A Writer's Notebook Page 33

  When I was young I pretended to know everything. It often got me into trouble and made me look a fool. I think one of the most useful discoveries I ever made was how easy it is to say: “I don’t know.” I never noticed that it made anyone think the worse of me. The only inconvenience is that there are people who have nothing better to do than to tell you at tedious length all about something of which you have confessed your ignorance. But there are quite a number of things that I don’t want to know about.

  The subjunctive. American writers use the subjunctive much more than we do. I suppose they are used to it and so it seems natural to them—to us it has always a slightly pedantic look—but I haven’t noticed that they use it in conversation, and I suppose it is their teachers who teach them to use it in writing. I surmise that the primness of language which teachers inculcate is forced upon them by the general slovenliness and incorrectness of speech common to their pupils. They are kicking against the pricks; the subjunctive mood is in its death throes, and the best thing to do is to put it out of its misery as soon as possible. After all, writing is founded on common speech, and there’s no reason to forget that out of the slovenliness and incorrectness which offend the pedagogue apt phrases and picturesque idioms arise. No American, either man or boy, would say: “I’ll come to see you if I be in town;” he’d say: “I’ll come and see you if I’m in town.” It’s much better that he should write it too.

  Of course there’s a certain difficulty in deciding when you should drop a word or an expression that is correct in favour of one that is in common use. Lunch is the verb, luncheon the noun. But common usage has made lunch a noun too. No one would ask you to have luncheon with him unless he remembered that it was correct; he would naturally ask you to have lunch with him. I think the sensible writer will use the shorter word and let the other fall into desuetude. There are still people who will refuse to talk of a bus and insist on calling it an omnibus, but when they want a cab it never occurs to them to ask for a cabriolet.

  I read somewhere that Rogers, the banker poet who was celebrated for his breakfast parties, said he hoped never to have at his table someone who spoke of balcŏny instead of balcōny.

  Unless a novelist makes you believe in him he is done, and yet if he is entirely believable he may very well be dull. That (complete verisimilitude) is at least one reason why people turn to detective fiction. It has suspense, it excites their curiosity, it gives them a thrill; and in return for so much they make no great demand that it should be probable. They want to know who done it, and they are willing to accept the most unlikely and inadequate motive for who done it having done it.

  There is no need for the writer to eat a whole sheep to be able to tell you what mutton tastes like. It is enough if he eats a cutlet. But he should do that.

  We were spending the night at a small town in Texas. It was a convenient stopping-place for people driving across the continent, and the hotel was full. Everyone went to bed early. At ten o’clock a woman in one of the rooms put in a call to Washington, and in the frame house you could hear plainly every word she said. She wanted a Major Tompkins, but she didn’t know his number; she told the operator that he was in the War Department. Presently she got on to Washington, and when the operator told her that she couldn’t trace him, flew into a temper and said that everyone in Washington knew Major Tompkins. It was very important, she said, and she had to speak to him. She was cut off and in a few minutes tried again. She tried every quarter of an hour. She abused the local operator, what sort of a one-horse dump is this? She abused the Washington operator. She made more and more noise. Nobody could sleep. Indignant guests rang down to the office, and the night manager came up and tried to get her to be quiet. We listened to her angry replies to his mild expostulation and when, defeated, he left her she started once more to ring the exchange. She rang and rang. She shouted. Furious men in their dressing-gowns, dishevelled women in wrappers, went into the passage and banged on her door telling her to stop making so much noise so that they could sleep. She told them to go to hell with such variety of language as to excite the outraged indignation of the ladies. The manager was again appealed to and at his wit’s end sent for the sheriff. The sheriff came, but he was no match for her and not knowing what else to do sent for a doctor. Meanwhile she rang and rang, screaming obscenities at the operator. The doctor came, saw her, shrugged his shoulders and said he could do nothing. The sheriff wanted him to take her to the hospital, but for some reason I couldn’t understand, something to do with her being a transient from another state, and if she was crazy, as all these frantic people insisted, she might become a charge on the county, the doctor refused to act. She went on telephoning. She screamed that she must get Major Tompkins; it was a matter of life and death. At last she got him. It was four in the morning and no one in the hotel had shut an eye.

