My Brother Evelyn & Other Profiles (7 page)

The posthumous honours bestowed upon Mr. Anthony Hope and Mr. John Galsworthy are… Thus had I begun when I opened another paper and learnt that Mr. Galsworthy's knighthood had been refused. The conferments, intended and achieved, are of the usual sort. Mr. Galsworthy's best work was done years ago, and Mr. Anthony Hope ought to have received a knighthood from Queen Victoria or not at all. I remember him with affection which has not been dimmed by the long lapse of years since I last heard of him. Up to the time of ‘Sophy of Kravonia' he amused and moved me more than most. His defects are obvious, and it is too late to discuss them; but he only narrowly missed being a very good novelist.

The usual thing has happened. When every honours list is being compiled some responsible jack-in-office remembers that ‘we must give a knighthood or two to literature and art'. Out of some Panjandrum's stagnant and cobwebbed mind emerge names from the past, names which were much talked of when last the dignitary read a book. I wonder how often they have to make researches to find out whether the objects of their esteem are really still above ground. I wonder whether this year, or last year, they wrote to Wilkie Collins or George Gissing offering a knighthood and received no reply. They are obviously running fearful risks; for the Galsworthy episode shows that proposed names sometimes slip into the definitive lists when answers have either not been received or have not been properly docketed.

Mr. John Galsworthy did himself credit, and his craft justice, in electing to remain a gentleman—even though on this occasion he would have had the distinction of climbing the honorific ladder in company with, though below and behind, that illustrious man, who has become a baronet, and Marmaduke, Lord Furness, who has been made a Viscount, shortly after complaining bitterly about the taxes at a company meeting whereat he also declared a dividend of 30 per cent. One cannot too often repeat that these titles, as a body, never have been any test or token of merit or service and are to-day less than ever so. Consequently, they are wasted on men of conspicuous genius or virtue unless they are given sufficiently early to be—the world being what it is—a real help in the man's career. A good artist who has not yet arrived at financial security could certainly be assisted by a knighthood, which would convince the sheep and the slowcoaches that he really was a person of importance. But to a man who has reached fame and a competence the thing has no uses at all.

This article had two amusing sequels. Galsworthy far from having ‘done his best work years ago', completed
The Forsyte Saga
with
In Chancery
and
To Let
and wrote two of his best plays,
The Skin Game
and
Loyalties
during the next five years.

The article was signed Solomon Eagle, the pseudonym of J. C. Squire, who became Sir John Squire in 1933.

ROBERT NICHOLS, ROBERT GRAVES, SIEGFRIED SASSOON, RICHARD ALDINGTON

Nineteen-seventeen, though a meagre year for novels, was a vintage one for poetry, and saw the emergence of a new group of soldier poets. The Rupert Brooke wave of enthusiasm which had welcomed the declaration of war, had not survived the slaughter of the Somme. In France, Henri Barbusse's novel
Le Feu
had struck a note of outraged indignation that was repeated by several of the younger English poets.

The third volume of
Georgian Poetry
was issued in the autumn and E. M. wrote in his foreword, ‘Of the eighteen writers included, nine appear in the series for the first time. The representation of the older inhabitants has in most cases been restricted in order to allow full space for the newcomers; and the alphabetical order of the names has been reversed, so as to bring more of these into prominence than would otherwise have been done.' The newcomers were W. J. Turner, J. C. Squire, Siegfried Sassoon, I. Rosenberg, Robert Nichols, Robert Graves, John Freeman, Maurice Baring and Herbert Asquith.

The three war poets, Nichols, Graves and Sassoon, were at that time treated as a team in the same way that Cecil Day Lewis, W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender were in the 1930s. In both instances the differences between the three were far greater than the resemblances, but the fact that the poets of the 1930s had left-wing affinities and that the soldier poets of 1917 were brother officers made their linking convenient and inevitable.

Graves, Nichols and Sassoon were all highly praised, and the order in which their qualities were assessed often depended less on the intrinsic merits of their poetry than on the political slant of the reviewer. Sassoon has told in his Sherston trilogy the story of his revolt against what he held to be the imperialist conduct of the war, and he was a useful weapon with which a left-wing writer could attack the Government. He had moreover a concentrated satiric strain, a journalist's eye for the telling phrase. The poems that were most quoted were those in which this strain was most pronounced.

‘Blighters'

I'd like to see a Tank come down the stalls.

‘In the Pink'

To-night he's in the pink; but soon he'll die.

And still the war goes on—
he
don't know why.

‘The General'

‘He's a cheery old card,' grunted Harry to Jack

As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack.

.….….….…

But he did for them both by his plan of attack.

Less attention was paid then to the tragic, tender poem ‘The Death Bed' by which today he is more often represented in anthologies.

For an imperialist, of the ‘my country right or wrong' type, like E. B. Osborn, Robert Nichols was the favourite. Nichols struck the heroic note:

Arms to have and to use them,

And a Soul to be made

Worthy if unworthy;

If afraid, unafraid!

Nichols's poetry could be used effectively, as Rupert Brooke's, in the peroration of a sermon. This is not said in disparagement of Nichols's poetry; what seemed good
in it then, seems good today. He was a genuine poet, but he appealed to a different public. He was in tune with the loyalties of a larger audience;
Ardours and Endurances
was the best-selling book of poetry since 1914
and Other Poems
, and he was sent to America on a propaganda mission.

Robert Graves was, I fancy, the least immediately successful of the three. He stood outside the conflict. He was wistful, witty, sentimental, regarding the war as an intrusion on his private world of childhood memories. He did not provide quotable material for the pacifist or for the home-front patriot. On his marriage to Nancy Nicolson in January 1918 Sydney Pawling remarked, ‘Heaven knows what they are going to live on, even if they roof their bungalow with the unsold copies of
Fairies and Fusiliers
.'

Graves sent me a copy of
Fairies and Fusiliers
inscribed ‘in hope of friendship', accompanied by a letter which I treasure. Reading it in my dug-out, I looked forward to the day when I should be back in London, when I could meet and become friends with him and with Sassoon and Nichols. I cherished, as every other soldier, the pipe dream of an easy wound that would send me back to London with a thin gold stripe upon my sleeve.

But I did not meet Graves till the autumn of 1963. We corresponded, we tried to arrange a meeting in 1919, but he was little in London, and our private lives took us on different roads. I have followed his career with the friendliest well-wishing. He has stayed the course and it is good to see that the youngest poets are reading him with respect.

Siegfried Sassoon was the only one of the three whom I met with any frequency; not nearly as often as I would have liked. Our meetings were so few that we can scarcely describe ourselves as being friends, but our meetings were so pleasant that acquaintanceship is too cold a word.
When the
Herald
became a weekly paper, Sassoon was appointed Literary Editor and I was one of his reviewers. I persuaded him to play in a cricket match against Clayes-more School; Gilbert Cannan was one of the other players. He and Sassoon had the same type of good looks, tall, thin, blondish, with Roman noses. They were both excellent company when they were in the mood, but they could both be very silent. We travelled down, ten of us, in a third-class carriage; Cannan and Sassoon sat opposite each other, in the centre. They did not speak a word the whole way to Winchester, and their barrier of silence divided the team into two quartets.

Sassoon has had a curious career. He started melodramatically, with questions being asked about him in the House of Commons. He was the rallying point both for the extreme left-wing pacifists, and for the men in khaki who suspected that the war was being unduly prolonged by interested parties, by the old men who were doing well out of it. It seemed to us desperately important that the realities of the war should be brought home to the civilian population. No one was bringing it home with the force and vividness that Sassoon did. He was the perfect person to argue our case for us. He was not a weak-kneed, long-haired neurotic. He was strong, handsome, vigorous, an athelete; there was no question of his courage, he had been awarded the M.C., his reckless feats in the line had become a legend. He was a case against whom it was very hard for ‘old men sitting in their clubs' to argue.

His start was meteoric. He stood on the threshold of infinite possibilities, and then quietly, undramatically, he left the stage. There are many poets who concentrate the essence of their work into a few years of intense production; Wordsworth was one them, Swinburne was another, though each went on writing into late old age. Poetry
is the wind that bloweth where it listeth; it visits certain people for a few years and then abandons them. The fires blaze high and then subside.

