‘If you make me do that,’ said Black Sheep very quietly, ‘I shall burn this house down and perhaps I will kill you. I don’t know whether I can kill you – you are so bony, but I will try.’
No punishment followed this blasphemy, though Black Sheep held himself ready to work his way to Auntie Rosa’s withered throat and grip there till he was beaten off.
In the last sentence we can hear something very much like the tones of Munro’s voice as we hear them in one of his finest stories Sredni Vashtar, Neither his Aunt Augusta nor his Aunt Charlotte with whom he was left near Barnstaple after his mother’s death, while his father served in Burma, had the fiendish cruelty of Aunt Rosa, but Augusta (‘a woman’, Munro’s sister wrote, ‘of ungovernable temper, of fierce likes and dislikes, imperious, a moral coward, possessing no brains worth speaking of, and a primitive disposition’) was quite capable of making a child’s life miserable. Munro was not himself beaten, Augusta preferred his younger brother for that exercise, but we can measure the hatred he felt for her in his story of the small boy Conradin who prayed so successfully for vengeance to his tame ferret. ‘“Whoever will break it to the poor child? I couldn’t for the life of me!”. exclaimed a shrill voice, and while they debated the matter among themselves Conradin made himself another piece of toast.’ Unhappiness wonderfully aids the memory, and the best stories of Munro are all of childhood, its humour and its anarchy as well as its cruelty and unhappiness.
For Munro reacted to those years rather differently from Kipling. He, too, developed a style like a machine in self-protection, but what sparks this machine gave off. He did not protect himself like Kipling with manliness, knowingness, imaginary adventures of soldiers and Empire Builders (though a certain nostalgia for such a life can be read into The Unbearable Bassington): he protected himself with epigrams as closely set as currants in an old-fashioned Dundee cake. As a young man trying to make a career with his father’s help in the Burma Police, he wrote to his sister in 1893 complaining that she had made no effort to see A Woman of No Importance. Reginald and Clovis are children of Wilde: the epigrams, the absurdities fly unremittingly back and forth, they dazzle and delight, but we are aware of a harsher, less kindly mind behind them than Wilde’s. Clovis and Reginald are not creatures of fairy tale, they belong nearer to the visible world than Ernest Moncrieff. While Ernest floats airily like a Rubens cupid among the over-blue clouds, Clovis and Reginald belong to the Park, the tea-parties of Kensington, and evenings at Covent Garden – they even sometimes date, like the suffragettes. They cannot quite disguise, in spite of the glint and the sparkle, the loneliness of the Bamstaple years – they are quick to hurt first, before they can be hurt, and the witty and devastating asides cut like Aunt Augusta’s cane. How often these stories are stories of practical jokes. The victims with their weird names are sufficiently foolish to awaken no sympathy – they are the middle-aged, the people with power; it is right that they should suffer temporary humiliation because the world is always on their side in the long run. Munro, like a chivalrous highwayman, only robs the rich: behind all these stories is an exacting sense of justice. In this they are to be distinguished from Kipling’s stories in the same genre – The Village That Voted The Earth Was Flat and others where the joke is carried too far. With Kipling revenge rather than justice seems to be the motive (Aunt Rosa had established herself in the mind of her victim and corrupted it).
Perhaps I have gone a little too far in emphasizing the cruelty of Munro’s work, for there are times when it seems to remind us only of the sunniness of the Edwardian scene, young men in boaters, the box at the Opera, long lazy afternoons in the Park, tea out of the thinnest porcelain with cucumber sandwiches, the easy irresponsible prattle.
Never be a pioneer. It’s the Early Christian that gets the fattest lion.
There’s Marion Mulciber, who would think she could ride down a hill on a bicycle; on that occasion she went to a hospital, now she’s gone into a Sisterhood – lost all she had you know, and gave the rest to Heaven.
Her frocks are built in Paris, but she wears them with a strong English accent.
It requires a great deal of moral courage to leave in a marked manner in the middle of the second Act when your carriage is not ordered till twelve.
