My Brother Evelyn & Other Profiles (18 page)

In appearance Bax had every advantage over Squire, but it was Squire who had the more definite personality; he had an air of attack on life while Bax was diffident, gentle, self-effacing. Squire was a countryman, Bax a townsman. Squire came of sound, unmoneyed, West Country stock. Bax was a man of substance, but he rarely spoke of his father and I do not know in which generation the foundations of the family's wealth were laid. Squire had the conventional upbringing of a man born into his class, Blundell's and St John's College, Cambridge. Bax was educated first by a tutor, then at Heidelberg.

Both married young but whereas Squire was temperamentally a family man, Bax was not. Squire had four children, and till they were launched in the world, maintained a home for them. Bax had one daughter, Undine, but his marriage broke up early and his wife refused him a divorce. Within a few months of her death in 1925, he remarried, but was soon established in a bachelor set in Albany.

Writers, because they do not have to keep fixed hours, are exposed to two main occupational hazards—gallantry and alcohol. Bax during the years when I knew him best, was perpetually involved in an emotional disturbance. One of his early poems begins,

Snare me anew dear net of woman's beauty,

I am too early free.

and concludes with a reference to the time when

My own eternal spirit shall rule me wholly

And all your charm be vain.

That time never came.

Squire, on the other hand, led a domestic life of exemplary decorum. His problem was conviviality. The cricketer who arrived late for a match of Squire's was wise to preface his apology with an account of how he had attended an Old Boys' dinner on the previous night. Bax was more inclined to be indulgent to the delinquent who began, ‘The trouble was, there was a girl…'

Both were ambitious but their careers followed divergent courses. Squire had to earn a living. Bax had not. The label ‘careerist' is applied to writers in a derogatory sense, but every man who has to earn a living must be a careerist if he is to amount to anything, and it is no criticism of Squire to describe him in his early years as a man with a sense of self-direction.

I first heard of Squire in 1915 from Gerard Meynell, a neighbour of his in Chiswick, the director of the Westminster Press who had an office in No. 11 Henrietta Street and lunched with my father at Gatti's two or three times a week.

Meynell lent me Squire's satirical war verses, ‘The Survival of the Fittest', that contained the quatrain,

God heard the embattled nations shout,

Gott straffe England and God save the king,

God this, God that, and God the other thing,

Good God, said God, I've got my work cut out.

Squire was then contributing to the
New Statesman
over the signature Solomon Eagle a weekly causerie on books which I now started to read each Saturday with keen appreciation of its lively readiness to expose pomposity. I then, as others, thought of him primarily as a wit and parodist. But by November 1918 he was cast for a very different part. His contributions to
Georgian Poetry
1916–17 had established him as one of the foremost of the younger poets. He was now editor of the
New Statesman
.
He contributed an influential weekly causerie to
Land and Water
. And in his collection of parodies ‘Tricks of the Trade', he had taken leave of his old role of jester by dedicating them to Robert Lynd as ‘these last essays in a not wholly admirable art'.

In 1914 he had been little known outside a narrow literary circle but by Armistice Day he was more than a coming man, he had arrived. Chance had been upon his side. In his early ‘thirties, a man of great energy who worked fast, he had been rejected for military service for bad sight. Since most of his contemporaries were in khaki, he had been consequently subjected to a minimum of competition at the very moment when his powers were coming to their peak.

When the war ended he was well placed to take advantage of the boom that followed. He had friends with capital which they were ready to invest in magazines. They already owned
Land and Water;
they now launched a literary monthly, the
London Mercury
. That summer the Hawthornden Prize was founded, the best book by an author of under forty earning a gold medal and a cheque for £100. Squire was one of the committee. In the autumn he became the chief literary critic on the
Observer
. He had some connection with the publishing house of George Bell & Sons.

Not only was he himself in a position of power, but so were several of his friends. Edward Shanks, who had also been unfit for military service, was sub-editor of the
London Mercury
and of the
New Statesman
. Shanks appeared in the 1918–1919 volume of
Georgian Poetry
and was the first winner of the Hawthornden Prize. He had a serial running in
Land and Water;
he reviewed novels for the
London Mercury
and the
Saturday Westminster Gazette
—a paper of quality and influence.

