My Brother Evelyn & Other Profiles (15 page)

Mendel
—my own favourite of his novels—is quite separate from the main current of his work. It is the story of Mark Gertler, a young Jewish painter—his parents had brought him over from Austria at the age of three—of great charm and of good looks, who earned a startling early success, was befriended by Edward Marsh, and whose portrait of his mother, painted when he was still a boy, hangs in the Tate. His success was too meteoric not to be followed by a reverse of fortune, and he died by his own hand in 1939, at the very moment, so some critics maintained, that he was evolving a style of painting that would have justified and fulfilled his promise.

Gertler when still quite young became a close friend of Cannan, stayed with him in the country and told him the story of his early years.
Mendel
is a direct transcription of those confidences. The book contains portraits of
Augustus John, C. R. W. Nevinson, Sir William Rothenstein and Dora Carrington, later Lytton Strachey's consort, with whom Gertler was in love for many years. Recently Carrington's brother Noel edited Gertler's letters. There were constant references to Cannan, and Oliver Edwardes reviewing it in the London
Times
suggested that
Mendel
might be well worth reissuing. I myself re-read it recently and was held and moved, but it is difficult when one re-reads a novel to know whether one is moved by the book itself or by the memory of oneself reading it in one's teens.

At the time, because of its portraits of living people, it did not add to Cannan's popularity. And Sir William Rothenstein was deeply offended not with Cannan but with Gertler. How could Cannan have known those things unless Gertler had told him?

Cannan's obituary in
The Times
was headed ‘Promise unfulfilled', but in several ways he was the most gifted of the Georgians. Henry James said in his
Times
article, ‘The charm of Mr Cannan is that we can take him at his word. His guarantee, his straight communication of his general truth is a value and values are rare.'

Douglas Goldring described him in
Reputations
as ‘the bad boy in the Georgian nursery' and by the time I met him in January 1917, he had done much to deserve that label. As a young man he had been befriended by J. M. Barrie, but later Barrie was forced to divorce his wife on his account. Mrs Barrie was many years older than Cannan and the marriage soon broke up. When conscription was introduced in 1916, he registered as a conscientious objector. In the last year of the war, he fell in love with a very attractive young South African, of good family, with whom he set up house.

In youth one needs an unpopular cause to champion.
Cannan was mine. I fought many verbal battles on his account. I championed his pacifism. I championed his advocacy of free love. They were the easier to champion, because I sincerely admired his novels and because he lent a glamour to misdemeanour. ‘What a world, what a set!' Matthew Arnold exclaimed in an amusing if priggish passage about Shelley's London group of Hunt and Hogg ‘with Godwin preaching and holding the hat… one gets sickened for ever of the subject of irregular relationships', and it must be conceded that the inward eye's contemplation of certain advocates of licence practising any form of active love evokes discomfort, but Cannan was tall and young and handsome and the lady with whom he shared a studio in Elm Tree Road was as radiant as a bird of Paradise.

Theirs was the first big evening party that I went to. It was given in December 1918, in honour of Mark Gertler. The studio was large, with a stairway leading up to a balcony from which the bedrooms opened. I shall never forget my first sight of her, standing at the stairway's head; she was fragile and pale-cheeked and small, with blonde hair, cut below the ears, so that it swung loosely like a bell; she was wearing a tight bodice and a terraced skirt, three-layered in pink and mauve and white; her legs were very slim and she wore pink shoes. I shall never forget the timbre in her voice as she waltzed past Cannan who was in a group of talkers, ‘Dance, darling, dance.'

For me she symbolized all that
vie de Bohème
I had dreamed of in a prison camp. Cannan had met her in the Charing Cross Road, in the Bomb Shop—it is called Collet's bookshop now—where old Henderson, with his red tie and red beard dispensed revolutionary literature as well as the best
avant-garde
plays and novels. In addition he published an occasional volume of belles-lettres. His shop was a kind of club. His son Frank was
one of Michael Arlen's first friends in London. It was in the Bomb Shop that Arlen read the volumes of modern poetry that he could not afford to buy. Gilbert Cannan was there, with Miles Malleson, when ‘she' arrived. As the story has it, they stood there incredulous and dazed, then emerging simultaneously from their trance, they hurried to opposite corners of the shop and, taking down copies of their own books, signed them for her.

