My Brother Evelyn & Other Profiles (28 page)

This is not, I must explain in advance, a story that confers any credit on myself.

In Baghdad there was an almost complete lack of eligible feminine society. Iraq is a strictly Moslem country and my three years there were celibate. My only relief from the consequent strain was an occasional ‘mental orgy' with the kind of book that is catalogued as ‘curious'. Such books were unobtainable in Iraq but they were in copious supply in Cairo. If the arrest was made, I should be sent there to assist in the interrogation, and I could replenish my library. I weighed the reasons for and against the making of the arrest. They seemed to balance out exactly. If I had had no personal preference either way, I should have flicked a coin. But I had a personal preference.

There are those who out of an exaggerated sense of duty would have chosen against their own wishes; in the same way there are those in authority who deliberately ignore the claims to promotion of a friend or relative. I am not like that. I tabled every pro and con, decided that the score was level, and ordered the arrest.

Perhaps more often than one would think, some frivolous equivalent of the need of a sex-starved officer for a dirty book leads to the click of handcuffs.

I did not, as it happened, go to Cairo. The suspect either in fright or in an attempt to commit suicide fell off
the train in which he was being taken as a prisoner. He was in hospital for several weeks. By the time he had recovered, the situation in Baghdad had shifted. I was heavily occupied with another case, and a younger officer who had recently had a bad attack of sand-fly fever and who was felt to need a change of climate was sent instead. The cross-examination of the suspect did not produce any very conclusive evidence, but my brother officer returned glowing with recovered health after a rumbustious romance with a member of the Palestinian A.T.S.

In another respect too, my six years' breather was a great piece of good fortune. It gave me an opportunity to review my own writing from a detached critical standpoint and to reassess it.

In January 1945, when the Battle of the Bulge had been converted into victory, and it had become clear that the war in Europe would be over early in the summer, it was rumoured that the oldest soldiers and those with the longest service records would be demobilized at once. By the end of the year, therefore, I should be back at my desk, at work on novels and short stories. I looked forward confidently to their resumption, but I presumed that I should find the machine a little rusty when I set it into motion, that it would take me a short story or two and half a novel to get back into smooth production. I thought I would be wise to read some of my earlier books and see what standard I had set myself. I wrote to England to have three or four sent out.

The reading of them was a considerable shock. I was disconcerted by the slovenliness, not in their actual writing but in the development of the plots. I would construct a situation, for fifty or sixty pages the narrative would mount rapidly; then there would be a break; the story would start somewhere else. There would be fifty or sixty
effective pages, then once again there would be a break; eventually at the close there would be an attempt to gather up the loose threads in a final situation that would give significance to the whole.

A novel is a parabola. The curve is gradual; about a third of the way up it steepens; four-fifths of the way along its length it turns into a sharp decline towards the climax. When you are going downhill, writing is easy and very pleasant; it is a gallop. The opening when the situation is set out and the characters set in motion can also be—though it is not invariably so—easy and pleasant writing. The difficult part comes when the rise of the curve steepens with every implication of the story pointed, in a gathering momentum, to the peak. Look at any major novel and you will see this principle at work. What I had done, I now realized, time and again, was to shirk that extra effort that was required to send the curve to its peak; instead I had taken a short cut and reached the climax along the level. By so doing I had not got the full dramatic value out of the situation, nor had I raised my characters to the summit of experience where they could reveal themselves and their potentials. I had never exploited to the full the situation that I had set out in the first fifth.

I had taken ‘short cuts' and that is fatal, not only for the artist but in every walk of life. How had I come to do it? I exposed myself to a personal inquisition. I had known all along that the novelist's problem was three-pronged. He had to find the material for his books, he had to find the leisure and peace of mind in which to write them, and he had somehow to fit into that pattern the human beings with whom he was personally involved. Looking back at the five years before the war, I recognized that I had not given myself enough leisure in which to get my writing done.

