STEPHEN McKENNA
Stephen McKenna
You would think it should be easy—far easier than writing a novel—for any man of literary capacity to sit down and write the story of his own life, bring into it, instead of imaginary characters, the real men and women he has known, and so make a great Autobiography. Yet there are fewer great books in autobiography than in any other form of literature. Some years ago I was remarking on this to Keble Howard, and he accounted for the deficiency by laying it down that hardly any man started to write his memoirs till his memory was failing and he was getting too old to work. It is supposed to be presumptuous, a little self-conceited, for a celebrity of any sort to publish his private history until he is so far advanced in years that, even if he has done nothing else respectable, he can claim to be respected on account of his age. Howard contended, and I agree with him, that a man of seventy or so has generally forgotten as much of the earlier half of his life as he remembers, and often misinterprets what he does remember because he looks back on it from a wholly different standpoint, misses the importance of things that were important when they happened, feels for his young self now as he did not feel at the time, makes tragedies of what then seemed comedies, and comedies of what seemed tragedies, and gets the whole picture out of focus.
I have lived long enough since then to have been able to prove for myself that all this is accurate; for I have read divers memoirs of men whom I knew when they were middle-aged and I was youthful, noting how much they omitted, incidents they have warped in the telling, events to which they have given an emotional significance that never really belonged to them. To remedy such a state of things Keble Howard’s idea was that anybody who had done anything and meant to do more, should write the first volume of his autobiography when he was under thirty, while he was still near enough to his youth not to have lost all the freshness of its feelings, still near enough to his childhood to be able to revive in his thoughts the actual magic of its atmosphere; he should write his second volume when he was about fifty, and his third when he was so far from the beginning that the end could not be much farther on. That is the only way, I believe, to do the thing perfectly. We have so few great autobiographies because most of them are more or less imaginary, so few of them are true.
Possibly Stephen McKenna arrived independently at the same conclusion, for in 1921, when he was thirty-three, he published “While I Remember,” which is in effect the first volume of his autobiography. But he reveals less of himself in this than of his surroundings. He is too much of what is commonly described as a gentleman of the old school to indulge in personalities and give away unpleasant facts about his friends, or even about his enemies; he will criticize their public life with devastating wit and epigrammatic satire, but he betrays no intimacies, will have nothing to say of their private characters or conduct, and he is almost as reticent in talking of himself as of others. You gather from his first autobiographical fragment that before he went to Oxford, of which he gives some delightful impressionistic sketches, he went to Westminster School, and was for a while, a teacher there, and perhaps the most personal note in the book is in a greeting to some of his old pupils, which owns that he blushes to recall the lessons he taught them. “My incompetence was incurable,” he says. “I should be well pleased to think that your memories of me are a hundredth part as kindly as my memories of you. Does it comfort you to know that my awe of you continued for three terms? If ever the prayer-bell had not rung before I showed that I could not solve some diabolical equation! If you could have seen into my mind during the first week when I ranged you in alphabetical order and guided myself despairingly by the two red-heads in the form!”
If he does not fill his pages with careless and indiscreet gossip of all sorts of well-known people it is not for lack of material, but simply that he has a conscience and a strict code of honor that make such chatter impossible to him. He will tell you of his experience, during the War, in the Intelligence section of the War Trade Department, and, briefly, of his experiences with the Balfour Mission in America, but though he has mixed largely in modern society and the world of letters and, as nephew of one of the ablest of latter-day Chancellors of the Exchequer, has been a good deal behind the scenes in political circles, he does not, after the manner of the usual sensational Diaries and Memoirs, now-a-days, scarify individual members of any circle, but reserves his commentary and condemnation for the changes and degeneration that have come over our general social habits and behavior, limits his discussion of contemporary writers to their works, and his criticism of famous politicians, and this is drastic enough, to their doings and misdoings in the political scene.