Sad to think that this sunniness and this prattle could not go on for ever, but the worst and cruellest practical joke was left to the end. Munro’s witty cynical hero, Comus Bassington, died incongruously of fever in a West African village, and in the early morning of 13 November 1916, from a shallow crater near Beaumont Hamel, Munro was heard to shout ‘Put out that bloody cigarette.’ They were the unpredictable last words of Clovis and Reginald.
1950
MAN MADE ANGRY
IT is a waste of time criticizing Léon Bloy as a novelist: he hadn’t the creative instinct – he was busy all the time being created himself, created by his own angers and hatreds and humiliations. Those who meet him first in this grotesque and ill-made novel*2 need go no further than the dedication to Brigand-Kaire, Ocean Captain, to feel the angry quality of his mind. ‘God keep you safe from fire and steel and contemporary literature and the malevolence of the evil dead.’ He was a religious man but without humility, a social reformer without disinterestedness, he hated the world as a saint might have done, but only because of what it did to him and not because of what it did to others. He never made the mistake by worldly standards of treating his enemies with tolerance – and in that he resembled the members of the literary cliques he most despised. Unlike his contemporary Péguy, he would never have risked damnation himself in order to save another soul, and though again and again we are surprised by sentences in his work of nobility or penetration, they are contradicted by the savage and selfish core of his intelligence. ‘I must stop now, my beloved,’ he wrote to his fiancée, ‘to go and suffer for another day’; he had prayed for suffering, and yet he never ceased to complain that he had been granted more of it than most men; it made him at the same time boastful and bitter.
He wrote in another letter:
I am forty-three years old, and I have published some literary works of considerable importance. Even my enemies can see that I am a great artist. Also, I have suffered much for the truth, whereas I could have prostituted my pen, like so many others, and lived on the fat of the land. I have had plenty of opportunities, but I have not chosen to betray justice and I have preferred misery, obscurity and indescribable agony. It is obvious that these things ought to merit respect.
It is obvious too that these things would have been better claimed for him by others. It is the self-pity of this attitude the luxurious bitterness that prevents Bloy from being more than an interesting eccentric of the Catholic religion. He reminds us – in our own literature – a little of Patmore, and sometimes of Corvo. He is near Patmore in his brand of pious and uxorious sexuality which makes him describe the character of Clotilde, the heroine of his novel, as ‘chaste as a Visitationist Sister’s rosary’, and near Corvo in the furious zest with which he takes sides against his characters: ‘She bellowed, if the comparison may be permitted, like a cow that has been forgotten in a railway truck.’ Indeed the hatred he feels for the characters he has himself created (surely in itself a mark of limited imagination) leads him to pile on the violence to a comic extent – ‘a scandalous roar of cachinnation . . . like a bellowing of cattle from some goitred valley colonized by murderers’.
No, one reads this novel of Bloy not for his characters, who are painted only deformity-deep, not for his story, but for the occasional flashes of his poetic sense, for images like ‘upright souls are reserved for rectilinear torments’; for passages with a nervous nightmare vision which reminds us of Rilke:
A little middleclass township, with a pretension to the possession of gardens, such as are to be found in the quarters colonized by eccentrics, where murderous landlords hold out the bait of horticulture to trap those condemned to die.
We read him with pleasure to just the exte
nt that we share the hatred of life which prevented him from being a novelist or a mystic of the first order (he might have taken as his motto Gauguin’s great phrase – ‘Life being what it is, one dreams of revenge’) and because of a certain indestructible honesty and self-knowledge which in the long run always enables him to turn his fury on himself, as when in one of his letters he recognizes the presence of ‘that bitch literature’ penetrating ‘even the most naif stirrings of my heart’.
1939
G. K. CHESTERTON
1
IT is possible to argue that the best biographies have been the result of conflict and not of surrender. One pictures the biographer, however cheerfully he may have undertaken his task, glowering with sullen determination and resentment at the huge mass of intractable material any life must represent. A man lives for seventy years: to make sense of this is a worse labour than reducing to order the record of a mere four-years’ war. To simplify is essential: so we see Boswell brushing aside in a few pages more than half his subject’s lifetime, or Lytton Strachey choosing one characteristic sentence and holding it like a thread of cotton through the maze.
