying a spurious healthiness. ‘The Man with the Red Hair' showing beneath ‘Fortitude'. It was hard to look at Walpole afterwards without remembering that cartoon.

I have been told that it was only by degrees that Walpole realized how much damage the book had done him.
Cakes and Ale
would not blow over. It was too good a book; as long as it was being read, and there seemed no likelihood of its not being read during his lifetime, he would look an ass. And it became in time apparent that he had made a mistake in letting himself still be numbered among Maugham's acquaintances.

Late in the ‘thirties Maugham gave a large supper party at Claridge's in honour of his grandchild's birth. There must have been a hundred and fifty people there. There was no fixed seating, there were a number of small tables and you sat where you chose. Most of the guests were connected in some way with the arts, and the grandchild's health was proposed by Osbert Sitwell. Walpole was in any gathering, because of his height and chin, a conspicuous figure, and there was a whispered ‘Fancy him being here', as he moved from one table to another. It was felt that he would have shown dignity had he stayed away.

His knighthood did his reputation little good. For no good reason, a knighthood has less prestige value for a novelist than it has for an actor or a painter, a critic or an historian. The best novelists have not been knighted and Galsworthy declined a knighthood. It was perhaps this reluctance of the novelist and poet to be addressed as Sir Francis or Sir George that encouraged Edward VII to institute the Order of Merit. When Walpole's name appeared in the Honours List, people said, ‘Ah, it's a consolation prize for
Cakes and Ale'
Walpole, to judge from the published extract in his diary, was aware of this. But he felt he would ‘like to be a knight'.

During the last months before the war he contributed a critical causerie to the
Daily Graphic
, a paper now amalgamated with the
Sketch
, that had at the time no
literary standing. One wondered why he accepted the assignment. He could not have needed the money, and it must have been boring to wade through mediocre books. Did he want to feel somebody of consequence? At the end of the ‘twenties Arnold Bennett had written a weekly article on books for the
Evening Standard
. But that had been a different matter. The
Evening Standard
was an important and influential paper. It gave Bennett a pulpit. And he had enjoyed a sense of day-to-day event-fulness. He had felt in the swim. He ‘made' several books,
Jew Süss
in particular, and every writer was anxious to be reviewed by Bennett. But the
Graphic
could not do that for Walpole.

As the 1930s moved to their shadowed close, a feeling of irritation towards Walpole became apparent among other writers, the result possibly of a sense of guilt on their part, the realization that they had been unjust to him. It would be idle to pretend that most of us had not taken a malicious pleasure in his discomfiture. The Malvolio motif is an unfailing formula, it is human to be jealous of success, and
Cakes and Ale
had been very funny. But all the same we recognized that he had been unfairly treated. We resented his having given us the sense of guilt.

In the spring of 1939 he was sent to Rome by the
Herald Tribune
to report the coronation of the Pope. In
Roman Fountain
, he used this trip as the framework for a variety of digressions. It is one of his better books, but it was published after the war had started and it contained much with which at such a time it was hard not to feel impatient. He wrote gratefully of the kindnesses he had received from Somerset Maugham when he was a young man in London. Why, one asked, must he maintain this pretence of friendship? He explained that he had given a false impression of complacence when he was young by
holding up his prominent chin to keep his pince-nez-position. It seemed childish that he should be worrying about that at this late day. He described his loneliness in a hotel bedroom on his first night in Rome. It was a self-pitying passage. ‘Really,' one thought, ‘what is the old quean fussing about now, living in a comfortable hotel as the
Tribune's
guest with a large cheque waiting him at the end!' He went on to wonder whether in such a hotel he might not one night feel the first symptoms of a mortal malady. A morbid passage. But, as I said, one was unfair to Walpole. Perhaps he did have a premonition then. At any rate, two years later he was dead.

He died in June 1941, when nerves were strained. For a year England had been carrying on a war single-handed. Russia had not yet been invaded, America seemed stable in neutrality. There had been the winter's bombing. Defeat was following defeat, in the Balkans, Greece, and Crete; the brief gains in the desert had been mostly lost. It was easy at such a time to snap. But making allowance for the temper of the moment, his obituary notices were astonishingly malevolent; they gave the impression that their authors had been smouldering for years with irritation, that they had not wanted to say what they felt during his lifetime because ‘after all the old boy was likeable and they were sorry for him', but that now they could not wait to get it off their chests. Nothing could have surprised me more at Christmas 1918 than to have been told that in 1941 I should be reading such obituaries.

Maugham has said more than once that a man who has done you a bad turn never forgives you for it, and it would seem that he has not forgiven Walpole the injury he did him.

In
A Writer's Notebook
he unfairly compares in terms of popularity Charles Garvice and Walpole—unfairly because Walpole must surely have made very much more
money than Garvice did. And in his preface to the American edition of
Cakes and Ale
which was printed on the front page of the Sunday Book Section of the
New York Times
, he identified Hugh Walpole as the original of Alroy Kear, describing him as a man whom you could like but could not respect, dismissing his work as negligible. The nail in the coffin.

Rupert Hart-Davis quoted in his biography, in particular reference to
The Times
obituary notice, the concluding sentence of Charles Morgan's section on Walpole in
The House of Macmillan
; ‘So good a story-teller is likely at any rate to live longer than many a
petit maître
who sneered at him as soon as he was dead.' But with the driving of that nail home, it is probable that more and more readers will join Anthony West in a mistaken identification of Alroy Kear with Walpole, so that Walpole will be recalled not as the author of
The Herries Chronicle
but as a minor character in one of the world's best light novels. Literary history contains few episodes as ironic.

CLIFFORD BAX, J. C. SQUIRE

Somerset Maugham in
Cakes and Ale
referred to the period when authors to show their manliness played cricket and drank beer, and between the wars, the name ‘Authors XI' often appeared in the fixture lists of a number of minor public schools and southern villages. These sides were captained either by J. C. Squire or Clifford Bax. Squire called his side ‘the Invalids' and Bax ‘the Old Broughtonians', the former because the idea of launching such a side had come to Squire when he was visiting a friend in hospital, the latter name because between 1911 and 1914 Bax had owned the Manor House at Broughton-Gifford and made it the centre for an annual cricket tour. The qualification for membership was the same, a personal friendship with the captain.

No two men could have been less alike than Bax and Squire. Bax was tall and well built; as a young man he was handsome, in later life distinguished. At the age of forty he grew a short Shakespearean beard which made him look like an hidalgo. Squire was of medium height and stocky. He had no distinction of appearance, but he had a pleasant, friendly face. He was short-sighted and peered at you through heavy lenses. He was untidy and usually looked as though he had shaved with a blunt razor eighteen hours before. Arnold Bennett described him in a pre-war diary as ‘Jaegerish'. At the end of his life he grew a long untidy beard. The last time I saw him was in 1956 at the luncheon Cassell's gave to celebrate the laying by Sir Winston Churchill of the corner-stone of
their new offices in Red Lion Square. Squire sat at the same table as myself on the opposite side. I wondered who he was.