My Brother Evelyn & Other Profiles (11 page)

The first part of that second comment states a fact, the second is a superficial criticism, based upon appearance. Hopkins had a foreign-office air. The Oxford University Press had an official status. Its representatives must be presentable. Hopkins was tall, impressive, tidily dressed, urbane. He looked a scholar. But though he was always the kind of man on whose behaviour even a Bohemian hostess of the 1920s could rely, he was very far from being conventional. Two incidents from Mainz will illustrate that point. Milton Hayes produced a camp revue which contained a number of
risqué
jokes and one suggestive scene, to which a padre objected. The nonconformist conscience of a section, a very small section, of the camp was roused. In a prisoner-of-war camp where everyone is under-occupied, storms can be quickly brewed in teacups. Opinions became violent. There was a general need for drama and a meeting was arranged in the theatre, at which each side could argue its own case.

It was important that the case for freedom should be handled with tact and skill, otherwise a censorship might have been imposed and the standard of entertainment would have slumped; it may be added that the scene to which objection was taken was very mild and could have been shown even then without offence at the Coliseum. Gerard Hopkins was chosen as the spokesman. It was felt that if he with his calm decorous manner had seen no occasion for complaint there could be none. His arguments prevailed.

But that, it may be argued, is not evidence of unconventionality. The incident does no more than indicate that Hopkins had a presence and a manner, a capacity for debate and a readiness to use it in defence of liberty of speech. All of which might be expected of a scholar and a man of letters. That is perhaps true, but the other incident does show a considerable degree of moral courage.

There was a canteen in the billiard room where you could buy wine and cigarettes. Wine cost a pound a bottle. It was a sour casual hock and we grumbled at having to pay so much for it, but we had so little on which to spend our money that before food parcels arrived, when we were very hungry, some officers devoted nine-tenths of their pay to the purchasing of bread from sentries. The standard black-market price was two pounds a loaf, but it went higher. Milton Hayes once paid three pounds fifteen shillings. When parcels arrived and we were no longer hungry, most of us welcomed an opportunity to split a bottle in congenial company once a week.

A senior officer discovered, however, that the wine for which we paid a pound could be bought in the town for six shillings; representations were made to the authorities that the profit was excessive. The authorities blandly replied that that happened to be their price. The senior officer was indignant and summoned a conclave of his
peers. It was agreed that the Germans must be brought to heel and a boycott of the canteen was announced. It was believed that the profits on the canteen were the private perquisite of the officer in charge. Had we been in a French camp, this would have been a natural assumption. But the Germans have a regard for correct behaviour. I imagine that the profits on the bar went to some welfare fund and the individual officer could not have cared less whether British officers drank wine or not. He had fulfilled his duty by making wine available to British officers at a price that lay within their means. But the boycott was installed and an officers' picket was posted to see that it was not broken.

Many of us were indignant; the posting of the picket was the final outrage; we might be in a preparatory school. But though many of us grumbled, none of us made any protest, none except Gerard Hopkins, and he was one of the ones who had grumbled least.

On a hot July afternoon he walked alone to the canteen. No one was playing billiards and the room was empty except for a somnolent German sentry at the bar and a bored British subaltern on picket duty. Hopkins ordered a bottle and sat down to drink it. Hopkins was a captain; the startled subaltern respectfully reminded him of the boycott. Hopkins courteously assured him that he was well aware of it and offered the subaltern a glass of wine. The picket was nonplussed and embarrassed. He would have to report the matter to a senior officer, but at half past two on a hot afternoon, senior officers were likely to be taking a siesta; they would not appreciate being disturbed. He hoped Hopkins would finish his bottle quickly and get out; but it takes a long time for one person to drink a whole bottle of wine and Hopkins was in no hurry to finish it. He had a book to read and he wished to make his gesture.

