Collected Essays (44 page)

1968

[4]

PORTRAIT OF A MAIDEN LADY

R
EADING
No Place Like Home
by Beverley Nichols I found myself thinking of Guy Walsingham, the author of
Obsessions
, in Henry James’s
The Death of a Lion.
It will be remembered how Mr Morrow, of
The Tatler
, interviewed her, for Guy Walsingham was a woman, just as Dora Forbes, author of
The Other Way Round
, was a man. ‘A mere pseudonym’ – that was how Mr Morrow put it – ‘convenient you know, for a lady who goes in for the larger latitude.’

A confusing literary habit, which led me to wonder a little about the author of
No Place Like Home.
For all I know Mr Nichols may be another Mr Walsingham. A middle-aged and maiden lady, so I picture the author, connected in some way with the Church: I would hazard a guess that she housekeeps for her brother, who may be a canon or perhaps a rural dean. In that connexion she may have met the distinguished ecclesiastics who have noticed a previous book so kindly. (‘The chapter on Sex’, writes a dean, ‘is the best sermon on the subject I have ever read.’) She is not married, that I am sure, for she finds the sight of men’s sleeping apparel oddly disturbing: ‘It was almost indecent, the way he took out pyjamas and shook them’, and on her foreign holiday, described in this book, she hints – quite innocently – at a Man. ‘His knowledge was encyclopaedic. His name was Paul. He was about forty-five. We had better leave it at that.’

It is impossible not to grow a little fond of this sentimental, whimsical, and poetic lady. She conforms so beautifully to type (I picture her in rather old-fashioned mauve with a whalebone collar): Christian, but only in the broadest sense, emotional, uninstructed, and a little absurd, as when she writes of the Garden of Gethsemane: ‘Here I had the greatest shock of all.
For the Garden was not even weeded!
’ She is serious about Art (‘Try a little experiment. Hold up your hand in front of your eyes so that you bisect a picture horizontally’) a little playful (‘Dürers so great that you felt you must walk up to them on tip-toe’). She loves dumb animals, and hates to see even a field mouse killed (‘One mustn’t let oneself wonder if perhaps the mice were building a house, which has now been wrecked, if perhaps Mrs Field Mouse was going to have babies, which will be fatherless’) and in
their
cause she shows considerable courage. (‘On more than one occasion I have created useless and undignified scenes at theatres in a vain protest against the cruelty of dragging terrified and bewildered animals to the footlights for the delectation of the crowd.’) This almost masculine aggressiveness is quite admirable when you consider the author’s timidity, how nervous she is in aeroplanes. (‘It is with the greatest difficulty that I refrain from asking the pilot if he is sure about the tail. Is it on? Is it on
straight
? What will happen if it falls off?’) and how on one occasion, climbing a pyramid, she very nearly had what she calls a ‘swooning sickness:’.

But what engaging company on these foreign cruises and excursions a maiden a lady of her kind must have been, exhilarated as she was by her freedom from parish activities. (‘All that matters is that we are alone and free,
free.
Nobody can telephone to us. Nobody can ask us to lecture on the Victorian novelists. It is beyond the realms of possibility that anybody, for at least twenty-four hours, will ask us to open a chrysanthemum exhibition’), and hilarious with the unaccustomed wine (‘We are, beyond a shadow of doubt, Abroad. And not only Abroad. At Large. And not only at Large but in a delirious haze of irresponsibility, and white wine’). Her emotions are so revealing: she weeps, literally weeps, over Athens. She disapproves of women who don’t grow old gracefully (‘I also thought how very much nicer and younger the average woman of forty-five would look, in this simple uniform, than in the stolen garments of her daughter’), she feels tenderly towards young people (‘The silvery treble of youth that is sweeter because it is sexless’), her literary preferences are quite beautifully commonplace: ‘What a grand play Galsworthy would have written round the theme of Naboth’s Vineyard.’ Excitable, sound at heart, genuinely attached to her brother and the vicarage. ‘The old dear,’ one exclaims with real affection, and I was overjoyed that she got safely home to her own garden before – but I mustn’t spoil her closing paragraphs:

There they were, dancing under the elm, exactly as I had planned them.

I was in time for the daffodils.

1936

FILM LUNCH

‘I
F
ever there was a Christ-like man in human form it was Marcus Lowe.’

