Collected Essays (23 page)

So from the moment that he began writing we feel his great talent bent on success – not just ugly commercial success, but the success of esteem, the esteem of those he considered his peers. Unfortunately, he had the modesty of a good fellow rather than the pride of the artist and he rated himself too low. Yeats decided to ‘dine at journey’s end with Landor and with Donne’: in the celestial club Mason would not have seated himself higher than the author of
The Dolly Dialogues
or Quiller-Couch. It is as if his journey into success, social and financial, had not allowed him time for thought, thought about the technique of his profession, thought even about its values. ‘Hardy had dropped out of his Pantheon, but the greater understanding took in Victor Hugo now and a full appreciation of Trollope’s Barchester novels, with Hugh Walpole’s series as a pendant.’ It will be seen that his biographer shares the uncertain ‘understanding’ of his subject. Mr Green refers to the ‘immortal’
Beau Geste
, to ‘that superannuated classic’ (odd phrase)
Phra, the Egyptian
, to ‘a first-class writer, Mr R. C. Sherriff’, and to
Musk and Amber
, ‘the uttermost pinnacle of (Mason’s) every power . . . the perfection of restraint . . . the sheer poetry’. What words has Mr Green left if he comes to deal with literature? Mason is interesting enough to deserve criticism, and this is the language of advertising.

Financial success – and the applause of those he considered his peers – came to Mason very quickly, with his second novel. How deliberately he sought it can be read in his biography. ‘Not feeling that the novel of contemporary manners and the psychological dissection of rather trivial characters demanded in such a work’ (this is only one of Mr Green’s critical
non sequiturs
) ‘was quite in his line. Mason cast about for new ground –
and ground from which might spring a quick and widespread success.
He read the works of that day’s most popular story-teller, Stanley Weyman. . . . and decided that in the realms of historical fiction lay his most likely province.’ (The italics are mine.)

Writing novels was not a career – it was an element in his career: an aid in leading his full bachelor life. One has the impression of a man who never surrendered himself. Life touched him only from across the footlights. We remember Conrad struggling with a novel in lodgings while his small son lay dangerously ill in the next room, the agony of his divided allegiances, but there were no allegiances to bring Mason painfully in touch with the ordinary emotions of his fellows. From the evidence provided by his biography (the death of a young secretary seems to have been his worst pain) a succession of light flirtations took the place of a wife or mistress. Even his participation in the First World War had a touch of the old Lyceum about it: Major Mason of the Secret Service sailing around the Mediterranean, intercepting anthrax germs, in Mexico stealing the audion lamps (whatever they may be) from a German-operated wireless station. He must have been a happy man and we do not grudge him his happiness. He has given most of us a lot of happiness at one stage of our lives. But if only, with so much skill and invention, he had been involved; if only he had worked at his craft.

I have been re-reading his most popular book.
The Four Feathers.
It is a study of fear, the fear of cowardice. The illustration he has chosen, a general’s son, heir to a long line of military ancestors, brought up for the Service, is an obvious and conventional one, but the story still holds us for a few lazy hours. Indeed, I think I liked it better than I did as a boy. Unlike the film adaptations most of the story takes place in England, off-stage, and I remember that when I was fifteen I wanted to skip all those pages of love and misunderstanding. The boy was bored by what the adult can’t quite swallow. And yet the book has many merits: the military mind of the parent is critically regarded. There are – in so conventional a story – unexpected notes of harshness: the girl who presents her lover with the fourth white feather of cowardice hates his three comrades who started the cruel affair and rejoices when one is killed in the Sudan. These are the touches of reality which force us today to read on, and which make it, I think, a better book than its close kin,
The Light that Failed.
But the dialogue is hopelessly unreal: it is there to advance the story and not to express character. When the hero is delirious in the Omdurman prison, his feverish utterances are sufficiently lucid and chronological to explain to the man he has come to rescue all the events leading to his capture. It is as if the author had an urgent appointment to keep when the story was done, and he must take the easiest way to reach the end. His task finished (and his MS was like a clean copy) there was mountaineering in the Alps, during the autumn a 2.000-acre shoot, a trip to South Africa. One remembers Conrad writing: ‘It’s late. I am tired after a day of uphill toil. Now it is always uphill with me. And the worst is one doesn’t seem any nearer the top when the day is done.’ One doubts whether Mason would have understood. They had set themselves different summits.

