Craftsman

I AM always ready to hear a man talk shop so long as he can express himself. How he masters his material, why this way and not another, and what the conflict is between his real and his imagined purpose—though this one can but deduce from his eloquence—fascinate me in the hedge-trimmer as in Cellini. That is my excuse, for I have invariably tried to write what I myself would like to read.

I have reached in my profession only a rank equivalent to a wartime major-general—among, that is, the first two hundred, any of whom may as easily be retired to discomfort as advanced to higher authority. But at that level practice is what counts. One can leave theory to the majors and the marshals, and concentrate upon command.

The life of a writer, especially if he is a slow writer, is inert. He must keep to daily hours, yet he has not the human society of the office; and a desk is less, not more endurable when there is no boss, no subordinate, no secretary for casual conversation, never a cheerful or a difficult client. His working day is short, for no man can drive imagination more than five hours; but at the end of it he is exhausted and, until unwound by time and alcohol, a poor companion to his family and friends.

In theory he can take a holiday when he wishes; in practice he must ask the boss—himself, that is—whether so unstandardised a workshop can possibly afford it. Nor can he ever know whether idleness is essential, repaying lost time with doubled energy, or whether he is merely being lazy.

There is no one who can promote him, no one whom it is worth while to impress with his ability or charm. What the public think he is worth, that and no more he will be paid. Editor, publisher and agent may ease for him temporarily the working of the law by which they, too, are bound, but he cannot evade it.

What then is the compensation which can bind a man who is no great lover of the study and has indeed far more affinity to the printer than the librarian into a skilled trade where the working conditions are intolerable and the wage uncertain? It is, I suppose, the making of an object which, to human perception, did not exist before.

That phrase is far looser than it appears. Make a chair without any blue-print from a plank in the garage and a fallen pear-tree, and certainly you will have created an object which did not exist before; make imitation Louis XV as efficiently as you like, but it did exist before. The gradations of originality between the two are the business of the critic. That is what he is for: to remind the mass-producer that he could make as much money quite as pleasantly in commerce, and to assure the determined worker in plank and pear-tree that his chair is indeed a creation and commendable, but that he should study the anatomy of sitters.

Thus if we are to judge the self-delusions of a man who claims to make, we must know to what standard he does his making. I do not believe that there is enough compensation in merely giving the public what it thinks it wants, nor have I any excited opinion of the writer who purposefully and for the sake of forced originality gives the public what it does not. To be a craftsman is to offer your own interpretation of life and its events in an accepted form, and so to handle a familiar medium that it will carry and transmit your own taste, your own faults and your own splendours.

I try to present my goods to the passer-by with the clarity which politeness demands. Then, if he does not like them, there is no shame; and if he does, my personal satisfaction is the greater. For that reward I returned to my craft in 1945 when both economic security and my enjoyment of my fellows would have been better satisfied in Intelligence or the administration of enemy territory. I had only practised the profession for four years and never written anything but security reports for six, but even in war there were indications that my strength was in words. I learned to control my own actions and those of my subordinates as well as any other competent citizen with some experience of leadership, but where I surpassed him was in giving a clear picture of what the actions and their environment were.

I did not become a writer until the far end of my youth, though I showed some promise of it at the beginning. I had a classical education and, from the age of sixteen on, enjoyed it. A sense of style in writing the dead languages I never possessed—a curious failure for one who in later life would pick up the feel and sentence rhythm of a modern language as naturally as a parrot—but in the translating of them I found my only discipline. I was never content until I had rendered into living English what I conceived to be—frequently on inadequate evidence—the thought of the Greek or Latin author. To this carefulness I added that of writing poetry, with a preference for the sonnet or any other verse form so long as it was sufficiently difficult. These led me to the rhyming dictionary and the over-poetical adjective, and the best productions of my melancholy muse were about as bad as the worst of Matthew Arnold. For the rest, my education left me an empty rather than an angry young man, with an indifference to religion, to self-discipline and to any authority, and a respect only for scholarship. Life has gently tempered the latter, but restored my ethical sense. I have a fascinated interest in even the wildest of heresies which will explain some aspect of apparent purpose, a liking for hierarchy in the government of men and an erratic sternness in government of myself.

At Oxford I turned to English literature. When I had some success in my final schools, it is odd that it never once occurred to me to become some sort of literary man. My impatience for the life of commerce or action was quite certainly right, for, though I knew very well what words could be made to do, I had nothing whatever to put into them. Never was a youth more ignorant of the motives and emotions of his fellow human beings. Under a pretence of worldly wisdom too emphatic to be easily exposed, my conception of the world was unreal as that of a woman’s weekly, and only in language more urbane. My own son at twelve was a far more satisfactory social animal than I at twenty.

Once in Roumania this waste ground of ignorance was filled as fast as a rubbish tip. Some pieces of it were levelled off, but of value only as playing fields. I became a tolerable and understanding companion for men; indeed the self of today would be delighted to be invited to dinner by the self of then. But to women I could give no companionship at all. Either I ignored them or I was intoxicated by the slight and enchanting physical differences between them and the very considerable physical difference from myself. Except for poems to girls—a more admirable subject for the short lyric than nature study—I had nothing to write about and did not try.

It was at the age of twenty-nine, eager to achieve a financial independence which would allow me to follow Marina, that I first hurled myself at writing. By then I was familiar enough with Geoffrey Household to dislike him, and the mood of self-pity at least led to a deeper sympathy with my fellows. My working attitude towards them—my conception, that is, of reality—was solid enough to be put into the waiting words.

I chose the short story, going straight for the hardest form. I never even considered the novel. Whether I was merely impatient of its length or felt instinctively that I was not ready for such large responsibility I do not know. I am still inclined to think the novel an artless form—or at any rate a lot more artless than we practitioners like to claim.

It is curious that a man changes far more as a thinking and interested organism than he ever does as a craftsman. In those early stories, written in the brown and violet mausoleum of my Spanish flat or the clean pension bedroom which succeeded it, my aim was much as it is today though I could not have explained the target. Money was the driving force, yet I never attempted to tailor my stories to the requirements of the commercial magazine; on the other hand I could see no virtue in the self-conscious imitations of Chekhov and Katherine Mansfield which were the uncommercial fashion, and it seemed to me that the experimenters were all jammed together in a blind alley. Hemingway burst through the end of it taking the walls with him, but even if I had known the work of that magnificent artist I doubt if I should have admired it as I do now—an admiration well this side of idolatry, for I can seldom feel affection for his characters. They would be easier company if the painful accidents so liable to affect their virility were permanent.

Those first stories of mine had no solidity at all. The beginning and the end might pass, but one led to the other through too undisciplined a middle. I was getting under the skin of my characters, not under that of any reader. One tale, I remember, was dressed with whole garlic cloves of Spanish dialogue to give it atmosphere. So, for me, it did; and if the reader were to find my atmosphere merely fog I did not care. In that I was closer than I believed to the school which esteemed fidelity of self-expression and little else. Whether you make the emotional interplay of your characters so obscure that the story means nothing unless verbally explained, or whether you lard it with blasphemies in foreign tongues, you have failed in the first demand of your craft: to make your meaning clear not only to your own literary set, but to a well-educated stockbroker. You are not entitled to assume that he is an amateur psychiatrist or that he speaks Spanish.

