Collected Essays (46 page)

Both these rather contradictory qualities appear in the Walt Disney Studios’ brilliant adaptation of
Three Little Pigs
(and I should like, before I forget in the fascination of the story, warmly to congratulate all those concerned in the production of this book: the chief electrician, the cameraman, the fashion designer, the art editor, the scenario writer, the director and assistant director, the producer, the author and the composer of the theme song). These pigs are no longer quite so British, which is to say that they are no longer quite so piggish. The curled tails, the improvident flutings, the house of straw and the house of twigs and the house of brick have never been more tenderly portrayed, but the wolf never more brutally. This is the wolf of experience, not of dream; Wall Street smashes, financiers’ suicides, the machine guns of the gangster are behind this wolf. Watch him outside the house of twigs, sitting in a basket, a sheepskin falling on either side of his ferocious muzzle like the wig of a Jeffreys: this is Justice conniving at unjust executions and letting the gangster free. And watch him again outside the house of bricks in a rusty hat, in an overcoat, in a false yellow beard: ‘I’m the Kleen-e-ze Brush man, I’m giving away free samples’: he is every share pusher personified, the man who knows of a new gold mine, a swell oil field.

But just because the whole story is more realistic than the English version, the American mind shrinks from the ruthless logical
denouement.
The two improvident pigs are not swallowed by the wolf, they escape and take refuge with their brother in the brick house, and even the wolf escapes with a scalding. The wolf’s escape, indeed, is the most American aspect of this transplanted tale. How often one has watched the methods of justice satirized upon the screen with a realism that would be impossible in England; yet nothing is done about it, the wolf escapes. The English story is the better one, to sacrifice two pigs that the third may live in safety, to sacrifice the improvident pigs that the provident pig may be remembered for ever in his famous aphorism: ‘The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.’

1934

GEORGE MOORE AND OTHERS

A
SUNK
railway track and a gin distillery flank the gritty street. There is something Victorian about the whole place – an air of ugly commercial endeavour mixed with odd idealisms and philanthropies. It isn’t only the jumble of unattractive titles on the dusty spines, the huge weight of morality at six-pence a time; even the setting has an earnestness . . .. The public-houses are like a lesson in temperance.

It isn’t all books by any means in the book market: a dumb man presides over the first stall given up to paint-brushes and dividers; we pass wireless parts, rubber heels, old stony collections of nuts and bolts, gramophone records, cycle tyres, spectacles (hospital prescriptions made up on the spot under the shadow of the gin distillery), a case of broken (I was going to say motheaten) butterflies – privet-hawks and orange-tips and red admirals losing their antennae and powder, shabby like second-hand clothes. One stall doesn’t display its wares at all: only labels advertising Smell Bombs, Itching Powder, Cigarette Bangs – Victorian, too, the painful physical humour reminding us of Cruickshank on the poor and Gilbert on old age.

And then at last the books. It is a mistake to look for bargains here, or even to hope to find any books you really want – unless you happen to want Thackeray, Froude, or Macaulay on the cheap. Those authors are ubiquitous. No, the book market is the place for picking up odd useless information. Here, for instance, is Dibdin’s
Purification of Sewage and Water
, published by the Sanitary Publishing Company, next to
Spiritual Counsel for District Visitors, Submarine Cables
, and
Chicago Police Problems
, published – it seems broadminded – by the Chicago University Press. Of course, there are lots of folios called
View of the Lakes
or of Italy, Switzerland, the Tyrol, as the case may be; and one can buy, in pale-blue paper parts, Bessemer on
Working Blast Furnaces. Doll Caudel in Paris
seems to be part of a series and looks a little coarse.