Under the huge Union Jack, the Stars and Stripes, the massed chandeliers of the Savoy, the little level voice softly intones. It is Mr Louis B. Mayer, head of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and the lunch is being held to celebrate the American Company’s decision to produce films in this country. Money, one can’t help seeing it written on the literary faces, money for jam; but Mr Mayer’s words fall on the mercenary gathering with apostolic seriousness.

At the high table Sir Hugh Walpole leans back, a great bald forehead, a rather softened and popular Henry James, like a bishop before the laying-on of hands – but oddly with a long cigar. Miss Maureen O’Sullivan waits under her halo hat . . . and Mr Robert Taylor – is there, one wonders, a woman underneath the table? Certainly there are few sitting anywhere else; not many, at any rate, whom you would recognize as women among the tough massed faces of the film-reviewers. As the voice drones remorsely on, these escape at intervals to catch early editions, bulging with shorthand (Mr Mayer’s voice lifts: ‘I must be honest to myself if I’m to be honest to you . . . a 200,000,000-dollar corporation like the Rock of Gibraltar . . . untimely death . . . tragedy’); they stoop low, slipping between the tables, like soldiers making their way down the communication trenches to the rest-billets in the rear, while a voice mourns for Thalberg, untimely slain. The bright Very lights of Mr Mayer’s eloquence soar up: ‘Thank God, I say to you, that it’s the greatest year of net results and that’s because I have men like Eddy Sankatz’ (can that have been the name? It sounded like it after the Chablis Supérieur, 1929, the Château Pontet Canet (Pauillac), 1933, G. H. Mumm, Cordon Rouge, 1928, and the Gautier Frères Fine Champagne 20
ans).

‘No one falls in the service of M.G.M. but I hope and pray that someone else will take his place and carry on the battle. Man proposes and God in his time disposes. . . .’ All the speakers have been confined to five minutes – Mr Alexander Korda, Lord Sempill, Lord Lee of Fareham, and the rest, but of course that doesn’t apply to the big shot. The rather small eyes of Mr Frank Swinnerton seem to be watching something on his beard, Mr Ivor Novello has his hand laid across his stomach – or is it his heart?

One can’t help missing things, and when the mind comes back to the small dapper men under the massed banners Mr Mayer is talking about his family, and God again. ‘I’ve got another daughter and I hope to God . . .’ But the hope fumes out of sight in the cigar smoke of the key-men. ‘She thought she’d like a poet or a painter, but I held on until I landed Selznick. “No, Ireen,” I’d say, “I’m watching and waiting.” So David Selznick, he’s performing independent now.’

The waiters stand at attention by the great glass doors. The air is full of aphorisms. ‘I love to give flowers to the living before they pass on. . . . We must have entertainment like the flowers need sunshine. . . . A Boston bulldog hangs on till death. Like Jimmy Squires.’ (Jimmy Squires means something to these tough men. They applaud wildly. The magic name is repeated – “Jimmy Squires’.) ‘I understand Britishers,’ Mr Mayer continues, ‘I understand what’s required of a man they respect and get under their hearts.’

There is more than a religious element in this odd, smoky, and spirituous gathering; at moments it is rather like a boxing match. ‘Miss O’Sullivan’ – and Miss O’Sullivan bobs up to her feet and down again: a brown hat: a flower: one misses the rest. ‘Robert Taylor’ – and the world’s darling is on his feet, not far from Sir Hugh Walpole, beyond the brandy glasses and Ivor Novello, a black triangle of hair, a modest smile.

‘He comes of a lovely family,’ Mr Mayer says. ‘If ever there was an American young man who could logically by culture and breeding be called a Britisher it’s Robert Taylor.’

But already we are off and away, Robert Taylor abandoned to the flashlight men. It’s exactly 3.30 and Mr Mayer is working up for his peroration: ‘It’s midday. It’s getting late. I shall pray silently that I shall be guided in the right channels. . . . I want to say what’s in my heart. . . . In all these years of production, callous of adulation and praise . . . I hope the Lord will be kind to you. We are sending over a lovely cast.’

He has spoken for forty minutes: for forty minutes we have listened with fascination to the voice of American capital itself: a touch of religion, a touch of the family, the mixture goes smoothly down. Let the literary men sneer . . . the whip cracks . . . past the glass doors and the sentries, past the ashen-blonde sitting in the lounge out of earshot (only the word ‘God’ reached her ears three times), the great muted chromium studios wait . . . the novelist’s Irish sweep: money for no thought, for the banal situation and the inhuman romance: money for forgetting how people live: money for ‘Siddown, won’t yer’ and ‘I love, I love, I love’ endlessly repeated. Inside the voice goes on – ‘God . . . I pray . . .’ and the writers, a little stuffed and a little boozed, lean back and dream of the hundred pounds a week – and all that’s asked in return the dried imagination and the dead pen.