One of the tales found a market in the old London Mercury. I undid the wrapper, pleasurably anticipating the feeling of triumph which should caress the beginner at the first sight of himself in print. What actually I felt was more like the shock of a cripple, brought up among the beautiful and good, at the first sight of himself in a mirror. The images which at the time of writing had thronged into and out of my mind were not there. Of course they were not. One cannot distil the scent of a hyacinth and have the hyacinth itself. But I was not accustomed to the cruelty of print and unjustly disappointed.

The dead years in America passed and I was well into my thirties, still without a profession or the beachcomber’s temperament which might have compensated for its absence. Hack writing had no bad effect, for there was no temptation to fall into the clichés and imprecise vocabulary of the journalist, both inseparable from speed and flourishing in the first draft of every writer. The encyclopedia and the broadcasting plays were for children and demanded simplicity. So I did not form any vicious habits—except perhaps to condemn the whole literary craft because its more commercial practitioners seemed to obtain no satisfaction whatever to make up for the uncertainty of income.

By now life had equipped me well with experiences and fairly well with the power to relate one to another, so that my world, right or wrong, was a consistent whole. All which had been left out was content, and that was amply provided in my missionary journeys for John Kidd. When I returned to London from South America, I had little fear of not finding a reasonable living in the largeness of the world. I had no ambition, and it was late to look for one.

It may be that we cannot avoid fate—though I refuse to believe in so human and Old Baileyish a conception as Karma. But I see no reason at all why I should ever have become a craftsman if the managing director of John Kidd had not appointed a nephew of his to travel the Dominions instead of waiting for me to be free. The result was that when Europe and South America had been visited there was nowhere else for me to go.

The firm told me to hang on for six months, and meanwhile to call on the big London printers to whom their regular travellers had never been able to sell. Since I, no more than they, was permitted to offer bribes to the machine-minders I was not expected to bring in many new customers, nor required to give a close account of how I spent my time. When I felt that I had worked long enough at the impossible, I carried on negotiations for an agency to import Spanish wines. I also wrote The Salvation of Pisco Gabar, spreading the essence of Peru upon the foundation of a character who could have lived there but did not, and of two stories of the high Andes which I had heard in the Argentine.

The typescript went off to America, whence some three weeks later a shower of gold and compliments descended upon me. The latter I accepted cautiously—not that I was to develop for another twenty years the self-protective armour of the writer against success and failure, but I could see no convincing reason for the effect of what I had done.

The Salvation of Pisco Gabar was quite unsaleable. It had no women in it; the end was strongly religious; its length was over twelve thousand words. That it should collect a jackpot after a mere six days in the office of Brandt & Brandt was due not to the cams of the commercial fruit machine but to the interplay of sympathetic personalities. Bernice Baumgarten gave it to Ted Weeks of The Atlantic Monthly, exacting a promise that he would read it on the train from New York to Boston. Ted recommended it to his editor-in-chief, Ellery Sedgwick, who took it, demanded more and offered to finance the writing of a novel. The wind was fair, and for once I did not try to sail against it.

It is perhaps forgivable that when a man has entered a new profession he should model his behaviour upon his own romantic idea of its practitioners. In December 1935 I went down to the south of Spain to start the novel, and rented a mill-house at Torremolinos, then happily unknown to the tourist agents. Indeed my house would have had little appeal to the motor-coach traveller. The terrace overlooked the club-house of the local fascists and was occasionally occupied by the militant left-wing whose armed leaders would politely knock at my door late at night and request permission to man the defences of the Republic. Equally politely I would grant it, set out refreshments and go, or not, to bed.

I acquired an excellent old cook, and explored the local cellars for Montilla, which on its home ground I prefer to sherry. I had no patience with any Bohemianism where my belly was concerned, and I proposed to indulge the budding genius with rather more freedom than I should have allowed to the commercial traveller. I set up my typewriter upon the tiled terrace which overlooked the Mediterranean as well as the forces of reaction, and wrote the opening chapter of a novel which was to deal—though how I was far from clear—with the lives and thoughts of intelligent, but not necessarily educated outcasts bound together by a community of tastes.

And all was well, one would think. But when a man sets out to live a life unrestrained by the common conventions, he must expect the disorder also to be uncommon. Released from the respectability of the businessman, I proceeded to mismanage my life as loudly and eccentrically as some pot-careless squire of the eighteenth century. The unchristened novel, later to be The Third Hour, progressed little further than its opening. Emotional storm was responsible. Had I been more experienced, I should never have allowed it to shock me out of work, for production is less easily halted by distress than by the slightest fever or a late night. While I have always been able to do a long and satisfactory day’s work in office or army with a hang-over, I cannot write at all. The life of a craftsman was leading me to moderation long before it was reinforced by advancing middle age.

I returned to London just before the Spanish Civil War broke out. I was strongly tempted to run away from domesticity and the difficulties of writing, and to join the Republicans; and yet was infuriated by the fact that volunteers were engaging themselves for the sake of democracy or communism or some confounded panacea for the toiling masses, and not one of them for love of Spain. The democracy of Spaniards is so absolute that they do not need its more punctilious forms of political expression. Indeed, it would not work at all, either at home or in the Americas, if they had not brought the art of revolution to such a pitch of efficiency that it is quite as effective as a general election and usually costs no more in lives.

Why, then, was I, holding these views, not for Franco rather than for the Republic? Above all, because I loved and pitied the individuals who made up Spain. I knew the ironworkers of Bilbao and the agricultural labourers of Andalusia. Courage and independence, nobility of manners, a pride that was unaggressive formed a proletariat so unproletarian that the very name was an insult. Yet they were treated with the full cruelty of early nineteenth-century economics. So long as poverty compelled them to work, nobody cared whether or not they ate. At least the Republic, with the Mexican example before it, was attempting legislation for the improvement of wages and working conditions.

I honoured the Republic, too, for its grant of regional autonomy to Catalonia and the Basque Provinces. I admit that this from a foreigner is impertinence. To the Castilian as to the Englishman regional autonomy has always seemed a betrayal of history, and he knows well that in a country of genial anarchists there must be a powerful brake on the centrifugal force. So I can only plead an emotional delight that the Basques had obtained their own republic, and an anger more personal than that of politically-minded demonstrators when Franco and German aircraft destroyed it.

With the indignation of the Republic against the Church I profoundly sympathised, though I am too unorthodox a Christian to claim the right of a protestant to be impatient. The Church in Spain, with its willingness to use arms, its absorption of wealth, its political patronage and its idle mouths had to be reduced to the more reasonable proportions of the Church in France. That the prayers of the ascetic which perfume the still sky above Toledo should influence us all I can believe; for such intervention the forced fasting of a spiritually heroic people might be a small price to pay. But when paid for an inordinate host of the black-robed, multiplying like the black-coated in any mundane war, starvation is unacceptable.

Summer in London restored my equanimity, and slowly persuaded me that the Spanish quarrel was not clear enough for one who saw opposing political creeds in shades of grey, never in black and white. The novel, however, still stuck fast. Short stories for the ever-generous Atlantic Monthly just paid the butcher and the wine merchant, and several of them finished in Edward O’Brien’s anthologies which in those days decided the top boys and girls of the year. But I have always distrusted the opinion of examiners. Their accolade gives me a spurious sense of triumph like that of the successful businessman who has outwitted the auditor. Meanwhile, Jack MacDougall on a visit to America heard of the new author and put up another advance. Honour forbade me any longer to tell myself that I was quite incapable of writing a novel.

