CHAPTER TWO

IT IS TO BE TRANQUILLY OVERWHELMED TO see the Mediterranean just before dawn, stretching out beneath your windows. There will be the grey satin of the sea, the mountains behind, the absolutely convincing outline of Reinach’s Greek villa at the end of Beaulieu Point. And the memory of Greek gods.

As I have said, I do not suppose I retain more than the merest crumbs of classical scholarship…. A couple of hundred lines of the Æneid; a few score couplets of Ovid; the usual tags of Horace, a little Catullus; even less of the Greek Anthology; a few sentences of Xenophon! But my passion for the classics remains. It is one of the greatest pleasures of my life that a legend avers that Ulysses once sheltered in the sea-cave below my garden. If I close my eyes I can see Pallas Athene with shield and spear stand in the sky and brood above her sea. Or if you quote to me: “Saepe te in somnis vidi …” or merely mention to me the name of Catullus, you will have me in such a state that I must leave my writing and walk from end to end of the terrace for some minutes….

But I do not think it is that that has given me my lifelong passion for the shores of this inland sea … nor even the glamour of the poets of Provence in the land that lies behind these coasts…. It is perhaps almost more the tradition of the wonderful country where the bees do work all the year round—the land where the lemon flower blooms…. Or perhaps it is the absolute conviction that the weariness and griefs of humanity came when they put these shores behind them…. Mankind ought never to have left these islands….

I reached Harold Munro’s villa at St. Jean Cap Ferrat on one of the last days of 1922. It was six years since I had seen the Mediterranean, going back to the line from the Red Cross hospital at Mentone…. The Red Cross train had stopped for an hour, at midnight, at Tarascon, and from the high railway platform I had seen the whole of the Camargue and half Provence under snow. That is a thing you will see only once every forty or fifty years…. And I was to see the whole of France under snow—white from Marseilles to Hazebrouck. There a reddish coloration seemed to add itself to the dark landscape.

That would be in February, 1916… I desperately disliked going back to the line. My lungs were in a terrible condition still, and I knew that I had been sent up because of the mistake of a Category Clerk. The depôt authorities who wanted to retain my services had told me as much—but in those days you did not claim exemptions merely on the score of a lung or so…. It was nevertheless hard….

It was then, I think, that I had really taken my farewell of literature. Under the shrouded lamps of the railway bookstall at Hazebrouck I had seen one of my own books. That had filled me with intense melancholy—with overpowering sadness…. The ambition to write dies hard and till then, either through the French publication of my propaganda works or because, even during the first battle of the Somme, I received orders to write this or that, I had retained at any rate some contact with the world of letters. In that ghostly station it was as if the silver cord had snapped.

But I was no sooner installed on those Riviera heights from which one could throw a biscuit on to the decks of the men-of-war in Villefranche bay—and see the octopus and mullet swim beneath those keels … than at once, to invert the words of M. Herriot, this English poet, no longer so very young, threw away the sword and grasped the goose quill. … I wrote the first words of an immense novel….

That climax had begun on the Feast of St. Katherine—the 25th of November, 1922, as I was crossing the square in front of Notre Dame de Paris. It was perhaps not quite the 25th, but I like to think that most phases of my career have begun on or about that feast of a saint for whom I have the greatest admiration. I met, under the shadow of the statue of Charlemagne, a man called Evans. He had been in my regiment, and we stopped to talk for a minute or two. Then we went into Notre Dame and looked at the little bright tablet that commemorates the death of over a million men.

“Do you remember that 17th September?”

“Surely to gootness, ton’t I!” He was, of course, Welsh—one of the little, dark, persistent race….

In September, 1916 we had both been rejoining the battalion after sick leave. He came from England, where he had been recovering after a wound in the thigh; I from a place called Corbie, where nothing more romantic had happened than having my teeth fixed, after having been blown into the air by something and falling on my face.

It had been from some date in August till about the 17th September that I had completely lost my memory, so that, as I have said, three weeks of my life are completely dead to me, though I seem to have gone about my duties as usual. But, by the 1st of September I had managed to remember at least my own name and, by the 17th, when Evans and I rejoined the battalion, which had come out of the line and gone in again to the G trenches in front of Kemmel Hill, facing Wyndschaete, I could remember most army matters fairly well.

We had gone down hill in clear sunlight over an atrocious field road. We were sitting on the driver’s seat of a G. S. limbered wagon that held our luggage, going down sharply and barbarously jolted…. Evans said—in Notre Dame:

“Surely to gootness, whateffer, I thocht my powels would drop out when I saw our shells pursting on Wyhtschaete!”

I had felt like that too, as I could assure him. We had commanded a tremendous view of the Salient from our box-seats, where we jolted down between broad fields covered with wheat in shooks and tobacco plants yellowing beneath the sun. And there, on the dark line, under the remaining roofs of the martyred village, in the light of the same sun, came the little white bursts—like cotton pods. It was all going on just as it had always gone on—and as if it had always gone on like that, all our lives…. Yes, I had felt as if my heart were dropping through my bowels.

The wagon had jolted more abominably than ever and I could, in Notre Dame, remember that I had felt beside my right thigh for the brake. The beginnings of panic came over me. I had forgotten whether I found the brake!

I said urgently:

“Evans, do you remember what sort of a brake a limbered wagon has?” Was it a little wheel that you turned round and round? or an iron lever that operated the shoe on the wheel?

Evans could not say whether limbered wagons had any brakes at all.

My panic became worse. It seemed a catastrophe that I could not remember what those brakes had been like. The memory that had chosen to return after Corbie must be forsaking me again…. I could remember that the Germans had dropped bombs on the hospital and that a Red Cross nurse had been killed. … But it was a catastrophe to forget about the brakes. … There were perhaps no brakes….

I exclaimed hurriedly:

“Evans…. Let’s go and have some … oysters!” They were the only things I could think of. Drink would only increase my panic and I wanted to keep my head clear.

We sat for a long time outside the café, on the right of the Place St. Michel, where you look towards the Seine. They used to have very good oysters there, and towards the end of November when the sea grows really cold they are at their best….

I thought Evans had been killed the day after we had got back to the line—but he obviously hadn’t. He had been farming in Canada after a very bad wound. He had had a hard time and that, as much as the war, had made him prematurely bald. Bald men are usually fat, but he was thin as it was possible to be, and small, with ecclesiastical features and a rather mournful manner. He was not really mournful, for he had done well in Alberta, and had come to Paris to have some fun and to buy agricultural machinery. He went on talking and talking in his mournful voice—about putting in rail posts, I think, with the frost at 30 below zero…. He fortunately didn’t want to do anything but talk, and my panic grew and grew…. I sat there, watching the crowds of students that go ceaselessly by after the classes of the Sorbonne are over. I sat thinking and thinking till long after Evans had gone—trying to pluck up courage. It would not come.

At last I went to a cocktail party, given by a French writer with an American wife. That party was like death. People sat about with panic-stricken faces, silent. You would have thought that everyone there had lost all his relations and all their fortunes and a war…. Proust was dead. He had died that afternoon. My taxi-driver had said to me as I paid him:

“Paraît qu’il est mort! C’était bien inattendu!” I had thought he had been speaking of Clemenceau, who was sick at the time.

Paris was a stricken city. In every house, in every café, on all the sidewalks people said continually: “It seems that he is dead. It was very unexpected.” They knew that Proust had complained of his health for many years. The whole city knew that. He had adopted fantastic modes of life on account of his health…. But that had been taken to be merely hypochondria expressed in the terms of a great, exotic novelist…. Now—it seemed that he was dead and Paris was a stricken city.

I had seen something like it in London—when Marie Lloyd died. London traffic stopped for half a minute, whilst the paper boys ran down the streets shouting: “Ma-rie dies! Ma-rie’s dead!” But Paris was hushed for three days—and not for a music-hall singer…. At that time, if you said to a waiter: “Where’s the funeral?” he told you, or if, being in deep black, you hailed a taxi, the man, without orders, drove you straight to where Proust lay in state…. At the same time Paris was preparing the paroxysm of hatred that attended the hideously stage-managed last hours of Anatole France…. On the boulevards they hissed: “Ten thousand men of letters are starving whilst they walk the pavements of the city, yet that irreverend dotard who betrayed France has spent upon his prolonged death-rattle a fortune drawn from the pockets of a world that hates France!” … For indeed the fortunes spent on cabling the old man’s last babblings to innumerable papers of a gaping world came from German and Anglo-Saxon coffers. Paris would have let him drift out of life quietly enough but for that.

Proust represented France of that day with a singular intimacy that is not easy for the poor world-at-large to understand. He was the culmination of a school of writers that had been long in coming and, still more, he was the Unknown Soldier of the literature of that decade. Literature enters with an unparalleled intimacy into French life, and the country had a sense of the subterranean and ignored strivings of that steadfast personality—as if, indeed, he had been the personification of the obscure beings who, working subterraneously with small spades in hidden tunnels, had saved France for the world.

I shared the feeling to the full. The death of Proust came to me like the dull blow of a softened club. That statement, I am aware, will read like hypocrisy when I go on to say that I had not read a word he had written. But it is not hypocrisy. I had not read him for a very definite professional reason, but I had heard with avidity all that was to be heard of him. Thus, for a long time I had had an extremely vivid sense of his personality and of his activities…. And, indeed, it added to the blow, that I was to have met Proust himself on the very evening of his death.

Nevertheless, it was his death that made it certain that I should again take up a serious pen. I think those that know my record will acquit me of the implication that might be read into that statement. I had no idea of occupying Proust’s place, and even at that date I still dreaded the weaknesses in myself that I knew I should find if I now made my prolonged effort. I was still tired and I have always been lazy.

I think I am incapable of any thoughts of rivalry. There is certain literary work to be done. As long as it is done I don’t care who does it. The work that at that time—and now—I wanted to see done was something on an immense scale, a little cloudy in immediate attack, but with the salient points and the final impression extraordinarily clear. I wanted the Novelist in fact to appear in his really proud position as historian of his own time. Proust being dead I could see no one who was doing that….

I was at the time merely passing through darkly tumultuous and crowded Paris. I wanted to get to my Mediterranean shores and their sunlight and solitary peace. I wanted to hear on the dry rocks the baked wind sift through the tufts of lavender and thyme, amongst which the bees do work the year round…. They really do!

But I stayed in Paris long enough to get a fair view of the literary situation…. One cannot, of course, if one is a working novelist, ever afford to get completely out of touch with the Paris literary situation. I certainly never have. One buys a book here and there. Someone mentions a French name and you store it in the memory. And, during my obscuration, Flint and Pound had kept me terrifically aware of at least the verse situation in Paris. When they were together they quarrelled like giants fighting with the arms of windmills. When they were apart they bombarded me with letters accusing each other of the worst of crimes. But the crimes were all obscurely connected with the merits of Paul Fort and Spire and Claudel and Paul Valéry and Francis Jammes, so that I got a fair view of those poets. Occasionally they would fight about the Dada movement, which was then going strong, or I would learn about Piccabia and Philippe Soupault and Tristan Tsara, and would rejoice to think that at last in the post-war world there existed a noisy and ferocious movement…. I wish a little that one’s friends wouldn’t be so quarrelsome. But they will be at each other’s throats, and when they fight are at least illuminative…. And occasionally Ezra—who has his jealousies—would, on the side, batter me with abuse of Proust…. And I had my view of foreign literary life in Paris through Miss Sylvia Beach. That untiring lady battered me without ceasing. She demanded that I should write innumerable articles about “Ulysses” and, with lance in rest, slaughter all his English detractors. I did! So I had a view of Joyce enthroned with adorers, complete somewhere on the slopes of Mount Parnassus, which is one of the Seven Hills of Paris. And I was brought into contact with Mr. Valéry Larbaud, Joyce’s chief Continental champion….

So I was not completely unaware of Paris’s literary geography. I was, indeed, almost too keenly aware of the activities of the Nouvelle Revue Française and M. Gide, who was not content to be the mere Prince de la Prose of that day.

And I had not been ten minutes in Paris before I was invited to a lunch d’honneur at the Paris branch of the Pen Club. Such functions are always desolate. You sit rigidly at attention between two French eminences. And French eminences never believe that a foreign writer can speak French. So each will have a little paper of notes and once every quarter of an hour each will address to you in English a remark about the writings of Dickens, Thackeray, Sir Hall Caine and Mr. Galsworthy. For the rest of the time they denounce to their neighbours the Nouvelle Revue Française, if they do not belong to M. Gide’s group. If they do belong to M. Gide’s group they denounce with even greater vehemence every one who is not published by the Nouvelle Revue Française…. It has been my good luck to be guest of honour at many such occasions…. I suppose that is because of the million sale of my Entre St.-Denis et St.-Georges during the war. When the French decide to be grateful they are grateful…. Indeed, before I left Paris for the South I had received a contract to write six novels in French. The publisher was not the Nouvelle Revue Française…. I speak French with a bad accent, but write it more easily than I write English.

And, but for the interview with Evans in Notre Dame and the death of Proust, I imagine that I might then have become a French writer. I ask nothing better…. French publishers pay almost nothing. On the other hand, French novels are very short. I should have to contend with the enmity of M. Gide’s group; but I could count on the powerful backing of M. Edmond Jaloux and M: Benjamin Crémieux, who had been my sponsors at that lunch, and of M. Philippe Soupault, the Dadaists, and the other jeunes of that day.

On leaving England I had made up my mind that if I was to earn a living it must be by writing. And indeed before that event I had written and sold a poor, slight novel. Mr. Lucas’s favourite journal had declared it the most amusing novel of that era, and it had been largely on its proceeds that I had been able to come Southwards. I thought that I could with ease turn out similar slight novels for the Paris publisher, and even if I found that impracticable, I had a very pleasant contract with Mr. Duckworth for a further series of novels. So that, if I became a commercial writer I might consider myself safe—as safety goes!

It was, however, not to be. I had never liked Paris much. But I always find that to be there makes me excited—and ambitious. I had not at that date any idea of leaving England for good. I had given up any idea of farming there. The three years after the war had been pretty good for farming, but I knew enough of markets to see that, as had been the case in the past, the farmer was about once more to be sacrificed to the industrialist. That, of course, is in England a necessity. In the rest of the world it is only a taste, except in France, where the peasant rules the roost. So I took my bearings in Paris.

Affairs in French literature were as I have adumbrated. There was, however, at that date a great colony of Anglo-Saxon littérateurs and practitioners of other arts. The two centres for writers were Ezra Pound and James Joyce. The sun about which the plastic artists revolved more or less wistfully was, as I have equally adumbrated, Miss Gertrude Stein, who at that time had more essentially the aspect of a patroness of painters than an imaginative writer. Miss Nathalie Barney, the protectress of Rémy de Gourmont, was a social centre for men of letters and Academicians of several countries, writing herself admirably distracted volumes of stray thoughts.

Mr. Joyce seemed to take little share in the rough and tumble of the several vortices. As befitted the English writer of distinction, he sat as if wrapped in sacred shawls, a high priest on an altar at which one was instructed to offer homage. It was a good thing. It was salutary that the most distinguished Anglo-Saxon writer in Paris should observe an attitude of dignity. Some one there must be to preserve the cult of the sacred flame.

It was, of course, Mr. Pound, who stirred up all the wasps’ nests. I wonder if the Latin Grammar from which we learnt when I was a boy is still used in schools. But perhaps no Latin Grammar is now used in any schools there. Our first exercise began:

1. Balbus was building a wall. 2. The boy will lose some time. 3. He came to irritate wasps. 4. The boy dances: Balbus is laughing at the boy.

I always think when, after an absence, I come on Mr. Pound in one of his new incarnations, that I must be Balbus. I am always building walls, sometimes without mortar, not unusually even without stones. And Mr. Pound is always irritating wasps. And dancing! After a time he leaves that place….

The story goes—and it is too good not to be true —that, to add to the harmony of the war years, Mr. Pound left London because he sent seconds to a harmless poet of the type that writes articles on Milton on the front page of The Times Literary Supplement. The poet asked for police protection. So Ezra went. To issue a challenge to a duel to a British subject is, by British law, to conspire to commit murder. And the British police model themselves on Milton. There is the same majesty about their approach.

Anyhow it is always good to come upon Mr. Pound in a new city. I never could discover that he had any sympathy for my writing. He wrote to me last week to say that eighty per cent of my work is rubbish—because I am an English gentleman. Patriotism is a fine thing!

All the same if Mr. Pound is established in a new Capharnaum and I go there, Mr. Pound leads me in procession incontinently to the sound of shawms round the city walls. You would think I was the infinitely aged mummy of a Pharaoh, nodding in senility on the box-seat of Miss Stein’s first automobile. And before the car Mr. Pound dances the slow, ceremonial dance that William Penn danced before the Sachems. Then when I have told the elders and the scribes that Ezra is the greatest poet in the world, Ezra goes and whispers to the loud-speakers that beneath the bedizened shawls I have asses’ ears. The drone is thus killed.

It was like that for three weeks or so in Paris. I learnt of the existence of several thousand literary scandals of the basest complexion and of perhaps seven and a half shining cygnets. I had the glimpse of an idea that something could be done if one could succeed in uniting all those hornets—with the exception always of the supporters of the Nouvelle Revue Française—in some sort of common activity. But towards the 12th December rain fell for three days. It became cold, with the cold that Paris alone knows as winter sets in. And, sighing, I departed to the South to write an immense big novel. Poor dung-beetle!

I have related elsewhere how, under St. Anthony, I found in a secret drawer of Harold Munro’s grandfather’s secretaire a number of golden guineas. A guinea is a satisfactory coin to find. A pound is good, but a guinea is handsomer, and the extra shilling makes the difference between a fee or payment and an honorarium. It was as if the Saint regarded me as a member of a learned profession. A good omen!

From that dimly candle-lit Provençal room I went out into the garden that sloped, stage by stage, precipitously down to the water. Nothing was missing. The moon was in its second quarter; growing therefore, I had not been in the place ten minutes before I had sowed some vegetable seeds. And there was even the great chorus of frogs. It was early days for frogs to go wooing. But there it was, rising and falling. The frogs, like the bees, do their work all the year round. The lights of Villefranche were reflected right across the absolutely motionless water of the bay. Again halcyon days! The night was as warm as new milk.

I stood there for a long time, taking stock. Like Robinson Crusoe. Things had piled up. By that time I had both my “subject” and my principal characters. My subject was the public events of a decade. My principal character I had compounded in the railway carriage between Calais—where my grandfather had been born—and Paris. It was as if my mind had not felt free to work until I was safe on this side of the sentry at Calais harbour mouth.

It was curious how it came. In the train at Calais there had been a young Koyli officer—of the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry. He was in mufti. He was going to Marseilles, to sail from there to Egypt to join his regiment. A douanier insisted on searching him and he protested violently. He said:

“Oh! it wasn’t in this way you received us when we last landed in France.” And, indeed, it hadn’t been!

I intervened with the douanier, but the fellow insisted on searching that officer. He found nothing dutiable and went away grumbling. The young man followed him with his eyes. He said:

“If that’s the only way he has of addling his brass, his country would be well shut on him!”

He had paid his own fare overland when he might have gone free on a transport. He had wanted, full of enthusiasm and friendship, to see in peace a country he had last seen when more than a million of his comrades were getting ready there to leave their corpses.

“Hard luck, old bean. You hit on a wrong un. Let’s wet it!”

It was whilst we were running through the Pas-de-Calais, wetting it, that my idea came. It was because the young man had used the Yorkshire dialect phrase, “addling his brass”—and a little because I had said: “Hard luck!”

The Yorkshire phrase had reminded me of Marwood. In familiar conversation he would constantly use it. It is more forcible than to say “earning his money.” It is more forcible even than “gold-getting”! He used to say: “In Yorkshire they say about money: It takes three generations: ‘one to addle, one to hold, one to spend….’”

And when that young fellow had used that phrase I suddenly saw Marwood—the heavy Yorkshire squire with his dark hair startlingly silver in places, his keen blue eyes, his florid complexion, his immense, expressive hands and his great shapelessness. He used to say of himself beside Conrad’s vibrating small figure:

“We’re the two ends of human creation: he’s like a quivering ant and I’m an elephant built out of meal-sacks!”

So the last words of my trilogy are:

“On an elephant. A dear, meal-sack elephant. She was setting out….”

He was a man of infinite benevolence, comprehensions and knowledges. He actually, as I have related, went through the whole of the Ninth Edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica wagering that, out of his own head, he would find seven times as many errors and misstatements as there were pages in that compilation. And he did…. I repeat these characterisations which I have already made in several other places partly because it is pleasant to me to dwell upon the thought of Marwood, but partly, too, because they here accent the synchronisation….

I thought then of Marwood, whilst escaping past the fields and farms and Normandy poplars, over the last “small Guinness” that I was to drink for perhaps ten years, and across the table from the last young English soldierman that I was to speak to for who knows how many! … I like young English army officers. I think they are the best breed the country produces, and do their jobs as well as any set of men in the world….

I was nevertheless not thinking of him…. For the large work that I might write—the word was still only “might”—I needed someone, some character, in lasting tribulation—with a permanent shackle and ball on his leg…. A physical defect it could not be, for if I wrote about that character he would have to go into the trenches. It must be something of a moral order and something inscrutable….

Human tribulations are the only things worth writing about. You can write about Napoleon at St. Helena or even at Elba. No one could present him as he was in his triumphs. I needed then a hard-luck story. The hardest human luck! …

I was in a railway-carriage—not in a French one running down through France, but in a first-class carriage running from Ashford in Kent to Winchelsea in Sussex. We were going back to our cottages after a hard week over manuscripts in the office of the English Review. I said to Marwood:

“What really became of Waring?”

“The poor devil, he picked up a bitch on a train between Calais and Paris. She persuaded him that he had got her with child…. He felt he had to marry her…. Then he found out that the child might be another man’s, just as well as his…. There was no real knowing…. It was the hardest luck I ever heard of…. She was as unfaithful to him as a street-walker….”

“Couldn’t he divorce?”

—But he couldn’t divorce. He held that a decent man could never divorce a woman. The woman, on the other hand, would not divorce him because she was a Roman Catholic.

“Her people were pretty good people, and she looked as straight as a die … straighter…. But her mother was one of the bad Hennessys…. There are good Hennessys and bad…. You should never marry a bad Hennessy…. Poor Dash did…. And look what has happened to him….”

Dash was a writer of the most admirable gifts for whom both Marwood and I had the greatest possible admiration. He had a dreadful history of despair behind him. The name of the famous family who are legendary in Europe was not Hennessy, by the by….

So, coming back to the other carriage somewhere near Amiens, I had the tribulations for my central character. He was to go through the public affairs of distracted Europe with that private cannon-ball all the time dragging at his ankle! …

And I had my two central female characters. One I had long ago thought of. She was, as I have already narrated, Miss Dorothy Minto, who had played in the Silver Box of Galsworthy’s, and was also one of the principal actresses in a play about Suffragettes … and admirable at that! … She would have to be a militant if my book ever came to anything. She was small and blonde and light on her feet…. I do not think I ever spoke more than two or three words to her, but she seemed extremely familiar to me because I had seen her so very often on the stage of the Court Theatre under Mr. Granville Barker’s admirable régime….

And suddenly, in Amiens station, I had my other. … She stood before me in the shadows above the luggage barrack and the waiting passengers as the train ran into the station. She was in a golden sheath-gown and her golden hair was done in bandeaux, extraordinarily brilliant in the dimness. Like a goddess come in from the forest of Amiens!

“Sylvia!” So I didn’t have to cast about for a name.

I hasten to add that the lady I have mentioned in a former chapter was guiltless of any of the vagaries of the character that ultimately resulted from that image…. She met me, like the lady in Epipsychidion, that once, on life’s dull way and charmed me towards enormous labours. I do not know that I ever even spoke to her. But I remember her discoursing with infinite wisdom … about Higher Education.

I may make the note that I never in my life, as far as I can remember, used a character from actual life for purposes of fiction—or never without concealing their attributes very carefully. This is not so much because I wish to avoid hurting people’s feelings as because it is, artistically, a very dangerous practice. It is even fatal.

The first thing that you have to consider when writing a novel is your story, and then your story—and then your story! If you wish to feel more dignified you may call it your “subject.” Once started it must go on and on to its appointed end. Any digression will make a longueur, a patch over which the mind will progress heavily. You may have the most wonderful scene from real life that you might introduce into your book. But if it does not make your subject progress it will divert the attention of the reader. A good novel needs all the attention the reader can give it. And then some more.

Of course, you must appear to digress. That is the art which conceals your Art. The reader, you should premise, will always dislike you and your book. He thinks it an insult that you should dare to claim his attention, and if lunch is announced or there is a ring at the bell he will welcome the digression. So you will provide him with what he thinks are digressions—with occasions on which he thinks he may let his attention relax…. But really not one single thread must ever escape your purpose.

I am—I may hazard the digression!—using that principle of technique in writing this book. You may think it slipshod and discursive. It will appear to drag in all sorts of subjects just to make up the requisite length. Actually it contains nothing that has not been selected to carry forward the story or the mood.

There is nothing really startling in the method. It is that of every writer of workmanlike detective stories. My friend on the New York Times calls me a master of the time-shift. He adds that a great many people dislike my books because I use that device. But he is mistaken. It is me they dislike, not the time-shift, which is a thing that delights everybody. It is, in fact, indispensable to the detective-writer. He begins his story with the words: ‘“He is dead,” she said.’ Then he gives some details of the past of him and her. He returns to the present to introduce the sleuths and the district attorney. The chief sleuth delves for pages into the past of him or her, going back thirty years to “his” past in Muddy Creek and Pekin. He returns to lunch with the District Attorney who is trying to double-cross him and then back and back and back…. And back once more to the “15th March, 19—.” Eventually the final clue is given, by something that happened in 1922, and you return to the present for half a page to dispose of the sleuth and the dashing young lady.

I mean nothing derogatory to the detective story, and am delighted that it should be immensely read. It is far more educational and of benefit to society than all the most pompous “serious” works that have been written in the last decade. I will thankfully give up my own work if someone will come in with the latest book by the authors of the Maze or of the Glass Key and will pass the rest of the day in a deck-chair in the sunlight, thankful and filled with admiration for the technique of the writers. But that technique is identical with that of all modern novelists, or of myself…. Or Proust.