1937

THE UNKNOWN WAR

T
HERE
are legendary figures in this war
*1
of whom most of us know nothing. Secretly, week by week, they fight against the evil things: against Vultz, the mad German inventor, against Poyner, preparing to unleash plague-stricken rats on India, and the sneering sarcastic Group-Captain Jarvis, who was really Agent 17 at Air Base B. Billy the Penman; Nick Ward, heroic son of a heroic father; Steelfinger Stark, the greatest lock expert in the world, who broke open the headquarters of the German Command in Norway; Worrals of the WAAFs; Flight-lieutenant Falconer, with a price of 20.000 marks on his head, ‘framed’ as a spy; Captain Zoom, the Bird Man of the RAF – these are the heroes (and heroines) of the unknown war. This can never at any time have been a ‘phoney’ war: from the word go, these famous individuals were on the job.

It is not surprising in some of these cases that we know little or nothing about it: even his fellow schoolboys are still unaware of the identity of Billy Baker. His biography records one occasion when he was rebuked in class for an untidy piece of dictation. ‘The Headmaster would have got a shock if he had known he was scolding the boy who was known as “Billy the Penman”. the hand-writing genius of the British Secret Service. That was a secret shared by few people indeed.’ (It was a fine piece of work which enabled Billy the Penman to substitute 500 ‘lines’ – ‘I must do my best handwriting’ – for the details of a new anti-aircraft gun before the Nazi plane swooped down to hook the package from a clothesline.)

On the other hand only the extreme discretion of his schoolfellows can have prevented news of Nick Ward’s activities reaching the general ear. Nick Ward, because of a certain birthmark on his body, is considered sacred by Indian hillmen, and periodically he visits the Temple of Snakes in the Himalayas to gather information of Nazi intrigues. (To Ward we owe it that a plot to enable German bombers to cut off Northern India failed.) Unfortunately on one of these journeys he was spotted by enemy agents. ‘It was because he had been recognized and because the Headmaster wished to protect him that all the boys at Sohan College had been ordered to wear hoods over their heads. It had thus become impossible for the Nazi agents to pick out Nick from the others. Later, Nick discovered that the local Nazi leader was Dr Poyner, the school medical officer.’ Only a school medical officer was capable of conceiving the dastardly stratagem that nearly betrayed Ward into enemy hands. Hillmen crept up to the dormitory with pegs on their noses and blew sneezing powder into the room, so that the boys were forced to take off their hoods. (The pegs on their noses prevented the Indians being affected.)

Perhaps the spirit of these heroes is best exemplified by a heroine – Worrals, who shot down the mysterious ‘twin-engined high-wing monoplane with tapered wings, painted grey, with no markings’ in area 21-C-2. Her real name is Pilot-Officer Joan Worralson, WAAF, and we hear of her first as she sat moody and bored on an empty oil drum, complaining of the monotony of life. ‘The fact is, Frecks, there is a limit to the number of times one can take up a light plane and fly it to the same place without getting bored. . . .’ Boredom is never allowed to become a serious danger to these lone wolves: one cannot picture any of them ensconced in a Maginot line.

But the man who inspires one with the greatest admiration is Captain Zoom the lone flyer who beats away on his individualistic flights borne up on long black condor wings, with a small dynamo ticking on his breast. Even his mad enemy Vultz could not withhold admiration. ‘For a pig-dog of a Briton, he must have brains! This is a good invention. By the time I have improved it, it will be fit to use. Ja!’ Vultz, it should be explained, was engaged in building a tunnel from Guernsey to Britain. ‘The Nazis, since their occupation of the Channel Islands, had thought out a a new scheme for invading Britain. They were tunnelling from Guernsey to Cornwall using an entirely new type of boring-machine invented by a brilliant engineer named Vultz. This machine made tunnelling almost as quick as walking. Vultz, a fiend in human form, had a fixed hatred of RAF men, and for this reason employed them as slaves in the tunnel.’ No wonder Nick Ward on another occasion exclaimed that ‘the Nazis stopped at nothing. They did not mind how foul were the tricks they tried or how helpless victims died.’ Listen to Vultz himself: