1918
Early in 1918 I was in London for a brief period after an absence from England of more than two years spent in France, Egypt, Greece and Serbia. My health was broken, my spirits were low. The Chelsea people were dispersed; only Hearn, with his lame foot, was left of the men, but several of the women were to be found. Herbert Hughes, by some miracle, was on leave, and he turned up [244] ]unexpectedly one night at my flat. We talked quietly, laughed a little, had some music, and fell into silence.
“Those great days!” said I, apropos of nothing.
“Yes. Nothing like them will come again. But all of us who remain alive and are still in England must meet. What about next Sunday? We’ll meet at Madame’s.”
And so it was arranged. Next Sunday there were seven of us to make merry, whereas in former days there were forty or fifty. But we seven were together once more: we who, as it were, had been saved—saved perhaps only temporarily.
It is a long studio in which we sit, but screens enclose a piano, the fireplace, a few rugs and chairs, and a table. Madame is tall and quiet and distinguished; her light soprano voice conveys an impression of wistfulness, and her personality, full of charm and a sadness that does not conceal her courage, diffuses itself throughout the room. We have met together for a rag, but no one evinces the least desire to indulge in any violent jollity.
Hughes goes to the piano, for a piano always draws him as a magnet draws steel, and sometimes, half-consciously, he feels the pull of one before he has seen it. He goes to the piano and, perking his nose at an angle of about forty degrees with the horizontal, plays French songs very quietly, whilst we sit gazing into the heart of the fire, each with his own thoughts, and probably each with the same thoughts—thoughts of Harry Lowe in Greece, of Gordon Warlow in Mesopotamia, of those who lie dead, though but two years before they were more alive than we ourselves, of those who have gone to France and never returned....
And Madame, moving with our thoughts, gently rises and joins Hughes and begins, her hands clasped on her breast, to sing with most alluring grace things by Hahn, Debussy and Duparc. The music lulls us into a very luxury of sadness, into a mood in which grief loses its edge [245] ]and sorrow its poignancy. To me, who have heard no music for two years, her singing is mercilessly beautiful, so beautiful, indeed, that my breathing becomes uneven and my eyes wet. And once again I feel that spinal shiver which, as a little boy, I used to experience when I heard an anthem by Gounod or just caught the sound of a military band as it marched down another road.... I never used to run from the house to see the band, for even in those early days I had an intuitive knowledge that beauty is mystery, and that to probe mysteries is to mar, if not altogether to kill, beauty.... And to-night, when Madame comes to the end of each song, I do not speak, I scarcely breathe, so fearful am I that the spell may be broken. But something of the spell lasts even when she ceases singing altogether and, looking at my wife, I know that she feels it too—that, indeed, all in our little company are more quietly happy, more reconciled to all the brutality and ugliness over the sea, than we have been for a long age.
We talk in quiet tones about the past, the present and the future, each contributing something to the common stock of conversation. Madame brings us tea and cakes, and we listen to the dim rumour of traffic in King’s Road. And then, not very late, moved by a common impulse, we rise to leave, and talking softly as we go, make our way outside where, as we did in that spot three years ago, we say farewell, wondering as we do so what Fate has in store for each of us and whether for one or more of us this is the end of our life in Chelsea—a life in which we have worked hard and played hard, enjoying both work and play, and in which we have been carelessly unmindful of the danger lying in wait for our country.
[246]
]CHAPTER XXI
SOME MORE MUSICIANS
Professor Granville Bantock—Frederick Delius—Joseph Holbrooke—Dr Walford Davies—Dr Vaughan Williams—Dr W. G. M‘Naught—Julius Harrison—Rutland Boughton—John Coates—Cyril Scott
At the present moment there are only two names that are of vital importance in British creative music—Sir Edward Elgar and Granville Bantock. No two men could be in more violent contrast: Elgar, conservative, soured with the aristocratic point of view, super-refined, deeply religious; Bantock, democratic, Rabelaisian, free-thinking, gorgeously human.
Of the two, Bantock is the more original, the deeper thinker, the more broadly sympathetic.