And when you get added to projections of that technique the saeva indignatio—the icy indignation with life of Mr. Oliver Onions in According to the Evidence and the Story of Louie; or the genuine sympathy and poetry that M. Georges Simenon gets into Le Chien Jaune or Le Charretier de la Providence, then you get mystery stories that are real literature. The authors will be too neglected, as is the case with Mr. Oliver Onions, to whom I am glad to introduce this tiny tribute. Or they will be adored by a whole nation as is deservedly the case with M. Simenon…..

It was along such lines that I proposed to conduct my ponderous novel…. I was walking up and down, you will remember, in the moonlight, under the olive trees of Mr. Munro’s garden on a still night of the winter of 1922-23…. I had imagined an audience to which I could address myself—in the Middle West that had given birth to Mr. Glenway Westcott. I do not mean that I was confident that the Middle West would do me the honour to read me. But to write with any composure you must invent and cherish for yourself the illusion that you will find some readers in sympathy with you. I had then my illusion!

I had two of my principal characters. Proust was dead and I did not see anyone else who was carrying on the ponderous work that seemed to be needed by the world. As a matter of fact, there was M. René Béhaine, whom I find to be the greatest writer of complexities now in the world. But it was to be some years before, through M. Léon Daudet, I was to make acquaintance with M. Béhaine’s work.

I still, however, needed my central character … in, as it were, the flesh. His tribulations I had.

The “subject” was the world as it culminated in the war. You—or at least I—cannot make the world your central character. Perhaps it ought to be done. Perhaps that may prove to be the culmination of the novel. I, at any rate, did not feel that I had the strength to do without the attraction of human nature. For mankind in the bulk seems to lose the character of humanity and to become mere statistics. I sit frequently and dream of writing an immense novel in which all the characters should be great masses of people—or interests. You would have Interest A, remorselessly and under the stress of blind necessities, slowly or cataclysmically overwhelming Interest Z, without the attraction of sympathy for a picturesque or upright individual. It ought, I have felt for years, to be done. But I doubt if I shall ever get to it. More power, then, to the elbow of the man who eventually tackles the job.

In the garden of the Villa des Moulins at St. Jean Cap Ferrat I knew that I should have to fall back on the old device of a world seen through the eyes of a central observer. The tribulations of the central observer must be sufficient to carry the reader through his observations of the crumbling world. For the tribulations of the central figure to be sympathetic it would be better if they were supported with composure. That is not essential. It is possible and is sometimes even desirable that your central character should excite sympathy by his weakness. How otherwise could you have Dostoevski? or even Turgenev? or indeed any serious writer?

But the very nature of my subject called for a character of some strength of mind and composure. No one else could have supported at once the tremendous pressure of the war and private troubles of a very dire description. He must have lost the power of cool observation. And my scheme called, before everything, for the power of cool observation in tremendous crises.

My own observation of active warfare had led me to a singular conclusion…. What preyed most on the mind of the majority of not professionally military men who went through it was what was happening at home. Wounds, rain, fear, and other horrors are terrible but relatively simple matters; you either endure them or you do not. But you have no way by which, by taking thought, you may avoid them. There are no alternatives. And when they are not immediately probable, it is singular, in the majority of mankind, how easily they can be put out of the mind…. But what is happening at home, within the four walls, and the immediate little circle of the individual—that is the unceasing strain! … You are tied by the leg: your children may be sick, your business going to rack and ruin; any of the disasters that beset humanity may be happening there…. And you are not even powerless to do anything.

You would think that, out there, in a French dugout, in a tent in support; in an army hut, you would at least be cut off from the anxieties of the everyday world. But you will find yourself a prey to the worst of all anxieties. You can do very little. But you can do a little and the real agony comes when you have to rack your brains over what, within those pitifully small limits, it is best to do. That is torturing.

A man at this point is subject, in his interests at home, to exactly the same disasters or perplexities as his temperament prepares for him in times of peace. If he is the sort of man to have to put up with the treacheries of others his interests at home will suffer from treasons; if he is the man to incur burdens of debt, debts there will unaccountably amass themselves; if he is a man destined to be betrayed by women, his women will betray him exaggeratedly and without shame. For all these vicissitudes will be exaggerated by the more strident note that in time of war gets into both speeches and events…. And he is indeed, then, homo duplex: a poor fellow whose body is tied in one place, but whose mind and personality brood eternally over another distant locality.

It was this stress that I had to take into account when I thought of my central character.

I carefully avoid the word “hero.” I was in no mood for the heroic. My character would be deprived of any glory. He was to be just enough of a man of action to get into the trenches and do what he was told. But he was to be too essentially critical to initiate any daring sorties. Indeed his activities were most markedly to be in the realm of criticism. He was to be aware that in all places where they managed things from Whitehall down to brigade headquarters a number of things would be badly managed—the difference being that in Whitehall the mismanagement would be so much the result of jealousies that it would have all the aspect of the most repellent treachery: in brigade headquarters, within a stone’s throw of the enemy, it would be the result of stupidities, shortage of instruments or men, damage by enemy activities, or, as was more often the case, on account of nearly imbecile orders percolating from Whitehall itself.

These things he must observe. When it seemed to be his duty he would criticise. That would get him, even at the Front, into many and elaborate messes…. So I should get my “intrigue” screwed up tighter and always tighter.

It came then to the choice of rank and social status. He could not be a private soldier, although many private soldiers serving in the trenches were equipped for disastrous criticism of their superiors. But, for the necessities of the intrigue his criticisms must filter through to headquarters. The criticisms of no private soldier, however intelligent, could do that. He must then be an officer of sufficient authority to make reports that would get through at times to the higher commands.