Somebody had left a book open on a stall, and I read with some amazement: ‘George Moore had a great idea of duty. “If I have one thing,” he says in his diary, “it is an imperative sense of duty.” He was always possessed with the full sense of ‘doing his duty.’ He wished to do it; and he prayed to God to help him do it. But what duty?’ What, indeed? Of course, one remembers the scene in
Salve
, when Moore said a prayer with Mr Mahaffy and was presented with a prayer-book, but this emphasis on duty seemed a little odd until I found the title-page and the author – Samuel Smiles, LL.D. This George Moore was not a writer, but a wholesale merchant and a philanthropist, and here, perhaps, is the real delight of the book market – nowhere else would one be likely to find the life of a Victorian draper. And it is rewarding. Smiles deserved his popularity; there is a bold impressionist vitality about his style; he roughs in very well the atmosphere of commercial travelling: the astute offer of a favourite snuff, the calculated jest, the encounters in hotel rooms – the Union Hotel, Birmingham, and the Star at Manchester, the seedy atmosphere of benevolence, what he calls ‘Mr Moore’s labours of love’: the hospital for incurables, the penny bank, the London Porters’ Benevolent Association, the Kensington Auxiliary Bible Society, the Pure Literature Society (Mr Moore’s favourite book, unlike his namesake’s, was
The Memoirs and Remains of Dr M’Cheyne).
His oddest philanthopy perhaps was ‘in marrying people who were not, but who ought to have been, married’ – or else his attempt to introduce copies of the Bible into the best Paris hotels. But Dr Smiles had more than vigour; he had a macabre if ungrammatical imagination, as when he describes the end of the first Mrs Moore. ‘Her remains were conveyed to Cumberland. On arrival at Carlisle, Mr Moore slept in the Station Hotel. It seemed strange to him that while in his comfortable bed, his dead wife should be laying cold in the railway truck outside, within sight of the hotel windows.’

Macabre – but not quite so macabre as this other book which had lost half its title-page, but seems to be called
The Uncertainty of the Signs of Death.
Published in 1746, and illustrated with some grim little copper-plates, it contains ‘a great variety of amusing and well-attested Instances of Persons who have return’d to Life in their Coffins, in their Graves, under the Hands of the Surgeons, and after they had remain’d apparently dead for a considerable Time in the Water’. A scholarly little work, which throws some doubts upon the story that Duns Scotus ‘bit his own Hands in his Grave’, it carries in the musty pages some of the atmosphere of an M. R. James story – there is an anecdote from Basingstoke too horrible to set down here which might have pleased the author of
O Whistle and I’ll Come to You.
I was pleased to find a few more details of Ann Green, who was executed at Oxford in 1650 and was revived by her friends – about whose resurrection, it may be remembered, Anthony à Wood wrote some rather bad verses – and before laying the book back beside the battered brown tin trunk which carried the salesman’s stock, I noted this recipe for reviving the apparently dead: ‘We ought to irritate his Nostrils by introducing into them the Juice of Onions, Garlick, and Horse-radish, or the feather’d End of a Quill, or the Point of a Pencil: stimulate his Organs of Touch with Whips and Nettles; and if possible shock his Ears by hideous Shrieks and excessive Noises.’

Poor human body which must be clung to at all costs. There is very little light relief in the book market – an old copy of
Three Men on the Bummel
, that boisterous work, all sobs and horseplay, and a promising folio out of my reach called simply
The Imperial Russian Dinner Service.
The smell of mortality, morality, and thrown-out book go together – and the smell of the antiquated Metropolitan Line. Here is another moralist. In
Posthuma Christiana
(1712, price 6d.) William Crouch, the Quaker, laments the Restoration – ‘The Roaring, Swearing, Drinking, Revelling, Debauchery, and Extravagancy of that Time I cannot forget,’ and a few lines, as I turned the pages, caught the imagination as Blind Pew once did at the Benbow Inn. He is quoting an account of the Quakers, thirty-seven men and eighteen women, who were banished to Jamaica. ‘The Ship was called
The Black Eagle
, and lay at anchor in
Bugby’s Hole
, the Master’s name was
Fudge
, by some called
Lying Fudge.
’ They lay in the Thames seven weeks, and half of them died and were buried in the marshes below Gravesend. ‘Twenty-seven survived, and remained on board the Ship; and there was one other Person of whom no certain Account could be given.’

That is the kind of unexpected mystery left on one’s hands by a morning in the book market. A storm was coming up behind the gin distillery, and the man with the Itching Powder was packing up his labels – trade isn’t good these days for his kind of bomb. It was time to emerge again out of the macabre past into the atrocious present.

