Waiting for Orders (20 page)
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Authors: Eric Ambler
What had happened in Marshall-aided England was what had happened earlier in New Deal America: the in-work nonprofessional classes had suddenly become prosperous and their adolescent children had found themselves with money to spend. The difference between the two movements had been the music to which they marched. The American kids had had the big band sound and 78 rpm records. The British youth had had rock-and-roll, pop groups and 45 rpm singles. The American kids of that first generation had gone to World War Two. The British lot, liberated by the pill, saw a future of eternal youth. Their swinging sixties became the pelvis-tilting seventies. In the eighties overweight whizkids at the dealing desks of the money and stock markets began to call themselves yuppies. It was reassuring to discover that British trains no longer ran on time; a few boys of the old brigade had evidently retained enough strength to work to rule.
The Detection Club was still very much alive, and I was still, it seemed, a member. I had been elected in 1952 when Dorothy L. Sayers was president, though no longer an active holder of the office. If she had been active I probably would not have been elected or even proposed. I wrote thrillers, not detective novels, and I would certainly not have sworn solemnly ‘never to conceal a vital clue from the reader’ at my initiation. Come to think of it, I never was initiated; I was proposed and I was accepted, though I cannot now remember who my proposer was. It must have been a member I already knew – either John Dickson Carr, Michael Gilbert or Julian Symons – and one who knew that I was not given to swearing foolish oaths. What I enjoyed about the Detection Club was the friendliness and conviviality of its meetings, qualities not characteristic of most gatherings of writers. Fortunately for me Miss Sayers no longer attended the meetings. I cannot believe that we would have seen eye to eye about anything.
It has always been a pleasure to see Julian Symons again. With him and his wife Kathleen there, almost any occasion becomes a pleasure. I remember in particular a weekend in Berlin. The city still had its odious Wall, and we were there with the help, encouragement and blessing of the British Council to show that British thriller writers cared and that if we could hit upon a magic trumpet note that would bring the Wall
down we would happily sound it. Instead we talked to the Berliners and they talked back. I had not expected to enjoy myself. Thanks to Julian, who chaired the meetings, I did. When the Detection Club asked for a short detective story to celebrate his eightieth birthday I was happy to try.
The One Who Did for Blagden Cole
is not really a detective story; none of the founder members of the Detection Club would have accepted it as such. It amused Julian though, and I have changed it only very slightly here and there: not to propitiate the shade of Dorothy Sayers, but to indulge my own belief that for a writer of fiction all changes that he makes himself are likely to be for the better.
F
ELIX
Everard Cole, the English painter who signed himself Blag or Blagden Cole, has been dead for over sixty years; yet only now is he beginning to be recognized as one of our century’s masters. The catalogue notes of last year’s retrospective at the Royal Academy attempted somewhat obscurely to explain the delay.
He was a draughtsman to be compared with Constantin Guys whom Monet admired and whose praises were sung by Baudelaire. As a painter he developed, as did other young Post-Impressionists of the Julian school, in the long shadow cast by Puvis de Chavannes, but he soon became drawn to the Intimism of Vuillard. He even studied for a while with the Synthetiste Paul Sérusier, an influence that may have contributed to the later richness of his palette and the charm of his Bonnard-like interiors. None the less, it was as a portrait painter that he fulfilled himself; and it was, perhaps, his commercial success as a theatrical portraitist that suspended and then postponed judgement on his work as a whole. He died, absurdly and mysteriously, at the height of his powers.
And so on.
Now, God help us, there is to be an official biography.
There is nothing absurd about a shot-gun blast at close range. The note-writer is wrong, too, about the dangers to a painter of commercial success. Those who deal in the reputations of dead artists – art historians, curators, senior auction-house appraisers – are rarely moralists but they are inclined to take themselves and their work seriously. They despise the snap judgements of popular taste. They hate to see art written about and hear it spoken of as if it were a branch of show business or the women’s fashion trade. They are intellectual snobs, of course, but they are not fools. In our day there have been few
good artists who have been able to avoid the attentions of the press or tried very hard to do so. Publicity has usually brought work. But the young Blagden Cole had sometimes gone too far. He had seemed to court publicity and controversy for their own sakes. Moreover he did so at a time before the 1914–18 war when popular newspapers were building national circulations. Their stock-in-trade was the common touch, but the touch had to be firm and sure of itself. To the fringe editorial staff of Harmsworth’s
Daily Mail
, informed jokers like Blag Cole were invaluable. When Blag made fun of Clive Bell and the Contemporary Art Society, readers could understand the jokes. When Bloomsbury hit back by describing Blag Cole’s talent as ‘the fine commercial knack of making rich grocers look interesting’ the
Mail
printed that too. Some of its keenest readers were grocers. All Blag achieved was notoriety.
It was about then that he took to signing his work ‘Blag’. He had never liked his given names. His mother had been a music teacher and the Felix had been her salute to the memory of Mendelssohn, one of her favourite composers. Blagden was her family name and Blagden Cole looked and sounded more interesting than Felix Cole. The abbreviation to Blag developed after the death of his sister Cécile, named after the other favourite composer Chaminade. Blag liked the abbreviation pronounced with a long
a
, as in the French word
blague
meaning a bad joke or trick. He made other enemies in those early years, and not just in Bloomsbury. Appointed as War Artist to the British expeditionary force on the Salonika front, he was the direct cause of a diplomatic incident.
The Army of the Orient based on Salonika was a multinational force. Besides the two British divisions, mostly survivors of the Gallipoli campaign, there were French, Serbian, Italian and Greek troops. The army commander was General Sarrail, an affable Frenchman with a soldierly bearing and a taste for political intrigue. He lived in a small palace in some state with his mistress, a Russian princess of great beauty with an astonishing taste in hats. The troops lived in tented camps among the malaria swamps of the Vardar valley with sand-fly fever and dysentery for company. A large Bulgarian army was dug in on the heights above and, although most of the Allied casualties were caused by disease, Bulgarian sniper fire
added substantially to the account. Morale was low; the troops thought of themselves as forgotten; and not without reason.
The nearest the General ever went to a forward area was the Cercle Militaire, a French officers’ club near their corps HQ. It was at this club that Blag heard from a correspondent of the Havas news agency about a review of troops planned for the Fourteenth of July. It was expected that, despite advice from Paris that the lady was spying for King Ferdinand of Bulgaria, the General’s noble mistress would be beside him on the reviewing stand. Photographers would be forbidden but who would notice a sketch artist in British uniform sitting on the edge of the parade ground?
No one did, and the pen-and-ink drawing Blag made from his sketch was smuggled to the Havas office in Paris via the Italian diplomatic bag. The magazine
L’Illustration
gave it a full page. They dared to publish it partly because it was strongly reminiscent of Guys at his best, partly because Havas had declared (truthfully) that none of the Allied censors in Salonika had objected to the work and partly because it was felt that Clemenceau the new Prime Minister would not object to British criticism of a French general whom he was known to despise.
The drawing shows Sarrail taking the salute at a march past of high-stepping Senegalese infantry. He is standing, hand at kepi, in an open horse-drawn carriage. Hovering over him, however, are the plumes of an enormous hat, that of his princess. She is standing slightly behind him in all her statuesque glory, protecting him from the sun with her parasol. The drawing has a caption in English: ‘General Sarrail reviews his presidential guard.’ It is signed ‘Blag d’après Guys’.
Unfortunately, Clemenceau did object, strongly. The British prime minister had chosen that moment to write to him personally about Salonika. Not only did he question Sarrail’s fitness for command (as everyone else did) but he had also had the impertinence to suggest that the British and French colonial components of the Army of the Orient would be better employed on the Western front in place of the French divisions there which had recently mutinied. Coming on top of the Blag drawing, with its insulting use of the phrase ‘presidential guard’, the whole affair looked like a planned provocation and
an attempt to humiliate France. French intelligence agreed and blamed the British secret service in Athens. Who but the British could employ their official war artist in Greece to discredit their French ally?
Blag was threatened with a court martial, but lied his way out of it. His story was that he had been asked to do the drawing by the French Cercle Militaire to hang with other pictures on the wall of their bar room, and since he was an honorary member of the Cercle he had been glad to do it. He had not been paid for the drawing. Its removal to France and reproduction in
L’Illustration
had nothing to do with him. The British force commander, himself an occasional guest at the Cercle, confirmed the findings of a Court of Inquiry in Blag’s favour. He had escaped the military danger, but the offence given had been almost wholly political and the politicians were not disposed to let the prank go unpunished. His accreditation as an official War Artist was withdrawn and he was sent home.
There Sir Alfred Harmsworth had been translated into Lord Northcliffe and his
Daily Mail
had become a power in the land. Blag’s old editorial acquaintances were not really pleased to see him, even when he told them the truth about the Sarrail affair. The word from on high was that he should be regarded as Bolshie, a new term then used to describe those likely to become mutinous. Besides, Sarrail had already been replaced by General Franchet d’Espèrey who didn’t live in a palace with a Russian mistress. Blag was advised to watch his step and do something ostentatiously patriotic, like a royal portrait. No, of course he couldn’t get a commission to paint royalty just at the moment. The black mark would have to fade. Perhaps he should volunteer to do war work of some sort, for the Society of Friends, maybe, or the Red Cross.
He seemed struck with the idea and asked for an introduction to a committee member of the Red Cross. They gave him one. The result, however, was not at all what they had expected. When Blag had been sent home he had taken all his sketchbooks with him. Nobody had tried to stop him taking them, not even the censors at base. So now he took the sketchbooks to the Red Cross. He had an offer to make and a proposal. If the Red Cross committee would choose one hundred sketches from the hundreds in the books he, Blag,
would make a hundred finished pictures of them. Most would be on double demy board, some line-and-wash, some gouache, some pastel. With the hundred pictures the Red Cross could mount an international fund-raising exhibition.
That it was such an extraordinary success was only partly due to Blag and his work. Timing and the fortunes of war were on his side, for it was in the late summer of 1918 that the forgotten Army of the Orient came into its own. The faces of the men Blag had sketched in 1917 were the faces of those who next year fought their way through the Balkans to the first Central Powers surrender of the war. There were the faces of Frenchmen and Englishmen, of Chasseurs alpins and South Wales Borderers, of the Scottish Brigade and Moroccan Cavalrymen, of pilots of the 47 Squadron RAF who won the Kosturino Pass and Spahis watering their horses in the Struma river. The exhibition catalogue became a collector’s item and sold well at charity auctions. Blag’s name became very well known. An eccentric British peer tried to sue him for unlawfully disposing of Crown copyrights. The French gave him a Légion d’Honneur. In London he was offered accreditation as an Official Artist to the Paris Peace Conference. He refused on the grounds that the spectacle of Allied politicians drawing battle maps for the next war was a job for a caricaturist. He was going back to painting portraits.
And he did. By the twenties he was, undeniably, the most fashionable portrait painter. He also dabbled in the theatre. He designed a ballet for Diaghilev and collaborated with Komisar-jevsky in the design of a production of
Peer Gynt.
He experimented with lithography. It is possible that he did too much and that some of his work then did not show him at his best. Most of it did, though, and in the last year of his life he was certainly at his best. He did indeed die ‘at the height of his powers’. It has been only the manner and mystery of his death that have obscured the fact. But the work has survived that long expert scrutiny and his reputation is at last secure. His messy death is no longer seen as an admission of artistic failure comparable with that of Benjamin Haydon. It is now seen as an act of voluntary euthanasia committed to terminate a life of mental suffering which had become intolerable.
Seen by the pundits that is. But not by the biographer. Now,
all the old lies and the old agonies are to be dredged up and picked over again by this less fastidious seeker after truth. I understand that he writes thrillers under another name; he is high minded, a moralizer. He says that, as the only surviving witness and as the subject of the last portrait Blag painted, I have a moral duty to unburden myself.
