Collected Essays (24 page)

Dinner at the long tables, set at right angles, seemed a kind of frozen geometry, but for a young man it was worse when the geometrical figure was eventually broken and I found myself with my coffee seated beside Arnold Bennett who, when a waiter gave me a glass of ‘something’ (I was too frightened to refuse), remarked sternly, ‘A serious writer does not drink liqueurs.’ At that moment (which doomed me, so far as liqueurs were concerned, to a lifetime’s abstinence) I looked away from him and saw Edgar Wallace at his first meeting with Hugh Walpole.

I feel quite certain it was the first time these two giants of the commercial novel had met: the giant of the circulating library and the giant of the cheap edition, the writer who wanted, vainly, to be distinguished and recognized and applauded as a literary figure, and the writer who wanted, vainly too, to have all the money he needed, not to bother about debts, to win the Derby every first Wednesday in June, and to escape – to escape from the knowledge of the world which perhaps the other would have given half his success to have shared.

I remember Walpole’s patronizing gaze, his bald head inclined under the chandeliers like that of a bishop speaking with kindness to an unimportant member of his diocese. And the unimportant member? – he was so oblivious of the bishop’s patronage that the other shrank into insignificance before the heavy confident body, the long challenging cigarette-holder, the sense that this man cared not so much as a flybutton for the other’s world. They had nothing in common, not even an ambition. Even in those days I found myself on the side of Wallace.

From what environment Wallace escaped we learn from Margaret Lane’s careful, sensitive and beautifully organized biography
*19
(has there ever before been so literate a biography of a writer completely outside the world of serious letters?). There is a curious likeness between the early world of Wallace and the early world of Chaplin: East London and South London were not so far apart.

The mothers of both men were small figures in the theatrical world who never made good. Chaplin was abandoned for periods to the workhouse; Wallace was abandoned altogether to a friendly family in Billingsgate. Chaplin had brief knowledge of his father; Wallace, who was illegitimate, none at all. Of the two children Wallace was the more abandoned, though Chaplin had the crueller experience, and the long distance between love and hate separates the careers of these two men. Chaplin remained, even in his success, rooted to Kennington; Wallace seems to have been concerned only to forget, and there is one repulsive moment in Miss Lane’s biography – otherwise the record of a very generous man – when his old mother, penniless and out of work, appeals to him for help and is sent away with the harsh word to expect nothing from him.

At about the same period Wallace wrote to his wife: ‘I hate the British working man; I have no sympathy with him; whether he lives or dies, feeds or starves, is not of the slightest interest to me.’ You can feel the flames of the burning boats flushing his face. One attitude to the hard childhood produced the immortal Charlie, the other at its best
The Four Just Men
bent on their mission of vengeance.

No one – the theologians and the psychologists agree – is responsible for his own character: he can make only small modifications for good or ill. Chaplin chose the route of the artist and assimilated the hard childhood which Wallace rejected. And Wallace? Instead of the artist we have a phenomenon which might have been invented by Balzac – the human book-factory. We cannot help wondering, reading of the 150 novels he wrote in twenty-seven years (twenty-eight of them written at £70 a time), whether he could not have found an easier road than words to – what? Not exactly financial success, for at his death he left £140.000 of debts, but at least to that state of life where there was money to burn.

Sometimes, looking in the windows of art-dealers south of Picadilly, I find myself wondering how it is that a painter has stopped just here. I could no more paint that sunset or that beetling cliff, that moorland with the clump of sheep, than I could draw a recognizable human face; but with that amount of enviable skill what has made the painter stop? Perhaps the answer is that if he had ever possessed the capacity to enlarge his skill he would never have begun on that sunset, that cliff, that moorland.

The parallel is not exact, for Wallace at the very beginning of his writing career had one great quality: he could create a legend. I read
The Four Just Men
for the first time when I was about ten years old, with enormous excitement, and when I re-read it the other day it was with almost the same emotion. The plain style sometimes falls into clichés, but not often; the melodrama grips in the same way as
The New Arabian Nights
(Stevenson, too, had a family history from which he tried to escape through fantasy); Wallace tells an almost incredible story with very precise realistic details. The Foreign Secretary pursued by the four anarchists doesn’t dress up as an old Jew, like the detective in
The Flying Squad
, nor as a toothless Arab beggar, like the American diplomat in
The Man From Morocco
, and there is no, thank God, love interest at all. The story moves at a deeper level of invention than he ever tapped again.

Afterwards he invented so rapidly that sometimes he forgot the opening of a paragraph before he reached its end, as in this description of a rather unlikely Bond Street flat (the italics are mine):

The room in which he sat, with its high ceiling fantastically carved into scrolls and arabesques by the most cunning of Moorish workmen, was wide and long and singular. The walls were of marble, the floor an amazing mosaic covered with the silky rugs of Ispahan. . . . With the exception of the desk, incongruously gaudy
in the severe and beautiful setting
, there was little furniture.

Grant the initial unlikelihood of four anarchists who terrorize London, the police force, the Government, and then every detail is authentic – so a legend is created. When the hour of doom for the Foreign Secretary pronounced by the Four Just Men approaches, he is locked in his room and detectives fill the passages. The whole city is in the hands of the police.

By order of the Commissioner, Westminster Bridge was closed to all traffic, vehicular or passenger. The section of the Embankment that runs between Westminster and Hungerford Bridge was next swept by the police and cleared of curious pedestrians; Northumberland Avenue was barred, and before three o’clock there was no space within five hundred yards of the official residence of Sir Philip Ramon that was not held by a representative of the law. Members of Parliament on their way to the House were escorted by mounted men, and taking on a reflected glory, were cheered by the crowd. All that afternoon a hundred thousand people waited patiently, seeing nothing, save, towering above the heads of a host of constabulary, the spires and towers of the Mother of Parliaments, or the blank faces of the buildings – in Trafalgar Square, along the Mall as far as the police would allow them, at the lower end of Victoria Street, eight deep along the Albert Embankment, growing in volume every hour. London waited, waited in patience, orderly, content to stare steadfastly at nothing, deriving no satisfaction for their weariness but a sense of being as near as it was humanly possible to be to the scene of a tragedy. A stranger arriving in London, bewildered by this gathering, asked for the cause. A man standing on the outskirts of the Embankment throng pointed across the river with the stem of his pipe.

‘We’re waiting for a man to be murdered,’ he said simply, as one who describes a familiar function.

Surely at the start this man could write. If only he had cared enough. But the illegitimate child left with the Billingsgate family, the boy on the milk-run, had not dreamt of being a writer. He had dreamt of a fortune, a first-class suite in some great liner, of a racing stable; he had dreamt of escape, and the greatness of the debts when Wallace came to die represented fairly enough the greatness of the escape, for the bank manager in Tanner’s Hill would surely not have allowed even Wallace’s employer on the milk-run an overdraft exceeding ten pounds.

1964

BEATRIX POTTER

‘I
T
is said that the effect of eating too much lettuce is soporific.’ It is with some such precise informative sentence that one might have expected the great Potter saga to open, for the obvious characteristic of Beatrix Potter’s style is a selective realism, which takes emotion for granted and puts aside love and death with a gentle detachment reminiscent of Mr E. M. Forster’s. Her stories contain plenty of dramatic action, but it is described from the outside by an acute and unromantic observer, who never sacrifices truth for an effective gesture. As an example of Miss Potter’s empiricism, her rigid adherence to what can be seen and heard, consider the climax of her masterpiece
The Roly-Poly Pudding
, Tom Kitten’s capture by the rats in the attic:

‘Anna Maria,’ said the old man rat (whose name was Samuel Whiskers), ‘Anna Maria, make me a kitten dumpling roly-poly pudding for my dinner.’

‘It requires dough and a pat of butter, and a rolling pin,’ said Anna Maria, considering Tom Kitten with her head on one side.

‘No,’ said Samuel Whiskers. ‘Make it properly, Anna Maria, with breadcrumbs.’

But in 1908, when
The Roly-Poly Pudding
was published, Miss Potter was at the height of her power. She was not a born realist, and her first story was not only romantic, it was historical.
The Tailor of Gloucester
opens:

In the time of swords and periwigs, and full-skirted coats with flowered lappets – when gentlemen wore ruffles and gold-lace waistcoats of paduasoy and taffeta – there lived a tailor in Gloucester.

In the sharp details of this sentence, in the flowered lappets, there is a hint of the future Potter, but her first book is not only hampered by its period setting but by the presence of a human character. Miss Potter is seldom at her best with human beings (the only flaw in
The Roly-Poly Pudding
is the introduction in the final pages of the authoress in person), though with one human character she succeeded triumphantly. I refer, of course, to Mr MacGregor, who made an elusive appearance in 1904 in
The Tale of Benjamin Bunny
, ran his crabbed earthmould way through
Peter Rabbit
, and met his final ignominious defeat in
The Flopsy Bunnies
in 1909. But the tailor of Gloucester cannot be compared with Mr MacGregor. He is too ineffective and too virtuous, and the atmosphere of the story – snow and Christmas bells and poverty – is too Dickensian. Incidentally in Simpkin Miss Potter drew her only unsympathetic portrait of a cat. The ancestors of Tom Thumb and Hunca-Munca play a humanitarian part. Their kind hearts are a little oppressive.

In the same year Miss Potter published
Squirrel Nutkin
, It is an unsatisfactory book, less interesting than her first, which was a good example of a bad
genre.
But in 1904, with the publication of
Two Bad Mice
, Miss Potter opened the series of her great comedies. In this story of Tom Thumb and Hunca-Munca and their wanton havoc of a doll’s house, the unmistakable Potter style first appears.

It is an elusive style, difficult to analyse. It owes something to alliteration:

Hunca Munca stood up in her chair and chopped at the ham with another lead knife.

‘It’s as hard as the hams at the Cheesemonger’s,’ said Hunca-Munca.

Something too it owes to the short paragraphs, which are fashioned with a delicate irony, not to complete a movement, but mutely to criticize the action by arresting it. The imperceptive pause allows the mind to take in the picture: the mice are stilled in their enraged attitudes for a moment, before the action sweeps forward.

Then there was no end to the rage and disappointment of Tom Thumb and Hunca-Munca. They broke up the pudding, the lobsters, the pears, and the oranges.

As the fish would not come off the plate, they put it into the redhot crinkly paper fire in the kitchen; but it would not burn either.

It is curious that Beatrix Potter’s method of paragraphing has never been imitated.

The last quotation shows another element of her later style, her love of a precise catalogue, her creation of atmosphere with still-life. One remembers Mr MacGregor’s rubbish heap:

There were jam pots and paper bags and mountains of chopped grass from the mowing machine (which always tasted oily), and some rotten vegetable marrows and an old boot or two.

The only indication in
Two Bad Mice
of a prentice hand is the sparsity of dialogue; her characters had not yet begun to utter those brief pregnant sentences, which have slipped, like proverbs, into common speech. Nothing in the early book equals Mr Jackson’s ‘No teeth. No teeth. No teeth.’

In 1904 too
The Tale of Peter Rabbit
, the second of the great comedies, was published, closely followed by its sequel,
Benjamin Bunny.
In Peter and his cousin Benjamin Miss Potter created two epic personalities. The great characters of fiction are often paired: Quixote and Sancho, Pantagruel and Panurge, Pickwick and Weller, Benjamin and Peter. Peter was a neurotic, Benjamin wordly and imperturbable. Peter was warned by his mother, ‘Don’t go into Mr MacGregor’s garden; your father had an accident there; he was put in a pie by Mrs MacGregor.’ But Peter went from stupidity rather than for adventure. He escaped from Mr MacGregor by leaving his clothes behind, and the sequel, the story of how his clothes were recovered, introduces Benjamin, whose coolness and practicality are a foil to the nerves and clumsiness of his cousin. It was Benjamin who knew the way to enter a garden: ‘It spoils people’s clothes to squeeze under a gate; the proper way to get in is to climb down a pear tree.’ It was Peter who fell down head first.

From 1904 to 1908 were the vintage years in comedy; to these years belong
The Pie and the Patty Pan, The Tale of Tom Kitten. The Tale of Mrs Tiggy Winkle
, and only one failure,
Mr Jeremy Fisher.
Miss Potter had found her right vein and her right scene. The novels were now set in Cumberland; the farms, the village shops, the stone walls, the green slope of Catbells became the background of her pictures and her prose. She was peopling a countryside. Her dialogue had become memorable because aphoristic: