A Man of Parts (49 page)

– Many people thought you changed after 1910 – that you became rather hard. Outwardly cheerful, sociable, but more selfish, more calculating, less forgiving
.

– I had to become hard. I’d been under extreme stress for the past year over the Amber affair, I’d been vilified and slandered publicly and privately, and I’d lost her in the end. I’d uprooted my family and settled in London to begin a new life. I’d given up the hope of using the Fabian as a way of getting my ideas into the public domain. From now on my books would be the only vehicle. I was on my own. I had to be hard.

The first book he published in the new decade, in the spring of 1910, was
The History of Mr Polly
, a novel that bore no obvious trace of the sexual scandals and ideological controversies in which he had been involved over the past few years. Mr Polly and the other principal characters were all lower middle class, poorly educated, and sexually innocent or unadventurous. Perhaps for that reason the novel received a rather muted reception, as if the reviewers were puzzled or disappointed by the absence of controversial content, and only gradually did it prove to be one of his most popular novels. It was seen by the critics as a throwback to earlier work like
Kipps
– which to some extent it was. But this comic idyll conveyed a quite subversive message to those who knew how to read it: that a man could break all the rules of law and society and still live happily ever after. Mr Polly intended to escape from a barren marriage and an unrewarding occupation by committing suicide, setting fire to his shop in the process so that his widow would get the insurance money, but he bungled the operation, failed to kill himself, set fire to several other shops as unsuccessful as his own, whose proprietors gratefully received the insurance, and made himself into a hero by rescuing an old lady from one of the burning buildings. He pocketed most of his own insurance money and deserted his wife to live like a tramp, settling down eventually as the odd-job man and chaste companion of the motherly landlady of a riverside inn, and successfully fought off a violent rival claimant by a mixture of luck and cunning. In the denouement the rival stole Mr Polly’s clothes but was accidentally drowned, and his corpse identified as that of Mr Polly, who was thus enabled to live at the inn under a new name for the rest of his happy life, while his wife benefited from yet another insurance policy. It was the most immoral story he had ever written, but the British public received it without a murmur of disapprobation because there wasn’t a word in it about sex.

The next novel, however,
The New Machiavelli
, which he had been working on in tandem with
Mr Polly
, was a very different and much more provocative book. It was written in the loquacious, discursive, first-person style of
Tono-Bungay
, combining the narrator’s personal history with a broad-ranging survey of the condition of England, but with a much more political slant. The novel in fact drew closely on his own disillusioning involvement in politics over the past decade. The hero, Richard Remington, studied Political Science at Cambridge and became a radical journalist in London, where he met and married Margaret, a woman with ambitions to be the wife of a leading politician, and stood successfully for Parliament as a Liberal. Disillusioned before long with both the Liberal and Labour parties, Remington decided that his ideal state – ‘
England as our country might be, with no wretched poor, no wretched rich, a nation armed and ordered, trained and purposeful amidst its vales and rivers
’ – could only be achieved by recruiting the powerful men of business who actually made the wheels of modern society turn, the more idealistic of whom might be persuaded to form a Samurai-like elite of dedicated leaders. To this end he crossed the House to join the Conservative Party, and started up a progressive Tory faction, with its own publication, the
Blue Weekly
, assisted in this enterprise by an attractive and unconventional young woman called Isabel Rivers. By this time he was estranged from his wife, who never satisfied him sexually or shared his political vision, and soon he was in love with Isabel and she with him. When their affair became the subject of scandal his career was jeopardised, and to save his reputation Isabel prepared to marry a man she respected but did not love. In the end they could not bear to part, left London, ‘
the slovenly mother of my mind and all my ambitions
’, and went to live on the Ligurian coast where, comparing himself to Machiavelli in exile, Remington wrote the story of his life.

In the latter part of the narrative he relived the drama of his relationship with Amber, but rewrote its actual, anticlimactic conclusion to make his fictional self appear more of a tragic hero, in the tradition of ‘all for love, or the world well lost’. In the earlier part he settled some scores with the Fabians, especially in the characterisation of Altiora and Oscar Bailey, a couple who ran a political salon from a house very like the Webbs’ home in Grosvenor Street.

She was a tall and commanding figure, splendid but a little untidy in black silk and red beads, with dark eyes that had no depths, with a clear hard voice that had an almost visible prominence, aquiline features and straight black hair that was apt to go astray like the head feathers of an eagle in a gale … Oscar had none of the fine appearance of his wife but he had a quite astounding memory for facts and a mastery of detailed analysis. He soon achieved the limited distinction that is awarded such capacity, and at that I think he would have remained for the rest of his life if he had not encountered Altiora
…

He was in no doubt that these characters would be identified as portraits of Beatrice and Sidney Webb, but was confident that he had said enough flattering things about them, especially about Beatrice, to take the edge off the sarcasm and ensure that they would not sue him for libel. And although he could not deny that the concluding sequence of the novel closely paralleled the climax of his affair with Amber, what he wrote about Isabel in the book was a kind of love letter to Amber which she would treasure rather than resent, with intimate details drawn from their life together (such as Isabel’s habit of calling Remington ‘Master’) that only she would recognise; and he did not think Blanco White, having won one crucial contest with him by threatening a libel suit, would risk all the unpleasant publicity of another for little gain.

Publishers however were extraordinarily pusillanimous about the book. Macmillan had contracted to publish it on the basis of the author’s description and did not find time to read it until the proofs came in, when he was horrified by the narrator‘s candour about his sexual life, and found ‘twice as much reason’ for rejecting the novel as in the case of
Ann Veronica
. The publisher tried to persuade first Heinemann and then Chapman and Hall to take the book off his hands, but both declined for fear of libel suits, even after he sent Amber a copy of the novel and she wrote him a helpful and friendly letter saying she and Blanco White saw no grounds for legal action in it. Eventually John Lane, who was something of a specialist in publishing risky books of literary merit, took the novel, and brought it out in January 1911. They were both thoroughly vindicated: there were no libel suits, and he even heard indirectly that Beatrice Webb had been impressed by the book and declared the caricatures of herself and Sidney to be ‘really very clever in a malicious way’.

The novel attracted considerable attention when it was serialised in the
English Review
in the latter part of 1910, and was widely reviewed when it was published in January 1911. It was generally received as an impressive but flawed novel, though the flaws were differently identified by different critics: it was the looseness of the narrative structure, or the tedium of the hero’s long digressions on political and social issues, or the malicious portraits of real personages, or the excessive attention to the hero’s sexual problems, or something else. Henry James sent from America, where he had accompanied his brother William in his final illness, one of his characteristic homilies disguised as panegyrics: ‘
Your big feeling for life, your capacity for chewing up the thickness of the world in such enormous mouthfuls, while you fairly slobber, so to speak, with the multitudinous taste – this constitutes for me a rare and wonderful and admirable exhibition, on your part, in itself, so that one should doubtless frankly ask oneself what the devil, in the way of effect and evocation and general demonic activity, one wants more
.’ But of course, James did want more – or rather less, less matter, more perfectly formed. ‘
I make my remonstrance – for I do remonstrate – bear upon the bad service you have done your cause by riding so hard again that accurst auto biographic form which puts a premium on the loose, the improvised, the cheap and the easy
.’ He did not want to argue, let alone quarrel, with Henry James, because of the respect he felt for the older writer, and because he empathised with him at this time of grief for the recent death of William, so he responded graciously to his criticisms, trying to perform the same trick as H.J. by receiving them as tributes: ‘
So far as it is loving chastisement I think I wholly agree and kiss the rod. You put your sense of the turbid confusion, the strain and violence of my book so beautifully that almost they seem merits
.’