1939

AT HOME

O
NE
gets used to anything: that is what one hears on many lips these days,
*2
though everybody, I suppose, remembers the sense of shock he felt at the first bombed house he saw. I think of one in Woburn Square neatly sliced in half. With its sideways exposure it looked like a Swiss chalet: there were a pair of skiing sticks hanging in the attic, and in another room a grand piano cocked one leg over the abyss. The combination of music and skiing made one think of the Sanger family and Constant Nymphs dying pathetically of private sorrow to popular applause. In the bathroom the geyser looked odd and twisted seen from the wrong side, and the kitchen impossibly crowded with furniture until one realized one had been given a kind of mouse-eye view from behind the stove and the dresser – all the space where people used to move about with toast and tea-pots was out of sight. But after quite a short time one ceased to look twice at the intimate exposure of interior furnishings, and waking on a cement floor among strangers, one no longer thinks what an odd life this is. ‘One gets used to anything.’

But that, I think is not really the explanation. There are things one never gets used to because they don’t connect: sanctity and fidelity and the courage of human beings abandoned to free will: virtues like these belong with old college buildings and cathedrals, relics of a world with faith. Violence comes to us more easily because it was so long expected – not only by the political sense but by the moral sense. The world we lived in could not have ended any other way. The curious waste lands one sometimes saw from trains – the cratered ground round Wolverhampton under a cindery sky with a few cottages grouped like stones among the rubbish: those acres of abandoned cars round Slough: the dingy fortune-teller’s on the first-floor above the cheap permanent waves in a Brighton back street; they all demanded violence, like the rooms in a dream where one knows that something will presently happen – a door fly open or a window-catch give and let the end in.

I think it was a sense of impatience because the violence was delayed – rather than a masochistic enjoyment of discomfort – that made many writers of recent years go abroad to try to meet it half-way: some went to Spain and others to China. Less ideological, perhaps less courageous, writers chose corners where the violence was more moderate; but the hint of it had to be there to satisfy that moral craving for the just and reasonable expression of human nature left without belief. The craving wasn’t quite satisfied because we all bought two-way tickets. Like Henry James hearing a good story at a dinner-table, we could say, ‘Stop. That’s enough for our purpose’, and take a train or a boat home. The moral sense was tickled: that was all. One came home and wrote a book, leaving the condemned behind in the back rooms of hotels where the heating was permanently off or eking out a miserable living in little tropical towns. We were sometimes – God forgive us – amusing at their expense, even though we guessed all the time that we should be joining them soon for ever.

All the same – egotistical to the last – we can regard those journeys as a useful rehearsal. Scraps of experience remain with one under the pavement. Lying on one’s stomach while a bomb whines across, one is aware of how they join this life to the other, in the same way that a favourite toy may help a child, by its secret appeal, to adapt himself to a strange home. There are figures in our lives which strike us as legendary even when they are with us, seem to be preparing us like parents for the sort of life ahead. I find myself remembering in my basement black Colonel Davis, the dictator of Grand Bassa, whose men, according to a British Consul’s report, had burned women alive in native huts and skewered children on their bayonets. He was a Scoutmaster and he talked emotionally about his old mother and got rather drunk on my whisky. He was bizarre and gullible and unaccountable: his atmosphere was that of deep forest, extreme poverty, and an injustice as wayward as generosity. He connected like a poem with ordinary life (he was other people’s ordinary life): but it was ordinary life expressed with vividness. Then there was General Cedillo, the dictator of San Luis Potosi (all my dictators, unlike Sir Nevile Henderson’s, have been little ones). I remember the bull-browed Indian rebel driving round his farm in the hills followed by his chief gunmen in another car, making plans for crops which he never saw grow because the federal troops hunted him down and finished him. He was loved by his peasants, who served him without pay and stole everything he owned, and hated by the townspeople whom he robbed of water for his land (so that you couldn’t even get a bath). His atmosphere was stupidity and courage and kindliness and violence. Neither of these men were of vintage growth, but they belonged to the same diseased erratic world as the dictators and the millionaires. They started things in a small way while the world waited for the big event. I think of them sometimes under the pavement almost with a feeling of tenderness. They helped one to wait, and now they help one to feel at home. Everybody else in the shelter, I imagine, has memories of this kind, too: or why should they accept violence so happily, with so little surprise, impatience, or resentment? Perhaps a savage schoolmaster or the kind of female guardian the young Kipling suffered from or some beast in himself has prepared each man for this life.