It must be about ten years ago that, staying a week-end with Ernest Newman, I was taken by my host one evening to Bantock’s house in Moseley. I remember Bantock’s bulky form rising from the table at which he was scoring the first part of his setting of Omar Khayyám, and I recollect that, as soon as we had shaken hands, he took from his pocket an enormous cigar-case of many compartments that shut in upon themselves concertina-fashion. From another pocket he produced a huge match-box containing matches almost as large as the chips of wood commonly used for lighting fires. Having carefully selected a cigar for me, he struck a match that, spluttering like a firework, calmed down into a huge blaze. He gazed upon me very solemnly and rather critically all the time I was lighting up, but his face relaxed into a [247] ]smile when, having plunged my cigar into the middle of the flame, I left it there for many seconds and did not withdraw it until the cigar itself had momentarily flamed and until it glowed like a miniature furnace.
I was destined to smoke very many of Bantock’s cigars, and I hope that when the war is over I shall smoke many more; but I never lit a cigar he handed me without noticing that he invariably observed me very closely and a trifle anxiously, as though afraid I should fail in some detail of the holy rite. I do not think I ever did fail, for he never met me without offering me a cheroot, which he certainly would never have done if I had omitted any necessary observance of the lighting ceremonial.
That first evening we talked a good deal—at least, Newman and a few other friends did; but Bantock, never a very loquacious man, committed himself to nothing save a few generalities. By no means a cautious man in his mode of life, he is nevertheless cautious in his choice of friends, and no man can freeze more quickly than he when uncongenial company is thrust upon him. There were several strangers in our little circle, and Bantock was content for the most part to sit back in his easy-chair and listen.
The following night we met again at the Midland Institute, Birmingham, where Ernest Newman was giving one of his witty and brilliant lectures. Bantock insisted upon my sitting on the platform, though for what reason I do not know, unless it was to satisfy his impish instinct for putting shy and self-conscious people into prominent positions. At that time he and Newman were the closest of friends, and as Newman and I were on very friendly terms, Bantock was disposed to regard me very favourably; at all events, before we parted that evening, he showed me clearly enough that he did not actually dislike me, for he invited me to visit him for a week-end whenever I saw my way clear to do so. From that time onward [248] ]I met him frequently in his own house, in Manchester, London, Wrexham, Gloucester, Liverpool, Birmingham and elsewhere.
Soon it became a regular practice of mine to run over from Manchester to Liverpool every alternate Saturday to attend the afternoon rehearsal and the evening concert of the Philharmonic Society, the orchestra of which Bantock conducted. These were very pleasant meetings, for a party of us used to stay at the London and North Western Hotel and we would sit until the small hours of Sunday morning talking music, returning to our respective homes on Sunday afternoon. At these times Bantock was at his best, and Bantock’s best makes the finest company in the world. In his presence one always feels warm and deeply comfortable, and yet very much alive; he made a glow; he reconciled one to oneself. I would not call him a brilliant, or even a good, talker, but I can with truth call him a very wise one; and in argument he is unassailable.
. . . . . . . .
Though I used frequently to go to Liverpool to hear Bantock conduct, I did not do so because I regarded him as a great artist with the baton. Of his ability in this direction, there is no doubt; but that he is an interpretative genius no qualified critic would assert. No: it was the personality of the man himself, and the new, modern works he used to include in his programmes that drew me to Liverpool. Bantock, at that period, was almost passionately modern. I remember with amusement how pettish he used sometimes to pretend to be when, perhaps in deference to public opinion (but perhaps he was overruled by a Committee?), he felt compelled to include a Beethoven symphony in one of his concerts.
On one occasion I met him at Lime Street Station, Liverpool, when he emerged from the train carrying a bundle of loose scores under his arm.
[249]
]“Let me carry your books for you,” said I.
He selected the least bulky and lightest of the scores he was carrying, and handed it to me.
“You are always a good chap, Cumberland,” he remarked. “Do take this; it’s the heaviest of the lot: Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. So very heavy.” He sighed. “And so dry that merely to carry it makes me thirsty. How many times have you heard it?”
But he was poking a cigar into my mouth, and I could not answer until it was well alight.
“At least fifty or sixty. Oh, more than that! Eight times, say, every year for the last fifteen years—one hundred and twenty.”
“Yes, always a good chap, and so very patient,” he murmured to himself. “Do you know, Cumberland, I had to work—yes, to work—at that Symphony in the train. And I define work as doing something that gives you no pleasure. Talking about work, I must post these before I forget.”
He took from his pocket a number of post cards all addressed to Ernest Newman. These post cards appeared to amuse him immensely, and he handed them to me with a smile. There were about a dozen of them, and each bore an anagram of the word “work”—KROW, WROK, ROWK, RWKO, etc.
“He’ll receive these by the first post in the morning,” Bantock explained, “and if they don’t succeed in making him jump out of bed and finish his analysis of my Omar Khayyám for Breitkopf and Härtel, nothing will.”
Point was added to the jest by the fact that Newman has always been a particularly hard, and generally very heavily pressed worker.
. . . . . . . .
In his early manhood Bantock travelled a good deal in the East, not so much by choice, but because circumstances drove him thither. Yet I often feel that the [250] ]East is his natural home. Whether or not he has any close acquaintance with Eastern languages, I do not know, but he certainly likes his friends to think he has, and many of the letters he has sent me contain quotations and odd words written in what I take to be Persian and Chinese characters. I should not, however, be in the least surprised to learn that these are “faked,” for Bantock loves nothing so much as gently pulling the legs of his friends.
He has not, however, the foresight of Eastern people. His enthusiasms drive him into extremes and into monetary extravagances. When he lived at Broadmeadow, with its extensive wooded grounds, outside Birmingham, he had a mania for bulbs, and I remember his showing me a stable the floor of which was covered with crocus, daffodil, jonquil and narcissus bulbs.
“But,” protested I, “these ought to have been planted months ago.”
“I know, I know,” he said sadly. “But the gardener is so busy. Still, there they are.”
His philosophic outlook has been largely directed by Eastern philosophy. He admires cunning and takes a beautiful and childlike delight in believing that he possesses that quality in abundance. But in reality, he cannot deceive. Even his card tricks are amateurish, and his chess-playing is only just good.
Apropos of his chess-playing, I remember that some years ago a chess enthusiast—a bore of the vilest description—used to visit him regularly and stay to a very late hour for the purpose of playing a game. These visits soon became intolerable, and, one evening, as Bantock, irritated and petulant, sat opposite his opponent, he resolved to put an end to the nuisance.
“Excuse me a moment,” said he; “I have left my cigar-box upstairs, and I really can’t do without a smoke.”
[251]
]He left the room, and went straight to bed and to sleep. Next time he met his visitor, they merely bowed.
Bantock used to relate this story with the greatest glee, and in the course of time the yarn grew to colossal dimensions. It became epical. One was told how his visitor was heard calling: “Bantock! Bantock! I’ve taken your Queen,” how strange noises proceeded from dark rooms, and how, next morning, his visitor, having sat up all night, was found wide awake trying the effect of certain combinations of moves on the board. When a thing is said three times, it is, of course, true, but Bantock never told exactly the same story three times. He believes, I think, that consistency is the refuge and the consolation of the dull-witted.
. . . . . . . .
Frederick Delius, a Yorkshireman, has chosen to live most of his artistic life abroad, and for this reason is not familiarly known to his countrymen, though he is a great personage in European music. A pale man, ascetic, monkish; a man with a waspish wit; a man who allows his wit to run away with him so far that he is tempted to express opinions he does not really hold.
I met him for a short hour in Liverpool, where, over food and drink snatched between a rehearsal and a concert, he showed a keen intellect and a fine strain of malice. Like most men of genius, he is curiously self-centred, and I gathered from his remarks that he is not particularly interested in any music except his own. He is (or was) greatly esteemed in Germany, and if in his own country he has not a large following, he alone is to blame.
He is a man who pursues a path of his own, indifferent to criticism, and perhaps indifferent to indifference. Decidedly a man of most distinguished intellect and a quick, eager but not responsive personality, but not a musician who marks an epoch as does Richard Strauss, [252] ]and not a man who has formed a school, as Debussy has done.
. . . . . . . .
Joseph Holbrooke, for sheer cleverness, for capacity for hard work, and for intellectual energy, has no equal among our composers. It was Newman who first spoke to me about him, and it was Newman who made me curious to meet this extraordinary genius.
Holbrooke’s weakness—but I do not consider it a weakness—is his pugnacity. He has fought the critics times without number and, in many cases, with excellent results for British music, though Holbrooke must know much better than I do that in fighting for his colleagues he has incidentally injured himself. A chastised critic is the last person in the world likely to write a fair and unbiassed article on a new work produced by the hand that chastised him. But not only the critics have felt the lash of Holbrooke’s scorn: conductors, musical institutions, some very prosperous so-called composers, committees, publishers and, indeed, almost every kind of man who has power in the musical world, have felt his sting.
But if he is clever and witty in his writing, he is much cleverer and wittier in his talk. I do not suppose I shall ever forget one Sunday I spent with him, for by midday he had reduced my mind to chaos and my body to limpness by his consuming energy. When he was not playing, he was talking, and he did both as though the day were the last he was going to spend on earth, so eager and convulsive was his speech, so vehement his playing.
Perhaps his most remarkable quality is his power of concentration. I remember his telling me that when he was yachting with Lord Howard de Walden in the Mediterranean, he was engaged on the composition of Dylan, an opera containing some of the most gorgeous and weirdly uncanny music that has been written in our [253] ]generation. At this opera he worked, not in hours of inspiration (for, like Arnold Bennett, he does not believe in inspiration), but when he had nothing more exciting or more necessary to do. For example, he would begin work in the morning, cheerfully and without regret lay down his pen at lunch-time, return to his music immediately lunch was finished, and unhesitatingly recommence writing at the point at which he had left off. Interruptions that arouse the anger of the ordinary creative artist do not disturb him in the least. He can work just as composedly and as fluently when a heated argument is being conducted in the room as he can in a room that is absolutely quiet. Music, indeed, flows from him, and if moods come to him which render his brain numb and his soul barren, I doubt if they last more than a day or two.
Of the truly vast quantity of music he has written, I, to my regret, know only a portion, and that belongs chiefly to his very early period, when he was under the influence of Edgar Allan Poe. Poe is his spiritual affinity, and Holbrooke’s setting of Annabel Lee—a work which I can play backwards from memory—is more beautiful and haunting than the beautiful and haunting poem itself.
I have called Holbrooke pugnacious and, some years ago, much to his amusement and, I think, gratification, I called him the stormy petrel of music. But what makes him stormy? What are the defects in our musical life that he so persistently attacks? First of all, he hates incompetence, especially official incompetence, and the incompetence that makes vast sums of money. He hates commercialism in art, and by that phrase I mean the various enterprises that exploit art for the sole purpose of making money. He hates publishers who issue trash; he hates critics who write rubbish. He hates the obscurity in which so many of his gifted colleagues live, and he hates the love of the British public for foreign music inferior to that which is being written at home. And I believe [254] ]he hates the system that presents editors of newspapers with free concert tickets for the use of their critics.
But, in dwelling at such length on Holbrooke’s combativeness, I feel I am giving a rather one-sided view of his true character. For he is not all hate. Indeed, it is true to state that no composer has written more in appreciation of men who may be considered his rivals. He is anxious and quick to study the work of men of the younger generation, and whenever any of that work appeals to him he either performs it in public or writes to the papers about it.
I have heard him called perverse, unreliable, injudicious, and many other disagreeable things. He may be. But Holbrooke is not an angel. He is simply a composer of genius working under conditions that tend to thwart and paralyse genius.
. . . . . . . .
Dr Walford Davies!... Well, what can I say about Dr Walford Davies except that he represents all the things in which I have no deep faith?—asceticism, fine-fingeredism, religiosity, “mutual improvement,” narrowness of intellect, physical coldness. I love some of his songs—simple things of exquisite tenderness, but it would be futile to regard him as anything more than a cultured gentleman with considerable musical gifts.
On two or three occasions I have been thrown into his company, but I have never been able to decide whether he is ignorant of my existence or whether he dislikes me so intensely that he cannot bring himself to recognise my existence.
He is terribly in earnest—in earnest about Brahms and perhaps about Frau Schumann also. He wrinkles his forehead about Brahms and poises a white hand in the air.... Please do not imagine that I do not love Brahms: I adore him. But Brahms was not God. He was not even a god. Whereas Wagner.... It was [255] ]in 1911, I think, that I heard Dr Walford Davies preaching about Brahms. Now, if you preach about Brahms, you are eternally lost, for you exclude both Wagner and Hugo Wolf.
How exasperating it must be to possess a temperament that can accept only part of what is admirable! It seems to me that Walford Davies distrusts his intellect: in estimating the worth of music, he seems to say, intellectual standards, artistic standards, are of no value. To him the only sure test is temperamental affinity. And he wishes all temperaments to conform to his own limitations.
I have seen Dr Davies near Temple Gardens with choir-boys hanging on his arm, with choir-boys prancing before him and following faithfully behind him. A shepherd with his sheep! I am sure he exerts upon them what is known as a “good influence.” But in matters of art how bad that good influence may be! Did ever a worshipper of Wagner walk the rooms of the Y.M.C.A.?
. . . . . . . .