  “Have you got Major Tompkins?” she asked the operator. “You’re quite sure you’ve got him? Is he on the line?” Then with concentrated fury, spacing out her words to make them more emphatic: “Tell—Major—Tompkins—that—I don’t—want—to speak—to him.”

  With that she banged the receiver down on to the cradle.

  There is one queer thing about patriotism: it is a sentiment that doesn’t travel. Many years ago I wrote a play called Cœsar’s Wife which was a success in England, but a failure elsewhere. It wasn’t a bad play. To the inhabitants of other countries it seemed improbable and faintly absurd that English people should sacrifice themselves to what they considered was their duty to their country. I have noticed the same thing in the war plays of the present time. Granted that there is a lot of hokum in all of them, American audiences will swallow it when it deals with the heroism and self-sacrifice of Americans, but the same heroism, the same self-sacrifice in the English excite their ridicule rather than their sympathy. They are impatient with the courage of the English during the bombing of London; their discomfiture in Greece, a discomfiture expected by all who took part in the expedition, their hopeless stand in Crete, only excited their irritation.

  South Carolina. The moan of the wind in the pine trees was like the distant singing of the coloured people, singing their sad song to a heedless or a helpless God.

  I wonder if the form of a story isn’t a sort of memoria technica that holds it in your memory. Why does one remember Guy de Maupassant’s best stories, Boule de Suif, La Maison Tellier, L’Héritage so clearly after forty years? It is not only the anecdote. The anecdote is no better than in a thousand other stories one has read and forgotten. This reflection has been occasioned by a story of G’s. It has been in several anthologies, and I think he was a trifle hurt that I didn’t put it in mine. He writes with distinction, and he has the peculiar American felicity for describing the feel, the scent, the impression of an environment. The story was interesting and complicated; but it fell into two parts, each of which would have made it a good story, and he hadn’t had the sense of form to combine them into a unity.

  I think you must make sure not to divide the interest in a story; Chekov, however haphazard his appear sometimes, took care never to do this. In fact, in a story as in a play, you must make up your mind what your point is and stick to it like grim death. That is just another way of saying that it must have form.

  Some American Delusions.

  (i) That there is no class-consciousness in the country.

  (ii) That American coffee is good.

  (iii) That Americans are business-like.

  (iv) That Americans are highly-sexed and that redheads are more highly-sexed than others.

  Of all the hokum with which this country is riddled the most odd is the common notion that it is free of class distinctions. I was asked one day out West to lunch with a woman who, I was told, had twenty millions. I have never seen a duke in Europe treated with such deference as she was. You might have thought that every word that issued from her opulent lips was a hundred-dollar bill that the guests would be allowed to take away with them. It is true that
there is a pretence that one man is as good as another, but it is only a pretence. A banker will talk in the club car of a train to a travelling salesman as though they were equal, but I am not aware that he will dream of asking him to his house. And in such communities as Charleston or Santa Barbara the travelling salesman’s wife, however charming and cultivated, will never succeed in making her way into society. Social distinctions in the final analysis depend upon money. The great English lords of the eighteenth century were not treated by their inferiors with the obsequiousness which now turns our stomachs because of their titles, but because of their wealth, which, with the influence it gave them, enabled them to grant favours to their friends and dependents. With the industrialisation of England they lost, great part of their wealth and with it their influence. If they have managed to maintain themselves in some measure as a class apart it is due to the innate conservatism of the English. But they no longer enjoy the same consideration. It was properly respectful dearly to love a lord when there was something to be got out of him, but now that he has nothing to give you it is contemptible.

  But it is a mistake to suppose that class distinctions exist only in the upper and middle classes of society. In England the wife of the skilled artisan looks upon herself as a cut above the wife of the common labourer and will not consort with her. I know of a mushroom city in the Far West which was built only a few years ago to house the employees of a great factory. White-collars workers and factory hands live in adjoining blocks in houses built on the same pattern and as like as peas; they eat the same canned goods, read the same papers, go to the same movies, drive the same automobiles; but the wives of the white-collar workers will not play bridge with the wives of the factory hands. It looks as though the existence of class distinctions is inseparable from life in the social state, and instead of denying its existence it would be more honest to admit it.

