Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 (85 page)

For book-writing our swift, eager days did not, perhaps, provide the best possible atmosphere, although they did supply a wealth of material for that future time when some change in political or personal circumstances would bring the opportunity for recapitulating their complicated emotions and experiences. But book-writing of a sort was carried on with fervour; and in spite of lectures, and teaching, and propaganda, and persevering much-travelled articles, our first novels were both finished by the spring of 1922. Roland’s father, after reading and approving of
The Dark Tide
, decided to take it to Putnams’, where a leading member of the firm was an old friend of his, while Winifred, also by his advice, approached Cassells’ with
Anderby Wold
, her story of Yorkshire farm life.

Putnams’ reaction to
The Dark Tide
- a dramatic tale of Oxford women students, with black and white values quite unrelieved by half-tones - was much, and perhaps even more than, what might have been expected. Frankly, they said, they did not recommend publication, and though they thought the author should go on writing, they suggested that perhaps it would not be a bad idea for her to wait until she had settled down and had a little more experience of life before attempting another novel.

I wrote rather bitterly in response to the letter from Roland’s father which enclosed this communication, for I felt that I had had quite as much experience of life (to say nothing of death) as I wanted for the present. After giving him my opinion of Putnams’ perspicacity, I begged him not to involve himself in any more of my failures; would he please return the manuscript and let me shoulder the burden of possible future rejections myself? In sending back the book, he suggested that I should try John Murray, so I called, greatly intimidated, at the offices of that impressive and decorous firm. There I saw Mr Leonard Huxley, who received me with gracious benevolence; I was standing, he told me, in the place where Byron had stood, and I was a young author aspiring to fame. His publishing house, however, soon repudiated the responsibility of helping me to achieve that aspiration, and for the second time
The Dark Tide
returned to Doughty Street, where
Anderby Wold
, back from Cassells’, very soon joined it.

At this moment I happened to read a Press paragraph stating that the
Femina Vie-Heureuse
Prize for 1921-22 had been awarded to Rose Macaulay for her novel
Dangerous Ages
. Tentatively I wrote to congratulate her without the slightest hope that she would remember me, but she replied almost at once, concluding with an inquiry after the progress of the novel that I had mentioned at the Somerville Bazaar. Nothing, had I but known it, could have been more profoundly self-sacrificing than this inquiry by an established writer of a junior Somervillian, for all successful authors are accustomed to receive so many requests from complete strangers for assistance with publishers, and so many unsolicited manuscripts with confident demands for free criticism, that the mere mention of somebody who has an unpublished novel and wants advice might well be enough to send any one of them out of town for a week.

Innocently regarding myself as quite a special case, I poured out to Miss Macaulay the tale of my disappointment over
The Dark Tide
, and in another letter of which the generous kindness was quite unspoilt by condescension, she suggested that I should send the book to Collins, her own publishers, offering at the same time to write to their chief reader, Mr J. D. Beresford, on my behalf. When the book, despite her intervention, came back once more, with a detailed letter of criticism upon which Mr Beresford must have spent several hours of precious time, she asked me to tea to talk it over. What she really thought of the raw crudities which even a cursory glance revealed, I now shudder to imagine, but she was too considerate, and too wise, to suggest those fundamental reconstructions which maturity and literary experience alone can make. Her advice enabled me to make numerous improvements in such details of style and syntax as were capable of amendment, and I carried away a glowing memory of hot crumpets and brisk, incisive conversation upon which I relied exclusively for stimulus in the disheartening months that followed.

During the remainder of that year I sent
The Dark Tide
to almost every publisher in London and elsewhere. It came back, on each occasion a little grimier and more dog-eared, from Constable, and Blackwell, and Chatto & Windus, and Martin Secker, and Sidgwick & Jackson; after that my memory loses count. Most publishers contented themselves with rejection-slips, but quite a number of eminent ‘readers’ wrote letters of advice, suggesting that I should rewrite the beginning, or the end, or the middle, or counselling a different form of dialogue, or urging me to change the story’s melancholy conclusion to a ‘happy ending’.

One thing, at any rate, this prolonged period of rebuff did teach me, and that was the enormous, unfailing patience of the established author with the novice. After each new rejection the untiring Miss Macaulay was ready with her inexhaustible supply of suggestions and encouragement, and to-day, when unsolicited manuscripts arrive at my house from unfamiliar sources with requests for criticism at my busiest moments, I remember her generosity to me when I was an unutterable nuisance myself, and wish that I could feel or show to my importunate correspondents a quarter of her persistent goodwill. Her periodic letters were the lamps which lighted that unprofitable year of 1922, so black in its continual discouragement, so empty, after the small comparative triumphs at Oxford, of any sign of ultimate literary success. But for Rose Macaulay I might well have given up, and although in the past ten years I have done so little of all that I hoped to do, and have advanced so short a distance along that humble path to achievement which so dimly resembles the shining highroad of my early confident dreams, I have never ceased to be glad that I did go on.

Meanwhile, the vicissitudes of Winifred’s novel,
Anderby Wold
, were proving much briefer and far less harassing. When we called at the Doughty Street studio before going to our respective families for a holiday after the Geneva Summer School of 1922, Winifred opened a letter from the firm of John Lane which made, to her humble astonishment, an offer for her book. To me also this event was something of a psychological crisis; Winifred was considerably my junior, at Oxford she had followed modestly in my literary wake, and it had simply never occurred to me that her work could be preferred and published before my own. In Kensington, alone in my bedroom, I made myself face and acknowledge the hard fact that
Anderby Wold
was a better book than
The Dark Tide
. Inwardly I knew it to be more balanced and mature than my own novel in spite of the fact that Winifred had planned and begun it when barely twenty-two, and at last I wrote her the appreciation which I had dumbfoundedly withheld in Bloomsbury.

