BEFORE NEXT NIGHTFALL I HAD A DOG AND a man-servant. This caused amusement to my friends. I do not know why. They said it was typical of me. I can’t see why. The dog was just dog, of no particular race and no particular intelligence—white with black patches. The man-servant was a nasty boy of fourteen, of no particular gifts and of no apparent intelligence, though in later years it grew evident that he possessed extraordinary gifts of foul language and had most of the human vices in a marked degree…. For the moment I employed him in drawing water from the spring, clearing roots, doing a little digging and looking after the dog. I had acquired the dog from a wandering man by the roadside—for half a crown. In consequence he had little homing sense, and a great part of the manservant’s time was taken up in running after the dog and retrieving him from other cottages or farms. The dog’s name was Beau, that of the boy, Jo…. Later I acquired a goat, called Penny, because it had a certain facial resemblance to Mr. Pound, and a drake that someone called Fordie, because it lived at Red Ford and was good to look at. These beasts had a great dislike of being left alone, so that when I went out I was followed by dog, drake and goat—sometimes for great distances. A little later I acquired a black pig. This animal was also companionable, but I thought my procession would look too noticeable if she were added to it. I built her a sty in part of a sort of natural cave in the bank at the back of the house. So she died.

The veterinary surgeon before her death diagnosed it as a case of swine-fever. He advised me to kill the animal at once and dispose of it as pork. In that way, he said, I should not lose money and should be saved the considerable inconvenience of having to notify the case. I said that I was not going to poison my neighbours. He offered to dispose of the pork himself on commission. He said that, if the pig died and the case came out, it would cause him considerable inconvenience. He would have to be disinfected, or quarantined, and no one would call him in for some time. Swine-fever is a dread and horribly infectious disease….

The pig died while we were arguing about it. The doctor immediately performed a post-mortem examination and declared that the pig had died of inflammation of the lungs. He insisted, nevertheless, that it should be buried under a great quantity of quicklime, so I suppose it may really have been swine-fever…. I mention this case as being one more instance—if such were necessary—of the desirability that no meat should be sold for human consumption—or even for consumption by hounds—unless the animal from which it comes has been slaughtered under state inspection….

In those halcyon days—just before peace was declared—everyone was filled with public spirit. That was the era of reconstruction, and each human being had his own plan for the salvation of humanity. My own contributions were to be two. Leaning on my spade handle I would dream long dreams about them.

The sun, as I look back upon it, seemed always to shine—though I remember coming out of my cottage door one morning and seeing all my beautiful beans cut down and blackened—by frost. But sunshine and stillness seemed to brood over the land, awaiting the sound of the guns from Portsmouth. And in that stillness I dreamed—of evolving a disease-proof potato! The second dream was so audacious that I hardly dared acknowledge it to myself.

The final arcanum—the philosopher’s stone—of agriculture is to discover a method of wastelessly administering nutriment to plants. An incredible dream. For, as manure is at present employed, an immense percentage of it is wasted in the ground or on the nourishment of weeds—and a vast amount of labour is wasted in the distribution. If then a method could be discovered by which each plant planted—or each seed sown—could be directly supplied with the nutriment it is to require, the addition to human wealth would be almost unmeasurable. As against that the transmutation of base metals into gold would be a mere flea-bite…. And then, presumably, you would throw men out of work….

I have had these dreams ever since I can remember—certainly ever since the ’nineties when in Paris I studied kitchen-gardening. I tried to introduce wine—and tobacco-growing—into Kent, but was stopped by the Excise authorities: I experimented along the lines of the discoveries of the great Professor Bottomley, but stopped them in order to write a book. Literature kept creeping in.

Now literature seemed to be done for as far as I was concerned, and I began with enthusiasm and indefatigable industry on the evolution of my potato. I had scraped together somehow a little furniture. The first thing I bought was a brass candle-snuffer tray, an eighteenth-century gadget, which my friends declared to be a characteristic extravagance. But it looked consoling, lying with a goose-quill pen in it on my broken-legged green canvas table, and round it I could conjure up a whole décor of eighteenth-century rooms. Then Mr. Clifford Bax lent me a chest of drawers and a bedstead—an act of kindness from a poet who must have cordially disliked my work if he had ever heard of it! … Then I bought five knives and some spoons and forks at the sale of a lieutenant of the East Sussex Regiment. He had committed suicide.

Growing potatoes from seed is quite different from the usual propagation. Instead of cutting a potato in half and committing the halves to the ground you have to take the seeds that are contained in the green, apple-like fruits of the plant in the autumn. These you sow in pots, from which finally arise tiny potato plants. You then set out these plants and in due course obtain a few tubers. These will be your future seed-potatoes.