I had noticed as I arrived, outside the studio, a very young couple standing in a coign of the wall, enlaced in decorous courtship. Other guests had remarked upon their presence. They were always there, Cannan said, no matter what the weather. On subsequent visits throughout that winter I saw them still, in rain and frost. They seemed like protective spirits, guarding the fortunes of the house. How long did they stay, I wonder? As long as romance itself did, possibly, for so rare a bird was unlikely to remain perched for long on so precarious a bough. Within two years ‘she' had winged towards wider meadows. I have not met her since, but I have watched with affectionate well-wishing her passage in a larger world.

I met Cannan through my former schoolmaster, S. P. B. Mais. Mais used to write to authors he admired, telling them that he had read their poems and novels to his pupils. Little pleases a writer more than to be told that he is read by the young generation; such letters led to friendship; they did in Cannan's case.

Mais was staying with my parents over Christmas, and I cajoled him into including me in an invitation. I can remember little of what was said that evening. Cannan was a silent man. I presume that Mais did all the talking. We went on to the Café Royal afterwards. It was my first time there and the Domino Room was crowded with men
back on leave; several groups were in fancy dress and the party at the next table wanted us to go on with them to a dance. I longed to, but I was a cadet at Sandhurst receiving no pay, and my weekly parental allowance of a pound was not doing much more than pay my bus and tube fares. In four months' time, I told myself, I should be gazetted, with money of my own; then I could accept that kind of invitation.

We talked that evening, naturally, of
Mendel
. Mais wanted to meet Gertler and see his pictures, so Cannan wrote him a note of introduction. Gertler lived then in Hampstead. ‘We'll go and see him tomorrow,' Mais said to me.

We breakfasted early, at Underhill, at eight o'clock. Mais ate, as he did everything, quickly. By quarter past he was on his feet. ‘We'll go over to see Gertler now,' he said.

Walking across the heath at Mais's speed, we reached the studio before nine. It did not at the time seem to me an extraordinary hour to pay a social call, but it must have to Gertler who was not yet up and whose breakfast table was being laid. He concealed his surprise, however, and very courteously showed us round his studio. ‘The Merry-Go-Round', with its strident orange and red canopy that later was the chief feature of the London Group Exhibition in the Mansard Galleries, was on an easel. I had never before realized how colours could sing.

Cannan at that period lived in a windmill at Cholesbury, a few miles from Berkhamsted, where W. W. Jacobs lived. I paid it a pious pilgrimage. Cannan was not there but we were shown inside. It had been painted in the fashion of the moment with bright primary colours. It was the only time that I have seen a windmill converted into a private residence. As far as I remember there was
no miller's cottage. If there was, it must have been very small. The main rooms were inside the carcase of the mill. The tapering of the cone-shaped walls was most effective.

In the Gertler memorial exhibition in 1941 there was a picture of the windmill with Cannan walking in the garden; there was also ‘The Merry-Go-Round', its colours as vivid as ever on that grey bomb-scarred day.

Cannan was disliked and disapproved of by many who did not know him, but he was well liked by those who did. I do not indeed see how he could have failed to be. There was nothing to dislike about him; he was well mannered and well-bred; he was never ill-tempered or impatient; he was temperate in drink; he never made scenes; he did not boast about his successes with women; he rarely discussed sex, as is often the case with men who lead full lives; he was single-minded in his devotion to the causes that he championed. As a writer he did nothing cheap.

He was a silent man. I have already described how on our way to a cricket match at Winchester, he and Siegfried Sassoon divided a third-class compartment into two groups of four. To some it may have seemed that he was haughty, arrogant and aloof. A small man can sit silent in a gathering and not be noticed but you are aware of a tall man's presence. He did not exert himself to be amusing. Myself, I was so stimulated mentally by his company that I talked a lot, but I can imagine that he may have made a self-conscious person more self-conscious. Some people may have found it hard to be themselves with him.