Before my marriage, I had gone into seclusion when I had a book on hand. In the early ‘twenties when I had a half-time employment with Chapman & Hall, I used, during the autumn and winter, to go every Monday night to a small inn in the country, work for three solid days and return to London on the Friday morning. During the later ‘twenties, when I was no longer working for Chapman & Hall, I would leave London for long periods; I never found that I could work in London, any more than I was to find later that I could work in New York: too many things were happening, the air was too electric. I would go to the South of France, to Villefranche; or to an inn in Devonshire, the Easton Court Hotel at Chagford on whose stout tables many writers have inscribed many solid books. A small hotel bedroom has its link with the monk's cell. There is the discipline of contemplation. On my long trips abroad to the South Seas, the West Indies and the Far East, I had found that same discipline. There were no Pan-American Clippers in those days. I would sit for hour after hour, in my cabin or in the smoking-room, at a table; then at the end of the day I would walk round the deck, breathing in the clean sea air, planning out my next day's work. I would find that a transatlantic crossing gave me exactly the right amount of time for a ten-thousand-word magazine short story. My best work during the five years before the war was the short stories that I wrote on transatlantic crossings. But I had not, during those years, given my novels a chance.

I thought I was doing so, but in point of fact I had not. My wife had bought a comfortably sized Queen Anne house on the Hampshire-Berkshire borders in which I had a comfortable study. But we also had a small service flat in London. I spent on the average a couple of nights a week there. I was a Clubman. The Wine and Food Society started in 1932. There was a sudden specialized interest
in wine. We all carried around little ivory cards tabulating the good vintage years. There was a good deal of entertaining.

During the summer I played cricket two or three times a week and went on a couple of tours. I also played golf regularly. We had week-end guests. We entertained and were entertained both in the country and in London. My magazine market in the United States was developing, and I went to New York most years. I was, in fact, leading a varied and entertaining life, but I was not giving myself those long, quiet, uneventful periods which a novel requires, which I had given myself during the ‘twenties, but had not since my marriage. With only one of my novels written in the 1930s was I satisfied, a West Indian novel on which I was at work when the war broke out.

I had begun it in late June. I was short of money. I wanted to go to New York in September, so I decided to avoid London until then and stay in the country, writing continuously. I went to work on the book again in January 1940. I was then back in the Army, at Dorchester, organizing the training of recruits in the manipulation of track-lined vehicles. I have always found the atmosphere of regimental life conducive to writing. You are leading a healthy open-air life: you are in touch with human beings, you have congenial company; your mind is not greatly exercised. You have plenty of opportunity to brood. When I was in the Army in 1916, I wrote
The Loom of Youth
in two stretches of three and three and a half weeks, writing for two hours before parades and two hours after them. In 1940 I wrote the last fifty thousand words of
No Truce with Time
in seven weeks, getting up every morning at half past two and going to bed every night at eight.

During those seven weeks I lived with the book. It
came out at an unlucky time, in February 1941, when neither in England nor America was anyone likely to be enthusiastic about an unsociological story dealing with characters who, though contemporary, were not affected by the war. It was, however, serialized by
Redbook
and the film rights were bought by M.G.M. though the picture was never made. I think it one of my better books. Certainly, as I re-read it in Baghdad, on the eve of my return to authorship, I accepted the lesson that it had to give; that I must, in future, give myself the proper atmosphere in which to write long novels. I must build for myself a routine of day-to-day eventlessness, so that I could dig deep into my subconscious and discover how much the particular subject had to offer.

Nearly always the idea for a novel or short story comes in a flash, but that flash—flash is the wrong metaphor, but it is an accepted cliché—is the first showing above ground of a plant that may have deep roots. You cannot tell till you have tended it, watered it, protected it, given it time. It may be a tree, it may be a flower; but you must not dig it up and transplant it right away. That first showing of green is nothing in itself. You have to wait. And that was the vow I made myself in the spring of 1945, in far Baghdad. I would turn over a new leaf. I would give myself the time to write.