We let the flat—always a useful source of income—and went down to a little guest-house at Beachley in the peninsula between Severn and Wye. There in the autumn garden, undisturbed and perhaps inspired by the Severn tides which foamed yellow up and down the narrows twenty yards away, I worked at a speed I have never approached since and at last came to know what in the world I was writing about. From Beachley we went on to Tangier. I hardly noticed the move. The world of imagination was dominant. In May 1937 the novel was finished after a year and a half of gestation.

There was enough material in The Third Hour for four novels—a common fault of beginners—and until war filled up the void I regretted that I had been so generous. For a first book it had a considerable succès d’estime, and it sold well enough to clear the advances and provide a few hundred pounds as well. The reviewers were kind to the story-telling but disliked the politics. The public took the politics far too seriously and the story-telling for granted. Those who loved the book still do, so that at least there must be a great richness of texture.

I was unconscious of any political preaching of my own. I had told the picaresque stories of several men and women from several nations, and shown their longing for some purpose greater than themselves which no religion or political creed could supply. To clear the ground for them I had to hold the illusions of capitalist, fascist and communist under a continual harassing fire of irony. Then I allowed the discontented to advance to their own purpose. My characters had the axe to grind, not I; and while I profoundly believed—as a novelist must—that for them the solution was right, I was not recommending monasteries of outlaws as a panacea for the ills of the nineteen-thirties.

With The Third Hour out of the way, I suffered from a financially alarming occupational hazard which has never left me and which I still refuse to accept as inevitable. I give myself a month or two of idleness and then sit down to another book. It opens magnificently; it proceeds to ten thousand words; it falters, and I suspect myself of laziness. I leave it alone and perhaps write a short story.

When I return to the manuscript of such high hopes I see at once that it faltered because the subconscious critic knew that it was poor, while the anxious author believed that it was good. I start another, and exactly the same thing happens. I am working hard, although I cannot avoid the thought that I might as well be enjoying idleness. But if I do not work, how am I ever to produce a novel at all? And so the vicious circle continues until my daemon, who is as unsophisticated and indeterminate as a night-gowned guardian angel on a pious postcard, decides that the time has come to break it. No doubt he—or she—would come more intelligently to the rescue if I did not insist so strongly on being master of my fate.

Meeting for the first time this impotence I was appalled by it. In the autumn of 1937, with a mass of reading for a historical novel, we went to Portugal. The only result was a fine chapter in the middle of a non-existent book. Somehow an income of about six hundred a year was maintained. It sufficed for simple luxuries, and winters abroad were very cheap.

One day in December 1938 I wrote the opening pages of a novel—a habit of which I was growing very weary. But these seemed exciting, and eventually I let them go to the printer with hardly a change. To what incidents these pages were to lead I did not know, but the whole of the story was inherent in them, and Rogue Male began, week after week, to live. I observed, faintly protesting, that whereas I had intended a picaresque story in which fear would supply the suspense, what I was really writing had some affinity to Buchan without his coincidences and with the cry of human suffering unsuppressed. But who was I to complain of inspiration? I could have wished the angel less prepossessed with violence, but if that was what it wanted I was prepared to place my craft at its disposal.

With those two first novels my laborious method of working became standardised, and through the years has only gained in slowness. I cannot think that I am a natural writer at all. To me it is a miracle that the great Victorians should have been able to rise from work at midday—Trollope indeed at breakfast-time—with neat sheets of finished manuscript on desk or floor, demanding nothing more than correction in proof.

In pencil I drive a sort of pilot tunnel through the underground darkness of the imagination. This is by far the hardest work, and I never sit down to it with any real trust that it can be done at all. On a good morning the result is some three pages legible only to myself. In the evening I pass this inchoate mess through the typewriter, and it comes out with the action settled, speed about right, smoothness poor, and the paragraphs close to their final shape. A five-hour day, between morning and evening, will produce anything between seven hundred and a thousand words.

With at last the complete typescript in front of me, I retype the whole lot, modelling the characters nearer to their originals in life or imagination, strengthening the dialogue, and correcting the sentences so that any one of them can be read aloud without pain to tongue or ear. This retyping crawls at a rate of ten or twelve pages a day and, though exhausting, is at last capable of giving me pleasure. Stevenson said that the fun of writing is rewriting. I should go further, and claim that it is the only fun.

Rogue Male, years later, revealed to me the sort of conglomerate through which the pilot tunnel is driven. A favourite book of mine at the age of eight was Patterson’s Man-eaters of Tsavo—strong meat for the young, but I was not more than pleasurably frightened by it. Possibly I lost my copy in the first term at a preparatory school. At any rate I never saw the book again until I reread it nearly forty years later after the war. Suddenly I was pulled up by a sentence which was nearly word for word in Rogue Male, and I soon found half a dozen fainter echoes. There was no doubt about it. That was where my interest in Fear had come from. Yet today I should not rate Patterson’s anatomy of terror very high—perhaps because in all literature which is not ephemeral the better drives out the good, and his lions are surpassed by Jim Corbett’s tigers.

Whether the reception of Rogue Male was more than polite I have forgotten, for it was published in September 1939 when I had already left England. Certainly I felt a detached pleasure at a sheaf of press cuttings which reached me in Ploeşti, but truth at that time seemed so much more provocative than fiction. Which, by any definition of the real, was nearer to reality I do not know. The attack upon the oil wells petered out into a dining club for diplomatic clerks. Rogue Male is still in the present.

Before it in England and after it in America came my first book of short stories, The Salvation of Pisco Gabar. I was uncritically in love with this, and a very mixed press permitted me to remain so; for every reviewer who singled out a story as particularly offensive, there was another who chose the same story as the best. Today I should rate the book as no more than promising, for several of the tales ran too close to the traditional smoking-room yarn—not that I despise the form, always provided that the characters are unconventional, the irony at least as important as the forthright action, and the cake from which the slice of life has been cut a living cake still extending in its own space before the beginning of the story and after its end. The man of letters who attacks the smoking-room yarn is in danger of finding Heart of Darkness undetected in the Congo to blow him clear out of the water.

In July 1945, when I called at the depot in Olympia and exchanged my uniform for a government suit and hat, the achievement of pre-war life—three books and a children’s story—was not enough to promise support for the four of us in the spirited life to which we were accustomed, though admittedly the babies had not been accustomed to it very long. But the war had packed me with self-confidence—a deal easier to attain when writing is in the future not the present—to which was added the encouragement of The Atlantic Monthly, expressed by immediate acceptance of three short stories and an advance of cash for a novel. There was also a film contract into details of which I will not go lest irony should change to invective and be roundly returned to me in the High Court by counsel for the plaintiffs. It would in any case be too savage dentistry upon a gift-horse which provided me with a large cheque when most I needed it.

The England to which we Middle-Eastern exiles returned was a foreign country. Its overpowering dullness shocked me even more than it did Ilona; for she, as a Hungarian, naturally expected the solid British culture to be somewhat lacking in vitality. The whole people seemed to be living to the motto of their ration books: do nothing until told; and the impression of those of us who had been away five or six years was exactly that of a capitalist tourist entering a communist state. Discipline might pass, as the price of victory; but I resented having to pay it for political experiment. The Army, which I had always felt to be the very ideal of socialism in its willing and common surrender to a common cause, was a far more friendly and less pompous organisation than the State.

Since the individual and his free development are precious to me, I loathe the State control which is inseparable from socialism. Yet if I were a citizen of an undeveloped peasant country, where the individual has hitherto had no chance of development, I should certainly support a strong, centralised, Socialist government. In China, for example, I might be a communist. But in France I should be a monarchist; in Spain, a liberal. For my own country, where the tendency of the State to sweep up all untidy ends of liberty must be continually checked, I am probably an anarchist.