Mrs Ward, however, is too fond of her subject and too close to it to reduce her material into a portrait for strangers. Her biography*3 is often of great interest: it is a useful and sometimes explicit corrective to Mrs Cecil Chesterton’s vulgar and inaccurate study of the Chesterton family; but it is too long for its material, too cumbered with affectionate trivialities. When we love we hoard a scrap of dialogue, a picture postcard, a foreign coin, but ‘these foolish things’ must be excluded from a biography which is written for strangers. Mrs Ward has amiably supposed her readers to be all friends of her subject: her book would have been better if she had realized – as Stevenson’s biographers also failed to realize – that in the case of a great writer the years inevitably produce enemies. One wishes, too, that she had remembered more frequently her non-Catholic audience. Remarks such as ‘the “holier bread” came perhaps to his [Chesterton’s] mind from the fact that the average of Daily Communion is unusually high at Notre Dame’ display the embarrassing parochialism which haunts so much Catholic writing in England.
Chesterton’s bibliography consists of one hundred volumes, the ‘quiet resolute practice of the liberty of a free mind’, as Mrs Ward admirably expresses it. Out of this enormous output time will choose. Time often chooses oddly, or so it seems to us, though it is more reasonable to suppose that it is we ourselves who are erratic in our judgements. We are already proving our eccentricity in the case of Chesterton: a generation that appreciates Joyce finds for some reason Chesterton’s equally fanatical play on words exhausting. Perhaps it is that he is still suspected of levity, and the generation now reaching middle age has been a peculiarly serious one. Mrs Ward should at least alter that opinion: she dwells at great length on Chesterton’s political opinions. He cared passionately for individual liberty and for local patriotism, but the party which he largely inspired has an art-and-crafty air about it today. He was too good a man for politics: he never, one feels, penetrated far enough into the murky intricacies of political thought. To be a politician a man needs to be a psychologist, and Chesterton was no psychologist, as his novels prove. He saw things in absolute: terms of good and evil, and his immense charity prevented him admitting the amount of ordinary shabby deception in human life. At their worst our politicians were fallen angels.
For the same reason that he failed as a political writer he succeeded as a religious one, for religion is simple, dogma is simple. Much of the difficulty of theology arises from the efforts of men who are not primarily writers to distinguish a quite simple idea with the utmost accuracy. He restated the original thought with the freshness, simplicity, and excitement of discovery. In fact, it was discovery: he unearthed the defined from beneath the definitions, and the reader wondered why the definitions had ever been thought necessary. Orthodoxy. The Thing and The Everlasting Man are among the great books of the age. Much else, of course, it will be disappointing if time does not preserve out of that weight of work: The Ballad of the White Horse, the satirical poems, such prose fantasies as The Man Who Was Thursday and The Napoleon of Notting Hill, the early critical books on Browning and Dickens; but in these three religious books, inspired by a cosmic optimism, the passionately held belief that ‘it is good to be here’, he contributed what another great religious writer closely akin to him in political ideas, and even in style, saw was most lacking in our age. Péguy put these lines on man into the mouth of his Creator:
On peut lui demander beaucoup de coeur, beaucoup de charité, beaucoup de sacrifice.
Il a beaucoup de foi et beaucoup de charité.
Mais ce qu’on ne peut pas lui demander, sacredié, c’est un peu d’espérance.