The British Army during the war was, in the officer’s mess, socially divided into quite rigid, if insensibly stages. Theoretically every man wearing H.M.’s uniform is a “gentleman” and, in the mess, the social equal of everyone else. In practice a superior officer is apt to remember that he is superior, and it is just as well for a subaltern to remember it, too. But, on the private, social side, the rigid barriers between class and class that have always subsisted continue to subsist. You may, at mess, sit next to the son of your milkman. He may be a fine fellow of faultless deportment, and as such you will treat and even respect him. But the moment you go to your own quarters—and they may be merely a hole in the mud—the normal civilian hierarchy reasserts itself.

For reasons that I will later dwell upon I did not wish my central character to be merely a “gentleman.” By the time I had arrived at St. Jean Cap Ferrat I had arrived at the stage of finding the gentle man an insupportable phenomenon…. But, separated from and absolutely above the merely gentlemanly class, there is in England another body. They are the Ruling Classes. This body is recruited as a rule from the sons of landed proprietors, old titled families, the sons of higher Army officers and what, in England, one called Good People. They are distinguished by being authoritative, cynical, instructed in the ways of mankind. They are sometimes even educated and not infrequently they are capable of real, cold passions for some person or some cause. It is they who monopolise and distinguish the First-class Government offices—the War and Foreign Offices, the Treasury, the Diplomatic Corps. They are permanent unless they come personal croppers over a woman, or through over-intelligence or on account of financial disasters. As such they are really the Ruling Classes. A politician may rise high and have the aspect of governing, but almost always he is the slave of the permanent officials who control his activities and his utterances…. It is the “gentlemen” of the country who control elections deciding whether the country shall be temporarily Conservative or Liberal … or even Labour. But the Permanent Official is almost always either Whig or Tory and sees to it that the services of the country run along the lines of its ancient traditions…. So at least it was before and during the war—and it was with those periods alone that I meant to deal.

The “Waring” of whom Marwood and I had talked in the railway-carriage between Ashford and Rye had been of pretty good family and, but for his disaster, would still have been in the Foreign Office. But he had taken the affair lying down and, utterly unmanned, was leading the alcoholic existence of one of those poor beings who manage golf or social clubs anywhere between the Riviera and Rangoon. His disaster, then, was alone useful to me.

And, curiously enough, almost before my feet as I stood in Harold Munro’s garden was the villa of a poor fellow who had had almost Waring’s fate. He was a wealthy American who had married a wrong ’un. She had been unfaithful to him before and after marriage. He had supported these wrongs because of his passion for the woman. At last she had eloped with a ship steward and had gone sailing around the world. The husband being an American of good tradition considered himself precluded from himself taking proceedings for divorce, but he would gladly have let the woman divorce him and would have provided liberally for her. She, however, was sailing around the world and he had no means of communicating with her. Almost simultaneously, after a year or so, he had conceived an overwhelming passion for another woman and the wife had returned…. What passed between them one had no means of knowing. Presumably she had announced her intention of settling down again with him and had flatly refused to divorce him. So he committed suicide….

The dim sight of the roof of his villa below me over the bay gave me then another stage of my intrigue. My central figure’s wrong ’un of a wife must return to him just after he had fallen for another woman…. The wife, of course, would be upstanding and in a golden sheath gown. Marwood had said she was a thoroughbred with congenital vices—a member of the Ruling Class … but reckless…. The “other woman” would be, equally naturally, the Suffragette.

But my central figure could not commit suicide. He must live his predicament down. It suddenly occurred to me to wonder what Marwood himself would have thought of the story—and then what he would have thought of the war. He had died before the opening of hostilities: otherwise his views would have had immense value….

I imagined his mind going all over the misty and torrential happenings of the Western Front—his tolerance for the military even when they were intellectually childish and his complete and vitriolic contempt for the politicians at Whitehall…. Above all for Dai Bach….

It was he who for the first time had said, speaking as a Tory:

“We ought to have had Lloyd George to do our dirty work. We have to have someone. We bought Disraeli: we bought Chamberlain. We ought to have bought Lloyd George!”

… And immediately, on that remembrance, I had my central character. Marwood had died before the war, but his knowledge of the world’s circumstances had been so vast and so deep that, as it were, to carry on his consciousness through those years seemed hardly to present any difficulties. I seemed, even as I walked in that garden, to see him stand in some high place in France during the period of hostilities taking in not only what was visible, but all the causes and all the motive powers of distant places. And I seemed to hear his infinitely scornful comment on those places. It was as if he lived again.

There he was, large—an “elephant built out of meal-sacks.” Deliberate, slow in movement and extraordinarily omniscient. He was physically very strong and very enduring. And he was, beneath the surface, extraordinarily passionate—with an abiding passion for the sort of truth that makes for intellectual accuracy in the public service. It was a fascinating task to find him a posthumous career.

Actually he had had no career after a brilliant beginning. An internal tuberculous condition made it impossible for him to live in a town. So, in the country he followed the career of a philosopher. He had his mysticisms. When he talked of Higher Mathematics it was as if he were listening to the voice of angels. I suppose he saw the ocean round the throne when he considered the theory of waves, and that he saw resurrections when he thought of recurrent patterns in numbers.

He died in the fullness of his strength and no death ever seemed to me to be more regrettable. To the best of my ability I gave him life again, and for me he lives still, in Avignon, and I shall have a letter from him to-morrow.

