A Writer's Notebook Page 35

  He was a tall, heavily-built fellow, with a shock of wavy, golden hair that glistened in the sun, bright blue eyes and a friendly, open countenance. He had little education and his English was terrible. He had no trace of self-consciousness. He was unaffected, chatty and sociable. He was an airman. He was talking of his experiences. “I never believed in religion before,” he said, “but when I was in a jam I prayed. ‘O God,’ I said, ‘let me live till tomorrow.’ I just said it over and over again.”

  She is a little woman with dark hair and dark eyes, with the prettiness of youth, and neat in her appearance. The vicissitudes of the war have brought her down to the deep South, but till then she had always lived in Portland, Oregon, and she measures everything by the standards, habits and way of living of that city. Whatever is different excites her dislike and contempt. She is happy in the knowledge that she is as good as anybody else and smarter (in the American sense) than most, but is painfully embarrassed when, as here, she is thrown into the society of persons who, she is uneasily conscious, belong to a higher class than her own. She is at once abashed and aggressive; abashed because she is afraid that they do not take her at her own valuation, and aggressive because she is determined not to let them put anything over on her. She was before her marriage secretary to a business man and never in her life till now had servants to wait on her. It fills her with a half-angry confusion; she thinks it undemocratic; but why she should imagine it more undemocratic to have someone to cook your dinner than to have someone to write your letters is not apparent. She resents the kindness of her hosts as patronage and accepts all that is done for her as her due because she has been forced to leave her home town. She dislikes Easterners; she thinks them stuck up, stilted, condescending and supercilious; in fact she regards them with the same distaste as Americans regard the English. She compares them very unfavourably with the people of Portland, Oregon.

  It will be lamentable if in selfishness, lack of foresight and stupidity the Allies after the war neglect in abhorrence of the German vices to practise their virtues. The Germans are ruthless and cruel, faithless to their word, treacherous and tyrannical, dishonest and corrupt. True, every word of it. They have taught their people habits of industry and discipline. They have taken pains to make the youth of their country strong, virile and brave. They have taught them willingly to sacrifice themselves to the common good. (It has little to do with the matter that their notion of the common good differs from ours.) They have made partriotism a powerful and active force. All these are good things and we should be wise to imitate them. People should read history. The people of the Italian republics thought they could maintain their liberty by buying off with hard cash the enemies who threatened them, and with mercenaries defend their frontiers. Their history proves that unless the citizens of a state are prepared to fight, unless they are willing to spend their money to provide sufficient armaments, they will lose their freedom. It is a trite statement that no one can enjoy freedom unless he is willing to surrender some part of it. It is always forgotten.

  I am gratified when a friend slaps me on the back and tells me I’m a fine fellow, but I do a little resent it when with his other hand he picks my pocket.

  He’s a crook and he’s been in jail. He’s in the army now and is very unhappy. He’s just been promoted again and it has depressed him; he hates life because he says he is always thwarted, every ambition he has ever had has always been realized and he has nothing to live for.

  Gushing, she said to me: “What does it feel like to be famous?”

  I suppose I’ve been asked the question twenty times and I never could think how to answer, but today, too late, it suddenly occurred to me.

  “It’s like having a string of pearls given you. It’s nice, but after a while, if you think of it at all, it’s only to wonder if they’re real or cultured.”

  And now that I have my reply ready I don’t expect anyone will ever put the question to me again.

  Plumbing. When you consider how indifferent Americans are to the quality and cooking of the food they put into their insides, it cannot but strike you as peculiar that they should take such pride in the mechanical appliances they use for its excretion.

  How sad that life should be both tragic and trivial: a melodrama in which the noblest sentiments of men serve merely to stir the cheap emotions of a vulgar audience.

  Let us eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die. Yes, but we die wretchedly and in anguish: yet not always: sometimes we die sitting quietly in an arm-chair over a whisky and soda after a pleasant round of golf, or asleep in our beds without knowing anything about it. Then, I suppose, we have the laugh over those who have tried and tried again and never rested till the end overtook them with so much they wanted to do still undone.

  They ascribe omnipotence and omniscience to him and I don’t know what else; it seems to me so strange that they never credit him with common-sense or allow him tolerance. If he knew as much about human nature as I do he’d know how weak men are and how little control they have over their passions, he’d know how full of fear they are and how pitiful, he’d know how much goodness there is even in the worst and how much wickedness in the best. If he’s capable of feeling he must be capable of remorse, and when he considers what a hash he’s made in the creation of human kind can he feel anything but that? The wonder is that he does not make use of his omnipotence to annihilate himself. Perhaps that’s just what he has done.

  What use is knowledge if it doesn’t lead to right action? But what is right action?

  Anyone can take me in once; I don’t mind that, I would rather be deceived than deceive, and it makes me laugh to have been made a fool of. But I take care not to let the same person take me in twice.

  Why it is so wounding to have an ill turn done you by a friend? Naïvety or vanity?

