Time to Be in Earnest (43 page)

This evening I went to the reception and prize-giving of the Society of Authors, which this year was held at the Roof Gardens, Kensington High Street, which I hadn’t previously seen. The choice of venue was a happy one as the rain had momentarily ceased and we were able to stroll outside, thus avoiding the congestion and high level of noise which one usually gets at these events. I was surprised at the gardens. There weren’t many flowers but a great deal of green, and it seemed amazing that the building could support such a weight of trees, earth and water. The two flamingoes looked rather depressed, as if aware that they were in the wrong place. Michael Palin presented the prizes and made a short, eminently appropriate and very funny speech. Afterwards I was invited by Mark Le Fanu to a small dinner party with Maggie Drabble, Michael Holroyd, Diana Shine, who is shortly, alas, to retire from the Society, and Michael Palin and his wife.

The Society of Authors awards ceremony is a cheerful event, largely because it provides an opportunity for writers to get together. The prizes, except for the Betty Trask Award, are not large and there is no shortlist and no formal dinner where prospective winners have to endure the probing eye of cameras. The Betty Trask Award has, however, always been controversial. It is awarded for a novel of a romantic or traditional nature by a writer under the age of thirty, and one knows perfectly well what Betty Trask, herself a romantic novelist, hoped to achieve. But
judges through the years have tended to concentrate on traditional rather than romantic novels and sometimes, I suspect, Betty Trask would be surprised if not a little aggrieved by the choice of book.

Macmillan are planning to reissue two novels by Nicholas Blake,
The Beast Must Die
and
A Tangled Web
, and have asked me to write an introduction suitable for both books. The reissues will be part of a Classic Crime series aimed at bringing back those old favourites which have been allowed to go out of print. I sent off my introduction this afternoon. Nicholas Blake (pseudonym of the poet Cecil Day-Lewis) was one of the writers I most enjoyed during my adolescence but, like Dorothy L. Sayers, he was an innovator of style rather than form. Most of the novels are written within the accepted contemporary conventions of an exciting narrative, a credible and tantalizing mystery and an amateur detective who combines creativity with ratiocination. He based his sleuth, Nigel Strangeways, on his friend the poet W. H. Auden, who was himself a lover of detective fiction and who wrote one of the defining essays on the genre, “The Guilty Vicarage,” published in 1948. In this Auden examines the obstinate appeal of the classical detective story in the light of Christian theology.

In
The Beast Must Die
Nigel Strangeways is married to his second wife, Georgia, a world-famous explorer who contributes her own insights and theories to his cases. It is interesting how many of the 1930s writers who created highly individual detectives married them to successful professional women. Lord Peter Wimsey finally wins popular detective novelist Harriet Vane, although there are differing opinions about whether this wish-fulfilment fantasy on the part of the author was entirely wise. Some readers find Harriet an irritating woman, although she does become more human after marriage. Albert Campion marries Lady Amanda Fitton, whom we are supposed to believe is an aeronautical engineer although we never hear of her with even a spanner, while Ngaio Marsh’s Roderick Alleyn is the husband of a famous painter, Troy. At least two of the writers, Dorothy L. Sayers and Ngaio Marsh, were able to make use of their own professional expertise. We can believe that
Harriet is a detective novelist and Troy a painter. I think this tendency on the part of women writers to equip their detectives with a successful and distinguished wife is particularly English. Georges Simenon is content to have Mme Maigret happily busy in the kitchen. It is a difficulty I have avoided by keeping Adam Dalgliesh a widower.

Yesterday to Chatsworth to present the Heywood Hill Literary Prize. It was a perfect day, to the satisfaction of organizers and guests alike as the event is held in the garden. I had Andy collect me at half-past nine to drive me to Derbyshire as I was worried that the one-day strike of maintenance men on the railways might mean a delay on the train. In fact it did, as the train and coach party were late in arriving, but not so late as to put the event seriously out of timing. I hadn’t seen Chatsworth before, largely, I suppose, because I don’t drive and many of the great houses aren’t easily accessible except by car. Superlatives become platitudes in the face of such beauty, such riches of art and architecture and such ordered perfection of nature.

The prize-giving itself was fun. There was a marquee and tables set both inside and on the lawn, and a red-jacketed band played the kind of jolly music one used to hear as a child at the end of piers, adding greatly to the air of slight frivolity. This was not a string quartet affair. It was planned to coincide with the annual party for mayors, so that my first impression was that the local authorities were astonishingly fond of literature. Then there were the literati from London, customers of Heywood Hill, and others who were there presumably because of friendship with the Duke and Duchess or with John Saumarez Smith, who manages the bookshop. So it was a strangely assorted party, but one which went remarkably well, although the mayoral chains sat gently clanking together and there wasn’t a great deal of mingling. I envied the confidence which could mix two such discordant groups in the happy assurance that a good time would be had by all, as, indeed, it was.