I have a very bad memory for the names of public-houses and hotels (though I love these places dearly), and I regret that I am unable to recall the name of that very attractive hotel in Birmingham where, early one evening, Dr Vaughan Williams, travel-stained and brown with the sun, walked into the lounge and began a conversation with me. He had walked an incredible distance, and though, physically, he was very tired, his mind was most alert, and we fell to talking about music. He told me that he had studied with Ravel, and when he told me this I reviewed in my mind in rapid succession all Vaughan Williams’ compositions I could remember, trying to detect in any of them traces of Ravel’s influence. But I was unsuccessful. To me he, with his essential British downrightness, his love of space, his freedom from all mannerisms and tricks of style, seemed Ravel’s very antithesis.
[256]
]Like myself, he had come to Birmingham to listen to music, and the following evening, after we had heard a long choral work of Bantock’s, we had what might have developed into a very hot argument. With him was Dr Cyril Rootham, a very charming and cultivated musician, and both these composers were amazed and amused when, having asked my opinion of Bantock’s work, I became dithyrambic in its praise.
“But I thought you were modern?” asked Williams.
“I am anything you please,” said I; “when I hear Richard Strauss I am modern, and when I listen to Bach I am prehistoric. But why do you ask?”
“Moody and Sankey,” murmured Rootham.
Williams laughed.
“Good! damned good!” he exclaimed, turning to his companion. “You’ve got it. Hasn’t he, Cumberland?”
“Got what?”
“It. Him. Bantock, I mean. Now, don’t you think—concede us this one little point—don’t you think that this thirty-two-part choral work of Bantock’s is just Moody and Sankey over again? Glorified, of course: gilt-edged, tooled, diamond-studded, bound in lizard-skin, if you like: but still Moody and still Sankey.”
I clutched the sleeve of a passing waiter and ordered a double whisky.
“One can only drink,” said I. “And when people disagree so fundamentally as we do, whisky is the only tipple that makes one forget.”
But, either late that night or late the following night, we found music in which we could both take keen pleasure. Herbert Hughes played us some of his songs, and I remember Samuel Langford, breathing rather heavily behind me, becoming more and more enthusiastic as the night wore on. Williams, to whom also the songs were new, took a vivid interest in them.
“I like your Herbert Hughes,” said Langford.
[257]
]“My Herbert Hughes?”
“Well, you do rather monopolise him. And I don’t wonder. He’s what one calls the ... the ...”
“The goods?”
Langford laughed in his beard and his eyes disappeared.
The last glimpse I had of Vaughan Williams was two or three years later, outside Hughes’ studio in Chelsea. We stood for a minute in the darkened street.
“Going to see Hughes?” I asked.
But he was busy with preparations for enlisting, and a few weeks later he, Hughes and myself and nearly all our Chelsea circle were swept into the army.
In June or July, 1917, I missed Vaughan Williams at Summerhill, near Salonica, by a day. But perhaps when the war is finished...?
. . . . . . . .
Dr W. G. McNaught, though a musician of the older school, is one of the youngest, most up-to-date and most powerful of our musical scholars. By one means or another, the influence of his personality is felt in every town and village in the British Isles. He is the editor of the best of our musical papers, a faultless and ubiquitous adjudicator at our great musical festivals, a witty and most reliable writer, a profound scholar, and a man of such natural geniality and spontaneity that he is liked by everyone. As a rule, I detest men who are liked on all hands, but I could never detest Dr McNaught even if he were to detest me and tell me so.
I do not remember when I first met him, and I do not think I have any special anecdotes to relate about him. But, in thinking of him now, and reviewing our friendly acquaintanceship of eight or ten years, I recall that I have never been able to persuade him to take me seriously. He has printed all the articles I have sent him, but he has always laughed indulgently at both them and me. I cannot help wondering why. Perhaps his exasperatingly [258] ]clever son has betrayed the secrets I have entrusted to him: the facts that my piano-playing is amateurish, my scholarship nil, and my ear fatally defective. And I think I once showed McNaught, jun., some of my compositions. One should never show (but of course I mean “show off”) one’s compositions when one cannot compose.
. . . . . . . .
Unless you are something of a musician yourself, you will probably never have heard the name of Julius Harrison, for though he has fame of a kind, and of the best kind, he is scarcely known to the man in the street. Just as Rossetti is primarily a poet for poets, so is Julius Harrison a musician for musicians. Only one word describes him: distinguished. Very distinguished he is, with the refinement and sensitiveness of a poet, the intuition of a novelist, and the waywardness of all men who allow themselves to be governed by impulse.
