My Brother Evelyn & Other Profiles (25 page)

The five days went by quickly. I planned to catch in Nice the train for Paris that is now called ‘Le Mistral'. Evelyn wanted to lunch in Monte Carlo. Our trains went within ten minutes of each other; so we took the same taxi up the hill. There was no station bar where we could pour a final libation to our fortunes. I crossed to the southern platform; and we sat by our suitcases in the sun, facing each other, with the tracks between us, waiting for our different trains to take us on our different roads.

When I was young, we were taught history in terms of battles and betrayals; of treaties and capitulations, of crowns and dynasties. Henry V was addressed as ‘England' and Louis XIV as ‘France'. It was assumed that a country prospered or declined as its monarch's stock rose and fell. No one wondered how the people fared under these capricious changes. Spain was England's enemy through the second half of the sixteenth and most of the seventeenth century. We were taught to assess the power of Spain by the defeat of the Armada. We were never taught that for a century and a half the stupendous wealth of the New World was poured into the coffers of Seville, while the people of Spain starved.

It is fashionable today to regard the 1930s as a period of ignominy for England and the start of the next decade as Britain's Finest Hour. Yet actually for many Britons the world continued to be navigated on an even keel. My father who was born in August 1866 died in June 1943 and I suspect that the last ten years of his life were the happiest.

My father has been described at length in my brother's autobiography
A Little Learning
and in my
Early Years
. Both pictures are drawn with love, devotion and in admiration. They are supplementary to each other. I was closer, far closer to him than my brother was. I was in far greater sympathy with him. Evelyn and he were constantly in conflict. They were irritated by each other. In my mother's opinion they were too like each other. For that very reason,
my brother understood him better.
A Little Learning
gave me a fresh insight into a number of facets of my father of which I was aware only subconsciously. In a novel there is nothing more difficult to depict than the ‘good character', the ‘good influence', the man or woman of integrity. There are not enough contrasting shades. For that reason the reader will get a more vivid picture of my father from
A Little Learning
than from my
Early Years
. And it is a very sympathetic picture. Any father would be proud to have had such a tribute paid to him.

A Little Learning
stops in the year 1925. My
Early Years
stops in 1930. Nineteen-thirty was, as I have said, a watershed for me. So was it for my father. At the end of 1929 he resigned his managing directorship of Chapman & Hall, retaining his chairmanship of the board, and acting as reader and adviser, working at his home in Hampstead. His salary was less, but it was adequate now that he had only himself and my mother to support.

It was a great relief for him. The years between 1925 and 1930 had been hard. He was over sixty and he was tiring. His chest was troubling him. In camp as a volunteer when a quite young man he had, through sleeping on a wet pillow, set up trouble in his left ear and he was very deaf. During the war he had as an economy taken to coming home for lunch and he put a heavy strain upon himself by continuing this habit. He spent three hours a day travelling between Henrietta Street and Underhill; he was exhausted by the pull up the hill before lunch and the hurried departure afterwards. He had reached the age when he needed the restorative of a nap after lunch.

In winter, Underhill was a cold house. The wind blew straight under the front door into the hall. There was no central heating. The book-room was uncarpeted, and the French windows opened onto a veranda. There was a direct draught through the house. My father had grown

corpulent. He should have dieted, but he had a Latin love of bread. Often after dinner he would be forced to stand up beside the mantelpiece struggling for breath. When he left the warmth of the book-room, the change of air struck chill upon his chest, and he would be convulsed with asthma.

The office had become a worry. Hypersensitive to criticism, he had not felt since the
coup d'état
which I described in my
Early Years
that he was master there. Evelyn's Oxford friends had referred to him as Chapman & Hall, which later they abbreviated into the nickname Chapman; he had liked it at the start but now, so my mother told me, he discouraged it; he no longer felt that he was ‘Chapman'.