During the early ‘twenties and possibly afterwards, Sassoon had a house in Westminster which he shared with W. J. Turner. Turner was a good friend of mine. What was Sassoon doing, I would ask him? ‘I never see him about anywhere.'

‘He's in the country,' Turner would reply. ‘He doesn't like London. He only comes up to listen to concerts.'

After the publication of the fifth volume of
Georgian Poetry 1920–1922
, E. M. considered that the series had served its purpose. In that last volume Sassoon was not represented. There was no means of guessing into what new directions he had developed. I presumed that he was passing through a fallow season. Then in 1928 there appeared quietly and unobtrusively
Memoirs of a Foxhunting Man
. It was published anonymously. I have no idea why; not, I am very sure, to stimulate conjecture. That kind of thing would not appeal to a man so reserved and dignified. Perhaps he wanted to avoid the legend that had gathered round his name. He wanted his book to be reviewed on its own merits. He did not want to read review after review beginning: ‘How little one suspected in 1918 when
Counter-Attack
fluttered so many dovecotes that ten years later we should be considering such a book as this, yet it must not be forgotten that his previous book published a year earlier was entitled
The Old Huntsman
. What a change, though, from that high, fierce temper of revolt.'

When the book proved a success he made no attempt to make a mystery about its authorship. The secret was out within a few weeks. It was followed by a series of further memoirs and the Sherston trilogy is today an
established classic. But he did not write about anything that had happened after 1922.

For the majority of writers there comes a time when they lose interest in the future, swing round in their tracks and start a second voyage ‘à la recherche du temps perdu'. A capacity to develop, to remain contemporary, to keep pace with the present and scan the horizon eagerly, is not necessarily a test of quality.

I met Sassoon for the first time in the spring of 1919. He lunched with me at the Savage Club and brought E. M. Forster with him. There are points of resemblance between their careers. Writing in the
New Age
in January 1911, Arnold Bennett said that ‘no novel for very many years has been so discussed by the critics as Mr Forster's
Howard's End.…
Mr Forster is a young man. I believe he is still under thirty if not under twenty-nine. If he continues to write one book a year regularly, to be discreet, to refrain absolutely from certain themes, and to avoid a too marked tendency to humour, he will be the most fashionable novelist in England in ten years' time. His worldly prospects are very brilliant indeed. If, on the other hand, he writes solely to please himself, forgetting utterly the existence of the elite, he may produce some first class literature. The responsibilities lying upon him at this crisis of his career are terrific. And he so young too!'

Forster's reply to that prophecy was to make only one further appearance as a novelist, fourteen years later, with
A Passage to India
. In close upon half a century he has produced in addition to that one novel, a collection of short stories and a few volumes of belles-lettres.

Both he and Sassoon have, I imagine, adequate private incomes. A novelist is rarely able to retire before his talent has declined; I fancy there comes to most writers
that period in mid-career when they feel written out, and would give anything to be Civil Servants, to have a steady job with a pension at the end of it. Because they cannot afford to retire, they force themselves to go on writing and eventually get their second wind.

It may be that ‘autumn laurels wreathe for them' and they write one of their best books in their last decade. But it does not happen very often. Most writers who develop early have done their best work before they are fifty. Who will say that Forster was not wise since fate gave him the opportunity of doing so, to stand upon his achievement, in the belief that he could only smudge his record? Few names are more honoured today in English letters.

As the ‘thirties drew to their close and the threat of war became insistent, I wondered what Sassoon was thinking. Was he oppressed by a feeling of frustration? His protest had been in vain and the world had not learnt its lesson. In 1938 he published a book of poems that did not attract very much attention but had a new quality of wistful resignation. He seemed to have accepted the inevitable. Perhaps he had come to feel as many others had, that no compromise was possible with the Germany that Hitler had created. The world might be in a better position today if we had made peace as we could have done in December 1916, before the Russian Revolution, before America had entered the war, before the collapse of social life in Germany and Austria had paved the way for Hitler, and before all those hundreds of thousands of young men had been slaughtered in the mud of Passchendaele. It may be that a chance was missed then. But by 1939 it was too late, Hitler had to be brought to book. The Second War had to be carried through to ‘unconditional surrender'. The first need not have been.