My Brother Evelyn & Other Profiles (19 page)

Taught by a private tutor, he made friends by chance. We all do that, but he did not in his early years meet the kinds of man with whom he had most in common. The nearest approach was Godwin Baynes, the doctor and rowing blue. Only meeting those who were also being exposed to eccentric forms of education, he did not become a part of his generation, and his marriage accentuated this divergence. His wife was several years older than himself and she did not, as a young wife might have done, open the door for him into the world of his contemporaries. On the contrary she encouraged him to take a house in Wiltshire and write poetry, which was all wrong for a young man who was by birth and tastes a townsman.

Within three years he had left Wiltshire and established himself in London with a young and attractive female. This in England before World War I was a highly unconventional procedure. The English are infinitely tolerant of anything to which they can close their eyes but even now convention decrees that unmarried couples should reside under separate roofs. The adventure showed a poetic courage on Bax's part since he had good reasons for fearing that his father would disinherit him. The fears proved unfounded, but so dubious a
ménage
cast his lot still further among the
unconventional, a set to which he did not by taste belong. ‘I am tired,' he said to me in 1925, ‘of failures and of misfits.' The
ménage
did not last very long, but by the time it ended he was nearly thirty.

The war would have given him a chance of finding the type of friend he needed, but he was medically unfit for service. As young men who were not in uniform in 1914–18 inevitably did, he gravitated still further among misfits.

It was while he was emerging from this fog that I first met him. I will not say that he was a disappointed man, he was too young, too vital, too ambitious to be that. But he was aggrieved at the lack of recognition that his work had received.

He published that autumn a book of poems,
A House of Words
, which contained a number of fine poems, but received a small and lukewarm press. The
Saturday Westminster Gazette
suggested that Clifford Bax's role in the arts was not that of a creator, but of an appraiser and interpreter, and the notice was editorially headed ‘Mistaken Vocations'. This hurt his feelings very much. It was illogical that it should, since he had no respect for the critical standards of the day. But no one is logical in this respect. Many people were surprised to learn from her notebooks how much store Virginia Woolf had set by her reviews. She had such little respect for most of the objects of popular veneration that one would have imagined that she would have suspected her own work's quality if it had been greeted with a chorus of praise. Why should an artist expect a public which he considers mistaken on every other point, to assess his own work correctly? Some writers expect to be acclaimed the winner of a race for which they have not entered themselves as starters.

I am myself surprised that Bax's poems so rarely appear in anthologies. For me they are deep in feeling, human
and finely wrought. He suggested to me once that his being a Buddhist had militated against their appeal since the philosophy at the back of them was foreign to a reader raised in a different faith. This may be true. In
Inland Far
he paints a sympathetic picture of the Buddhist who converted him, but he gives no reason for having found Buddhism more satisfactory than the faith of his fathers. Keyserling in his
Travel Diary of a Philosopher
stresses the influence of climate on religion and in his chapter on ‘Colombo' argues that Buddhism is in tune with the heavy heat and lush luxuriant foliage of Ceylon. Is it fanciful to suggest that Bax's adoption of a faith alien to the bleak cold north is a corollary to his eccentric education?

He did have a certain measure of success.
The Rose Without a Thorn
had a long run when it was first produced, has been frequently acted by amateurs, and has been used on the radio and on TV. He wrote several charming ballad operas. He adapted
Polly
for the stage;
Midsummer Madness
was exquisitely staged by Nigel Playfair at the Lyric, Hammersmith with Marie Tempest in the lead.
Mr Pepys
too was a success. But in his choice of subject he was frequently handicapped through not having the same educational background as his fellow-countrymen.

In
The Rose Without a Thorn
he had in Henry VIII a character in whom everyone was interested; so had he in Mr Pepys, but it was a different matter when he wrote of fifteenth-century Italians. He himself considered
The Venetian
his best play, but my own interest in it was immeasurably diminished by my ignorance of the period; others were in my plight. It is hard to interest an audience in a period other than its own, unless the conflict of that period can be related to its own, unless a parallel can be drawn, or unless it is already familiar with it. Shakespeare's plays have, for instance, made certain historical characters familiar, so that Gordon Daviot's
Richard of
Bordeaux
presented from a new angle a man about whom the public already had its own idea.

It is important for the writer of historical plays and novels to recognize which these characters and periods are. It is also important for a playwright—for any writer for that matter—to gauge how much knowledge he can assume in the public which he is anxious to address. Nothing annoys a reader more than having a story hinge on a reference he cannot catch. For the writer of historical plays this is particularly important. The historical dramatist is in one respect at a disadvantage with regard to the writer of drawing-room comedies. He is robbed of the effects of suspense and of surprise because the audience knows how it will all turn out; watching
The First Gentleman
, for example, it knows that George IV's daughter will die in childbirth, otherwise how could Queen Victoria have reached the throne. But in compensation he has a ready-made sense of dramatic irony. In John Drinkwater's
Mary Stuart
, the tension was heightened by the audience's foreknowledge that Rizzio had only a few minutes to live. In
The Venetian
Bax assumed that this sense of dramatic irony existed. He made a duke reflect on the eve of battle, that five hundred years hence men would be discussing what he achieved or failed to achieve in the next few hours. But the greater part of the audience had never heard of the battle or the duke and were wondering why they were being invited to be concerned over what seemed to them a remote tribal skirmish.

‘Birds of a feather', I suppose, and the lives of nearly all my men friends have been convulsed by a series of romantic crises. As their friend, I have received a number of confidences from the ladies of their concern. Bax attracted a great many women; though he had a soft voice and a gentle manner he was intensely virile. He was kind,
generous, attentive in small things; in love tenderly forceful, concerned with a woman's pleasure before his own. He had an intuitive and sympathetic grasp of a woman's problems; women felt that they were understood by him. This understanding is exemplified right through his work, particularly in his rhymed
Plays for Girls
, in
Midsummer Madness
and in the character of Catherine Howard in
The Rose Without a Thorn
. He was a good friend to women, capable of deep and unselfish friendship. It was, I fancy, women more often than he who refused to be satisfied with ‘just friendship'.

Though he was anything but promiscuous, he was rarely uninvolved in a liaison. He said to me more than once, ‘I have had now all the experience that I can absorb. When this thing is over, I'm going to quit all that and turn my experience into plays.' But ‘this thing' was always followed by another ‘thing'.

His liaisons followed, unconsciously, the principle of the rotation of crops, a ‘lady of quality' succeeding a Bohemian, and someone frivolous following someone serious. During 1923 he was occupied with an austere lady, not unattractive, but tall and grim, forbidding at a first and indeed seventh meeting. She was possessive, jealous of his friends, limited and exclusive in her tastes, insisting that he should only know people whom she thought ‘worth while'. But I may be prejudiced. I was one of the friends who was not ‘worth while'.

When her reign ended, in mid-1924, he completely altered the pattern of his existence, moving out of his studio into a comfortable house north of the Park, with an establishment consisting of a married couple and a valet. This move coincided with and was perhaps occasioned by the entry into his life of an old friend, Vera Leslie.
A House of Words
contained a number of character poems. One of them called ‘The Flirt' was inscribed to her.

Myriad-lovered

Vain provocative

Heartless, honeyed

Exquisite girl.

Are you merely

Something enchanted?

Could we unspell you

What should we find?

Vera was a socialite. She was smart. She had a gift for drawing. She appreciated elegance. Though her background was ‘army and county', she preferred the company of artists. Her first husband had been an artist and printer, Stanley North; her second and at that time current one was Filson Young. There was not a great difference in age between herself and Clifford and they had been friends in youth. When I had questioned him about ‘Flirt' he had told me that she was one of the most fascinating women he had ever known.

Under Vera's guidance he changed his appearance to suit his new address. He went to a good tailor, bought patent leather evening shoes, adopted a wider-brimmed style of hat and grew a beard. He had a good cook and he gave charming dinner parties for which he expected his guests to change. I have very happy memories of those dinners. He always maintained that four is the best number for a party;
^*
sometimes he invited three other men, sometimes two women and a man. Sometimes he wrote verses on the place cards. I cherish one on which he combined within a couplet the titles of three of my books:

Myself when young
spurned
Pleasure
and sought Truth;

Weave wiselier thou upon
The Loom of Youth
,

Nineteen-twenty-five was a happy year for him. He was working well.
Midsummer Madness
was produced. He
enjoyed his change of circumstance. He was a man who in some respects grew up upside-down, and he now at the age of forty was showing an undergraduate's interest in clothes. A valet was a great adventure for him.

He was also very happy with Vera. He was in the mood for a gay companion, after the gaunt guardian of his diary, and the fact that he and Vera had known each other when they were young gave him a sense of having the threads of his life drawn together. So often one feels incomplete with a new friend because one cannot talk about one's past; in the same way for that matter one often feels incomplete with an old friend because one cannot discuss with him one's immediate concerns. Vera and Clifford could let their talk wander at will over twenty years.

During this period he wrote several of the stories that were published under the title
Many a Green Isle
. One of them was inspired by Vera. In it he wrote, ‘on a sudden I realized that as great a wonder had happened to me as if I had stepped into an enchanted pool and had come forth ten years younger. And my new self laughed at the arrogance of the self whom I had shed. After all then—the world had been right; the simple souls had been right; they were not mere sentimentalists because they assumed that the love between men and women was the inmost treasure obtainable from life. “Proud poet,” I said to myself. “Now you are with the humblest. Now you are back at the beginning of wisdom and perceive that those who belittle love are those who could never find it.”'

It is not impossible that this friendship might have been a lasting one, might have been the anchor for him that a later friendship was to become, but Vera's husband, Filson Young, took exception to it. Divorce proceedings were initiated and Vera and Clifford married. Vera was a person of much charm, was a good hostess, who knew how
to decorate and run a house, but Clifford never looked himself in it. He needed to be alone. Four years later he took a set in Albany.

He was now in his late forties and it was here that he appeared to catch up with himself, to complete the process of growing up the wrong way round and stand square upon his feet, to reach a point of development that was in keeping with his nature. Both as a Bohemian and as a socialite he had been cast for the wrong roles, and he had been out of character in marriage. He needed solitude and freedom, and a setting in which he could meet and entertain different kinds of friend. He did not need formality but he did need comfort. He did not need a valet but he did need a good housekeeper.

He was in tune with the whole atmosphere of Albany with its quiet, its privacy, the college atmosphere of the ropewalk, the red-uniformed porter with his cockaded hat, and the rounded windows with their view of Vigo Street. Seeing him with his books and pictures round him, I felt that he was himself at last. His book,
Evenings in Albany
, a graceful blending of reverie and reminiscence gave a happy picture of his life there. It was during this period that he made friends with men of his own type—men like E. V. Lucas and C. B. Fry.

No two men could have been more different than Bax and Squire. They were very different too, as captains of a cricket side.

It might have been expected that Bax, who had shown little sense of stage-management in his career as a writer, would have been a vague and casual captain of a cricket side and that Squire, who had such a marked sense of self-direction, would have been on the field a brisk, military martinet. Not at all; though Bax looked like an Elizabethan poet, he was a business-like manager. The staff
work of his tours was smooth, and his teams arrived on time with an umpire, a scorer and a twelfth man in flannels.