There was also W. J. Turner who had appeared in the
1916—1917 volume of
Georgian Poetry
. He was an Australian and when I met him first in 1919 he was in uniform, but I fancy he had been on sick leave for some while. He reviewed the theatre in
Land and Water
. Squire's brother-in-law, Clennel Wilkinson, became a little later if not the editor of the
Outlook
the man who accepted manuscripts.

A fantastic situation had in fact arisen. Squire and his friends had control of, or an influence over
Land and Water
, the
Observer
, the
London Mercury
, the
New Statesman
, the
Outlook
, and the
Saturday Westminster Gazette
. The Hawthornden Prize was one of their subsidiaries. During 1918 a warm friendship sprang up between Edmund Gosse and Squire; that gave Squire the ear of the
Sunday Times
. Robert Lynd was a close friend of Squire and that accounted for the
Daily News
.

This situation was not the outcome of a ‘deep-laid plot', but of Squire's career reaching a peak at a time when his competitors were away and of two close friends of his, who were also good poets and good critics, appearing simultaneously upon the scene. There were jobs going and no one was available who could fill them better. But it is not surprising that there should have been envious talk about the ‘Squirearchy'.

Writers returning from the war and war work and, in some cases such as D. H. Lawrence, from the obscurity to which unpopular war views had consigned them, men as yet unadjusted to new conditions, many of them in financial difficulties, found that they could not get a hearing. Wherever they looked they saw ‘the gang' at work. A monopoly had been established for the placid pastoral poetry of John Freeman, Francis Brett-Young, Martin Armstrong, Edmund Blunden; excellent of its kind, but there were other kinds. A whole group of poets lacked a forum—D. H. Lawrence, F. S. Flint, Richard
Aldington, T. S. Eliot, Ford Madox Ford, John Gould Fletcher.

I often saw Harold Monro during those years. I had worked for him for a few weeks at the Poetry Bookshop. We played squash together at the R.A.C. and dined together afterwards. Monro was warm-hearted, affectionate, very companionable, but he was a disappointed man. Before the war he had edited and published
Poetry and Drama
in which Brooke's ‘Grantchester' appeared; he had issued chapbooks and volumes of poetry—Robert Graves's first book among them: he had organized weekly poetry readings. He had also published
Georgian Poetry
. The Poetry Bookshop had been a centre for the new idea. Now the centre had moved. He felt he had been shouldered out.

If Squire himself was aware of the hostile atmosphere that his success engendered, he never showed it. He behaved as though he had not an enemy in the world. There are very few people whom I have never heard say an unkind or spiteful thing about another person, and of those very few, some, I suspect, have been charitable partly through caution and partly through a lack of definiteness in their own personalities; tolerance is often no more than the child of laziness and indifference. Squire was not like that. He was too busy to have enemies and too large-hearted. He had supreme self-confidence. If there is such a thing as a superiority complex, then he had one. He was never boastful, but he had no doubt of his own talents. Poetry was to him the alpha and omega of existence. He knew he was a good poet, and if, so he felt, you are a poet, everything falls into place.

He was always welcoming, exuberant, enthusiastic. He was generous and open-handed. The members of his Surrey cricket tour were all of them his guests. In his days of affluence he befriended many young poets who
had financial problems and he paid the college fees of one of them. His material fortunes were to know many fluctuations, but circumstance was powerless against him. He never looked crestfallen.

The ‘Squirearchy' fell apart during the 1920s. Spain which under Charles V had been swollen by the satellite principalities of the Holy Roman Empire remained a power under Philip II: and so did Squire when Shanks and Turner followed separate careers.

He described himself as a centipede with a foot in a hundred worlds. In addition to his critical and editorial work, he found time to stand for Parliament as a Liberal—in 1918 he had stood as a Labour candidate—and each time he forfeited his deposit. For ten harried years he wrote little poetry, but in the mid nineteen-'thirties he enjoyed a St Martin's summer and
A Face in Candlelight
contains some of his finest work. In 1932 a large dinner which he appeared to have organized himself was given in his honour, and shortly afterwards he was knighted.

In March 1953 his seventieth birthday was honoured by a small dinner at the Garrick Club, organized by J. B. Priestley and A. D. Peters, and attended by his oldest friends. It was a genuine disappointment to me that I should have had to be abroad. It was a great success.

Squire died in 1958. In his last years he lived in the country, at an inn. He rarely came to London, but his friends visited him and the villagers revered him. He was one of Macmillan's chief advisers and his book page each week in the
Illustrated London News
had its own special quality. His reputation was firmly based upon high achievement.

I wrote of Clifford Bax at some length in my autobiography. But he was then still alive—he died in the
autumn of 1962—and I was anxious not to say anything that would seem to him too personal. He disliked publicity and had a stubborn regard for privacy. As it was, one of his friends upbraided me for contending that Bax's father had made a mistake in not sending him to Eton. Would Clifford, she argued, have been any more charming or sympathetic if he had. That was not my point. I believed and believe that Bax's career exemplifies the disadvantages of an unconventional education.

If a man departs from the norm, he should do so under the compulsion of his own temperament and not because of external pressure. It is a mistake to encourage a boy to consider himself exceptional. It is for him to prove that he is exceptional. A boy should be brought up among his equals. If you send the son of an earl to a small grammar school, he will be looked on as an oddity; it is unwise for a boy to be brought up with those much poorer or much richer than himself. A boy should feel himself at one with the group into which he is born, and incited to excel his contemporaries on their own ground.

If it is clear in the nursery that a boy is a freak, physically or mentally, then he should be prescribed a special treatment. But Clifford Bax was not a freak. He was healthy, athletic, with a love of games, with a fine alert mind. Born into the upper-middle class in 1884, he should have gone to the kind of school to which members of that class go. As he would inherit a considerable income and as he had no family links with another school, Eton was the right one for him. He would have learnt there that the possession of money is a privilege and a responsibility, shared by others. He would also by competing with his contemporaries have acquired a standard with which to appraise his own abilities. This is very important for an Englishman. He tends otherwise to over or underestimate
his powers. Bax in his early years did both. His view of himself was out of focus.

When I met him first in June 1920, he was living in a top-floor studio in Edwardes Square. It was a large sunny room, with some fine pieces of furniture; warmed with a stove it was relatively comfortable, though the rain dripped through the roof and he arranged a series of vases on the floor to catch the drops. He had no resident maid but a woman came in daily to provide breakfast and to tidy up. He took all his meals out, except tea which he prepared himself. He had no telephone. He often did not open the door to visitors, preferring not to be disturbed; his friends devised a code of knocks, so that he should know who was on the door-step.

He dressed in unpressed tweeds. He resented having to put on evening clothes, and when he did he wore heavy brogue shoes, sometimes with rubber soles. In winter he wore a heavy, threadbare coat, fifteen years old; it had belonged to a poacher and had voluminous inside pockets. He was considering, he told me, the purchase of a new one, and was deliberating the wisdom of having it made for him by a tailor. He was apprehensive lest in ten years' time he should have put on weight and a coat that now fitted well might then constrict him. He wore dark felt hats with narrow brims. Once he bought a new one, and its contrast with the threadbare coat was disconcerting. I am not easily embarrassed, but I could not help suspecting that we looked an incongruous couple as we walked down Kensington High Street, myself short and dapper with a military bearing, he tall and undulant, like a scarecrow swaying in a wind.

When I met him first, he was in a morose mood. He had been writing for several years with limited success. Under no compulsion to earn a living, he had not
Squire's sense of self-direction. He was ready to accept any publisher's suggestion. He was not the man who brought ideas to publishers. His bibliography, in consequence, contains several minor books. The man who stage-manages a career realizes that it is important for a book to look important. Instead of writing a short biography of Bianca Capello to fit into a publisher's series, Bax would have been wise to have put three or four contrasted biographies inside a single volume, as Lesley Blanch did in
The Wilder Shores of Love
.