Theoretically each separate plant should differ from every other one. Each should be the progenitor of a new race, and, the race being new, should for a time be immune from disease…. Actually, a great proportion—say, six out of ten—seem to inherit ancestral diseases. But three out of ten will be markedly different from their ancestor and from each other, and the tenth will be a sport—with black, scarlet or five-fingered tubers or with blossoms of unusual blues and pinks.

Of, say, fifty different plants by the end of 1922, I had succeeded in selecting nine that seemed to be reasonably new varieties, and two that apparently resisted all the diseases they were likely to meet. They were not, however, very attractive in appearance and, presumably on that account, received no commendation at the Pulborough Flower Show. I daresay I could have bred them to be smooth and oblong. I had planted them, on purpose to test them, in very bad ground, so that, though very large and heavy-cropping, they were lumpy, one quite white and the other peculiarly purple. If, next year, I had planted them in fine, friable, carefully-sifted soil, they might have turned out to be smooth enough to please the market-gardeners, and to have established a race as famous as the Beauties of Hebron or the great Scottish varieties. Then I might have known fame as a benefactor to my kind—and near-wealth…. Alas! America, as you shall hear, came creeping in, and the fear of the effects of another winter on my poor lungs, or the mirage of Provence … and the illusion that I might, by then, be able to write a book!

So Mary Butts and Samuel Johnson remain unhonoured, unplanted and unrowed and my button-hole lacks the green ribbon of the Order of Agricultural Merit, that otherwise might have adorned it….

I have tried in various departments of life to be a benefactor to my species. In the South, long ago, I thought out a method of conveying moisture to the roots of sweet corn, which needs a wet bottom and a scorching top. And I have by that means obtained, both in America and in various places in Europe, corn that I don’t believe could be easily beaten. Indeed to-day—on the 9th April, 1933—when I lay down my pen I am going to sow corn by that method. It is a Sunday—and the better the day, the better the deed. It is the ninth of the month and just before the full of the moon. So, under Providence, I may hope to raise the best of Golden Bantam that will be grown between here and Memphis, Tenn.

I communicated that method to several Southern papers and tried to get it into the pages of the New York Herald Sunday Supplement—which wasn’t, however, taking any. But I have never received any thanks from grateful sweet-corn-growers. … Shortly afterward I invented a collar-stud with a bayonet attachment. This I gave to Mr. Fred Karno as against a trifling poker debt, on board the Minnetonka in 1906. I don’t know whether that amazing impresario who had at the time sixteen companies running in the United States, and I don’t know how many in England and who—without benefit of clergy—managed them all from what had once been a barn in St. Helens, Lancashire—I don’t know whether the genial and amazing Mr. Karno, with his magnificent Lancashire brogue, ever patented that engaging device. I hope he did and made a fortune, since brass, very properly, addles brass. But I do know hundreds and hundreds of thousands of agonised dressers for dinner and hurriers to catch suburban trains have had cause, down the years of a quarter of a century or more, to bless whoever did put that stud on the market….

Then, too, I invented a method of nicely adjusting the flavour of garlic in dishes to the taste of the individual diner…. Ah, that!

But the guns announcing Peace had not yet sounded…. You are to imagine me, in halcyon weather, leaning on my spade, in the garden in front of crumbling Red Ford under its great oak…. It was an admirable, loamy soil, all the better for having rested for the duration of the war. My first crop of white haricots never came up, and I rocked most of the beds round and raised them; thus I got better drainage, and after that none of my crops failed. Even the beans that the frost had touched came round all right.

So my thoughts found larger horizons…. I dreamt of the Sussex Large Black Pig—the largest Hog in the World…. I had been to a conference, in Storrington, presided over by the seductive Mr. S. F. Edge, who is famous in the automobile world—and irresistible when it comes to pigs. His address on the Large Black—of which he possessed all the champions—would have fired brute beasts with imagination…. And I dreamt of vast territories over which my Large Blacks of the size and compactness of the rhinoceros should rove and prodigiously increase…. And also, I sighed: “If I only had capital…. A windfall or two and my Large Black beauties shall have their photographs in all the porcine fashion papers….” And they did. The windfalls came….

I have always had luck when gardening. I imagine it is because I observe the rules of the game of gardening life. I propitiate the little winged devils of doubt and destiny. I always seed whilst the moon is waxing; I never begin a planting on a Friday or a 13th, but always on a 9th, an 18th, or a 27th. I attach superstitious reverence to certain favourite plants or beds. If there is a wishing-well in the neighbourhood I fetch a bottleful of it to start my first watering of the spring…. So I attached names of friends to each of my potato plants.

In consequence Joseph, when he woke me in the mornings, would dash in with startling pieces of literary information:

“Mr. ’Enry James have picked up proper in the night, but Mr. Conrad do peek and pine and is yallowin’. Mr. Galsworthy’s beetles ’ave spread all over Miss Austin….”

He was exceedingly enthusiastic about those plants….

Those little imbecilities of a jocular kind are maybe necessary to the proper conduct of an innocent and agricultural existence. They cause a little merriment by the juxtaposition of the improbable; they enhance the zeal of one’s finds; perhaps they are palliatives against the imps and little devils of doubts; perhaps they induce the contemplative and bovine frame of mind that is conducive to good gardening…. Perhaps, too, that is why Mr. Lucas’s favourite periodical is a necessity for the Briton….

I had at Red Ford a rook called: “O Sapiential” We found him with a broken wing, in the paddock, on the 17th December…. The collects of the octave of Christmas are the collects of the Great O’s…. They begin: “O Sapientia …,” “O Innocentia,” and so on…. My birthday happens to fall on the 17th, so my collect begins: “Oh Sapience….” That should make me be listened to with more respect.

Certainly: “O Sapientia” was remarkably propitious to one’s boots. He hung in a wicker cage by the kitchen door and showed a prodigious appetite for cheese. If Joseph was allowed to give that rook a couple of chunks of cheese he would clean and grease, not only one’s boots, but the donkey’s hooves, dreamily whilst he gazed at O Sapientia, but in the most masterly fashion…. And there are ways and ways of greasing boots and hooves…. I cannot remember the donkey’s name, but Joseph never looked after his hooves properly till he could do it looking up from time to time at that wicker cage….

Mr. Galsworthy—the novelist, not the potato—once nearly jumped over my verandah at Winchelsea because I said:

“Here’s Hall Caine coming.”

I always thought that Poor Jack suspected me of keeping queer literary company, and on that occasion he ejaculated:

“My God!” though usually the least profane of mortals.

But the Hall Caine who was walking with a disdainful nonchalance down the middle of Winchelsea High Street was only the Blue Angora cat of the House.

That cat was the most contemptuous being that I have ever even imagined. Once Conrad threw the match from his cigarette at the fireplace. It fell short, on to the magnificent tail of Hall Caine, who was gazing at the coals. The tail caught fire. But did that cat move? No…. It simply gazed contemptuously down and the master of adorned English had to spring like a lamp-lighter to extinguish the flames….

And the hilarity that cat’s expression caused in Conrad was so great that—this is the point of the story—he immediately wrote three pages of the End of the Tether right off the reel…. And I see that it has got me through eighteen lines of minute writing and writer’s cramp at a time when I am just longing to be out, sowing my corn in the gorgeous Mediterranean day….

All this domestic-pet stuff is very English and, I suppose, beneath the notice of the philosopher. But if one is in England, where there is no intellectual life, and in the English countryside, where there is not even any intelligent occupation save gardening—which is an Art—these things, by the tyranny of environment, force themselves on your attention…. In Provence it is different. The cat-dog-wild-bird-wild-flower obsession needs heavy green, dampish backgrounds. Under limpid skies and amongst the sun-baked rocks it will no more live than will Brussels sprouts. For the Provençal every wild flower is “quelque giroflée”—“some sort of wallflower”—and every wild bird: “Quelque moineau”—“some sort of sparrow”: unless of course it is large enough to be called a “grive,” and eaten…. It is wonderful how refreshing that is. In England, if you don’t wish to be ostracised you must know—or pretend to know—the difference between a bearded tit and a crested grebe, and between the nest of a golden plover and that of a wood-pigeon, and your conversation must be perpetually larded with the names of all the wearisome tits and trying finches and with anecdotes of foxes and spaniels and pointers and hares…. If you want to talk about international politics you must from time to time tell an anecdote about a badger or bring in the local, West Riding name of the dandelion—to show that you are really “sound.” … But the first walk I took after my enlargement, in Provence, I took in the neighbourhood of Antibes with the son of a French Prime Minister who was also Professor of Colonial History at the Sorbonne and with an heiress of Judith Gautier, who talked of Wagner and of Stendhal … and Hindu Spiritualism.

We descended a valley towards the Mediterranean. The Professor talked of the laws of inheritance in Annam and the lady about the silk that Wagner used for his dressing-gowns…. And there under a hedge was The First Primrose! … I got ready all the quotations one pants out on such occasions, and then from amongst the blossom of a cherry tree burst out the notes of The First Nightingale. I burst out:

“Regardez…. La première primevère…. Vous savez: ‘A primrose on a river’s brim …’ and … Ecoutez…. Le premier rossignol…. Vous savez: ‘Infiniment musical, infiniment mélancolique….’”

The Professor looked over his pince-nez at the pale yellow nestling tuft.

“En effet” he said, “c’est quelque giroflée” and went on talking about the rice laws of Siam.

The lady glanced up at the cherry tree. She said:

“En effet…. C’est quelque moineau …” and went on talking about l’Amour as treated by Henri Beyle, incidentally giving an account of an apparition she had seen in the garden of a Yoghi in Suresnes.

I heaved an immense sigh as the burden of nature-quotation fell for ever from my aching back and plunged like a huge rock into the laughing waves…. I need never say again:

Not even ever:

But the day of my enlargement was in June, 1919, still far distant, and I dreamt of a miraculous tuber and a Largest Black Sow to the accompaniment of fork, drake, donkey, old mare, goat, stable-boy, with a background of heavy green June grass laced with the streak of scarlet of a rivulet.

And then…. All my planting was finished. In a day or two the guns from Portsmouth would sound, the halcyon days were over. Life would begin…. If I could scrape together the capital, in spite of all the devils, little and big, I would have some Large Black Sussex pedigree sows of Mr. Edge’s famous herd—my name should be in all the agricultural papers…. But where was capital to come from? … It seemed almost an occasion for prayer! …

I went up to London, partly to try to get capital, partly in order to sign a petition to the Throne asking to be allowed to change my surname. Because peace would soon be declared….

I signed the petition easily and then drifted about the Strand. The streets of London are paved with gold…. I doubted if I could afford even a sherry and bitters at Short’s…. I was homeless in the familiar streets. So I took a cheerless room in the Cecil which cost me £2 17s. 6d.

I drifted, more desultorily than ever, in on Pinker, whose office was just around the corner. It was always cheering to tease Pinker. I would pretend to make a joke about Henry James and he would jam his glasses on to his intelligent eyes, spring out of his chair declaiming the dreadful things he would do to me if I dared to speak disrespectfully about the man who of all his clients was his Grand Panjandrum … and mine!

Poor dear Pinker…. When, a year later, I heard, as I have already narrated, that he had died of pneumonia in New York, I remember I thought that New York could be no place for me … if it could kill anyone so granite-hard as that Scotsman.… It seemed as if an unbelievable nut-cracker had smashed a corundum walnut! How little I foresaw!

He received me, then, with the words:

“You’ve just got ten minutes!” He was panting with excitement. He said: “The option expires today and the American Embassy closes at four … in ten minutes…. Hell, get a move on….”

Mr. Pinker had been searching for me all over the habitable globe for some time….

So I had my large Blacks—the two largest sows in the world, and others!—and thousands of acres of common land over which they could roam; and land of my own for the potatoes; and a spring above the house from which the water could be piped; and a house that had been old before Columbus committed his indiscretion, and orchards and a copse and oaks of great girth and a proper bailiff to pull Joseph’s ear … and an immense view. They said locally that it looked over twelve counties, and I daresay we really could see three from the west window.

It was, I need not say Hollywood, under Destiny, that had intervened. Not the gorgeous Hollywood of a few years later, but one sufficiently bounteous and just craving for plots in a world getting ready for boom years….

This is of course the romance of Un Jeune Homme Pauvre … and observe how, in it, virtue is rewarded and how nicely, with Hollywood for its machine, Destiny arranges its effects. For, if I had gone into Short’s and had spent ten minutes over that sherry and bitters—for which I really craved—I should have been too late to sign Pinker’s contract at the Embassy and the contract would have expired. But I had resisted temptation—at the dictates of Economy. For the first and last time in my life!

And other virtues had come into it…. For, if I had not come up to town on that day I should not, equally, have come upon Mr. Pinker in the nick of time. And I had come up to town on that day because I wanted my change of name to take effect exactly on the day when the peace terms were signed and the world was to begin again. I had long wanted, for quite private family and material reasons, to adopt the name of a distant relative of my mother’s, and the temptation to do so whilst the war was still on was considerable. To have a foreign-looking name in those days had been very inconvenient and to have adopted my present surname during the life of my mother’s relative might have been profitable, for he was childless and eccentric, with considerable property in Sussex and in Kent, in the neighbourhood of the Crays, where I had come across him a little before the war, though I only saw him once. The property he had inherited from the Madoxes, Welsh people who, as the rich Welsh so often did, had emigrated to Kent and bought land in the seventeenth century. It lay mostly in the Crays, which has since become part of London, so that the wealth I might possibly have inherited would have been very great.

But I had said to myself the moment war broke out that it would ill befit me to go back at that juncture on the name of my father, though actually he himself had begun the process. Properly speaking—and during his first years in England—his name was Huffer, which in Ruthenian or some Polish dialect signifies a plover…. The legend was that, during one of the Crusades, one of his ancestors was asleep in the desert and lapwings awakened him just in time to save him from the approaching Paynims. I should have thought myself that plovers, liking marshy places, would have avoided deserts. Be that as it may, three plovers natural and courant figured in the first and third quarters of my father’s coat of arms and his crest was, equally, a lapwing natural and courant. With the romantic feeling of one who was a master of the poetry and language of the troubadours—a fact which may account for my passion for Provence and all that is in it—he used to say that those lapwings were doves—but doves natural do not have little crests, neither do they run.