  A good rule for writers: do not explain overmuch.

  G. K. He knew X. was a crook, but thought, whomever else he cheated, X. wouldn’t cheat him. He didn’t know that a crook is a crook first and a friend afterwards. And yet I find something horribly fascinating in X.’s crookedness. He ruined G. K. and fled to America to escape prosecution. I met him in New York dining at an expensive restaurant; he was as debonair, as amiable, cheery and sympathetic as he had ever been. He seemed honestly glad to see me. He was very much at his ease and the embarrassment was not on his side but on mine. I’m sure no qualms of conscience disturbed his night’s rest.

  One would have thought it easy to say thank you when someone has done you a service, and yet most people find it a difficult thing to say. I suppose because subconsciously their pride revolts at the notion that you have put them under an obligation.

  I have just been reading again Russell’s Our Knowledge of the External World. It may be that, as he says, philosophy doesn’t offer, or attempt to offer, a solution of the problems of human destiny; it may be that it mustn’t hope to find an answer to the practical problems of life; for philosophers have other fish to fry. But who then will tell us whether there is any sense in living and whether human existence is anything but a tragic—no, tragic is too noble a word—whether human existence is anything but a grotesque mischance?

  No one can live long in America without noticing how prevalent is the vice of envy. It has unfortunate consequences, for it leads people to depreciate things that are in themselves good. How strange that it should be a sign of affectation, and even of degeneracy, to be well-mannered and well-dressed, to speak English with correctness and live with a certain elegance I A man who has been to a good boarding-school and to Harvard or Yale must walk very warily if he wants to avoid the antagonism of those who have not enjoyed these advantages. It is pitiful often to see a man of culture assume a heartiness of manner and use a style of language that are foreign to him in the vain hope that he will not be thought a stuffed shirt. None of this would matter very much if the envious wanted to raise themselves to the level of those they envy, but they don’t; they want to drag them down to their
own. Their ideal of the ‘regular fellow’ is a man with a hairy chest who eats pie in his shirtsleeves and belches.

  Somewhere in Trivia Pearsall Smith remarks, not without complacency, that best sellers cast an envious eye on writers of greater literary distinction. He is in error. They regard them with cool indifference. The author of whom he is thinking belongs to a different class; he is only a best seller in a small way, but he has pretensions to be a man of letters and it is a mortification to him that critical opinion will not give him what he considers his due. Such was Hugh Walpole, and I have little doubt that he would have given all his popularity to gain the esteem of the intelligentsia. He knocked humbly at their doors and besought them to let him in, and it was a bitterness to him that they only laughed. The real best seller is harassed by no such desires. I knew the late Charles Garvice. He was read by every servant-girl, every shop-girl in England and by a great many people besides. Once at the Garrick I heard him asked how many copies of his books had been sold. At first he would not tell. “Oh, it’s not worth talking about,” he said, but at last, pressed, with a little gesture of impatience, he said: “Seven millions.” He was a modest, unassuming, well-mannered man. I am convinced that when he sat down at his desk to turn out another of his innumerable books, he wrote as one inspired, with all his heart and soul.

  For this is the point: no one can write a best seller by trying to. He must write with complete sincerity; the clichés that make you laugh, the hackneyed characters, the well-worn situations, the commonplace story that excites your derision, seem neither hackneyed, well worn nor commonplace to him. On the contrary he thinks them fresh and true. He is as intently absorbed in the creatures of his invention as Flaubert ever was in Madame Bovary. Years ago Edward Knoblock and I decided to collaborate on a picture. It was a hair-raising melodrama, and we piled thrilling incident upon thrilling incident, and as one thing after another occurred to us we laughed till our sides ached. It took us a fortnight and we had a grand time. It was a competent piece of work, well constructed and exciting; but we could never get anyone to produce it. The persons to whom we submitted it one and all said the same thing: “It looks as though you had written it with your tongue in your cheek.” And that of course is exactly what we had done. The conclusion is obvious: you cannot write anything that will convince unless you are yourself convinced. The best seller sells because he writes with his heart’s blood. He is so framed that he honestly shares the aspirations, the prejudices, the sentiments, the outlook of the great mass of the public. He gives them what they want because that is what he wants himself. They are quick to discern the least trace of insincerity and will have nothing to do with it.

  One of the misfortunes of human beings is that they continue to have sexual desires long after they are sexually desirable. I suppose it is not improper that they should gratify them, but I think they would do better not to talk about it.

  He told me that his wife was rather silent and that he wished he could get her to talk. “Good heavens,” I said, “start reading a newspaper. That’ll immediately set her chattering like a magpie.”

  For centuries satirists have been holding up to ridicule the ageing woman who pursues a reluctant youth; the ageing woman continues indefatigably to pursue the reluctant youth.

