Authors: Henry Williamson
Elated by Spica’s letter about his story—composed from scenes imagined against a dream country arising from boyhood memories of Beau Brickhill and Reynard’s Common and beyond—Phillip wrote cheerfully to her, and received a reply that she was shortly passing through London with her mother, and if he had nothing better to do, would he meet them for tea at the buffet at Victoria station?
There he met the two ladies; and asked by Mrs. Trevelian where he was living, he replied, “Oh, in Wakenham, Mrs. Trevelian.”
“That dreadful place! It’s on the wrong side of the river, surely?”
“Oh, no, Mother!” said Spica at once.
Asked further how he was getting on, Phillip replied that he was now contributing to several papers—which was true enough, as he had had short guinea articles taken by five different London journals.
Mother and daughter were on their way to Cambridge; he took them in a taxi across London to Liverpool Street station, keeping up to the end a manner, as suggested by his mother, of quiet, impersonal restraint; and saying goodbye before the train left, went to a waiting-room, feeling suddenly exhausted. Then remembering Jack O’Donovan, who lived in Wandsworth, he walked across the river and was told that he would be welcome to stay the night.
Two music-halls were visited that Monday evening, for Jack to report in
The
Age.
Phillip drank beer that he did not want. Jack’s everlasting talk about girls added to his fatigue, and he spent a sleepless night, finally lighting the gas and writing scenes for another book. He was told in the morning that he was welcome to stay as long as he liked, but left after breakfast. That night he wandered on the Embankment, at times trying to sleep while leaning against the granite parapet; one among hundreds of human derelicts and out-of-works, many of them ex-soldiers, who had come to pass the night on the iron seats, only to be moved along by policemen. The following night he spent on a leather bed in Rowton House, which cost a shilling; but the smells, groans, snores and mutterings of the tramps in the doss-house were enough: that semi-romantic experiment was not repeated.
Jan. 18. I am quite happy in my old room at home, overlooking the garden.
There must be another character in my climactic novel: an elderly man, egotistical, a scientist who can explain everything appertaining to the soul in terms of repressed desires, thwarted instincts, hereditary traits, and the foul pit of the subconscious. He can explain everything except how poetry is written, and how the flower breaks from the bud on the stem.
Spica wrote to me c/o The Parnassus Club, saying that she had ‘been to London recently, once for pleasure and twice for interviews with the Ministry of Labour’.
She did not, of course, see me or tell me that she was coming up. Yet she must write and mention afterwards that she has been. Why?
It’s only right, of course, that she shouldn’t see me, for she does not love me, and has a conviction that she interferes with my
work. What is my work? What avails all the art in the world? Most men of genius had something the matter with them: Wagner, a fanatic; Michelangelo, a sexual invert; Flaubert, impotent; Shelley, estranged from normal society, like Byron; Balzac, consumed with ambition to prove—what? According to Julian Warbeck, with whom I walked all day yesterday—except when he stood in some pub and drank pint after pint of beer and I drank a glass of milk—most geniuses are onanists and so bring on neuroticism and weakness of mind: Algernon Charles Swinburne especially, said Julian. He agreed with me that such examples give scientists like Max Nordau—a flat-footed drain-inspector, Julian called him—the theory of art madness. Even Jesus was a madman, possessed of delusions of grandeur, and according to Nordau, via Warbeck (who got the expression flat-footed drain-inspector from Compton Mackenzie, who in one of his books calls Nordau a flat-footed bus-conductor) was a homosexualist and should have been locked up. That, to me, is the view of a distorted intuition: for true intuition surely springs from love and pity. The instinct of pity derives from generations of female mammals being tender with their young.
This evening I risked Mrs. Portal-Welch’s possible displeasure by taking Warbeck to the Club. Julian swore he would not say a word this time. “Anyway, it’s not worth it, with those people.” On his first and last appearance there, as my guest, he tore John Crowe, the Cornish psychologistal novelist, to bits, and Mrs. P-W told me I mustn’t bring him again.
This time Ronald Harsnop was giving the address, on the Freudian novel, which he derided, saying that a dose of liver salts would cure most of the frustrated thoughts of an author, and why should he anyway inflict them on a reading public which wanted, first and always, a story of character and action. He included in this category some of the (unnamed) war-poets, calling them defeatists, weak men, unable to hold their own in war. Harsnop is himself a versifier, who published several books in the war, one of them about a man shot for cowardice trying to mix among the ghosts of his comrades killed in battle, and being rejected for “a whining coward thing”. I read bits of it and thought it pretty awful trash.
At question time Warbeck got up and said, “I would like to ask the lecturer what emotion inspired him to write his own series of jingoist verses, particularly the one which described the spirit of a soldier, shot for cowardice, entering the Hall of the Free Beer and Free Woodbines. The dead heroes sitting at the tables roared for him to go out. No man,” said Warbeck, “who had been in action himself would have written that bit of fearful mongrelism. I will not promote it above its poetic content to call it doggerel.”
He looked around. “Will Mr. Harsnop tell us what was his own chief emotion in the war? Was it admiration for front-line soldiers, which it could hardly be, for clearly Mr. Harsnop does not understand them, or was it a sublimation of his own fearful thoughts? Perhaps Mr. Harsnop will tell us if he served at the front?”
Harsnop said he was a gunner, and had frequently been in action.
“But were you not an anti-aircraft gunner, well behind the lines?”
Harsnop admitted that that was one of his duties, but that he failed to see why, as a writer, he should not write of courage and devotion to duty, which he saw all around him at the front. “Now I will ask you a question,” he said. “I don’t know who you are, but from your general tone and attitude I should hazard that you are one of the Comrades, if not Red, at least a delicate pale pink.”
“Unlike yourself,” retorted Julian, “I have no politics. But if I did have a political outlook, and if it were pink, it would at least have more colour than that of a milksop. I am not saying that you are a milksop, but if you are not one, why do you write like a milksop? Your verse, I will not call it poetry, may have autopsychical value as a revelation of your inner fears, but otherwise it has no value whatsoever.”
“You are being personal, and you are an extremely rude man,” said Mrs. Portal-Welch. “Mr. Harsnop, I must apologise to you for what the last speaker has said. Now are there any more questions, from members?”
I wanted to say that in battle
everyone
feels glassy fear, at least in the first wave when machine-guns are cutting down a line of men on either side of you, and that no infantryman who had been through it would damn another who lost his nerve, for some had private fears which sapped them, originating from before the war; but I could not get up to speak, as I felt suddenly exhausted.
Julian is a bit of a bully. Before the arrival at Caxton Hall he said to me that my essay in
The
English
Review
was “pure nonsense, and anybody could have written it.” After the meeting he started to hold forth on Swinburne in the neighbouring pub, and I slipped away with a young Suffolk poet called Southwold, who had been with the infantry and agreed with me that Harsnop had got his literary style from Kipling, the bravado part.
Jan. 20. Julian is now full of ideas for travel. Today he suggested that we go to Spain together, working our passages; an hour later he proposed Holland; after closing time it was a flying trip to Cambridge, in an Aero Club ’plane; ten minutes later, “We must, simply
must,
take a wherry on the Broads this coming summer.”
These expeditions having been enjoyed in fancy, “We’ll spend
the summer in Devon, I think, and write like mad.” Then, “Dine with me next Wednesday in Town, and I’ll introduce you to Lorna and Toots Pounds.” Etc., etc., etc. Meanwhile we are trudging over country unseen by him, he about a yard ahead of me, turning round all the time, so that I can’t get him out of my sight, as I pretend to be taking in his yards of Swinburne, tangled up with boastings of himself in a niche of the Temple of Fame.
But this is too
nude
a portrait, as Barbellion would say. Julian can, when sober, be an interesting companion. Then I enjoy his company, and his presence keeps me from brooding about Spica—sometimes.
Phillip was sitting one evening towards the end of January in the Café Royal with Julian Warbeck and Anders Norse. They were in the room lined with mirrors in gilt frames fixed against the walls, marble-topped tables, and red plush settees. Norse, a man of about thirty, with healthy red face and prematurely white hair, was holding in the palm of his hand five sovereigns, an uncommon sight since the war. Turning to the girl sitting quietly on his right hand beside a massive man with an ugly powerful face and a fringe of dark ringlets under a wide-brimmed black felt hat, Anders Norse said cheerfully, “Nice feel these have, don’t you think?”—at which the girl, wearing a jibbah of large wooden beads and a yellow scarf on her dark head replied, “If one is only interested in money, perhaps.”
Phillip had seen the girl at the Parnassus Club but had never spoken to her. Had she recognised him? If so, she had made no sign. Surely she would not think that Anders Norse, in his unsophisticated geniality, had offered her money because he wanted to get off with her?
Julian, with folded arms, looked arrogantly amused. Phillip wondered what he should do if the sculptor were suddenly to open his hands, powerful with the moulding of so much clay, and tear off the collar of Anders’s coat. So he leaned across and said, “My friend has no ulterior motive, I assure you, he thinks that a sovereign is a beautiful piece of work. We are writers, of a sort. Will you do us the honour of drinking with us?”
“Sure,” replied the sculptor. “I vill have a large ‘Old Scottie’, and this lady, who is my Sibyl, vill have a bottle of Burgundy.”
Julian grunted, and began to bite his nails. He had no regard for what were generally ridiculed in the popular press as the distorted figures of a Jewish sculptor from New York’s East Side.
The grunt was succeeded by enjoyment that old Phillip had been caught in a characteristic impulse to make things worse in the best of all possible worlds.
The waiter came with a bottle lying on its side in a flat wicker basket. He held it to the gaze of the sculptor, to show the label; then presented the cork, before pouring the top of the wine into a glass. Then bowing, he set before the sculptor a large glass of whisky with a bottle of soda-water; and three tall glasses of Pilsener beer, which the three men had been drinking.
“One pound, sixteen shilling,” said the waiter, coming to Phillip’s side.
Phillip had only some coppers, and his last ten-shilling note. Quietly, with a slow smile, Anders Norse put down two sovereigns on the plate, nodding to the waiter who bowed and went away with the money.
Shortly afterwards the sculptor, his drink merely sipped, left with his model, who had not touched her glass of wine.
“Hurr,” grunted Warbeck. “‘I vill ’ave a large Old Scotti and my Sibyl she vill ’ave a boddle of Burgundy. Well, it’s a poor heart that never rejoices,” and taking the whisky, he poured it down his throat, followed by his glass of Pilsener with the remark, “Beer is for the young, bed is for the old, I think.”
“I’m awfully sorry, Anders,” said Phillip. “I ought not to have interfered.”
“It’s all right, Phillip. I had to spend them sooner or later. I got them from an American client this morning.”
“I’ll pay you back as soon as I can.”
“Don’t worry. By this time in five years you’ll be earning five thousand a year.”
“Do you really think so?”
“I’m sure of it.”
Julian Warbeck scoffed again as he reached for the bottle of Burgundy.
“By the way, did you get payment for your essay in the
English
Review
?”
“No. I didn’t really want any, Anders.”
“Well, you can’t live on air. Even Shelley had private means. Let
me
try next time. I’ve sent your book to Hollins, by the way, with a special letter of recommendation to J. D. Woodford, their reader. Don’t worry, it will be taken sooner than later. Well, I must be on my way.”
Phillip was left with Julian and the bottle of Burgundy. “I
can’t drink my beer, it’s too cold,” he said. “Can you manage it for me?”
“Certainly!” Down Julian’s gullet went the pale yellow beer. Phillip swallowed a glass of red wine, and after initial doubts began to feel cheerful. Half an hour later the two left, the bottle having been emptied.
By this time Phillip was feeling exhausted by Julian’s constant scoffing, which became bullying when Phillip would not lend him the ten-shilling note. He was so persistent that at last Phillip, near to tears, gave it to him, with the feeble remark, “At least Swinburne was a gentleman, even if he was a poet.” And turning away he ran along the Embankment, followed by Julian, who soon gave up.
Phillip ran on as far as the Sphinx, where he stopped, feeling breathless and deathly sick. He managed to get to the parapet in time to spare himself shame before people passing by. Vomiting gave no relief. He felt that he could not breathe. Bending over again, with a choking feeling, he felt in his mouth a strange salty taste. He saw blood on the parapet, while Cleopatra’s Needle appeared to be falling over. He was lying on the paving stones; and managing to get to a plane tree, leant against it, breathing quickly, his heart thudding in his ears.
A policeman helped him to a seat. Later an ambulance arrived, its bell heard dimly through a desire to sleep. He was taken to the casualty ward of Gower Street Hospital, and lying on a bed, given oxygen. Later he was questioned by a young doctor, who told him that he had had a haemorrhage.