In any case, on his arrival in England, a man of immense erudition who had run musical journals in Paris and in Rome, he looked naturally into a dictionary and found that Huffer = (a) “An ass”; (b) “An idle and boasting fellow.” He therefore incontinently inserted an “e” into Huffer, which became Hueffer—a name so suspect and unpronounceable that anyone bearing it might well expect without trial to be shot as a queer enemy spy. Out of filial piety I chanced that, though in June, 1915, I made some change in my Christian names, getting rid of a bushel of saints’ and other scriptural names which caused singular emotions in Orderly Room when I had to sign my full name to military documents….

Observe again then with what a just observance of the novelist’s necessities Destiny conducts its coincidences. For, once more, if I had changed my troublesome patronymic in 1915 I should not have gone up to town in 1919 and again should not have found Pinker nor have raced to the American Embassy to sign the Hollywood agreement….

I may make the note that I had intended to keep the change of name as a strictly private matter and to continue to write, if I ever wrote again, as Hueffer.… But one day Mr. Gerald Duckworth said to me:

“If only you’d sign your books ‘Ford’ I might be able to sell the beastly things.” He said that nothing so puts people off buying books as any difficulty in pronouncing an author’s name. A book-buyer hates to feel like a fool or as one unacquainted with proper pronunciations. “And how should one pronounce your beastly name?” he asked, “Hoo-effer? Hweffer? Hoifer? Hyoofer? It’s impossible to know.” He added that his traveller had implored him to ask me to make the change…. That is why nowadays a great number of readers hesitate to buy my books, thinking that they must be about automobiles, or Detroit—or against bankers….

So that amount of filial piety I showed! … I never knew my father well. He died whilst I was still a child and, as I was sent to a boarding school at the age of eight and he, during the summer holidays, was usually at Bayreuth, I have hardly any memories of him. I remember a few stories that he used to tell me in rare moments when he must have felt the urge to shape my infant mind. They were mostly about travelling afoot in the forests of Silesia, with bears and robbers or of his grandfather’s adventures in Russia during 1813 which I have narrated elsewhere. But even of these stories my memory is now very vague. There was one of a robber who said to his wife: “We must kill them both” when my father and a friend were sleeping in his loft…. And another that comes back to me as rather amusing about a party of survivors of the war of 1870 who had each lost something—a leg, a hand, an eye in battle. They were dining together in a restaurant and each in turn at the end of the meal said to the waiter, whilst taking off a leg or an eye:

“Waiter, you may remove the fish…. And while you are about it you may as well take away my leg …” or “You may as well take away my eye …” or “my hair …” or “my hand …” until, when it came to a gentleman who had lost both feet and a nose the waiter fled and was only found hours afterward in a wine-cellar….

My father, however, represents for me the Just Man! … In memoriam aeternam erit Justus, and I do not believe he can ever have faltered before any judgment-seat. He was enormous in stature, had a great red beard and rather a high voice. He comes back to me most frequently as standing back on his heels and visibly growing larger and larger…. My mother, who was incurably romantic and unreasonable with the unreason that was proper to the femininity of pre-Suffrage days, comes back to me as saying:

“Frank, isn’t it just that Fordie should give his rabbit to his brother?” My brother having accidentally stepped on his own rabbit and killed it, my mother considered that I as the eldest should show an example of magnanimity by giving him mine.

So my father, as large as Rhadamanthus and much more terrible, says: “No, my dear, it is not just that Fordie should give his rabbit to his brother, but if you wish it he must obey your orders as a matter of filial piety….” And then the dread, slow: “Fordie … give your … rabbit … to your … brother…. Et plus vite que ça!” He was fond of throwing in a French phrase.

I don’t know who was more dissatisfied with that judgment, I or my mother. But that is no doubt what justice is for.

Analysing, as I sometimes do, my heredity I suppose I got from my mother—who got it from her father—my faculty for running up against oddnesses … and for taking geese for swans. From my father I must have acquired my passion for Provence, for good cooking—and possibly for New York. He was never in New York, but he was for ever sighing for the country of Guillem de Cabestanh, and a little before his death he was tremendously excited over the revival of an old project…. Just before his marriage to my mother, whilst he was still most passionately a student of the Provençal poets, he was offered, through the poet Mistral, a professorial post in, I think, Arles. It is actually more probable that it was in the University of Montpellier, but it comes back to me as having been Aries. The project fell through, but in 1885 or so he again, in Paris, met Mistral—who comes back to me as having exactly resembled my childhood’s hero, Buffalo Bill…. My father, who was worn out with his labours on The Times, again expressed his longing to settle down for good in the country of the troubadours and Mistral again promised to find him something. In the meantime he had him elected a member of the Félibrige, the Provence Academy for the promulgation of the Langue d’Oc…. My father, however, died before that came to anything…. But to this day it thrills me to think that I might have been born in Arles…. Or at least in Montpellier! … Alas: dis aliter visum!

On my culinary and American predestinations that my father’s heredity inflicted on me I will descant when the time comes to consider, here, these matters.*

Let us return to the Hollywood incident, which I dwell upon for the benefit of poor, good novelists. The moral is that one should never cut one’s throat—if one is a novelist. For there is always Hollywood. Literature is said to be a good stick but a bad crutch. Sometimes it’s a pretty poor stick. Nevertheless the life of the writer—of any artist—is the best life if only because he alone never “retires.” His philosopher’s stone—the technical discovery that will at last content him with his own work—is always just around the corner.

There was Hokusai—the Old Man Mad about painting. The following version of his life was given me by Mr. A. E. Coppard, sitting on the trunk of a felled beech above the great common where my Large Blacks roamed…. There are of course many versions of the sayings of Hokusai, but this one pleased me most because of the dark gipsy earnestness of the narrator who was such a great artist in words—and who so admirably lived the only life worth living.

Hokusai, then, when he was seventy, said: “Now at last I begin to divine faintly what painting may be.” At eighty he said: “Now I really think that after ten more years of research I shall know how to paint.” At ninety he said: “Now it is coming. A little more research and thought! …” On attaining the age of a hundred years, he said: “To-morrow I am going to begin my Work of Works …..” And so died….

It is that that makes the following of an Art such a blessed thing. Muscles may go back on you; your head is frosted; your eyes grow a little dim; the sense of taste palls; and the soul must pause to breathe and love itself have rest…. But always, just around the corner, you know there is your secret…. For myself I know that, next autumn, I shall begin on a novel…. Ah! … Well, at least it shall begin to do what I have wanted all my life to do!

So one supports with equanimity what would make a banker commit suicide. There are times when one seems to have to do without anything. In moments of bitterness one says: “Why is it that I alone must for ever make bricks without straw?” For myself, though I love luxuries, I despise—and dislike—comfort. The domestic apparatus, the arm-chairs, the heating arrangements, the hair oils, the boot-trees, the shaving glasses, the golf gadgets, the first editions, the orchid houses … all the things that are the necessities of the most ordinary banker would make me, if I had them, think that I was doomed to go to hell…. Yet upon occasion one thinks that, for the dignity of one’s art one ought to possess, say—at least a really handsome blotter! …

I was once coming back from New York to Marseilles on a not particularly smart boat, and there was on board an American banker! Not much of a banker, as was denoted by the vessel he had chosen to travel on. He had a little bank in some Southern small town—it might have been Clarksville, Tennessee…. And just because he was called banker, the whole of that vessel navigated only for him. He was a fat fool, yet every man hung on his lips, every woman fought with every other for the privilege of walking beside him, every sailor holystoning the deck got out of his way and the sacred bridge of the captain himself was just an annex of the smoking-room for that banker and his lady of the moment. I sat in a corner, neglected.

And I said to myself:

“This is wrong…. I am the only person on this boat who, for what it is worth, am of any distinction, the only one whose name is known, not to a few score small people in Clarksville, Tenn., or Stanton, Va., but to several thousand keen intellects on each of three continents. I perform work of beneficence to humanity. Never did I obtain money from my fellows in order to speculate in dubious undertakings and so get myself the air of a prince whilst being the meanest kind of chevalier of industry….”

In short, I said then in the height of the boom years what the President of the United States has just discovered….

And then, black at heart, looking over the bulwarks, at the Azores which I could not afford to visit in style whilst that fellow had had sent for him the launch of His Excellency the Governor, a sudden lightness came upon me. I bought a bunch of the tiny Azores bananas from a bumboat under the side—a sheer extravagance, since we should have them at dinner. And I addressed to the back of that fellow, speeding over the harbour in his gilded barge, the once popular lines:

That came true enough for him in America on the 7th March, 1933…. Even at that there were not too many goods for me. I had to get on for a week on fifty borrowed francs in Paris.

But it is in windfalls from places like Hollywood that, materially, the writer who is mad about writing gets his reward. In windfalls: in buckshee! And, if he has been mad enough about his writings they will come just frequently enough and just sufficiently in the nick of time to make him keep all on going.

I am not of course talking to the novelist of commerce—the admirable fellow who by the study of the market is enabled to hold up the banner of our Craft on the very battlefield of the banker. He can look after himself. Of him there are perhaps a dozen within a dozen miles of the plot of Mediterranean hillside that I cultivate. When I enter—though I am seldom given the privilege!—his sumptuously restored Provençal house, his be-bathroomed palazzo, his English-flower-gardened, tennis-courted Mexican adobe villa I am humbly grateful that Providence should vouchsafe so much to practitioners of those Arts in the practice of which my ancestors for generations have died in reduced circumstances…. But it is not for them that I write nor will they ever read me.