1944
2
A man’s enemies are not always deserved. He has not chosen his in-laws. The most obvious feature of Mrs Cecil Chesterton’s book*4 is the steady undercurrent of rather petty dislike: dislike of her sister-in-law, who took G. K. Chesterton away from London, from the convivial Fleet Street nights, to the quiet of Beaconsfield. Mrs Chesterton paints – from her personal angle – the picture of an unhappy man cut off from the companionship of his peers, his mind dulled and his work ruined. But it is possible to doubt whether in fact those noisy pub-crawling Fleet Street friends, Crosland and the rest, were his peers, and whether he ever wrote better books than The Everlasting Man, The Thing and the Autobiography – all completed at Beaconsfield. Dislike may produce a good book, but not when it is expressed so covertly as here – the sneer between the lines, from the first page, when we read that Chesterton ‘was a striking figure in those days’ (the days. Mrs Chesterton means, before his marriage, but when was he not a striking figure?) to almost the last, when she complains that there was not enough to eat and drink after G. K.’s funeral. On p. 26 we are introduced to Frances Chesterton: ‘She looked charming in blue or green, but she rarely wore those shades, and usually effected dim browns and greys’: on p. 70, ‘a tragedy fell on the Blogg family which hit Frances cruelly hard. She had an engrossing affection for her people; they were indeed the altar of sacrifice, both for her and her husband’; on p. 72, ‘She did not like food, except cakes, chocolate and similar flim-flams, and her appreciation of liquor stopped short at tea’; on p. 69, ‘Frances disliked the Press as such, and really only cared for small journals and parish magazines, to which she contributed her quite charming verse.’ So they go on, the little gibes against the dead woman who did not care for Fleet Street, harmless and silly enough if it were not for the culminating passage of staggering vulgarity which purports to describe – in the melodramatic and sensational terms of the novelettes the author used to write – Chesterton’s wedding night. Chesterton is supposed to have confided this to his brother, and one can only say that in that case he trusted someone who was not to be trusted. Mrs Cecil Chesterton may consider that this passage of her book disposes of Frances Chesterton once and for all; it disposes far more destructively of the author who is ready to print it.
It must be admitted that it is not only her enemies who suffer from Mrs Cecil Chesterton’s tastelessness. Her own honeymoon is thus described:
In honour of the occasion I wore a dress of green and gold – a favourite combination of Cecil’s. I was all ready when he emerged from his bedroom, astonishingly well groomed. He looked at me from the door, and his face lit up, almost ecstatically, as though he had glimpsed some sort of vision. ‘. . . For mine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, sweetheart,’ he said softly, and I wondered at the worship in his eyes.
One is reminded again and again of a song called ‘Literary Widows’ in one of Mr Farjeon’s early revues which had a refrain something like this:
Shovel the dust on the old man’s coffin,
Then pick up your pen and write.
One is left contrasting these badly-written, expansive, discretionless memoirs with the silence of Frances Chesterton, the wife of
the greater brother, who will be remembered in her husband’s verse long after these spiteful anecdotes are forgotten.
With leaves below and leaves above,
And groping under tree and tree,
I found the home of my true love
Who is a wandering home for me.
1941
WALTER DE LA MARE’S SHORT STORIES
EVERY creative writer worth our consideration, every writer who can be called in the wide eighteenth-century use of the term a poet, is a victim: a man given over to an obsession. Was it not the obsessive fear of treachery which dictated not only James’s plots but also his elaborate conceits (behind the barbed network of his style he could feel really secure himself), and was it not another obsession, a terrible pity for human beings, which drove Hardy to write novels that are like desperate acts of rebellion in a lost cause? What obsession then do we find in Mr de la Mare – one of the few living writers who can survive in this company?
The obsession is perhaps most easily detected in the symbols an author uses, and it would not be far from the truth – odd as it may seem on the face of it – to say that the dominant symbol in Mr de la Mare’s short stories is the railway station or the railway journey: sometimes the small country railway station, all but deserted except by a couple of travellers chance met and an aged porter, at dusk or bathed in the quiet meditative light of a harvest afternoon: sometimes the waiting room of a great junction with its dving dusty fire and its garrulous occupant. But if not the dominant symbol at least this symbol – or rather group of symbols – occurs almost as frequently as do the ghosts of his poems – the ghosts that listen to the mother as she reads to her children, the lamenting ghosts that rattle the door like wind or moisten the glass like rain. Prose is a more intractable medium than verse. In prose we must be gently lured outside the boundaries of our experience. The symbol must in a favourable sense of the word be prosaic.