In argument with politicians I am always beaten. I cannot express what I believe, whereas they express what they cannot possibly believe. But in the last two years I have modified the contempt with which, in thought and in fiction, I treated the man whose sole qualification to represent the people was the mouthing of what they wanted to hear.

The most unexpected experience which ever happened to me, far surpassing the curiosities of South America and war (since they were in the pattern of my life) was to be elected a borough councillor. No one else could be found to stand. I agreed—for there was I complaining at being tied to the creatures of my imagination, and here was a chance of evenings in a world of action, however mild—and since I was certainly not a Socialist, I permitted myself to be called Conservative.

The administration I enjoyed; the politics bored me, for there is no need of them in the running of a borough. Press and public, however, like the council chamber to be a cheap and inaccurate debating hall, and it is the democratic duty of councillors to satisfy them—a fairly harmless duty since all the work has already been done in the committees where politics rarely intrude and every question is patiently considered on its merits. I can think of no better way to run local government than through unpaid, conscientious citizens who make the job their hobby.

As a civic dignitary I was only an amused and competent actor, but the service did teach me that in deriding Members of Parliament I had been attacking the wrong men. The whole basis of politics is the hard-working, unintelligent worker in the ward whose enthusiasm is kept alive by what he or she wrongly believes to be the principles and practical intentions of the opposite party. Their opinions and their tastes are reflected in the executive committees. A coven of retired grocers and colonel’s wives, savagely anti-Socialist, an unseemly chapel of plumbers and female civil servants, savagely anti-Conservative, choose the candidate, distort policy, bombard their leaders in Parliament with telegrams of protest when they have been courageous, and of congratulation when they have sacrificed national to party interest. Even so, they sometimes fail to impress their prejudices upon an unwilling House of Commons; and the elected politicians, whom all my life I have blamed for ignorance and insincerity, should really be honoured as the barrier between their executive committees and national disaster. All must be forgiven to the Member, for he alone protects us from the full effects of democracy.

But in 1945 I could see only that the politicians had no desire to dispel the queues which ended at their feet. The family emigrated from London to remotest Devon and bought a house. Its position at the head of a creek off the Salcombe Estuary would have haunted the mind of any holiday-maker until he could return; but to civilised man and woman, living there all the year round without paid labour—or, worse, with it—the place had nothing to offer but unlimited rabbits and eggs. House agents would have advertised it as ‘suitable for artist or writer’—though why they should assume that such fastidious professionals will tolerate more discomfort than their fellows I have never understood. More likely to live upon a beauty of surroundings is the man who cannot create it for himself.

Production was low, and if we had not sold the house at a profit, the effect of idleness would have been more obvious than it was. The independent craftsman is compelled in self-protection to close his eyes to the threat of disaster lest he be over-influenced by it; and that optimism which appears irresponsible to an accountant or an Income Tax Inspector is in fact as essential as the guard-rail upon some malevolent machine. It can be removed for intervals of care and maintenance, but if it is not in place during the working year alarm inhibits or diverts the hand.

The next move was to a rented house near Dorchester of enormous size and such generous ugliness that one could feel for it nothing but affection—an affection in my case redoubled because there my beloved Magyar first began to be fascinated by England and the English. All the time I was conscious of that heaven, the mutual love of a close-knit family, which is taken for granted by most men and women of goodwill, and for me was an undeserved reward surpassing the most exotic pleasures and excitements.

Almost immediately I found that disconnected chapters fell into place, and that I was half-way through Arabesque. It was an uneven novel—for in the eight years since Rogue Male my taste had declined through lack of reading as much as lack of writing—into which I poured the essence of my Middle-Eastern experience. And this time I did have an axe to grind. I was infuriated by American ignorance of Palestine and the incompetence of our own official propaganda. I set out to show the Arab-Jewish problem from the neutral army point of view. It was a fair objective, since I understood Palestine better than all but a few specialists and could express what I knew more cunningly than they.

In America, well reviewed and accepted as fair comment, it was the most profitable of all my books. In England it died still-born—and this at a moment when Palestine was topical and even the opinions of politicians were saleable. Those were the days when newspapers had little space for reviews or for advertisements, and it was hard to get a book noticed at all unless it was by an established writer. My publishers of that time assumed that I was. They had forgotten that eight absorbing years had passed since Rogue Male. My name was completely unknown except to the Intelligence Corps, whose purchases probably accounted for the few copies which were sold.

I doubt if a writer is ever entitled to blame his publisher for low sales. Serious publishers are not salesmen, and do not claim to be. In England they differ only in their tastes; and what passionately interests them is the making of books, not of money. For books in general they will do any amount of propaganda. Book clubs, press campaigns, literary societies for old ladies—the publisher loves them all. But salesmanship appals him, and he is unwilling to earn the dislike of his equally gentlemanly competitors by lunching once a week in large provincial cities with his travellers and once a month with the director of an unscrupulous advertising agency. Were it his necessity to sell bananas in Spain, he would expect to do so by commissioning a series of evening-paper articles on the superiority of the Banana to the Grape.

It is inevitable that the publisher should have a split personality, divided between his love of literature and his desire to make a living. Frustrated as a mother, he is determined to be a midwife, and his taste, patience and humanity generally make him a good one. But the tough commercialism of which he is unjustly accused is limited to snatching with perfectly sincere regret the odd half-crown from printer and author, and to the search for the rainbow gold of the best-seller. When threatened by imminent bankruptcy, he puts his prices up instead of down, ignoring the fact that no ordinary member of the public ever buys a book unless it is paper-covered. Publishers know this but they do not believe it. My father, for example, knew that policemen could be bribed, but he did not believe it.

Thanks to American sales, the failure of the English Arabesque was not disastrous, but it was a shock to find that I had to go back to the bottom of the literary snakes and ladders and start again. The result was that I strained for effect. I put an extra polish on style and made the next book carry all the assets I had—a setting both romantic and true, characters from Syria and Spain and half Europe, and what should have been a dark stream of excitement gathering in the mountain waters until it rushed headlong for the fall. But the fall was my own. I attained a blank failure. Since I was by no means flown with insolence—unless it were a Disraeli-like insolence of over-embroidering my waistcoat and insisting that I be heard—the fates were unkind.

I must be content with having aimed The High Place at the sun and lost the arrow without even knowing whether it cleared the nearest bush. The novel was set on the Syrian frontier, and concerned a colony of anarchists who had reached the logical conclusion that only a third world war could bring about the desired abolition of the State. Since I was writing in 1948 and alarmed by the steady growth of State dictatorship in England, I had only to exaggerate my own resentment in order to create a hero and narrator who should be deeply involved in the anarchists’ plot until he discovered that their intention was not merely to take advantage of war but to cause it. Yet I fear their trigger device, though scientifically correct, was unconvincing. Indeed, I was later told by an experienced diplomat that the provocative language used to each other at international conferences by Russians and Americans was already so bad that no drugged cigar could possibly make it any worse.

Still, that might have passed. So might my study of the Russian, the Spanish and the religious aspects of anarchism, all contributing with a reasonable economy of words to the final tragedy. Where, I think, I failed was in breaking my own rule. I did not make my meaning clear to the well-educated stockbroker.

I hid a story within the story. I was, and am attracted by the Manichean heresy. I suspect that the battle between Good and Evil is unending, and that the triumph of Good on this planet of earth is not certain. Whether it is certain in a more universal purpose we cannot know, since the terms good and evil are relative only to human conduct and meaningless in any other context. We have no ready reckoner to tell us whether any course of action will cause more human suffering or less; therefore we can only follow the dictates of conscience, and hope to heaven that it has a purpose. More we cannot claim for it, since conscience may lead us—as it did Elisa Cantemir in the novel—to what by any human standard is intolerable evil. Thus Evil must be the servant of the ultimate purpose no less than Good, and we are possessed by one or the other.

Into this myth of dualism I fitted my characters. The servant of Ahriman was Elisa Cantemir; the servant of Ahuramazda, Anton Tabas. Oliver Poss, an international spiv with a Greek passport standing apart from the conflict, was a wholly amoral Pan. Eric Amberson, the hero and narrator, represented the Mithras who must be sacrificed for humanity; but since, like a chief witch of the old religion, he was only too willing to give up his life, the harder sacrifice of love, happiness and self-respect was demanded from him.

Now, all this should not have been in the least apparent in the book, since Amberson himself was telling the story and unaware that he and the antagonists were playing their parts on two stages, one human and one divine. I used every conjuring trick of technique so that the religious dualism should pass clear over the heads of those for whom it meant nothing, and add a pleasure for any reader who picked up the symbolism. But the result was to leave in the air a vague and unsatisfactory sense of the supernatural, which was of course disastrous; and I never realised its presence until some contemptuous reviewer, intending to be unkind but blessedly revealing what was wrong, compared Elisa Cantemir to Rider Haggard’s She. As I had conceived her, Elisa was a passionate but unfeminine political maniac and the last person in all fiction likely to go up in smoke.

Even the rogues of Defoe cannot leave religion alone. This mounting uninvited into a too mysterious pulpit obliges me to satisfy curiosity and to answer the question of what I do believe. When I was in my twenties, dining in Bucharest with that liberal Byzantine, Canon Douglas, he told me that all my rag-bag of speculations could honestly be contained within the Church of England. It may be so, but I have to employ some far-fetched allegories before I can repeat the Creed. I am no more troubled by miracles than the centurion of Capernaum; and indeed I do not think that physicist and biochemist are now very far from explaining in their meaningless but useful words the source of power. I accept the Doctrine of the Trinity as a clear and magnificent definition of Godhead. Yet I cannot believe that any one of the great religions is less true than another.

They provide maps, and the individual soul is wise to choose that which is most familiar to him, whether a Roman road map which shows the day’s march as straight whatever the points of the compass, or the coloured inch-to-the-mile of the Hindu, or the child’s atlas which I myself prefer wherein detail is inadequate and unimportant, and the general picture clear. Since I am not yet weary of this life, I hate the thought of dying; but I am certain that when dead I am the earning of Life will be a harder and more intellectually adventurous task than the earning of a living, and that when the map is no longer two-dimensional I shall need all the self-discipline and knowledge which I have been able to acquire and the grace, which I have not deserved, of the Second Person of the Trinity, by whatever name He be called, if I am to find my way among the dreams.

The failure of The High Place reminded me that I had not yet reached the age of contemplation when it is permissible to promulgate heresies, and that my immediate duty was to support a family. A year’s work had brought in no income—proof, at any rate, that it was honest.

The obvious way of recovery was to write some fast-moving story of unlikely adventure. Speed, I knew, was one of my gifts—in spite of the laborious slowness with which the illusion is produced—and I was constantly being exhorted to write another Rogue Male. But I cannot analyse myself well enough to imitate myself. So I plunged for pure speed and imagination, and produced a commercial thriller called A Rough Shoot in the hope of selling it as a serial in America. In its genre I am not wholly ashamed of it, but the difference between this story and Rogue Male is the difference between cast iron and wrought.

A Rough Shoot was bought by the Saturday Evening Post as a serial, and also made into a film—a very bad one. Almost simultaneously the Post took the finest of all my long short stories, Three Kings, so that I had more money in the bank than I ever had before or since. The first sale merely proved that my calculation was right, the second that my craftsmanship was triumphant. In one I had pleased the market; in the other I had pleased myself, but needed the confirmation of the market that my taste was not purely personal. There is no artificiality in the distinction.

I have never been sure whether any story would sell or not, for my subjects are always unusual. If, in spite of the oddness, an experienced editor considers the story fit for mass reading, then there is every chance that I have hit my target. I may, of course, have fallen unconsciously into commercialism, but that is improbable unless I am playing with some entertaining fantasy without any undertones at all.

Johnson declared that no man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money. What I think he meant to express—though one should not study too closely all the mushroom cloud from a Johnsonian bomb—was his detestation of the amateur for whom it was enough to have written at all. It would be fair to present the problem thus: if you cannot live by your writing, the translation into words of your own manner of thinking cannot be effective, for your whole aim and object is to be so compellingly good that the maximum number of people, whether they approve or not, will have to pay money to read you. The market is the ultimate test for the craftsman. That it should also be the first and only test for the hack is unimportant.

I had no intention whatever of allowing A Rough Shoot to be published as a book, for I thought it too slight and ephemeral. The literary scholar of thirty-five years ago is still alive enough in me to be exasperatingly contemptuous of the mere story-teller. But weakly, and at last, I gave way to the insistence of my American and English publishers. A Rough Shoot was only forty thousand words, half the length of a novel, so I decided to write a sequel with the same hero and narrator and more true to life in that we would inspect the jolly school-boyish character when he was overcome by darkness, defeat and revenge. A Time to Kill was meant to appear in one volume with A Rough Shoot—a story of attack followed by one of defence.

But publishers dispose. Readers, they said—and they said it on both sides of the Atlantic—would not stand two stories in one volume. I do not know why. Personally I prefer to have eighty thousand words for my twelve and sixpence. Again I gave way—with the result that I was typed as a thriller writer, and not a very good one at that. My only sour satisfaction was that the public would have little to do with either book until offered as a paper-back, thereby proving that its business sense was as good as my own.

I set both stories in Dorset because I wished my characters to be free of foot, and I have no liking for description of the open north where the thermometer insists it is not cold though nothing but whisky will allay the discomfort of continual shivering. The western end of the chalk, not too closely populated, suits the mood of loneliness. Man on the short turf is apart from his fellows, and in a sense predatory upon them, since for his food and drink he must descend below the tree-tops. Meanwhile he may stand back from an England which, half-way to the horizon, recovers her youth and appears again a forest—ecstatic, as a man standing back from his beloved, that a beauty which was all of feeling is also a beauty to be seen. I delighted to draw the setting of A Rough Shoot from the four hundred acres of high farmland where I myself shared a shoot, though I could not allow to my narrator, who was a plain, provincial businessman, more poetry of description than would be in character.

A writer explaining how he deals with his subjects is almost bound to fall into excesses of conceit and humility. They are both so necessary to him. Lacking conceit, he would stop trying for the better; lacking humility, he would not know what the better was. More entertaining and just as relevant is to explain why he is drawn to his subjects at all, for that at once becomes the story of those thoughtless and happy hours when the raw material of writing is fed into the unconscious. If poetry be emotion recollected in tranquillity, much prose has as its origin tranquillity recollected with emotion.

To shoot for the pot has always refreshed me, combining my love of open country with the more urbane anticipation of a future meal. But, though a competent shot with rifle and pistol, I have never been more than a comedy figure with a gun. Anything which flies or runs—so long as it does—is reasonably safe from me. Occasional lessons have only driven my teachers to despair, for I am not even consistent in error. I may be under or over or peppering the next parish.

The beginning of my sporting activity was as fraudulent as the rest of it. When I was at Oxford I was employed one summer to be a good and healthy influence upon a thirteen-year-old boy. The job called out a temporary sense of responsibility, and a self which was then unknown to me did it well; possibly I remembered the dreaming happiness of my own boyhood before 1914, and was determined to preserve it in another. This charming boy was expected to learn to shoot, and I to encourage him in the art. Day after day the gamekeeper hurled chunks of pottery into the air for us. Invariably the boy hit them, and I missed them; on the other hand, I enjoyed it, and he did not. So we came to a gentlemen’s agreement under which I should shoot the rabbits while he entertained himself as he pleased. The rabbits on that Somerset estate looked as if they had been bred by a circus conjurer. Some were black, some red as a fox, and some, fathered by liberal-minded, rabbit-coloured rabbits, were tortoiseshell.

Returning to October Oxford I could now claim, in a casual manner, to be able to shoot; and Ivor Barry invited me from time to time to annoy his father’s pheasants. Thus I qualified for a future banker—not, of course, by reason of my prowess, but possibly because I knew all the correct gestures. They were almost in my blood, for when I was a very little boy I would make my father tell me bedtime stories of the shooting at Bilney in Norfolk and the gamekeeper and the local characters.

In Roumania one of the many saints of the Orthodox Church would sometimes close the bank long enough for a night and a day in the silent Danube marshes. I loved the morning flight for its unearthliness, its change, marked as that between waking and sleeping thoughts, from the city of men to the city of the birds. Closely following a peasant guide through darkness so black that there was no gleam of water, I arrived at nowhere and squatted in a waist-deep pit. Heralding the morning flight, teal bulleted overhead in twos and threes, their bodies just blacker than the night. Out of the grey came the grey geese, and after them, when the water was silver and the points of the rushes black against sunrise, the squadrons of the duck. Then the sun rose, and far away I could see the frontier of willows separating the sown from the desert of water in which no man lived but an occasional outlaw. One such, arriving with infinite precautions, I met at a peasant wedding. He was the local hero, and the bride’s father was greatly honoured that he should have taken such a risk. The man was all misery and wet hair, his sheepskin cloak rotting with mud, and his person a biblical comment upon the fruits of murder.

The feathered arrows of the half light were nearly always too fast for a slow arm encumbered by clothes; but warmed and after breakfast I was tireless in the pursuit of snipe, caring greatly for my dinner and less for the sporting dogma that he must be shot because he is the hardest bird to shoot. To my palate the snipe surpasses the woodcock, always provided that he is free from a faintly fishy tang and has never seen a shop counter.

The evening flights of September—since I do not mind leaches but I cannot stand cold—were much to my taste, and once in my life have I known what the first-class shot must feel. My companions were laid up with fever, due either to mosquitoes or a surfeit of water-melons, and I strolled out through the dusk along the top of a flood bank with no cover at all. The duck, confident that no one would ever attempt to shoot them from so improbable a position, committed suicide upon the end of my gun until it was too hot to hold. I could scarcely carry my bag, especially since I had to cover a quarter of a mile backwards facing the dogs of a gipsy encampment. They set great store by the useless beasts, and it would have been unwise to kill.

Once I shot in the Dobrudja, where the tumuli of the dead cover the steppe like ants’ nests—perhaps a Scythian cemetery with room for twenty cemeteries between one grave and another, perhaps the last record of Darius’ expedition while there was still leisure to bury the dead before the onset of starvation and empty wandering. Beyond this nomad’s paradise and close to what then was the Bulgarian frontier, high vegetation begins again. There we came to two great hedges, thicker than even an abandoned Dorset hedge, which enclosed nothing and seemed evidence of human intention rather than accomplishment. Over each hedge was a peregrine falcon. The tiercel and his mate had worked out a technique which proved that they were killing as much for sport as for hunger. The falcon would glide low along the foot of her hedge where partridges were cowering. Up would get the covey and fly across to the second hedge. Just before they arrived, the tiercel would strike, bagging one or missing. He then patrolled his own hedge until the partridges lost their nerve again and were driven back to the falcon. We four guns were in the middle of this fascinating game. We did occasionally drop a bird out of the covey, but for the most part the peregrines worked like a pair of ill-trained gun-dogs, a hundred yards ahead of us.

In the years which followed Roumania my mind, enterprising in all but relaxation, paced the cage which I had made for it, and I never touched a gun until my return at the beginning of the war. Again there were morning and evening flights on the Danube marshes, and sometimes long tramps over the open plain—ten or more guns, with a hundred paces between them, walking mile after mile across the sunburnt stubble and fallow. Game got up so far away that full choke in both barrels was recommendable, and I was completely outclassed by the Roumanians, who were a people of keen shots with a strict and admirable code of game laws.

In the Lebanon my ex-gamekeeper sergeant-major and I were bound together by a community of tastes which once exposed us to the delight and derision of two sections. We were about to start one of our pistol-shooting matches. The target was being nailed up when he and I simultaneously spotted a snipe. We fell upon our bellies and crawled in its direction. To have killed a snipe with a .45 revolver would be a memory for ever. Twenty-six pairs of eyes watched us with amazement, for nothing less than a German spy bogged from his parachute could account for this lunatic behaviour. We fired together at nothing visible. None of them connected our slow and skilful stalk with the little brown bird which rose and obligingly settled again. Once more we got within twenty yards and fired. This time one of us must have been very close, for the snipe disappeared towards High Lebanon, producing every jink and trick in its repertoire. We returned and explained ourselves. But the word ‘snipe’ carried little magic for those highly intelligent townsmen. We might as well have said it was a sparrow.

Snipe and Sheikh Fouad Douaihy persuaded us to explore a melancholy bog on the flats to the north of Tripoli. I put up nothing but a venerable hare. Each of us was taken aback at finding the other in so unlikely a spot, and his astonishment lasted a fatal second longer than my own. Sheikh Fouad was enchanted at this success, and nothing would content him but that we should drive some miles to a village station on the Tripoli-Aleppo line and eat the hare with a cousin—there was nowhere he did not have a cousin—who was the stationmaster.

The stationmaster was naturally unprepared for such an invasion. He was a bachelor and lived in a room above the ticket-office, approached by a wooden step-ladder. Sheikh Fouad, however, appeared to have no doubt that he could cook a hare. I cannot even guess at his motives. He may have wished to assure this outlying member of his clan, who possibly was in trouble with his superiors, that he, Fouad, was on excellent terms with the British Army and could fix anything; or he may have known that the man had not had a square meal for weeks. Alternatively—and this is the more likely—he merely wished to give the lonely stationmaster an opportunity to entertain within his means the head of the clan.

It was seven o’clock and we were ravenously hungry. The solitary porter was sent off into the night to buy herbs and wine. The stationmaster climbed to his bedroom with the hare. We three sat upon the hard benches of the ticket-office, drinking araq to keep out the draughts which howled through the wooden walls. After an hour and a half the porter returned. By then the sergeant-major and I were owlish with araq on empty stomachs, but still keeping up our party manners.

Now fortified by bread and wine, I asked for a situation report on the hare. Sheikh Fouad explained that the stationmaster had only a frying pan and a primus stove. His tone gently rebuked my curiosity. A gentleman should not enquire too closely into the manner in which other gentlemen chose to live.