He had no cause for doubting his staff's loyalty. On the twenty-fifth anniversary of his appointment to the managing directorship they staged a surprise for him: a lunch in a private room at the Florence attended by every member of the staff where he was presented with a book signed by all of them. He was very touched. But in small ways and all the time he was conscious of his changed position.

He was also worried by the yearly balance sheet. The basic financial situation was unsound. The firm was not doing badly. It was publishing good books, and at a profit, but not at a sufficient profit to recompense both cumulative preference and ordinary shareholders. I was very glad that I was no longer a member of its board. As an outsider I could give my father sympathy in a way that I could never have done had I been still employed there, teased by the knowledge that something must be done, and soon.

As to the ultimate outcome I had little doubt. Two can live as cheaply as one, and amalgamation with another firm would reduce overheads. With double the capital four times as many books could be issued without adding
to the salary list. I foresaw this, in the same way that early in a long novel you foresee the eventual end—whose fortunes will rise and whose will fall and who will marry whom—but how it is all to be brought about you have no idea; if you had, you would not bother to go on reading. I knew how it must end but I did not see how the inevitable amalgamation was to be achieved without my father losing his appointment.

His retirement from the managing directorship offered him a respite. It also gave him leisure for his own writing. Nineteen-thirty was the firm's centenary year and he wrote its history under the title
A Hundred Years of Publishing
. The book was written as publicity, and certain of the later chapters were phrased so as to give pleasure to authors, members of the staff and personalities in the book trade: but its early chapters with their anecdotes of Dickens, Trollope and Meredith are part of literary history and give it a real value as a work of reference. John Farrar has told me he invariably ends his lectures on publishing by reading its last paragraph with its picture of the publisher sitting at the end of the day among the books that bear his imprint.

As soon as this book was finished my father set to work upon his autobiography. He was happy writing it, yet even so he was fretted about Chapman & Hall's future. He still dreaded the annual shareholders' meeting. Though the meetings were attended by a mere handful, there were innumerable other shareholders scattered over the country whom he had never seen, to whom one day it might occur to wonder whether some use might not be made of these apparently valueless scraps of paper. He felt he was sitting on a volcano, with no right to hope as the father of the founder of the firm's fortunes had, that ‘something would turn up'.

But in fact it did.

Carl Brandt once said to me, ‘If ever you have a fluke or a coincidence in a short story it must be an unlucky one for the chief characters.' And it was by one of those interventions of providence that occur in real life, but in a novel would appear contrived, that the fortunes of Chapman & Hall were salvaged.

The
deus ex machina
was Philip (now Lord) Inman. Inman is a mystery figure, much of his mystery lying in the fact that he does not look in the least mysterious. He is tall, handsome, affable, hospitable; he enjoys good company; he is determined but not aggressive. He is one of those busy men who never look as though they were in a hurry. He first made his mark in public life as the secretary of the Charing Cross Hospital, which like all hospitals at that time was supported by voluntary contributions. Inman had a genius for raising funds. He had an eye for politics and in Attlee's second government he was Lord Privy Seal: yet he was never part of a party machine. He is an independent man, the cat that walks by itself. That is in large part his strength. He knows what he wants and what he does not want.

His intervention in the affairs of Chapman & Hall made the last decade of my father's life a happy one. In his autobiography Philip Inman has told how he came to be associated with the firm. I, as my father's son and an ex-director, saw the situation from a slightly different angle. For me it had an element of comedy.

Chapman & Hall had published a kind of autobiography by Inman called
Oil and Wine
describing how he had raised funds for the Charing Cross Hospital. The book had been suggested by the secretary to the company, A. W. Gatfield, who was by now on the board. During the negotiations a certain measure of friendship
grew up between Gatfield and Inman and it seemed to Gatfield that Inman was the kind of man who was needed on the board. Today Inman is a well-known public figure, but in 1934 no one knew very much about him, apart from his connection with the hospital, and the board could not see in what way he was likely to be of help to them. They turned down Gatfield's suggestion.

‘I am not used,' Inman said to my father at a later date, ‘to having the offer of my services declined.'