… I do not have to say that no incident in this book had any parallel in his actual life! He lived the life of a Yorkshire squire that an inherent physical weakness compelled to inhabit the South and to eschew all the privileges of his birth. So he was the Permanent Official turned hermit, but unsoured!

There remained then for me, under Munro’s olive-trees, a final struggle with my courage. This was the question of details. For me, before I can begin a book, it is necessary for me to have got together an immense number of details that might bear upon the circumstances of the story that I am about to relate. It is really quite immaterial whether Army G.S. limbered wagons have brakes that screw down or brakes that act by leverage. It is a million to one that I should never have to mention a G.S. limbered wagon, and the question of the nature of its brake could quite easily be avoided. I have at least skill enough for that….

But what had put me into a panic on that afternoon in Notre Dame was the sudden fear that the quality of my memory might have deteriorated. Usually I can be fairly sure of my memory—particularly for material details and the conversation of other people. What I say myself I forget rather easily and what I write usually goes out of me with astonishing rapidity. All names also go. But the speeches of other people remain to me with singular clarity and so do, say, the details of machinery. So my mind is cluttered up with an amazing amount of useless detail. But to me it is not useless, for without it I should feel insecure. I may—and quite frequently do—plan out every scene, sometimes even every conversation, in a novel before I sit down to write it. But unless I know the history back to the remotest times of any place of which I am going to write, I cannot begin the work. And I must know—from personal observation, not reading—the shapes of windows, the nature of doorknobs, the aspects of kitchens, the material of which dresses are made, the leather used in shoes, the method used in manuring fields, the nature of bus tickets. I shall never use any of these things in the book. But unless I know what sort of door-knob his fingers closed on, how shall I—satisfactorily to myself—get my character out of doors?

So, in that garden above Villefranche bay, I put myself through a regular Staff Examination. I found I knew still every “detail” of Infantry Drill, of musketry practice as set forth in the text-books and could repeat them word for word in English and fairly well in Welsh. I found I still had by heart all the paragraphs of King’s Regulations and Military Law that a regimental officer could be required to know. I went over in my mind every contour of the road from Bailleul to Locre, Locre-Pont de Nieppe, Nieppe down to Armentières—and of all the by roads from Nieppe to Ploegsteert, Westoutre, Dranoutre. And I found that I could remember with astonishing vividness every house left, in September, 1916, along the whole road, and almost every tree—and hundreds of shell-holes!

I will here make a confession. I have always had the greatest contempt for novels written with a purpose. Fiction should render, not draw morals. But when I sat down to write that series of volumes, I sinned against my gods to the extent of saying that I was going—to the level of the light vouchsafed me—to write a work that should have for its purpose the obviating of all future wars.

War to me was not very dreadful. I would, for my personal comfort, far rather go through another similar war than face an eternity of writing endless books. But the desperation and horror that war caused to other people impressed me with such mass and such vividness that I was ready to put my principles behind me…. I was not going to go against my literary conscience to the extent of piling horrors on horrors or even of exaggerating horrors. That policy, in the end, always defeats itself. After you have seen two or three men killed or mangled your mind of necessity grows a carapace round itself and afterwards witnessing the slaying of thousands hardly moves you unless those men belong to your own unit. And the mind of the reader does the same thing…. To read the words of that tablet in Notre Dame excites emotions. I never read them myself without tears in my eyes—and even merely to think of them I find at times unbearable…. But the emotions are those rather of pride than of revulsion. One thinks: “The fine fellows!” or one thinks: “How well they must sleep!” One thinks: “They at least are out of it!” One says: “They at least did not die in vain….”

But it seemed to me that, if I could present, not merely fear, not merely horror, not merely death, not merely even self-sacrifice … but just worry; that might strike a note of which the world would not so readily tire. For you may become callous at the thought of all the horror of “more than a million dead”: fear itself in the end comes to rest…. But worry feeds on itself and in the end so destroys the morale that less than a grasshopper becomes a burden. It is without predictable terms; it is as menacing as the eye of a serpent; it causes unspeakable fatigue even as, remorselessly, it banishes rest. And it seemed to me that if the world could be got to see war from that angle, there would be no more wars….

So it was my duty to be sure of my details. For technical facts as facts I have no respect whatever. Normally I rather despise myself for playing for factual accuracy in a novel. It did no harm to Shakespeare not to know that Bohemia has no sea-coast or even to believe in the fabled virtues of the mandrake. I would just as gladly make such slips as not. But they give weapons to fools and if, in this case, I failed in factual correctness, I should betray the cause for which I was working.

So for two or three days I mooned about, testing my memory as to all sorts of technical facts and geographical minutiæ. I tried myself out on Nordenfelt and Maxim and Stokes guns as on the stoppages of the collection of bits of tin and hairpins that we infantry were given to use as machine-guns—and precious good they were, too! I tested myself as to strengths of units, as to supply, as to cyphers, as to the menus for troops and the stabling of mules. In each case I checked myself by such textbooks as I still had, and in nearly every instance I found that my memory was correct enough.

So one day I sat down at Munro’s grandfather’s campaign-secretaire—it had been on the field of Waterloo—I took up a pen: saluted St. Anthony, who looked down on me, in sheer gratitude for his letting me find my pen at all, and I wrote my first sentence. The scene took the shape it did out of remembrance of how Marwood and I had conversed in the railway carriage between Ashford Junction and Rye, where they play golf. It ran:

“The two young men—they were of the English public official class—sat in the perfectly appointed railway carriage.”