Collected Essays (16 page)

There’s Free Will, for example: there’s Moral Responsibility; and such little riddles as where we all come from and where we are going to, why, we don’t even know what we are – in ourselves. I mean. And how many of us have tried to find out? (
Mr Kempe
)

‘The points as I take it, sir, are these. First,’ he laid forefinger on forefinger, ‘the number of those gone as compared with ourselves who are still waiting. Next, there being no warrant that what is seen – if seen at all – is wraiths of the departed, and not from elsewhere. The very waterspouts outside are said to be demonstrations of that belief. Third and last, another question: What purpose could call so small a sprinkling of them back – a few grains of sand out of the wilderness, unless, it may be, some festering grievance; or hunger for the living, sir; or duty left undone? In which case, mark you, which of any of us is safe?’ (
Strangers and Pilgrims
)

‘My dream was only –
after
; the state after death, as they call it . . .’ Mr Eaves leaned forward, and all but whispered the curious tidings into her ear. ‘It’s – it’s just the same,’ he said. (
The Three Friends
)

There is no space in an essay of this length to study the technique which does occasionally creak with other than the tread of visitants; nor to dwell on the minor defects – the occasional archness, whimsicality, playfulness, especially when Mr de la Mare is unwise enough to dress his narrator up in women’s clothes (as he did in
The Memoirs of a Midget).
Perhaps we could surrender without too much regret one third of his short stories, but what a volume would be left.
The Almond Tree, Seaton’s Aunt, The Three Friends, The Count’s Courtship, Miss Duveen, A Recluse, Willows, Crewe, An Ideal Craftsman, A Froward Child, A Revenant, The Trumpet, Strangers and Pilgrims, Mr Kempe, Missing, Disillusioned, All Hallows
– here is one man’s choice of what he could not, under any circumstances, spare.

In all these stories we have a prose unequalled in its richness since the death of James, or dare one, at this date, say Robert Louis Stevenson. Stevenson comes particularly to mind because he played with so wide a vocabulary – the colloquial and the literary phrase, incorporating even the dialect word and naturalizing it. So Mr de la Mare will play consciously with clichés (hemmed like James’s between inverted commas), turning them under-side as it were to the reader, and showing what other meanings lie there hidden: he will suddenly enrich a colloquial conversation with a literary phrase out of the common tongue, or enrich on the contrary a conscious literary description with a turn of country phrase – ‘destiny was spudding at his tap root’.

With these resources at his command no one can bring the natural visible world more sharply to the eye: from the railway carriage window we watch the landscape unfold, the sparkle of frost and rain, the glare of summer sunlight, the lights in evening windows; we are wooed and lulled sometimes to the verge of sleep by the beauty of the prose, until suddenly without warning a sentence breaks in mid-breath and we look up and see the terrified eyes of our fellow-passenger, appealing, hungry, scared, as he watches what we cannot see – ‘the sediment of an unspeakable possession’, and a certain glibness would seem to surround our easy conscious Christian answers to all that wild speculation, if we could ever trust ourselves to urge that cold comfort upon this stranger travelling ‘our way’.

1948

THE SARATOGA TRUNK

T
HE
long trainload
*5
draws by our platform, passes us with an inimical flash of female eyes, and proceeds on into how many more dry and gritty years. It set out in 1915 with some acclamation, carrying its embarrassing cargo – the stream of consciousness – saluted by many prominent bystanders – Miss West and Mrs Woolf, Mr Wells, Mr Beresford, Mr Swinnerton, and Mr Hugh Walpole:

Miriam left the gaslit hall and went slowly upstairs. The March twilight lay upon the landings, but the staircase was almost dark. The top landing was quite dark and silent. There was no one about. It would be quiet in her room. She could sit by the fire and be quiet and think things over until Eve and Harriet came back with the parcels. She would have time to think about the journey and decide what she was going to say to the Fraulein. Her new Saratoga trunk stood solid and gleaming in the firelight.

Who could have foreseen in those first ordinary phrases this gigantic work which has now reached its two thousandth page, without any indication of a close? The Saratoga trunk becomes progressively more worn and labelled. There is no reason why the pilgrimage should ever end, except with the author’s life, for she is attempting to represent the whole effect of every experience – friendship, politics, tea-parties, books, weather, what you will – on a woman’s sensibility.