No, I am concerned for a queer, not easily defined fellow. To him writing has the aspects of an art. One’s art is a small enclosed garden within whose high walls one moves administering certain manures and certain treatments in order to get certain effects. One thinks that people ought to like these effects, say of saxifrages against granite. If the public does not like the effect and will not pay to see it…. Well, it is unfortunate. But one has got one’s effect…. Or one has come somewhere near it: or one has failed because of the puceron noir…. the cuckoo pint in one’s brain. Next year one will try again. Maybe people will come to see that. In ten years’ time: or in seventeen…. Or maybe someone from Hollywood—as happened in my case—may walk into one of your twenty-year-old and forgotten gardens. He is overwhelmed by the beauties and, to the sound of his shawms and halalis, people rush in…. Very likely they will be rendered better men and women by the sight of the beauties you produced in your forgotten past….

I don’t imagine anyone was rendered any better by the relic of my forgotten past that, thus saving my life, Hollywood came upon in June, 1919…. Years after, outside Loew’s theatre at the corner of Sheridan Square and Sixth Avenue, I came upon the photographs of what Hollywood had made of my forgotten work with Mr. Rudolph Valentino going strong in the part of the hero…. Or it may have been Mr. Ramon Novarro! … The effect upon me was to make me run as fast as I could to the nearest speak-easy which fortunately was no further than the back parlour of a drug store in Greenwich Avenue. There, combating an almost irresistible desire to dive under the counter, I asked the clerk for a dose of the strongest alcohol he had, mixed with sal volatile, which encourages the heart…. And, in those fumes as, gradually I grew calmer, I saw poor Mr. Pinker and his sanguine spectacles in his office and the garden of Red Ford when that day I got back to it … and the rook and the duck and the stable-boy and the donkey and the dog … and some less pleasant objects…. For a week or so I avoided lower Sixth Avenue. I might have been tempted to go in and look at that monstrosity. I never did. But I heard enough about it from my friends!

I had better make the chronological note that the Loew’s theatre episode occurred in the Fall of either 1923 or 1924, whereas the date with which this chapter is in the main concerned was the 4th June, 1919….

Before, however, returning to Red Ford I will answer the question of whether, if one desires to be an artist one can write for money. I answer without hesitation that one cannot. The bluff Englishman—and the Anglo-Saxon of other breeds when he desires to appear bluff—will say that you are a fool or worse if you do not. He will say that the business of a proper man is to make a living complete with bathrooms, Buicks and the receipts of tax-collectors. But perhaps an artist is not a proper man. At any rate, he will be a fool if he write, or paint, or compose or make statues—for money. He will be a fool because his work will go to pieces. And the last thing he will make will be money in any quantity.

No: his only chance in life is to try to get his effects with saxifrages, or pigments, or words … and only then hope that someone will come into his garden. He may even then try to get publicity—all the publicity that is going. But whilst writing and, still more, whilst he is thinking out what he is going to write he must consider only the work itself….

There is a personal devil…. He is a man with a husky voice—a Literary Agent. When for years you have cultivated the Muses on a little thin oatmeal you may have conquered the esteem of a certain body of your fellow-men. Then the Agent will approach you and whisper in your ear:

“Why not give up writing novels and write a spiced biography of the Queen Jezebel whom Joshua slew or of the Queen of Sheba who was black but comely? Or of Napoleon? Or General Grant? … There is a fortune in it.”

You should show him the door. Politely, if possible, for Satan has great powers of evil when offended. But show him the door….

And yet you may be pleased. For if the devil thinks you a person that it is worth his while to corrupt you may be assured that you have a certain value. It may one day become even commercial value sufficient at least to bring you windfalls that make life delightful….

There is a useful word—buckshee—which is current in the British Army, all of whose units in turn spend long years in India and pick up and transmute terms from the native vernacular. Buckshee 〓 Backshish, the universal Oriental word for “a tip.” Buckshee is more than backshish. It is a gift from Providence, whereas the other is a mere coin blackmailed by force of whining from a Sahib…. But say your regiment which is detailed to march at 7 a.m. does not make off till nine because the Colonel—who was out overnight—has mislaid his false teeth. The two hours extra you get for poker or “house” are “buckshee” rest. Or your company cook finds he has two pounds or so of stew over when all the other tables are served. He dumps the whole lot into the mess-can for your table. That is buckshee grub…. So Providence will act towards you, the poor, good writer. And buckshee rest and buckshee grub are the best of all. They come to no banker … or at any rate to no pre-1933 banker.

And the Destiny that looks after some potato-growers and pig-raisers is kind, too! … It can be kind in the way it arranges events…. For shortly after I got back to Red Ford serene in the consciousness that I had at least a year or two of respite I was struck by two of the disasters that are the worst a man can know. Had they overwhelmed me before I called in on Pinker these lines would never have been written to the long rhythm of the Mediterranean wave. Or never written at all.

I had a secret … a dark secret that I concealed even to myself as horticulturist. There are things done by the right hand that one’s left does not even think of. I had, then, translated the Alcestis of Euripides.

