A Man of Parts (62 page)

Letty’s story was given a happy ending by the unexpected return of Teddy, wounded but alive, but the hero of the book could not be relieved of his grief so easily. Mr Britling’s recovery from the trauma of his son’s death began when he heard that his former German tutor, Herr Heinrich, had also died, in a Russian prisoner of war camp, and he decided to send to Heinrich’s parents the violin their son left behind in the haste of his departure, with a note of explanation that quickly grew into a long letter in which he relieved his own feelings by sharing them. ‘
If you think that these two boys have both perished, not in some noble common cause but one against the other in a struggle of dynasties and boundaries and trade routes and tyrannous ascendancies, then it seems to me that you must feel as I feel that this war is the most tragic and dreadful thing that has ever happened to mankind
.’ There were many drafts, begun and abandoned, as Britling worked through the night and into the next dawn on his text, struggling to be honest and to avoid false feeling and false rhetoric – what he referred to disparagingly as his ‘
tinpot style
’. As the letter grew longer and longer it became less like a personal letter and more like a prophetic public utterance. ‘
Never had it been so plain to Mr Britling that he was a weak, silly, ill-informed and hasty-minded writer, and never had he felt so invincible a conviction that the Spirit of God was in him, and that it fell to him to take some part in the establishment of a new order of living upon the earth
.’ His last paragraph began: ‘
Let us set ourselves with all our minds and hearts to the perfecting and working out of the methods of democracy and the ending of the kings and emperors and priestcrafts and the bands of adventurers, the traders and owners and forestallers who have betrayed mankind into this morass of hate and blood – in which our sons are lost – in which we flounder still
…’ But, he reflected, ‘
How feeble was this squeak of exhortation!
’ and left it unfinished. He thought of sending the violin back to Heinrich’s parents without a covering letter, but: ‘
“No. I must write to them plainly. About God as I have found him. As he has found me
.”’ The book ended with the exhausted Mr Britling standing at the window of his study as the sun rose. ‘
Wave after wave of warmth and light came sweeping before the sunrise across the world of Matching’s Easy. It was as if there was nothing but morning and sunrise in the world. From away toward the church came the sound of some early worker whetting a scythe
.’ The image of the scythe pleased him with its ambiguous mixture of associations: the Grim Reaper, swords into ploughshares, the cycle of the seasons promising the renewal of life after death.

When he decided to call his novel
Mr Britling Sees It Through
he believed that by the time it was published the war would be over, or nearly over; but in July, while it was going through the press, the battle of the Somme began, and was still continuing as the book was published in September. When the battle could be said to have finished, which wasn’t until November, a million men had died or been wounded on both sides, and nothing had been gained to bring the war nearer to a conclusion. He was apprehensive that in this context his title would seem inappropriately optimistic and adversely affect the novel’s reception, which was a matter of serious concern because his financial position was not healthy. His remark to Letty, at the very beginning of the war, ‘
I’m a rich man
’, seemed hubristic in retrospect. All the expenses he had incurred in the last couple of years – the extension and renovation of Easton Glebe, the lavish entertaining there, the maintenance of Rebecca’s household, the rental of his London flat, the purchase of Gladys, and the school fees for his boys, now boarding at Oundle – these things, and many others, had drained his savings alarmingly, and he reckoned that he had only £5,000 left in his bank accounts.
The Research Magnificent
, published in 1915, had not done particularly well; unsurprisingly, for it was essentially a reprise of all the other prig novels with more exotic locations. Only his prolific journalism had kept him solvent, and he badly needed a best-seller.

To his immense relief and gratification
Mr Britling
turned out to be just that. It caught perfectly the public mood as the news from the Western Front got worse and worse – it reflected and articulated people’s grief for wasted young lives, their anger at the incompetence of their political and military leaders, their struggle to reconcile the monstrous evil of the war with the ideals of duty, patriotism and religious faith which had been instilled in them from childhood. It received rapturous reviews, was praised by many of his old adversaries – even Mrs Humphry Ward – and made the subject of sympathetic sermons in churches. It brought him a huge postbag from appreciative readers, especially from those whose husbands or sons had been killed in the war, many of whom sent their condolences on the assumption that he had lost a grown-up son himself, so vividly had he described Mr Britling’s bereavement. The book went into thirteen impressions before Christmas, and had earned him £20,000 in royalties in America by the same date. His financial worries were over, at least for some considerable time.

– So one might say you profited from the catastrophe of the Somme – from the whole bloody war, in fact
.