‘I am trying to make myself believe that a book of yours will really exist, with your name on the cover, and we shall perhaps stand outside Bumpus’s and look at it on the shelf of new novels . . . I know the reviews will be nice - it is a kind book as well as a clever one and has always inspired me with a secret envy . . . You make me feel very humble - one who talks but never achieves while you quietly achieve and don’t talk. You will be quite famous by the time you are my age - and one rare thing will make your success the more distinguished, and that is that you cannot get any success so great as the success you deserve . . . I shall be glad really to know someone intimately who succeeds - just because all my best friends so far have either died before they could achieve anything or else are held up for lack of funds. One needs a change to prove that just occasionally life does repay one for living . . . Somehow the whole world seems subtly changed by your book getting taken. I suppose it’s like what I said . . . about crossing the gulf between aspiration and achievement; once people have done it they are never quite the same again.’

By the end of 1922, I had come to the sad but resigned conclusion that
The Dark Tide
was never likely to find a home, and in desperation had begun to draft my second novel, ‘The Man on the Crucifix’, which was afterwards published under the title
Not Without Honour
. In spite of this new experiment, the hope of becoming a writer of any kind was flickering very low; apart from Rose Macaulay, the literary world of London seemed to have made it very clear that they did not want me and my ingenuous efforts, and I began once again to feel that I could justify my survival of the War only by piping for peace upon an indefinite series of platforms. And yet, notwithstanding the lack of external evidence from publishers and editors, I could not quite slay an inward conviction that it was not really upon platforms that I could best plead either that or any other unpopular cause.

‘As Vera Brittain, lecturer and speaker for the League of Nations Union, etc.,’ I wrote on Christmas Eve to Winifred, who was again in Yorkshire with a family rejoicing over the imminent publication of
Anderby Wold
, ‘I feel quite able to hold my own with Winifred Holtby - and to tell you the honest truth, I don’t care a damn if I can’t; I don’t really care for anything but writing, and making up my mind to stop doing it would never prevent me from going on . . . Not that writing isn’t a bitter business. Yesterday I read bits of Barbellion, whose life seemed to be filled, like mine, with rejected manuscripts. Then I made up my mind that even though our flat was choked with the returned manuscripts . . . I would nevertheless put all I knew into the “Man on the Crucifix” . . . So I set to yesterday evening and wrote the first draft of the difficult first page of the first chapter. I immediately hated it. I wanted to produce on myself the same effect as Hugh Walpole and “Elizabeth” produce on me, and I found I couldn’t do it. Then I cursed myself because I couldn’t write . . . I can’t remember, but I believe that a year ago I had a sort of idea that I’d only got to finish a book to get it published; Mr L.’s . . . encouragement after all did rather suggest that, didn’t it? - and wasted years had shut out any other means of knowledge. At any rate perhaps hating what I do, being at least a new method, may produce a different result.’

Unfortunately the prospects of a different result, while I was only at the beginning of a new book whose predecessor was still a pariah, were too remote to provide an immediate stimulus, and the next day found me writing to Winifred more gloomily than ever.

‘I am depressed this morning . . . because it is Christmas, and cold and damp, and because I ache for beauty and joy, and because there is no sun, and by no stretch of imagination can I pretend it is spring at Siena. I am bogy-ridden by ghosts of individuals and of manuscripts, and also by the dim figure of “The Man on the Crucifix”, which I can’t attack because my feet are too cold for inspiration. I feel like Hilda [Reid], from whom I have had a card briefly stating: “I have been chasing wild geese.” ’

When
Anderby Wold
appeared a few weeks later, it deservedly gained an agreeable number of interested reviews. Its agricultural theme was based upon a paragraph from Hobbes’s
Leviathan
: ‘Felicity is a continual progresse of the desire from one object to another, the attaining of the former being still but the way to the later . . . so that, in the first place, I put for a general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restlesse desire of power after power which ceaseth only after death . . . and there shall be no contentment but proceeding.’ The tolerant, imaginative treatment of so large a topic by so young a writer caused Winifred to be carefully watched from that time onwards by the more discerning editors and critics, and put an end once for all to her occasional ludicrous misgivings about becoming a writer rather than a teacher.

While the reviews of
Anderby Wold
were coming in,
The Dark Tide
was still lugubriously circulating, but, tattered and dirty as the manuscript now was, it had almost reached the end of its tedious travels.

13

In the late spring of 1923, my tired and dishevelled novel strayed into the hands of Mr Grant Richards, who was then enjoying one of his most elegant periods of publishing. I had almost completed ‘The Man on the Crucifix’ when the entire complexion of my world was changed by a note from him asking me to call. The book, he said, had certain obvious faults which would make the risk of publication considerable, but he was nevertheless attracted by its atmosphere of youth and freshness.

‘What with all this youthful freshness, and needing more experience of life, and so on, I must be suffering from arrested development, ’ I thought ruefully to myself. ‘Well, perhaps being a War Office tweeny for so long
was
rather bad for the intellect, to say nothing of the stultifying effect of suspense and sorrow. Crowded living and a great rush of events probably do retard development in some ways as much as they hasten it in others; after all, one of the chief factors in mental growth is time to think and leisure to give one’s thoughts some kind of expression. Those of us who got caught up into the War and its emotions before our brains had become mature were rather like Joseph II of Austria - we had to take the second step before we took the first. I daresay if I’d stopped at Oxford, instead of becoming a V.A.D., I should be more intelligent by now; I might even have published a book or two which would have been remembered, whereas my four years with the Army seem quite forgotten by everyone except myself. Oh, well—!’

And that, after all, was the only comment now to be made on the War; it couldn’t be helped that one had to make it so often.