1952

ISIS IDOL

One break comes every year in my quiet life. Then I go to Dresden, and there I am met by my dear friend and companion. Fritz von Tarlenheim. Last time, his pretty wife Helga came and a lusty crowing baby with her. And for a week Fritz and I are together, and I hear all of what falls out in Strelsau; and in the evenings, as we walk and smoke together, we talk of Sapt, and of the King, and often of young Rupert; and, as the hours grow small, at last we speak of Flavia. For every year Fritz carries with him to Dresden a little box; in it lies a red rose, and round the stalk of the rose is a slip of paper with the words written: ‘Rudolf – Flavia – always’.

So
The Prisoner of Zenda
ended. How one swallowed it all at the age of fourteen, the clever, brittle sentiment of a novel that has been made a schoolbook in Egypt, has been serialized in Japan, which has been filmed and staged time and again. Now it begins to fade out, like the ghost ‘with a melodious twang’.

There is a true Edwardian air about
The Prisoner of Zenda, Phroso
and
The Dolly Dialogues
; and they may still survive awhile as period pieces. If one had tried without Sir Charles Mallet’s help,
*17
to imagine the author surely one would have hit on this frontispiece: the long well-bred nose, the pointed legal face, the top hat gleaming in the late summer sun, the silver-headed cane, and the chair beside the Row. Ladies with large picture-hats slant off under the trees towards Hyde Park Corner. The author is amused; he has just come up to town from Lady Battersea’s; he is composing a light whimsical letter on the latest political move and his own idleness to the Duchess of Sutherland, whom he knows affectionately as Griss. It is the atmosphere of Sargent, of Fabergé jewels, but one is not sorry that to this author, who enjoyed with such naive relish the great houses, the little political crisis, the vulgarity was hidden.

He was a thoroughly Balliol best-seller: a double first, a President of the Union, he took his popularity (£70.000 earned in the first ten years of writing) with admirable suavity. He was never really a professional writer: it is mainly the respectable underworld of literature that is represented in the letters of which Sir Charles Mallet’s book is more or less a
précis
: he turned his novels off in a couple of months. Sometimes there were as many as three manuscripts awaiting publication. He managed in his delicate dealings with tragic or even black-guardedly themes to retain the Union air of not being wholly serious. You could forgive his sentimentality because it struck so artificial an attitude. He was a Balliol man: he wasn’t easily impressed by his great contemporaries. It seemed to him that Hardy was rather limited in his opinions, and when Henry James died, he wrote: ‘a dear old fellow, a great gentleman . . . The critics call him a “great novelist”. I can’t think that.’ His own work was highly praised by Sir James Barrie and Sir Gilbert Parker, but he was not conceited. ‘Have you read my
Phroso
? I wrote it in seven weeks laughing, and now I have to be solemnly judged as though it were the effort of a life. It’s really like explaining a kiss in the Divorce Court. . . .’ An Isis Idol knows that next week he must inevitably be dethroned, and he was quite prepared to see himself superseded by another generation of popular writers who would appeal to a taste which was already beginning to reject the sentimental badinage of
The Dolly Dialogues.

‘I should describe you, Lady Mickleham,’ I replied discreetly, ‘as being a little lower than the angels.’

Dolly’s smile was almost a laugh as she asked:

‘How much lower, please, Mr Carter?’

‘Just by the depth of your dimples,’ I said thoughtlessly.

He always said that a run of about fifteen years would be his limit, and he wrote towards the end of his time: ‘If I live to advanced age, I shall, I think, be dead while I yet live in the body. I don’t complain. It is just . . . I’ve had a pretty good run.’ It was sporting, the thoroughly Isis manner, and one is rather sorry that he did live long enough to see his sales decline, that he didn’t die, like Mr Rassendyll, still king in Ruritania. His heart ought to have given way in his own fragile, romantic, rather bogus style at the highest leap – of his carefully recorded statistics.