All which reticences are natural to him and exactly characteristic. They seem to denote an austerity that is in keeping with his somewhat ascetic appearance. But if in profile, as somebody has suggested, he curiously resembles the portraits of Dante, there is more of the graciousness than of the gloom and bitterness of the somber Florentine in his composition. You may realize that if you read “Tex,” the charming memorial volume he produced after the death of Texiera de Mattos. It is a collection of his dead friend’s letters linked together with explanatory notes of his own, and in these letters, and indirectly in the notes, I think you get more intimate glimpses of the real McKenna than anywhere else, and find him, behind the polite mask and settled air of restraint, often irresponsibly outspoken, always sympathetic, warm-hearted, and with a very genius for friendship.
If he has studiously avoided personalities in his memoirs, he has, of course, drawn freely in his novels on his knowledge of political and social life and people, though even there nobody has, so far, pretended to recognize living originals of any of his characters. He began his career as a novelist with two artificial comedies. “The Reluctant Lover,” in 1912, and “Sheila Intervenes,” in 1913. They had some affinity with the romantic fantasies of W. J. Locke and the sparkling talk of “Dodo” and “The Dolly Dialogues.” The story in each was told with the lightest of light touches, and the conversations were punctuated with smart epigrams. Their cleverness was undeniable, and already, in “Sheila,” he was making play with his knowledge of political affairs. They were brilliantly clever, but ran entertainingly on the surface of things. He was learning to use his tools; feeling his way. In “The Sixth Sense” he was beginning to find it, and he found it triumphantly in “Sonia, or Between Two Worlds.”
“Sonia” is one of the notable things in fiction that came out of the War. It appeared in 1917, when we were all uplifted to high ideals and sustained by a fine belief that a new and nobler world was to rise, phœnix-like, out of the ashes and chaos into which the old world had been resolved. The atmosphere of that time, all its surge of altruistic emotion, are so sensitively and realistically preserved in the story that one cannot re-read it now without a sense of regret that we have forgotten so much of our near past and failed so meanly to realize the better state that, in those dark days, we were all so sincerely confident of building. Beginning in the decadent world of the late ’nineties and the dawn of the century, the story comes down, or goes up, into the miraculously new world that the war made, and glances optimistically into the future. Most of its characters are drawn from the higher classes of society, and the love romance of Sonia and David O’Rane, the most charming and glowingly human hero McKenna has ever given us, has the social and political history of the period for its setting. Never before or since has he shown himself so much of an idealist nor handled great issues with such mastery and imaginative insight. “Sonia” has been ranked with the great political novels of Disraeli, and I doubt whether Disraeli ever did anything so fine in poignancy of feeling and delicacy of style.
“Ninety-Six Hours’ Leave,” his other war novel, was a lively tale written for amusement only; and “Sonia Married” maintained the tradition attaching to sequels and did not rise to the level of “Sonia.” The biggest of his other novels are, I think, “Midas and Son,” a masterpiece of irony, a mordant satire on the vanity of riches; and that brilliant study of the snobbishness, shallowness, cynicism, social ambition of the unpleasant Lady Ann Spenworth, “The Confessions of a Well-Meaning Woman.” It blends a maturer philosophy of life with the vivacity and sparkle of his early conversational novels. It exposes without mercy the squalid little soul of a person who is or has been of importance in society, and if her self-revelations make her seem abhorrent it is because she herself seems so abhorrently alive and so minutely true to certain morbid, unlovely sides of human nature.
You would not guess from the abounding vitality he puts into his novels that McKenna was by no means of the robust kind. In winter he generally escapes from our unsatisfactory climate, and you hear of him voyaging to remote parts of Asia or South America, or somewhere where the sun shines. But when he is at home, there is an hour before lunch, at the end of the morning’s work, that is given over to any friends who may drop in at his pleasant Lincoln’s Inn chambers, to find him the most genial and interesting and interested of hosts, with as neat a hand for mixing a cocktail as any in London.