The afternoon wore on, siestas ended and the billiard table was again in use. The picket officer was relieved and sought out a senior officer. Presently a colonel came across. He sat down at Hopkins's table and Hopkins offered him a glass. The colonel began his remonstrance, at a disadvantage. Hopkins was the kind of person whom even an irate colonel had to treat with deference; he wore the Military Cross, and the colonel suspected that Hopkins had a nimbler wit than his. He made some derogatory remarks about ‘letting down the side' and went away. Hopkins resumed his reading.

He made his bottle last four hours; everyone who came into the room stared at him, but he ignored them. By the late afternoon the rumour had got round the camp that the boycott was either over or being broken. Several captives came across to ascertain the facts. The picket assured them that the boycott was still in force. It did not look as though it was, they told him. One or two groups gathering courage from Hopkins's example ordered wine themselves. By the time Hopkins had finished his bottle, the boycott had been broken.

That now was a courageous act. Hopkins was under military discipline and ran the risk of putting himself in serious trouble, moreover he was very far from having public opinion on his side. Many members of the camp were in favour of ‘teaching the Boche a lesson' and quite a number of them were teetotallers. Hopkins made his protest in the interests of a minority. He was far from being a conventionally-minded respecter of authority. It was not on that account that his novels had little popular appeal. He was a man who did not recognize at first the true direction in which his talents pointed.

Hugh Kingsmill's story was a very different one. On our return to England after the Armistice, I persuaded
him to offer his novel
The Will to Love
to Chapman & Hall. My father was pleased with it and published it, but it was scantily reviewed and sold under a thousand copies.

A novel without a hero, in which Frank Harris, very thinly disguised, was the central character, it came out at the wrong time. Few people in April 1919 were interested in Harris. Discredited socially and financially by 1914, he had spent the war obscurely in the United States indulging in anti-British propaganda. He had yet to earn a dubious prominence as the biographer of Oscar Wilde and as a scabrous, mendacious autobiographist.

Kingsmill's novel described how Harris seduced the daughter of a schoolmaster and blackmailed her father for two thousand pounds. It was told lightly and ironically, but the character of the girl was drawn with warmth and sympathy. Had the book been published in 1927, in the days of the Bright Young People, when domestic sucepti-bilities had been hardened and sharpened by Aldous Huxley and Michael Arlen, and when Harris as the author of
My Life and Loves
was ‘in the news', it might have caught the popular fancy. But the public was not ready for it in 1919.

Kingsmill was disappointed but not discouraged. He had a sunny, resilient nature.

During the next few years he led an itinerant existence. Though he was married with, at that time, one child, he had no settled home. But his father owned a number of hotels, the Flandre in Bruges, the Albany in Hastings, the Hotel des Alpes in Mürren, in Scotland the Bridge of Allan, so that Kingsmill had access to a suite of rooms in half a dozen places.

I never met his first wife. She was pretty, attractive, vivacious but did not, I have been told, encourage his
literary ambitions and was jealous of interests that she could not share.

On his return from captivity he took Holms down for a visit at the hotel where she was staying. Holms had some ideas on Pascal which he wanted to express. When he found that Mrs Kingsmill thought Pascal had been a doctor, he turned his back on her and addressed his conversation to her husband. He drank too much, drifted into gloom and delivered a long brooding soliloquy on suicide and Schopenhauer. Next day Mrs Kingsmill suggested that it would be more convenient if Hugh saw his ‘literary friends' in London. He would have been wise, I think, to have broken the ice gently with Hopkins or myself but when I expressed a hope that one day soon I should be meeting her, he shook his head. ‘Keep things in their frame, old man, keep things in their frame.'

The framework which he adopted—a wife in the country and his friends in London—may not have been the best formula for a successful marriage, and that first marriage did not survive the ‘twenties, but it suited his friends admirably. He would arrive in London every three weeks, in a holiday mood, released from discipline, happy to be among us, anxious to exchange gossip and to hear our news. His exuberance was a keen and salutary stimulus; he stirred us out of a rut. If you are professionally employed in literature in a metropolis, it is very easy to be absorbed by the latest best-seller and by current gossip. It was refreshing to find Kingsmill excited over a new interpretation of
The Brothers Karamazov
and perplexed about the exact function of a minor character in
Eugénie Grandet
. There was no voice during those years that I was more glad to hear unexpectedly over the telephone.

At that time he was supremely confident in his powers
as a writer and he had a good-natured contempt for most of the idols of contemporary esteem. When such trivial fellows were admired, he should not find it difficult to carve his own career. He was impatient for the day when he would be free from the irksome routine of a hotelier. ‘When I'm in the very middle of a paragraph, old man, I'm called away to inspect the roof of the maids' lavatory.' Actually he was writing under ideal conditions. When
Horizon
organized a symposium on how a writer could best supplement his earnings from his books, most contributors agreed that he needed a job unconnected with literature, that he should not be a publisher's reader, write scripts for the B.B.C. or copy for an advertising agency; he must be able to come fresh to his creative work.

Kingsmill's job was from that point of view ideal. He had warm and comfortable quarters. He was well-fed. He could travel. He was in touch with human administrative problems. He was meeting new people, and different kinds of people. His routine offered him constant copy and he was not overworked. He had responsibilities and he had to be on the spot, but he could have devised a programme, as he had at Mainz, which would have allowed him a regular undisturbed period. It was a pity he did not remain in his father's business. But he left it in the later ‘twenties, when his marriage broke, and the new life which he began with his habitual confidence and high spirits was to prove a harder conflict than he had expected.

His first book after
The Will to Love
contained three long short stories and was entitled
The Dawn's Delay
. It was published in 1924 and bore the name Hugh Kingsmill. At that time his brother Arnold was editing for Chapman & Hall a yearly series called
Georgian
Stories
. The 1925 volume included a story from
The Dawn's Delay—W.f
. It was the last number that Lunn edited; next year I took it over and William Gerhardi was one of the writers whom I asked for a contribution. I sent him a copy of the 1925 volume to show what kind of company I was inviting him to join. In his letter of acceptance, he expressed such enthusiasm for
W.J
.—‘who was this genius? did I know him?'—that I sent his letter on to Kingsmill, who promptly responded by sending Gerhardi a copy of
The Dawn's Delay
.

‘This,' Gerhardi wrote in
Memoirs of a Polyglot
, ‘was the beginning of a friendship that has not been uneventful. It has survived two storms, which so dislocated our lives that each of us remains to this day, to the other's mother, a sinister influence in the career of her son. Kingsmill's habit, I regret to say, is to abscond and set up house with somebody in whom I have invested a good deal of emotion and then to defend the purity of their hearth against my visits, though indulgent enough to consent to meet me outside his new home.'

Kingsmill is the hero of Gerhardi's novel
Pending Heaven
and there is an excellent description of him in
Memoirs of a Polyglot
. Gerhardi never lost faith in his friend's talent. There were those, he complained, who thought that his ‘literary enthusiasm for his writings are biased by friendship. The truth is my literary enthusiasm for him has inveigled me into a precarious friendship. I feel in regard to Hugh Kingsmill the satisfaction of a man who backs an outsider knowing him to be a “dead cert”.'

But it did not turn out that way. I would not say that Kingsmill was a failure. He published a number of biographies on which his publishers did not lose money and which were well reviewed; his two anthologies of Abuse are classics; he was literary editor of the
English Review;
during the war he was on
Punch's
reviewing staff. In any-other walk of life he would have seemed successful. A soldier who retires as a Brigadier would not be considered a failure because he did not finish as a Lieutenant-General and a K.B.E., but for authors the gap is immense in terms of tangible reward between a best-seller and an author whom a publisher is glad to have upon his list. It is not surprising that an author should grow bitter. Why-should his books sell less well than those of a man who is less well read than he, a less sound judge of values, with a less concise command of English, a man who has seen less, done less, who conversationally is less effective? It is very easy to attribute that other man's success to backstairs influence, a capacity to play cards cunningly or to the low standard of public taste. And Hugh Kings-mill was one of the unlucky ones who never hit the jackpot.