  She is not a stupid woman; indeed, she is a clever one. She neither looks at the paper nor listens to the radio, for, says she, since she can do nothing about the war she can’t see why she should bother about it. She honestly can’t understand why you should want to read the news rather than hear her talk about herself.

  I gave her an advance copy of my book to read. She was enthusiastic in the praise of it, and every word of praise she uttered was a mortification to me. I had to exercise all my self-control not to tell her to hold her silly tongue, and instead to pretend to be gratified and flattered. If there was no more in it than she saw, then all the thought I had given to it, all the reading I had done, all the pains I had taken were waste. I try to persuade myself that she had only seen vanity and shallowness in it because she is a vain and shallow woman. It may be that you only get out of a book what you put into it and see in it only what you are. So it may be that you can only realise the serenity of the Phaedo if there is at least some serenity in you, and the nobility of Paradise Lost if you are not yourself quite devoid of nobility. The notion tallies with that old one of mine that the writer of fiction can only adequately create characters that are aspects of himself. Others he describes, he does not create, and they seldom carry conviction. And if this is true it follows that by studying the characters with which an author has best succeeded, which he has presented with most sympathy and understanding, you should be able to get a more complete idea of his nature than any biography can give you.

  1944

  By way of postscript. Yesterday I was seventy years old. As one enters upon each succeeding decade it is natural, though perhaps irrational, to look upon it as a significant event. When I was thirty my brother said to me: “Now you are a boy no longer, you are a man and you must be a man.” When I was forty I said to myself: “That is the end of youth.” On my fiftieth birthday I said: “It’s no good fooling myself, this is middle age and I may just as well accept it.” At sixty I said: “Now it’s time to put my affairs in order, for this is the threshold of old age and I must settle my accounts.” I decided to withdraw from the theatre and I wrote The Summing Up, in which I tried to review for my own comfort what I had learnt of life and literature, what I had done and what satisfaction it had brought me. But of all anniversaries I think the seventieth is the most momentous. One has reached the three score years and ten which one is accustomed to accept as the allotted span of man, and one can but look upon such years as remain to one as uncertain contingencies stolen while old Time with his scythe has his head turned the other way. At seventy one is no longer on the threshold of old age. One is just an old man.

  On the continent of Europe they have an amiable custom when a man who has achieved some distinction reaches that age. His friends, his colleagues, his disciples (if he has any) join together to write a volume of essays in his honour. In England we give our eminent men no such flattering mark of our esteem. At the utmost we give a dinner, and we don’t do that unless he is very eminent indeed. Such a dinner I attended when H. G. Wells attained his seventieth year. Hundreds of people came to it. Bernard Shaw, a magnificent figure with his height, his white beard and white hair, his clean skin and bright eyes, made a speech. He stood very erect, his arms crossed, and with his puckish humour said many things highly embarrassing to the guest of the evening and to sundry of his hearers. It was a most amusing discourse delivered in a resonant voice with admirable elocution, and his Irish brogue pointed and at the same time mitigated his malice. H. G., his nose in the manuscript, read his speech in a high-pitched voice. He spoke peevishly of his advanced age, and not without a natural querulousness protested against the notion any of those present might have that the anniversary, with the attendant banquet, indicated any willingness on his part to set a term to his activities. He protested that he was as ready as ever to set the world to rights.

  My own birthday passed without ceremony. I worked as usual in the morning and in the afternoon went for a walk in the solitary woods behind my house. I have never been able to discover what it is that gives these woods their mysterious attractiveness. They are like no woods I have ever known. Their silence seems more intense than any other silence. The live oaks with their massive foliage are festooned with the grey of the Spanish moss as if with a ragged shroud, the gum trees at this season are bare of leaf and the clustered berries of the wild China tree are dried and yellow; here and there tall pines, their rich green flaming, tower over the lower trees. There is a strangeness about these bedraggled, abandoned woods, and though you walk alone you do not feel alone, for you have an eerie feeling that unseen beings, neither human nor inhuman, flutter about you. A shadowy something seems to slink from behind a tree trunk and watch you
silently as you pass. There is a sense of suspense as though all about you there were a lying in wait for something to come.

  I went back to my house, made myself a cup of tea and read till dinner time. After dinner I read again, played two or three games of patience, listened to the news on the radio and took a detective story to bed with me. I finished it and went to sleep. Except for a few words to my coloured maids I had not spoken to a soul all day.

  So I passed my seventieth birthday and so I would have wished to pass it. I mused.

  Two or three years ago I was walking with Liza and she spoke, I don’t know why, of the horror with which the thought of old age filled her.

  “Don’t forget,” I told her, “that when you’re old you won’t have the desire to do various things that make life pleasant to you now. Old age has its compensations.”

  “What?” she asked.

  “Well, you need hardly ever do anything you don’t want to. You can enjoy music, art and literature, differently from when you were young, but in that different way as keenly. You can get a good deal of fun out of observing the course of events in which you are no longer intimately concerned. If your pleasures are not so vivid your pains also have lost their sting.”