Nine passed, and ten. At half-past ten Fouad, for the first time in all our months of friendship, showed impatience. The stationmaster came tumbling down the ladder and announced that certainly we could eat the hare if we wished, but though a magnificent hare—a better hare, more exquisitely shot, there could not be in all Syria!—its extreme age deserved respect and another half-hour of cooking.

At eleven, the stationmaster descended the ladder, holding his wash-basin in his arms. Within it, smoking among olives and onions, was the hare. It was delicious, resembling hare à la Grecque, but not so oily. How he managed it I cannot conceive, although he had infinite time, the head of his clan to entertain and the native Lebanese genius for cooking. Wine and congratulations flowed. Sheikh Fouad beamed, as if he had known all along that his improbable impulse would be justified.

There were warm and idle evening flights in the Valley of Jezreel, the marshes of Lake Hula and the waters of Jericho. Once, staying at a kibutz on the Syrian frontier, I had a marvellous early morning after quail which lay so close that even I could not miss them, and once I spent two days in the tamarisk jungle along the banks of the lower Jordan after invisible pig. So back to Devon and Dorset, where my skill was just sufficient to keep a meatless and growing family supplied with rabbits—by no means a dull diet, for they were in such quantity upon the down of A Rough Shoot that there was no difficulty in picking the right age for frying, for grilling, for roasting or—should a parent intercept what was intended for its children—for goulash and rabbit loaf.

A curious disadvantage of the writer’s life is that he is not compelled to live anywhere in particular. He is commonly envied for this freedom, yet to handle it a man must either be unenterprising or have a great love for his chosen spot. Those impulses which quickly come to nothing because the breadwinner must live near his work may be too freely indulged.

In 1949 Ilona and I held a family council. Our unity in Europe makes us approach most subjects from the same direction and with the same assumptions—though I, the cold Englishman, am noisy and emphatic, and she, the excitable Hungarian, is patient and courteous. We decided that we lived too far from London, that we needed more friends, that the business would prosper if production were closer to the market. The first and third reasons were nonsense. The second was true enough, since my own friends were far too scattered over the world, and a woman who marries a foreigner is deprived of her right to contribute to marriage, except at rare intervals, her own circle of intimates and relations.

We bought a cottage at Strand-on-the-Green and had it converted to a house during six months of violently rising building costs. At least as many of my fellow citizens have been ruined by architects as by the Law or the Stock Exchange, for once the work has started there is no point at which you can get out, sell and cut your losses. But it is not fair to put the blame on the architect. He is employed to create a thing of beauty, and he would be an unlikely paragon among men if he were also an accountant. At least we added to London a house slight and decorative as a good essay, and probably—though, the builders had to scamp the job here and there—more lasting.

Now loaded with debt in the traditional manner of writers and actors, yet innocent of any extravagance, I tried to double my sale of short stories and failed. I discovered that the deliberate invention of one tale after another was beyond my powers. There was no obvious reason why this should be, for several of my most profitable stories have been built of pure imagination; but they are freaks, mere isolated efforts of the guardian angel to impress me with its industry. What I myself require for a short story invariably comes—if it is not a memory of my own—from the casual conversation of other people. It may be a single phrase, or some account of the oddity of a friend or an anecdote. The only essential is that what I hear should amuse my sense of irony. It is a good year when imagination is set alight more than twice. My made short stories, therefore, lacked the true and urgent flame, and as little first-class work came out of the spurt of energy as if I had waited for my subjects and made no spurt at all.

Enough stories had now satisfied magazine editors and myself for me to insist that both my publishers should publish. They could only agree, hoping to make up their losses on a later book. They were rewarded for uncommercial kindness by no loss at all, for they sold their editions of Tales of Adventurers down to the last copy.

This is the book by which I should wish to be judged, since it could not possibly have been written by anyone else. Original work, upon which he need not even put his name or trade-mark, is all that any craftsman can claim. How far it is aesthetically pleasing he cannot know, for the eye of affection forgives too much.

Reviewers in both countries were uncommonly kind. The only charge they preferred against me, and that mildly, was of searching out and elaborating the exotic. It is true that I often take my subjects from war or very foreign parts or Iron Curtain politics or any situation which will allow me to show individual man and woman in direct relationship—that is to say, with no protection but their own character or integrity—to unfamiliar circumstance. It is all a question of taste, and my defence is that I try to write what I like to read.

The delicate story founded upon one single subtlety of human character is rarely for me. The analysis may be brilliant and moving, but the fact analysed is a commonplace which I know already. My temperament demands that it should be presented to me as an epigram of four lines, not a short story of two hundred. I would agree that much of the finest literature merely gives new life to the familiar, and that the great play or novel gathers up in its sweep the fairly ordinary actions of fairly ordinary people. But the short story does not march to that slow and magnificent time. It is a little dance of bees, pointing direction. And if there is no new flower when I arrive there, I may be fascinated as a craftsman, but as a reader I am bored.

It is, of course, the even greater boredom of the commercial short story which has frightened honest men and women into writing with the false simplicity of Wordsworth on an off day. Even so, it is not always desirable to use a sow’s ear to make a silken purse. Between the commercial story and the stuff with a full-stop every dozen words, there is still infinite room for experiment.

Because I was for so long an amused, romantic, ironical observer of men and manners between Persia and the Pacific coast, it was natural that, when I turned from living life to imagining it, I should be attracted by the same sort of incident in fiction as in reality. What I see as a short story worth writing is more likely to happen abroad than in England; and when it does happen at home, England presents itself to me as a European country of great individuality and I am conscious of its frontiers. To a lesser extent this is also true of my novels. I cannot get away from the interaction between my country and its world.

What masters I follow I cannot analyse. I suspect that Conrad has some influence, and, the moment I write fiction in the first person, Defoe. There must also be echoes from the French and the Spaniards, for they are the story-tellers whom I most frequently re-read. But my most conscious loyalty is to the English language, and one of the reasons for my slowness is humility. I hesitate to accept my ephemeral thoughts as meriting the precise expression which I admire. In spite of mass literature I do not believe that English has yet entered so late silver an era that it should be necessary to over-simplify it or over-elaborate. The style of Hemingway’s imitators gets in my way as a reader just as annoyingly-as does that of Walter Pater, and I resent that anyone should make love to my language with perversities until all the delicious ingeniousness upon the border of convention has been exhausted. To my taste, the finest English prose of our day is Osbert Sitwell’s, straightforward to read and discreetly decorated. I question whether the future historian, comparing him to the masters of the two previous centuries, will find any marked decadence.

Tale of Adventurers was followed by the usual year or two of searching for a subject which would keep up the standard of the short stories and save me from a run before the wind with some confounded fellow meditating improbable violence. Meanwhile I turned to and enjoyed a few months of hack work, honest as that of any chairmaker who will ring the door-bell for repairs rather than produce imitation Louis XV. It was indeed a thriller, but it was true. I rewrote for children the Anabasis of Xenophon—and with a proper enthusiasm for the original author, since I myself had been over the route as far as the Kurdish mountains and I had suspected at the age of thirteen that the retreat of the ten thousand must be good reading if only one could get away from the aorist, the parasangs and the Persians with unpronounceable names.