Perhaps he was not only silent but impersonal—a disability that I may not have noticed because I was myself, in my admiration for his work, so at ease with him. In the Gertler letters an interesting passage describes how Mary and St John Hutchinson, when they were
staying at the mill, organized a trap so that they could get Cannan alone late at night and induce him to tell them his life story.

‘As a life,' they said, ‘it was very dull and he told it in a dull dreary voice, all even, but nevertheless it was very important to help us to understand him. You see, it is just as I thought, nothing ever
really
stirred him, nothing ever made a real impression. When for instance he came to the part of his life when a rich cousin comes as if from nowhere and adopts him, puts him into a rich home suddenly after his own sordid environments and then to Cambridge, he did not seem at all impressed or excited. He did not seem to feel the change and was not surprised. He told it all in the same even bored voice, and so on and so on.…

‘Many, many times we had to pull him up to prevent him from becoming vague and abstract. We would ask him, “What do you mean exactly?” or “Tell us the details”.'

Yet they finally concluded, ‘We really felt that we now understood Gilbert much more.'

His private life caused so much concern to so many strangers. Could it have been that he really was not very interested in it; that he was someone to whom things happened? Can it be that he was a temporarily embodied spirit, for whom eventually the frail fabric between two realities dissolved? His final novels were incomprehensible. He appeared to be travelling in a fog, yet with serene unawareness that bright day was not about him.

Was he overrated between 1910 and 1920? I question it. A novel has to be very good or to have very special qualities of interest to remain alive thirty years after its author's retirement or death. A novelist who is still around, publishing a book every so often, appearing in public, writing articles, being interviewed, replying to the Toast of Literature, sponsoring the work of the younger
generation, retains the public's interest in his personality and a curiosity towards his early work. If W. L. George and Gilbert Cannan were still alive, I am confident that one or two of their earlier books would be on the book-stalls in a Pan, Penguin, or Pocket Library reprint.

My friendship with Cannan was a cause of considerable concern to my future father-in-law, W. W. Jacobs, who was very perturbed about the kind of people that his daughter would meet when she left his vigilance. Megan Rhys was a source of considerable concern to him. He refused to invite Cannan to our wedding on the grounds, so he wrote to me, of his conscientious-objector attitude during the war; but it was on moral grounds that he explained his fiat to my father. ‘There is Cannan,' he said, ‘able to go everywhere, and this wretched girl able to go nowhere, cut off for the rest of her life from decent people.' How that prophecy had been turned topsy-turvy within five years.

I have included a sketch of W. W. in my autobiography and my brother wrote of him at greater length in
A Little Learning
. The characters in Jacobs's stories were all rebels against authority. His most famous, Bob Pretty, was a village poacher, his sailors Sam Small and Peter Russet dodged policemen, the night-watchman lived on the windy side of the law, but on the two main issues of politics and sex Jacobs was extremely bigoted.

His reputation as a writer still stands high, deservedly. Few Englishmen have understood the technique of the short story so perfectly and he had a wonderful power of compression. No authors enjoy criticism, and he was indignant with the critic who complained that the night watchman was getting garrulous. ‘If there is one thing he isn't, it is that.' Jacobs was right. The night watchman's ironic
commentaries on life remained to the end caustic and concise. Arnold Bennett wrote an essay on him in the
New Age
called ‘W. W. Jacobs and Aristophanes' in which he gave the following example of Jacobs's lean, bleak wit. A man offers a mistrustful wife as an explanation of his late return, the fact that he had seen a boy run over in the street. ‘How long did that take you?' the wife said. ‘Do you think that funny?' Bennett asked. ‘I think it very funny.'

There was another criticism that Jacobs did not relish, but of which he admitted the truth. ‘The Biter Bit.' All his stories fit into that formula. But then that is the classic formula. A situation is set out, a character attempts to solve it, but the solution is achieved in a manner completely opposite to the plan. Most of the best stories fit that formula—those that is to say that depend on plot—and when one has written that kind of story one is wise to ask oneself whether it does or does not conform. If it does not, there may be something wrong with it.