– Well you could say that Homer profited from the Trojan War. It’s a paradox of all writing that deals with tragedy: writers take negative experience and turn it into something positive. If it comes off we get praised, and paid for it too. That doesn’t mean that
Mr Britling
put me on the same footing as a war profiteer.

– But did you really believe that religious stuff at the end? Or was it an artful device to ingratiate yourself with the British public?

– I believed it while I was writing the book – it wouldn’t have worked otherwise. You can’t fake something like that. Writing
Mr Britling
was a kind of religious experience for me – what William James describes as ‘conversion’ in
Varieties of Religious Experience
. When Britling convicts himself of being a ‘weak, silly, ill-informed and hasty-minded writer’, it’s my
mea culpa
as well as his. I was ashamed of some of the bombastic, swaggering stuff I wrote about the war in the early stages, and I wanted to confess. And as I wrote the scene in which Britling tries to comfort Letty I found all this religious language welling up – from my childhood, I suppose, from my mother’s piety, which I’d reacted against in youth, but now it seemed the right kind of language. I began to see a way to articulate my secular utopianism in the language of Christianity and make it perhaps more accessible to the mass of people. In
God the Invisible King
, published a year later, I developed Britling’s ideas discursively in my own voice.

– A lot of your freethinking friends thought you’d lost your senses in that book
.

– It went down a treat with the public, though. I remember sending Rebecca a kind of Psalm.

Theological books are selling

Selling like Hot Cakes
,

And the Breasts of my Mother Land

Are tight with the Milk of the Word
.

As for me I lunch with Liberal Churchmen

I dine with Bishops

Lambeth Palace is my Washpot
.

– It
was
a cynical exercise then?

– Not at all. I repudiated my conversion later, but at the time I was quite sincere. I could see the funny side of my sudden popularity as a radical Christian theologian, but I was sincere. And whatever you say,
Mr Britling Sees It Through
was a good novel. Britling lives.

– The last good one you wrote, in fact. The last one anybody would want to read twice
.

– You’re probably right.

– But you went on to write another twenty-two of them. All dead as doornails now. Fodder for the penny tray outside the second-hand bookshop
.

– Yes. But I didn’t know that then.

In September 1916 he had several reasons to feel pleased with himself:
Boon
was forgotten;
Mr Britling
was a hit; Winston Churchill wrote to congratulate him on ‘
the success with which your land battleship idea has been put into practice
’ (the British Mark 1 tanks had actually a very limited success in the battle of the Somme, but he appreciated the acknowledgement to his Land Ironclads); and on the 21st of the month he reached the age of fifty in good health. Even his sexual life had improved. In August he had finally voiced his dissatisfaction with the libidinal opportunities of Alderton in a letter to Rebecca: ‘
I wish we could fix up some sort of life that would detach us lovers a little more from the nursery. I want to make love to you and be with you as a lover day and night and to have all that more of a lark and companionship than it is … You see in the nature of things we haven’t much more than ten or twelve years more of love and nakedness and all those dear things. It’s a pity to so arrange life that we get nothing better than snatched moments of the night together and evenings with those two appalling bores Wilma and GooGoo
.’ (GooGoo being Anthony’s name for his nurse.) He asked her to think up some scheme to offload Anthony on to her sisters so that they could get away together, even go abroad. She didn’t manage this, but she did agree with his proposal to rent a studio in Chelsea as a love nest. ‘
Prepare for thorough lickings in the London studio
,’ he wrote lasciviously by return. The Chelsea studio fell through, but he found rooms on Claverton Street in his old haunt, Pimlico, which served them for some time as a rather seedy place of assignation. Secrecy and privacy enhanced their lovemaking, but the underlying tensions in their relationship were unresolved.

In the spring of 1917 Rebecca moved with Anthony to Leigh-on-Sea on the Essex coast in order to escape the threat of Zeppelin raids on London. The house was charming but the location badly chosen as it proved to be on the favoured route of the new German four-engined Gotha bombers, whose airmen used the Thames to navigate their way to London, and sometimes dropped their bombs on estuary towns like Leigh, mistaking them for the outskirts of the capital. ‘
It is so unpleasing to sit down at dinner with a Gotha trying to nest on the roof and a noise filling the sky as though the Trinity were unskilfully moving a piano
,’ Rebecca wrote to a mutual friend, but the insouciant tone was entirely faked, as he discovered when he was staying with her during such a raid. At the sound of bombs exploding in the distance she snatched Anthony from his cot and hid with him under the dining-room table, moaning ‘Oh God! Oh God!’ as the throb of the planes’ engines grew louder, and crying out, ‘We’re going to die! I don’t want to die!’ as they passed overhead. He felt some fear himself, but his own way of dealing with it was deliberately to step out on to the balcony and scan the skies, simulating calm, and Rebecca’s undignified hysterics upset him.