I am uncertain of my dates, but I should imagine Miss Richardson in her ponderous unwitty way has had an immense influence on such writers as Mrs Woolf and Miss Stein, and through them on their disciples. Her novel, therefore, has something in common with Bowles’s Sonnets. She herself became influenced about halfway through these four volumes (comprising twelve novels or instalments) by the later novels of Henry James – the result, though it increased the obscurity of her sensibility, was to the good, for she began to shed the adjectives which in the first volume disguise any muscles her prose may possess – ‘large soft fresh pink full-blown roses’ is only one phrase in a paragraph containing 41 adjectives qualifying 15 nouns. Or was it simply that Miriam became a little older, unhappier, less lyrical? In the monstrous subjectivity of this novel the author is absorbed into her character. There is no longer a Miss Richardson: only Miriam – Miriam off to teach English in a German School, off again to be a teacher in North London, a governess in the country, a dental secretary in Wimpole Street: a flotsam of female friendships piling up, descriptions of clothes, lodgings, encounters at the Fabian Society: Miriam taking to reviewing, among the first bicyclists, Miriam enlightened about socialism and women’s rights, reading Zola from Mudie’s (surely this is inaccurate) and later Ibsen, losing her virginity tardily and ineffectually on page 218 of volume 4. When the book pauses we have not yet reached the Great War.

There are passages of admirable description, characters do sometimes emerge clearly from the stream of consciousness – the Russian Jew, Mr Shatov, waiting at the end of the street with a rose, patronizing the British Museum, an embarrassing and pathetic companion, and the ex-nurse Eleanor Dear, the lower middle-class consumptive clawing her unscrupulous petty acquisitive way through other people’s lives. There are passages, too, where Miriam’s thought, in its Jacobean dress, takes on her master’s wide impressionist poetry among the dental surroundings, as in this description of the frightened peer who has cancelled all his appointments:

Through his staccato incoherencies – as he stood shamed and suppliant, and sociable down to the very movement of his eyelashes, and looking so much as if he had come straight from a racecourse that her mind’s eye saw the diagonal from shoulder to hip of the strap of his binoculars and upon his head the grey topper that would complete his dress, and the gay rose in his buttonhole – she saw his pleasant life, saw its coming weeks, the best and brightest of the spring season, broken up by appointments to sit every few days for an indefinite time enduring discomfort and sometimes acute pain, and facing the intimate reminder that the body doesn’t last, facing and feeling the certainty of death.

But the final effect, I fear, is one of weariness (that may be a tribute to Miss Richardson’s integrity), the weariness of the best years of life shared with an earnest, rather sentimental, and complacent woman. For one of the drawbacks of Miss Richardson’s unironic, undetached method is that the compliments paid so frequently to the wit or intellect of Miriam seem addressed to the author herself. (We are reminded of those American women who remark to strangers, ‘They simply worshipped me.’) And as for the method – it must have seemed in 1915 a revivifying change from the tyranny of the ‘plot’. But time has taken its revenge: after twenty years of subjectivity, we are turning back with relief to the old dictatorship, to the detached and objective treatment, while this novel, ignoring all signals, just ploughs on and on, the Saratoga trunk, labelled this time for Switzerland, for Austria, shaking on the rack, and Miriam still sensitively on the alert, reading far too much significance into a cup of coffee, a flower in a vase, a fog, or a sunset.

1938

ARABIA DESERTA

O
NE
opens the new novel by Mr Conrad Aiken
*6
with all the excitement that comes from complete confidence in the author. One is satisfied beforehand of the impregnable front he will offer to the details of criticism, the contemporary nature of his thought, the subtlety and exactitude of his style, his technical ability which never allows a value to escape. One can surrender at once to appreciation, to the deep interest of his psychological exploration. One of the characters in
Great Circle
described the map of a brain as being like ap imaginary map of Mars. ‘Full of Arabia Desertas. Canals, seas, mountains, glaciers, extinct volcanoes, or ulcers . . . And all that strange congregation of scars, that record of wounds and fissures, is what speaks and acts.’ That is the region in which Mr Aiken moves.