  I wonder that the people who are concerned for the survival of democracy are not anxious at the inordinate power it gives to oratory. A man may be possessed of a disinterested desire to serve his country, he may have wisdom and prudence, courage and a knowledge of affairs, he will never achieve a political position in which he can exercise his powers unless he has also the gift of the gab. I was listening to some people the other day discussing the chances L. had of becoming prime minister and their opinion was unanimous that he had none because he was a poor speaker. I suppose they were right, but is it not frightening that the indispensable qualification a politician needs to conduct the complicated business of a modern nation is a voice that sounds well over the air or the knack of inventing striking phrases? It is only a happy accident if he combines these gifts with common-sense, integrity and foresight. The appeal of oratory is not to reason, but to emotion; one would have thought that when measures that may decide the fate of a nation are under consideration it was pure madness to allow opinion to be swayed by emotion rather than guided by reason. Democracy seldom had a ruder shock than when a phrase—you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold—nearly put an ignorant and conceited fool in the White House.

  Of course Mothers’ Day is an ingenious device of the manufacturers to sell their goods, but they surely wouldn’t buy costly space in the newspapers to advertise this occasion for giving unless the public response were satisfactory. They are trading on a sentiment. I have a notion that family affection is a great deal stronger in America than with us. People are expected to feel it and doubtless do. I was surprised to hear that a busy man in a busy office was to be away for a week because he had gone with his wife to bury her mother in some place no farther from New York than Bristol is from London. In England he might have gone to the funeral, but would have come back at the latest next day. What surprised me was not only that he felt it necessary to absent himself for so long from his urgent affairs to support his wife in the distress which for all I know she felt, but that his employer, notwithstanding the inconvenience it caused him, looked upon it as right and proper. During this war I have seen instances of the passionate affection that exists between son and mother and between mother and son. Once at Pennsylvania Station, waiting for my train, I saw a group of draftees who were going to camp. There was one woman, a stout, homely little grey-haired woman, who clung to her boy, her arms clasped round his waist, with an expression on her face of despair. She might have been a mistress parting from her lover, yet the boy was only going into training and there was no chance of his being sent overseas for many months. In England that mother, if she had come to the station to see her son off at all, would have kissed him lightly when the gates were opened and said: “Well, good-bye, old boy. Be good,” and with a smile and a wave of the hand walked away. I have seen soldiers in the U.S.O. clubs so homesick that they were pitiful.

  In England mothers have been parting from their sons for three hundred years, sometimes knowing it was for ever, and have come to look upon it as too normal an event to make a fuss about. It is true that in the development of America families going West went together, and the hardship and danger they had to encounter may have strengthened the tie between them; but after all, thousands of adventurous young men went off alone, and there is no sign in the letters or memoirs of the time to indicate that their departure filled their parents with anguish. There is nothing to show that the women left behind when the whalers went out from New Bedford and Nantucket bore the separation with anything but fortitude. Isn’t this emotionalism something of recent origin? I don’t suppose anyone doubts that the Americans of today are more emotional than the English. They weren’t, as far as one can tell, a hundred years ago. How has this come about? I can only suppose through the admixture of blood which has prevailed during the last two or three generations. Emotion is communicative; the sentimentality of the German, the excitability of the Italian, the effervescence of the Irishman, the susceptivity of the Jew, have overcome the reticent self-control of the New Englander and the pride of the Virginian. The stiff upper lip now is a sign of stupid insensibility. It gives occasion to a sneer or a wisecrack.

  I often think how much easier life would have been for me and how much time I should have saved if I had known the alphabet. I can never tell where I and J stand without saying G, H to myself first. I don’t know whether P comes before R or after, and where T comes in has to this day remained something that I have never been able to get into my head.

  There is nothing about which men lie so much as about their sexual powers. In this at least every man is, what in his heart he would like to be, a Casanova.