An affluent but humbly born citizen of New Orleans, who had been blackballed by the Jockey Club, bought up the race track and turned it into a cemetery which acquired so much chic that the patrician families who had refused his application for membership now requested the privilege of taking up their ever-lasting rest on the ground they had denied him. Inman decided to buy up Chapman & Hall, and Gatfield gave him his assistance.

It was a palace revolution. For the moment my father's position looked uncertain. But Inman, on realizing the kind of people with whom he had to deal, decided to work with and not against the existing régime.

Inman achieved a miracle at Henrietta Street. He acquired the ordinary shares, pacified the preference shareholders, wrote down the capital and within a few months Chapman & Hall was flourishing. For him the enterprise was a kind of hobby. He got fun out of it. It was something new, another iron in his well-banked fire. For my father it was a relief and a release. He had no longer to worry about the firm's future or his own. He ceded the chairmanship of the board to Inman and concentrated as vice-chairman on his duties as consultant. At about the same time his domestic routine was simplified. In the summer of 1933 he sold Underhill and took a first and second storey maisonette in Highgate, a few yards
above the school cricket ground, in a short row of houses that stood back from Hampstead Lane behind a row of elms. The two main rooms faced north, but the room that my father used as a combined bedroom and study, faced south and was warm and sunny; there was a certain amount of traffic along the road, but he was too deaf to be disturbed by it.

He could scarcely have made a luckier choice. High-gate village has maintained many of the characteristics of a small county town. It has a life of its own. There is The Grove with its long trail of literary associations, from Coleridge to John Drinkwater and J. B. Priestley: there is the Highgate Institute; the tradespeople have the manners of those who have been used to dealing with the same families for generations. There is the school cricket ground where my father went every Saturday in summer. Not so far away is Ken Wood, acquired by the nation, where he took his walks.

When he first moved to Underhill, North End itself had had certain village attributes which Evelyn described in
A Little Learning,
but they have not survived the coming of the Tube and the creation of Golders Green. Being a householder in North End Road did not make my father a member of a community whereas being the sub-tenant of a flat in Highgate did. He began to make friends among his neighbours, which was what he needed now that he went into London only once a week. He soon became a familiar sight in Highgate, with his grey Homburg hat, his white hair curling above his collar, his short thick-set figure, his slow walk and the black poodle by his side.

His health was better now that he did not have to make those early starts for Henrietta Street; and the board meetings that had been such a penance to him when he was managing director, when he had felt that every
Friday his week's work was being subjected to criticism, were pleasantly dramatic interludes now that he arrived as the adviser, the elder statesman, patient, wise, encouraging. He looked forward to Fridays.

Nor did he lose the close touch with authors which had been one of the recompenses of his routine. He read every manuscript and corresponded with the authors, who very often would come out to take tea with him at Highgate.

The following letter that he wrote to Douglas Goldring is a typical example of his tactfully encouraging approach to authors.

I have just read ‘Pot Luck in England' with very great enjoyment. It seems to me, if I may say so, full to the brim of personality and appeal. The descriptions of scenery and character are intimately interpretative. I know many of the places well and you have pinned their very souls to the paper. The book ought to inspire the wandering spirits of road and meadow and comfort those who now have to linger in the loggia. It is a rare good book indeed.

BUT—(there is always a but—) I wondered if you could be induced to reconsider a few of the phrases and references here and there, which in a world where no two people think alike, might conceivably affect the book's popularity. I know you like to speak your mind; and that the acid of your
ripost
is to you like the woodcock's trail to the
gourmet
, but if you could deny yourself the satisfaction, here and there, I honestly believe you would be glad later on. I was asked to read the MS. for libel. I found no libel but I did trip over a few comments… The Author's Society, Lord Londonderry, Sir Thomas Inskip, Howard Spring? I sent a list to Gatfield. If it finds its way back to you, may I commend it to your sympathetic consideration? At any rate it was made in the friendliest possible spirit by Yours sincerely,