Nevertheless, he was conscious that the novels he intended to write in the future would be of roughly the same kind as
The New Machiavelli
, and would never satisfy the accepted criteria for literary fiction. He felt it expedient therefore to issue a manifesto for a different kind of fiction, using as his platform a public lecture to the Times Book Club on ‘The Scope of the Novel’, presenting himself as the member of a new movement whose work was going to supersede the novel of character and personal relations. ‘
We are going to deal with political questions and religious questions and social questions. We cannot present people unless we have this free hand, this unrestricted field … We are going to write about business and finance and politics and precedence and pretentiousness and decorum and indecorum, until a thousand pretences and ten thousand impostures shrivel in the cold, clear, draught of our elucidations … Before we have done, we will have all life within the scope of the novel
.’ The event was reported in the
New Age
by Arnold Bennett, the only other potential member of this new movement he could have named if challenged, who described the audience somewhat flippantly as ‘
the “library” public in the mass … a thousand women and Mr Bernard Shaw
’, but approved his argument and gave it valuable publicity by his article.

The New Machiavelli
was also the occasion, or pretext, for the entry of another significant woman into his life: the Countess Elizabeth von Arnim. He had been slightly acquainted with her since 1907, when Constance Smedley, feminist author and founder of the very successful Lyceum Club in London for Women Artists and Writers, introduced her to him, and he had long been well aware of her reputation as a writer – how could one not be?
Elizabeth and her German Garden
had been the literary sensation of 1898. A short, stylish narrative that was published as a novel but read as if it were autobiography, rendered all the more teasingly enigmatic by the fact that no name other than the one in the title appeared on the title page, it told the story of an English, or at least English-speaking, woman married, not altogether happily, to an impoverished Prussian Junker referred to throughout as ‘
the Man of Wrath
’, who had made her the mother of three little girls with scarcely more than a year between them, referred to as ‘
the April baby, the May baby and the June baby
’. To escape the tedium of life in a city apartment Elizabeth took to spending much time in her husband’s neglected and unproductive country estate in Pomerania, where she created in the teeth of many obstacles and discouragements a beautiful English garden as a refuge and a joy for herself, and where she entertained various guests whose egotism and insensitivity were observed with subtle Jane-Austenish irony. The book proved irresistibly readable, especially to women, who relished the narrator’s spirited resistance to her husband’s patriarchal prejudices, but English male readers also appreciated its mischievous satire on German manners, and both sexes enjoyed Elizabeth’s descriptions, lyrical and comic, of her horticultural enterprise. The mystery of the work’s authorship added to its appeal. It quickly became the best-selling book of the season, went through eleven reprints in its first year, ten more in the second, and (he learned on good authority) in due course earned the writer £10,000 in royalties. Jane was enchanted with the book and made him read it, which he did in one sitting and pronounced it clever but slight, a verdict in which there was an element of professional jealousy since its sales made those of
The War of the Worlds
, published in the same year, look comparatively modest.

By the time he met the author her identity was widely known. She had published several more books, not so successful as her first but not negligible, and borne two more children to the Count. At that first meeting, however, he gathered that the Man of Wrath was languishing under the oppression of illness and financial troubles, and Elizabeth was in command of the family and the main source of its income. She was petite, with a neat figure that curved in and out at the right places in spite of all her childbearing, and features that were pleasant to look at without being beautiful or even conventionally pretty. As he had expected, she was amusing company, but there were glimpses of real intelligence and unexpected talents – as a musician, for instance – beneath the small talk. He liked the little Countess, but when she invited him to lunch with her at the Lyceum Club, where she was staying, he declined politely, having too many other pressing claims on his time and attention, mostly connected with the Fabian, to cultivate this new acquaintance. Later Constance Smedley, evidently prompted by Elizabeth, wrote to say that the latter had been hurt by the refusal and was still very eager to meet him again, even if it meant travelling to England especially for the purpose, and he sent her a bland message apologising for any unintended discourtesy and issuing an open invitation to visit him in Sandgate at any convenient opportunity.