  She was successful, well-off, admired; she had a host of friends. She should have been a very happy woman, but she wasn’t, she was miserable, nervous and discontented. Psychoanalysts could do nothing for her. She couldn’t tell them what ailed her, because she didn’t know herself. She was in search of her tragedy. Then she fell in love with a young airman, many years younger than herself, and became his mistress. He was a test-pilot, and one day, when he was trying a machine, something went wrong and he crashed. He was killed before her eyes. Her friends were afraid she would commit suicide. Not at all. She became happy, fat and contented. She had had her tragedy.

  It is curious how defenceless people are when confronted with their own frailties in others. The humbug is taken in by other people’s humbug; the flatterer takes their flattery at its face value. The most abandoned liar I know once wrote to me in a fury because someone had told lies about her daughter. I don’t know why I didn’t write back to ask her if she thought she was the only abandoned liar in the world. R., who is an inveterate swanker, is invariably taken in by other people’s swank. He is always trying to make himself out more important than he is, and notwithstanding one disappointment after another, goes on placing implicit faith in the similar pretensions of others. Nothing ever made me more doubtful of T. E. Lawrence’s genuineness than that he so heartily trusted two persons whom I knew to be bogus.

  One of the things that must strike the foreigner in the United States is that whereas mos
t men have a host of acquaintances, few have friends. They have business associates, playmates at the bridge table or on the golf links, buddies they fish or shoot or sail with, boon companions they drink with, comrades they fight with, but that is all. Of all the people I have met in America I only know two men who are close friends. They will arrange to dine together and spend the evening in desultory conversation because they enjoy one another’s society. They have no secrets from one another and each is interested in the other’s concerns because they are his. Now when you consider how sociable the Americans are, how amicable and cordial, this is very strange. The only explanation I can offer myself is that the pace of life in the United States is so great that few men have time for friendship. Leisure is needed for acquaintance to deepen into intimacy. Another possible explanation is that in America when a man marries his wife engulfs him. She demands his undivided attention and she makes his home his prison.

  Women’s friendships everywhere are unstable. They can never give their confidence in its entirety, and their closest intimacy is tempered with reserve, misgiving and suppression of the truth.

  A friend indeed. She is middle-aged, but neat and trim and very smartly dressed, the kind of woman of whom you say: “She must have been quite pretty when she was young”; but when you ask why she never married you are told: “She’s simply devoted to her mother.” She has a great capacity for sympathy. No one could be kinder. When your husband is being tried for fraud she will sit beside you all through the proceedings, and when he is sentenced to a term of imprisonment she will come and stay with you till you get used to the situation. If through some mischance you are suddenly ruined she will spend a week with you to help you to decide what to do, and if you’re in Reno and suddenly feel you can’t face the ordeal of going into court she’ll hop on a plane and give you her support till you get your decree. But it is in the case of death that she is at her best. If your husband has died of coronary thrombosis, if your daughter has passed away in childbirth or your son been killed in a motor accident, she will pack a couple of suitcases and by train or air fly to be with you. Distance is no object. She will not be appalled by the rigours of the climate in North Dakota, nor deterred by the heat of summer in Texas; even the inopportune gaiety of Miami at the height of the season will not daunt her. She will not shrink if the tragic event is attended by an unwelcome publicity; she is very nice to the reporters and can’t forgive herself that she forgot to ask them not to mention her name in their write-up. She will listen with unfailing patience as you tell her over and over again the sad details of your dear one’s last moments. She will make the necessary arrangements. She will see to the flowers. She will answer the letters of condolence that you don’t think you need answer yourself. She will pray by your side in church; she will stand by your side, sobbing, at the open grave. On your return from the cemetery she insists on your taking a rest and then, after a good dinner—“You must keep up your strength, darling”—she suggests a game of gin-rummy. She always leaves the day after the funeral, she has a thousand things to do in New York, and “You must try and pick up the threads, darling.” Back in the metropolis, though naturally exhausted after what she has gone through, she picks up the telephone and tells her friends, one after the other, how dreadful it has all been.