If I had not had that six years' break, if I had not had that opportunity of taking stock of myself, of seeing my books, from a distance, with new eyes, I do not believe that I should have been able to stay the course into the ‘sixties. Between 1919 and 1939 I published fifteen novels. Since 1945 I have published only five. The last three certainly are better than any of their between-the-wars predecessors, and have been considerably more successful.

E. S. P. HAYNES

I returned from the Middle East in mid-June 1945. Almost the first number that I rang was that of E. S. P. Haynes, one of my oldest friends, whom I had first met in January 1917.

I was home then from Sandhurst for the Christmas recess and S. P. B. Mais was staying at my parents' house; he had dined on a Saturday night with Haynes, returned late and noisily and disturbed the poodle. On the following morning he was not at breakfast. When I returned from church he was still in his room. He sent down a message that he was supposed to be going for a walk with his host of the previous evening but that he did not feel like walking; could Haynes be telephoned? At that time there was no telephone in my parents' house. Oh, well, Petre Mais replied; it did not matter. He did not suppose that his host would feel like walking either.

At a quarter past twelve, however, a large, hatless, comfortably-dressed man of middle age arrived. I told him that Mais had not expected him to appear that morning. Our visitor looked perplexed. ‘Why not?' he said. Those two words made a rapid thumb-nail sketch of a personality. They defined three traits, a strong head, a refusal to let the new day be disturbed by the accidents of the previous night, and a rigid observance of routine.

During over thirty years of friendship, he retained those characteristics.

By birth a Pollock, by marriage a connection of the Huxleys, a scholar of Eton and of Balliol, a lawyer and a man of letters, thirty or so books stand against Haynes's
name in the British Museum's catalogue. Some of them are of the type that booksellers list under the generic title of ‘belles-lettres'; the most successful were his
Lawyer's Notebooks
—a four-volume series of reflections, comments, recollections; others were controversial;
Divorce Law Reform
and
The Decline of Liberty in England
. He was a persistent propagandist for man's right to live in the way he chooses, but it is not as the champion of individual liberty but as an individual that his friends remember him. He was one of the last of the eccentrics.

Everything about him was unusual, his time-table, his habits, his appearance. He was the untidiest man that I have ever seen. He never discarded a pair of trousers while its seat held together, and at least one key button was invariably unadjusted. The spare bed in his own room was piled with books and pipes, though I never saw him smoke anything but a cigar. He had some twenty pairs of shoes all of them half-worn. His end of the dining table was arrayed with small jars, bottles, tins of chutney, garlic, sauces, charcoal biscuits. Evelyn Waugh must have had him in mind when he created in
Scoop
the character of Uncle Lionel, who regarded the dish that the servant handed him as the raw material for a meal, onto which he worked from the stock of small bottles spread before him.

He was Rabelaisian in his conversation and in his behaviour. The plumbing in his chambers at Lincoln's Inn was primitive and to save himself the trouble of walking down a passage and up a flight of stairs, he kept in his cupboard a chinaware utensil; at least one female client was astonished when in the middle of a conference he rose to his feet, turned his back and availed himself of its convenience. It never occurred to him that he was doing anything unusual. He never did anything for effect, that was his great charm. He was of a piece. He
‘did what came naturally'. Having evolved a pattern that was congenial to himself, he observed it rigidly.

Shortly after his marriage he acquired the lease of a stucco-fronted four-storey house in St John's Wood Park. He lived in it until a few months before his death in 1950. In Lincoln's Inn he had the same chambers in which his father had worked and for forty-five years, for six days every week, his horizon was bounded by two long lines of Georgian windows. He did the bulk of his work between ten and two. He had a family practice. He was a rare and unwilling litigant. His appearances in the lower courts were exceptional and at half past two o'clock he went out to lunch.