No one, including me, spoke for too long, which is always an advantage. The two prize-winners were Richard Ollard, whose biography of Pepys I had re-read before travelling, and a writer new to me, Norman
Lewis, travel writer, diarist and novelist. He is nearly ninety, and in his speech after the presentation described how, as a boy, he had become enchanted with the written word. He was sent to spend long holidays with three maiden aunts, one an epileptic and subject to constant fits, another who spent the day weeping and a third who was manic. They wouldn’t let him out of the house so he watched other children at play from the windows. However, they had a library and he was able to relieve the lonely hours of his imprisonment with reading. From this grew a lasting love of books and his own career as a writer. Of all the reasons given by writers for that first spur to creativity, being imprisoned by mad aunts is the most intriguing.

After lunch guests were able to see the house—particularly the library, where special books had been laid out—or to walk in the park. Then, when the coach had left for the station, I relaxed in the drawing-room until tea was served. I had been invited to stay the night and the room into which I was shown was called “The View.” It was appropriately named; the view was magnificent. I gazed out of the immense window with its twenty-four panes at the garden and, to the horizon, grasslands, hills, woods, and the summer sky. There were enough books in the room—carefully chosen to suit all possible tastes—to keep one happily reading for a month.

I went to rest before dressing for dinner and picked up Enid Bagnold’s autobiography. What a complicated, not entirely likeable, woman she must have been. One passage: “Who wants to become a writer, and why? Because it is the answer to everything, to why I am here, to uselessness. It’s the streaming reason for living; to note, to pin down, to build up, to create, to be astonished at nothing, to cherish the oddities, to let nothing go down the drain, to make something, to make a great flower out of life even if it’s a cactus.”

Who wants to become a detective novelist and why? To impose order on terrifying chaos? To bring justice out of injustice? To give the illusion that we live in a moral and comprehensible universe? To make money? To provide a structure within which writer and reader can safely confront terror, violence, death? To show that to some things at least there is an answer? To distance the atavistic fear of cruelty and death? To make a pattern? To explore men and women under the trauma of a police investigation for the ultimate crime? To create a modern morality play in which truth is at least established even if it doesn’t prevail? To celebrate justice? To get the better of one’s enemies? To gain the illusion of power?
To advise and entertain, solace and delight? Because it’s the thing one does best?

Bagnold quotes a phrase from Gibbon which caught my eye: “In that silent vacancy that precedes our birth.” Is our love for the architecture, art and beauty, which links us to the past, part of our need to know where we come from and, by touching, seeing, loving inanimate objects, to give the illusion that we have been here longer than our brief span? It can only work one way, and perhaps that is part of the terror of death. When that final lid is screwed down on us there will be no more vicarious living. But now we stretch out minds, even hands, into the past and gain a spurious immortality. The silent vacancy comes alive.

Tom Stoppard was among the guests and I found in my room the Faber paperback edition of his broadcast plays. They were first broadcast as long ago as 1966 and I can’t think why the BBC doesn’t let us hear them again. The Corporation must have a wealth of archive. Why is it so neglected? Why do we no longer see on our screens the single play by a distinguished playwright?

Before I began dressing for dinner the telephone rang and the butler said that the Duke wondered whether I would like a glass of champagne. Indeed I would, and he brought it up personally to all his guests. I was thinking how much at home one feels in the private apartments. But how strange to live in a house where every yard walked reveals something fresh of beauty, interest or history, where one glances up to see a Velázquez, a Rubens, a Lawrence, a Frans Hals, a Van Dyck. Some of the Duke’s purchases of modern art were resting against the wall, obviously awaiting their right place. It was interesting to see that even the owners of great houses face the problems of we humbler mortals, not knowing what to do with recent acquisitions. I could never get used to living in a house with 175 rooms, 359 doors, nearly 8,000 panes of glass to be cleaned, 56 lavatories and 3,426 feet of passages. It must sometimes seem far more of a responsibility than a pleasure.

After dinner, sitting on the terrace with the other house guests as darkness fell, with the house floodlit and golden behind us, I wished I was standing on a distant hill looking down at it.

This morning, from my bedroom window, looking out over the formal gardens to the river, I could see coloured tents and a large marquee erected for what was apparently to be some kind of flower show, and in the next field a fun-fair with a children’s carousel. Small figures moved about with that air of unflurried busyness which is always agreeable to
watch. I could have been Glencora, Duchess of Omnium, surveying the preparations for her great summer fête. I almost expected to see the archery targets being set up for the beribboned and crinolined ladies to demonstrate their skills while allowing the gentlemen discreetly to help them pull the bow. But instead the fête burst into bloom with the morning and I watched while, like an accelerated film, shrubs and small trees appeared as if by magic. It was one of those moments when a vivid scene from fiction becomes reality.