After his return home he sent her a long letter of complaint about her behaviour which broadened out into a speculation about their innate incompatibility. ‘
These trivialities seem to have released my mind to look at a whole group of facts that I have refused to look at before. I thought, “Do I love this woman at all?” I thought, “I’ve made up a story about her and it isn’t the true one
.”’ What was the true one? What were the facts? That he had an essentially positive outlook, whereas she seemed to attract and embrace negative experience, for example her continuing intimacy with her sisters and mother, who hated him, and the entourage of dreary women servants and companions with which she surrounded herself and discouraged intimacy. ‘
All the past four years which might have been a love-adventure in our memories, your peculiar genius has made into an utterly disagreeable story – which has become the basis for an utter hopelessness about anything to come. It is your nature to darken your world and blacken every memory. So long as I love you you will darken mine
.’ He wrote and dispatched this letter more from a need to relieve his feelings and in the hope of making her more amenable to his desires than with the design of ending their relationship, and he was somewhat shaken when she fired back a fierce response, claiming that she hadn’t loved him for the past year, and that she was perfectly capable of supporting herself and Anthony if only he would make an adequate financial settlement on her and stop upsetting her with his unreasonable demands. He replied temperately, ‘
If I’m not going to be your lover I’m going to be your loving brother. We have told each other some rather astonishing truths. Now let us keep all the appearances going for a time, a little time anyhow, before we change anything
.’ By the end of the month the quarrel was over and a truce sealed on the bed in Claverton Street, setting a pattern for the years that followed.

Meanwhile on the bigger battlefield, there was no prospect of a truce, as the armies slogged at each other like weary, bloodied pugilists whose trainers refused to throw in the towel. But it was obvious to him, once America came into the war on the Allied side in 1917, that Germany was doomed, however long it might take, and a year later he had what looked like an opportunity to play a useful part in the final act of the conflict. Lloyd George, who was now Prime Minister in place of the discredited Asquith, had brought two press lords into government – Rothermere as Minister for Air, Beaverbrook as Minister of Information – and Beaverbrook appointed another press lord, Northcliffe, as his Director of Enemy Propaganda. Newspaper men had a better appreciation of his value than politicians and civil servants, and when Northcliffe invited him to join the team at Crewe House as chairman of a newly formed Policy Committee for Propaganda in Enemy Countries, he accepted eagerly. He believed it was vitally important to prepare the German people to accept defeat, by making clear that the Allies would not be vindictive in victory and that the end of the war would be an opportunity to achieve permanent peace for the whole world. He had lately become involved in committees promoting the idea, first floated by Leonard Woolf and others back in 1915, of a League of Nations, which would supervise the post-war peace treaty and guarantee international security on a permanent basis. He planned to use his chairmanship of the Propaganda Committee to ensure that these positive messages were incorporated in the leaflets created at Crewe House and distributed by various means to the soldiers and civilians of the Central Powers. Before long he sent a forceful memorandum from his committee to the Foreign Office, putting forward the arguments for a constructive peace settlement, including a plausible draft constitution for a League of Nations, and received a patronising lecture from the head of political intelligence in response. The Crewe House team nevertheless persisted in promoting the League of Nations idea in their publications, and it received lukewarm endorsement from the government. It was of course essential that British public opinion should be educated in the same direction, but this was not within his committee’s scope. Northcliffe and his fellow press lords did nothing, however, to assist the process in their own newspapers: vitriolic anti-German reporting and editorialising continued unabated in the popular press, especially Northcliffe’s
Daily Mail
and London
Evening News
. When he wrote to Northcliffe, pointing out the inconsistency, the latter flatly refused to do anything about it, and replied curtly: ‘
I entirely agree with the policy adopted by my newspapers, which I do not propose to discuss with anyone
.’ He realised belatedly that the propaganda produced at Crewe House promising a constructive and generous peace settlement was cynically designed for German consumption only, and that the government was intent on punishing Germany as well as defeating it. He felt exploited and betrayed, and resigned his chairmanship only a few months after taking it on.