Rather more gradually than usual my angel presented to me a faint outline of Fellow Passenger. I liked it, and took over. I was weary of the melancholy confessions of ex-communists, and it seemed to me that any of the fiery young men whom I had known in the early nineteen-thirties—when a lad of generous spirit was no more to blame for catching communism than any other intimate disease—would be far more ready to laugh at himself than to beat a dreary breast with Germanic polysyllables. And communism itself is so gloriously inefficient—the indestructible genius of the Russians continues in spite and not because of their official creed—that I can never fear it, as I did Hitler, to the point of hysteria. Among its infinite tragedies there is a gleam of comedy which Cervantes would have enjoyed—that of fallible human beings striving towards a very ancient, noble and impractical ideal by means that are preposterous to any but themselves.

In the writing of the book I was for once very near to pleasure, and those who liked it forgave the performance of acrobatics upon the very brink of fantasy for the sake of the high spirits. It did fairly well, and for the first time my English sales far surpassed the American. Across the Atlantic they were a little shocked at my cavalier treatment of the treasured bedtime bogeyman.

I was eager that the public should take to this book just sufficiently to allow me to move over into the territory of the English and Spanish picaresque. Fellow Passenger was already in the tradition—far nearer, say, to Defoe than to Buchan. There was no violence, but enough speed to persuade the reader who only took me out of the library for excitement that he had had his two-pence worth. The narrator, too, belonged in the class of rogues rather than rogue males, and his character allowed him to tell his story with such irreverence as I chose to give him.

I have always had a strong preference for throwing a story into the first person. Through entering the mind of too many characters clarity is diffused, and the novelist finds himself commenting and explaining when he should be recording. The narrator may be the hero, or he may be an intelligent observer. On the whole I have a liking for the first in a novel, and the second in a short story. But, from the moment the word ‘I’ is on the paper, speech, thoughts, what the narrator may see, what he implies and what he suppresses are his, as absolutely as in a play, and no longer the writer’s. Somerset Maugham’s insistence that the ‘I’ must be himself forces him into too arch a modesty—for he cannot claim for himself all he might claim for a Marlowe—with the result that the apologies and dinner parties of the first pages go on too long. That, I think, is the only reason why this superb master of the short story will never be as popular with the critical as he is, and rightly, with the fireside reader.

When I wrote The Third Hour I was joyously ignorant that there was any problem at all to be solved in the use of the third person. Fortunately the bulk and vitality of a first novel swamped any awkwardness which there might have been in the transitions between the mind of one character and of another. In Arabesque, again in the third person, I was too conscious of the difficulty and fussy as a vicar’s wife experimenting with chrysanthemums upon the pulpit steps. I compromised by allowing action to be seen only through the eyes and in the presence of hero and heroine; and when I needed one short and satirical chapter in which neither of them could be present I set it as a division in the middle of the book and called it ‘Interlude.’

The use of the first person at once does away with the problem of whether the novelist and the readers may know more than the characters and, if so, how much. But it substitutes two other troubles. The first is the reason why the narrator should tell his story at all. I am sure it is unnecessary to answer this question, and I tell myself that I am not going to bother with it; yet every time I feel a lack of urgent reality until I have bothered with it. The second trouble is style. The narrator may—indeed must—use basic Geoffrey Household, but upon that he may only embroider within the limitations of his character and his probable powers of self-expression. The limit of realism is quickly reached. For example, I could not allow a Civil Servant to tell his tale in Civil Service English. But sometimes in a short story I will let the English read as if it were a translation from a foreign language—a most dangerous tour de force, for the pitfall of the comic foreigner yawns wide open.

The narrator of Rogue Male was a highly educated man, packed with class traditions and suppressions. He was fully capable of thinking anything I could think, but the words had to be dragged out of him. He would never have admitted his sufferings to any but himself, and his suppressions are also for himself. In fact he was using the conventions of the diary. There was no room for any fireworks. The ornaments of language had to be confined to simple flashes of agony.

To Eric Amberson in The High Place I could allow far more fluency. The consciousness of his personal tragedy working upon a man who had all the sensitivity of a frustrated craftsman gave him the right to let himself go and to construct sentence and paragraph as well as his creator could manage. A Rough Shoot, however, was too easy to give much aesthetic pleasure, for it was told by a plain Dorset businessman. To him language was a vehicle for facts; in the realms of the spirit he would be as incoherent as the rest of us. I could not write the complex, commercial-letter sort of English which he would in life have written—once in the naughtiness of an after-dinner mood I tried it, and ten pages would have been enough for any reader—but the nearer I held him to basic, the more real he would be and the faster the story would go.

The hero of Fellow Passenger was a man after my own heart. Half English, half Ecuadorian, he could look at our manners from the outside and enjoy them. There was no limit except that set by propriety—mine, not his—on what he might think and what he might do; and when he loved the beauty of woman or landscape or wine, his dancing style could fairly be allowed to sparkle with appreciation.

Fellow Passenger did what I asked of it, setting me free to move towards the pure picaresque with reasonable certainty that I would not also be moving to bankruptcy. On the plane of daily life I was also more at ease, for we had got rid of that dainty and ruinous mistress, the Strand-on-the-Green house, without a loss. All was set fair for leisurely story-telling.

But the angel was in her most feminine avatar. She would have nothing to do with this simple, virile and practical programme; nor would industrious persuasion move her, for the picaresque is not so simple as it appears. An original character will, it is true, stroll through the imagination with all necessary impudence; and, once he is established, his adventures, his loves and the shape of the society upon which or in spite of which he lives may be invented with generous ease. The element of suspense which must carry the reader through to the end is far more troublesome to discover and develop. It may be danger, but then the story runs too close to the thriller. It may be, as in Tom Jones, the course of true love. But my characters are never creatures of social convention; I could not outrage probability by keeping them out of bed until the end of the book.

I tried a political motive to give me suspense and set my scene in the Balkans of the nineteen-thirties—only to find that I had become enmeshed in intrigue. The picaresque was overwhelmed by chancellors, archbishops and the leaders of the proletariat. In fact I had created a credible state, but it had cost a quarter of the book to do so.

With Ruritania safely in the waste-paper basket, I began to suspect that I might again be doomed to the three-year period between the beginning of one book and the next. I would no more accept such a gap in major production than any businessman, and I stuck as firmly to my chair. Oil wells in Roumania provided some excellent chapters, but the book could not decide what it was about. Oil wells in Arabia would have been a more topical choice, if I did not lack the reporter’s trick of making superficial facts appear essential.

So it went on; and the angel would not be compelled unless I count as hers—for I did not know she had any interest in mere facts—the capricious and impatient suggestion that I should write my life while waiting for another less untidy. I doubted if it could be of interest, and still doubt—for there is no significance in what I have done, none of the famous among those whom I have met and little to commend my thoughts but their expression. Yet the pattern of my life, without any forced selection of incidents, fitted the convention of the picaresque and, though the last page could scarcely present my half-successful self as living happily ever afterwards, I had at least advanced from the professionless young rogue among the pimps of Bucharest.

What I have plainly in common with the hero whom I would have preferred to create is that I can look back on the past with geniality. It is not wholly due to reticence that I have left out the humiliations and the darknesses of the soul. Memory is an unconscious Christian, forgetting the few trespasses committed by others and the many committed by oneself.

If I have numbered like a witless sundial only the serenest or half-clouded hours, it is perhaps because I was always aware of enjoyment when I had it. Guilty I have been over and over again of seizing it, but never have the laws of life exacted the full price. I have been given great liberty to admire. I will not play the critic and find meaning in an individual when only a general richness of literary texture was intended; yet should construction demand an occasional minor character to taste and to give praise, I too may fulfil a purpose of that which wrote me.