1935

THE LAST BUCHAN

M
ORE
than a quarter of a century has passed since Richard Hannay found the dead man in his flat and started that long flight and pursuit – across the Yorkshire and the Scottish moors, down Mayfair streets, along the passages of Government buildings, in and out of Cabinet rooms and country houses, towards the cold Essex jetty with the thirty-nine steps, that were to be a pattern for adventure-writers ever since. John Buchan was the first to realize the enormous dramatic value of adventure in familiar surroundings happening to unadventurous men, members of Parliament and members of the Athenaeum, lawyers and barristers, business men and minor peers: murder in ‘the atmosphere of breeding and simplicity and stability’. Richard Hannay, Sir Edward Leithen, Mr Blenkiron, Archie Roylance, and Lord Lamancha; these were his adventurers, not Dr Nikola or the Master of Ballantrae, and who will forget the first thrill in 1916 as the hunted Leithen – the future Solicitor-General – ran ‘like a thief in a London thoroughfare on a June afternoon’?

Now I saw how thin is the protection of civilization. An accident and a bogus ambulance – a false charge and a bogus arrest – there were a dozen ways of spiriting one out of this gay and bustling world.

Now Leithen, who survived the perils of the Green Park and the mews near Belgrave Square, has died in what must seem to those who remember
The Power House
a rather humdrum way, doing good to depressed and starving Indians in Northern Canada, anticipating by only a few months his creator’s death.
*18

What is remarkable about these adventure-stories is the completeness of the world they describe. The backgrounds to many of us may not be sympathetic, but they are elaborately worked in: each character carries round with him his school, his regiment, his religious beliefs, often touched with Calvinism: memories of grouse-shooting and deer-stalking, of sport at Eton, debates in the House. For men who live so dangerously they are oddly conventional – or perhaps, remembering men like Scott and Oates, we can regard that, too, as a realistic touch. They judge men by their war-record: even the priest in
Sick Heart River
, fighting in the desolate northern waste for the Indians’ salvation, is accepted by Leithen because ‘he had served in a French battalion which had been on the right of the Guards at Loos’. Toc H and the British Legion lurk in the background.

In the early books, fascinated by the new imaginative form, the hair-breadth escapes in a real world, participating wholeheartedly in the struggle between a member of the Athenaeum and the man who could hood his eyes like a hawk, we didn’t notice the curious personal ideals, the vast importance Buchan attributed to success, the materialism . . .
Sick Heart River
, the last adventure of the dying Leithen seeking – at Blenkiron’s request – the missing business man, Francis Galliard, who had left his wife and returned to his ancestral North, has all the old admirable dry ease of style – it is the intellectual content which repels us now, the Scotch admiration of success. ‘Harold has a hard life. He’s head of the Fremont Banking Corporation and a St Sebastian for everyone to shoot arrows at.’ Even a nation is judged by the same standard: ‘They ought to have made a rather bigger show in the world than they have.’ Individuals are of enormous importance. Just as the sinister Mr Andrew Lumley in
The Power House
was capable of crumbling the whole Western world into anarchy, so Francis Galliard – ‘one of Simon Ravelston’s partners’ – must be found for the sake of America. ‘He’s too valuable a man to lose, and in our present state of precarious balance we just can’t afford it.’

But though
Sick Heart River
appears at the moment least favourable to these ideas (for it is not, after all, the great men – the bankers and the divisional commanders and the Ambassadors, who have been holding our world together this winter, and if we survive, it is by ‘the wandering, wavering grace of humble men’ in Bow and Coventry, Bristol and Birmingham), let us gratefully admit that, in one way at any rate, Buchan prepared us in his thrillers better than he knew for the death that may come to any of us, as it nearly came to Leithen, by the railings of the Park or the doorway of the mews. For certainly we can all see now ‘how thin is the protection of civilization’.

1941

EDGAR WALLACE

I
ONLY
saw Edgar Wallace once, but the moment has stayed in my memory like a ‘conversation piece’. I was twenty-five years old, I had published a first novel, and I found myself a junior guest, very much ‘a stranger and afraid’ at a great publisher’s do at the Savoy Hotel – a banquet (no lesser word will serve) given jointly by the English and American firms of Heinemann and Doubleday, who were then in uneasy partnership.