King Coffin
is a study in madness. The Arabia Deserta of Jasper Ammen’s brain lies much further from the ordinary trade routes than the brain Mr Aiken mapped in
Great Circle
of the damned-to-be-cuckolded dweller in polite Cambridge, Mass., further, I think, than many previous novelists have gone. Jasper Ammen is an egocentric; one sees him always from inside his brain, trying to get free in a crazy superman pride from life, from the little circle of theoretical anarchists he has supported with his money, from the woman who loves him, from every friend in turn, by deliberate acts of rudeness, by mystifications, asserting his superiority by small social immoralities such as reading other people’s letters and diaries. The last stage of that assertion, of course, must be to destroy life. But the crime must be a pure one; if he murders a friend, too many impure motives, of irritation, boredom, jealousy, may play their part. So Ammen chooses a complete stranger, a little man he happens to notice in the subway.

To satisfy his sense of power Ammen sets himself to learn all the details of the life he proposes to end; he speaks to Jones on the telephone, sends him theatre tickets anonymously the better to watch him, shadows him to his office and his home in its mean villa-ed street, he even makes his way into the cellar of his house when all above are occupied with childbirth. All interests but Jones, the chosen stranger, and his own sense of power fade out of Ammen’s brain: ordinary life reaches him only in snatches of overheard conversation, married people talking on stairways, girls in the street, two students starting a car.

Ammen’s madness is not of merely specialized interest, for it is a fonn of self-consciousness, not of derangement. He has carried consciousness of himself, the mapping of his own brain, to a point that excludes the world, but it is an accurate, not a crazily drawn map. The pathos of his situation is that so complete a self-consciousness must inevitably recognize its own defeat. The moment of cutting himself loose, the moment when he made his decision to destroy, is the only real moment of detachment, of complete superiority:

It seemed very remote, a long time ago, very remote and oddly bright and innocent: it had been spring; and although it was
still
spring, somehow now it seemed as if he was looking back to it from another season, another year. The plan had then been formless, of course, and this had given it the charm and vagueness of all new things, new undertakings – the stranger had not yet been discovered or his strangeness identified, the whole problem still remained metaphysical – a mere formula – and it was now possible to recognize that at that stage there had been an unmistakable sense of
freedom
which had, at once, with the actual selection of Jones disappeared.

The values of this story could not have been conveyed through any other mind than Ammen’s, but Mr Aiken, of course, by keeping his story inside the egocentric consciousness, has had to sacrifice all the usual enticements of the novel in the way of vivid objective characterization. I wish I could convey with what poetry and subtle drama, with what pathos in the climax when hopeless defeated Ammen watches Jones put away his still-born child in the hideous marble necropolis, Mr Aiken has compensated the reader. Mr Herbert Read once wrote of the psychological complexity of James’s world that ‘it was obviously the real world, the only world worth describing, once your course is set that way. Henry James went ahead, fearlessly, irretrievably, into regions where few are found who care to follow him.’ Mr Aiken is one of the few – which is only another way of saying that he is perhaps the most exciting, the most finally satisfying of living novelists.

1935

THE POKER-FACE

O
NE
has seen that face over a hundred bar counters – the lick of hair over the broad white brow, the heavy moustache with pointed ends, the firm, good-humoured eyes, the man who is a cause of conviviality in other men but knows exactly when the fun should cease. He is wearing a dark suit (the jacket has four buttons) and well-polished boots. Could Sherlock Holmes have deduced from this magnificently open appearance anything at all resembling the bizarre truth?

Mr Hesketh Pearson tells this far from ordinary story
*7
with his admirable accustomed forthrightness: Mr Pearson as a biographer has some of the qualities of Dr Johnson – a plainness, an honesty, a sense of ordinary life going on all the time. A dull biographer would never have got behind that poker-face; an excited biographer would have made us disbelieve the story, which wanders from whaling in the Arctic to fever on the West Coast of Africa, a practice in Portsea to ghost-hunting in Sussex. But from Mr Pearson we are able to accept it. Conan Doyle has too often been compared with Dr Watson: in this biography it is Mr Pearson who plays Watson to the odd enigmatic product of a Jesuit education, the Sherlock-hearted Doyle.