I had done this, as it were, underground, at odd moments, almost anywhere and, really, as if in fear. On the very day after I had left the army Mr.—now I think Sir. — Nigel Playfair had commissioned me to make an acting version of that masterpiece. He was then, deservedly, making a fortune by the production of the Beggar’s Opera at the King’s Theatre. It was natural that he should contemplate the exquisite masterpieces of the past.

If I had not known that the Alcestis was perfectly fitted for the stage without any adaptation—and, still more, if I had not known that Mr. Playfair was an extremely intelligent producer and one with reverence for masterpieces—I should not have undertaken the really formidable task. As it was all I did in order to produce an acting version was to make an exact translation from the original into quite modern English.

I am no sort of Greek scholar in the modern sense and I can no longer do more than make a guess at the meaning of any Greek text outside Xenophon and the Bacchae and Alcestis. Those two were drummed into me at school, and until 1914 I used to read the Bacchae and at least Alcestis’ address to her bed once, and possibly more often, every year. So making a rough rendering was not very difficult, but to find modern words that one could put into the mouth of Hercules and that would not jar was labour enough.

I worked on it in the little studio I had taken on Campden Hill and over the Red Ford fire…. Mr. Playfair came and heard me read it. He made some suggestions for alterations, but, as I had expected, I was able to argue him out of them. The only departure from the original production that was contemplated was that, after the departure of Hercules in search of Alcestis, the curtain was to come down for five minutes.

Mr. Playfair took the manuscript away…. That would be in March, 1919. The understanding was that it was to be the penultimate production at the King’s Theatre….

I had about £120 in the bank then—all that remained of my blood-money. I had had the vague hope that when the Alcestis was produced I might earn more by other productions and so—though my left hand was not to know it—I might remain at least the poor miserable sort of a literary man that a translator is. That I should myself build up a book I knew to be still impossible. In the process of work on the Alcestis I had, however, recovered some shadow of power over words. But not much.

I still regarded the possible production of that work, as it were, with averted eyes…. I have always sworn that I would never write a play and hope for any kind of gain from the theatre…. I had seen Henry James and Conrad—and even Mr. H. G. Wells—all going through the agonies of hope and despair before the theatrical mirage. As compared with the earnings of even a successful novelist those of a half successful playwright are vast. One of my poor dear friends would hear Mr. George Bernard Shaw say that, even before Mr. Granville Barker took him in hand and made his fortune, his dramatic earnings were £75 a week—£3,900 a year! … And poor James or the wretched Conrad would snatch at pen and paper and scheme at play after play. And there would be miserable ecstasies at the merest shade of a chance of production and insupportable despair when the shade died away. And the perpetual restlessness of alchemists in search of the Philosopher’s Stone! … So I had steeled myself against indulging in any dreams at all. I was convinced that Mr. Playfair would never produce the play, or if he did that it would not survive the first night. I forced and forced myself to think that.

In May Mr. Playfair wrote to say that the run of the Beggar’s Opera—or perhaps of its successor—looked like being so prolonged that he had decided to put the Alcestis on at Mr. Drinkwater’s Repertory Theatre in Birmingham. It was to go into rehearsal at once. In a month he would be writing to ask me to go up and attend rehearsals….

I had then £72 in the bank. I might just do it…. I had got through three months and installed myself in Red Ford on £48. The £72 might keep me going the six months that the Alcestis would certainly be delayed…. I began trying to make a version of the Elektra of Sophocles….

Just after returning from calling on Pinker—just after, you observe! … I drew two small cheques on my account. They were dishonoured. For a man of English public-school training there is nothing left when faced by such discreditable bits of paper—nothing left but to leave the world.

By the next post I had a letter from Mr. Playfair. He asked me to send Mr. Drinkwater another copy of the Alcestis. Mr. Drinkwater had lost my manuscript. The play was to go into rehearsal at once.

There was no copy of the Alcestis. For economy’s sake I had not had a duplicate copy typed and I had thrown away my manuscript….

A friend had drawn out the whole of my £72 on two forged cheques! … Think of what my position would have been if Destiny had made me put off my call on Mr. Pinker!

* Note.—My father amongst his other activities wrote several libretti for operas and translated a great many more. His verse was often excruciating to the poet’s mind, but apparently it suited opera-singers, for it was In great demand. Singers ask more for open-vowel sounds and for the absence of sibilants than for good verse. Major Sutherland Edwardes, who was my father’s most intimate friend once, in a jocular article accused him of having written the worst line of verse in the English language. The verse, however, was not my father’s, whose memory I am glad here to rehabilitate. It was quoted by him as an instance of bad libretto-writing in an article urging librettists to study the needs of the voices of singers. The line was this … In a translation of Don Giovanni, the Don, approaching Zerlina, is made to exclaim:

“Can that eye a cottage hide?”

I leave the reader to divine what it means.