When I first met him he was little more than a brilliant boy full of rich promise. He lived at Stourport, where I used to go occasionally and pass a few days with him on the river. I knew of nothing against him save that he was an organist, and I feared that he might be tempted to remain an organist and build up a teaching “practice,” just as a doctor builds up a practice. But I was mistaken. He ventured on London, suffered obscurity for a year or two, worked like a fiery little devil, and at length threw up the hack-work that kept him alive. Then he emerged, very engaging and very likeable, into the real musical world of London. Sir Thomas Beecham gave him Tristan und Isolde and other operas to conduct, the London Philharmonic Society invited him to interpret to it one of his own works, and concerts devoted entirely to his compositions were given in several provincial towns. In five years he will be recognised as the greatest conductor England has yet given us; in ten years he will have a European reputation as a composer.
[259]
]What is he like? He is mercurial, passionate, loyal, snobbish, charming, outspoken, very open to his friends.
“I am snobbish, Gerald; we have agreed about that, so you won’t quarrel with me, will you?” he has asked several times.
“Apropos?” I have answered.
“Well, I really can’t stick your pal, So-and-so. An out-and-out bounder.”
“Yes, Julius. But he bounds so beautifully. Besides, he has real talent.”
“But you’ll never ask me to meet him, will you?”
“When I’m rich, Julius, I shall have two flats—one where you and your friends can come, and another where my bounderish friends may foregather. But I’m afraid I shall be oftener at the flat you visit than at the other. You are a beast—what makes you so snobbish? And why do you continue to like me, who am not ‘quite’ a gentleman in your eyes?”
“Oh, but you are, Gerald. Well, perhaps you’re not. Only in your case it doesn’t seem to matter. You are so full of affectations—jolly little affectations, I admit, but still....”
I don’t think anything will break our friendship, for Julius is good and generous enough to allow me to say the rudest things in the world to him. He only laughs. For my part, I can forgive him anything, for he admires my poems. And I suppose he will always forgive me much for I admire without stint his genius as a conductor and his genius as a composer. I think that at heart he will always remain a boy, a boy full of passionate dignity, of untarnished ideals, of frequent impulses.
. . . . . . . .
Of all unhappy artists the most unhappy are those who are impelled by temperament to mingle social propaganda with their artistic work. Rutland Boughton has the soul [260] ]of the artist-preacher. He has persuaded me to many things: he almost persuaded me to “try” vegetarianism, and I remember one morning very well when, sitting on the end of my bed, he pointed a finger at me and enumerated all the evils that infallibly follow on the immoderate drinking of whisky.
I regret this tendency in him: it does not strengthen his art, and it exhausts a good deal of his energy and time. A practical mystic, a man of intense and sometimes difficult moods, a man so honest himself that he is incapable of suspecting dishonesty in others, a man who is always poor, for he loves his art better than riches: he is all these things. Now, a man who endures poverty as cheerfully as he may, who is continually bashing his head against the brick-wall indifference of others, and who at the same time is extraordinarily sensitive, may seek happiness, but, if he does, it will always elude him. Boughton, of course, would deny this. I can hear him saying: “But of course I’m happy!” At times, Rutland, you are happy. You are happy when you are immersed in a new composition, when you are playing Beethoven (do you remember that evening when, on a poorish piano, you played so bravely a couple of sonatas for Edward Carpenter and me?), when you are lecturing, when you have made a convert. But when you believe, as you do, that the world is awry, has always been awry, and shows every sign of continuing indefinitely to be awry, how can you, with your ardour for rightness, for justice, for goodness, be happy?
For years Boughton has done very special Festival work at Glastonbury where, when the war has spent itself, I hope to go for a week’s music, for at Glastonbury strange things are being done—things that are destined, perhaps, to divert in some measure the stream of our native music.
In the early days of August, 1914, Boughton burst into my flat. I was still in civilian clothes and was [261] ]reading Ernest Dowson to discover how he stood the war atmosphere: I thought he stood it very well.
“What, Gerald!” Boughton exclaimed; “not enlisted yet?”
“My dear chap,” I protested, “I am old and married and have a family. Besides, I don’t like killing people: I’ve tried it. And I strongly object to being killed.”
“Oh, you can help without killing people. There’s the A.S.C., for example.”
“A.S.C.? What’s that?”
“I’m going to enlist as a cook. Come along with me.”
But I told him that I was reading Dowson, that I was presently going to read a volume of Æ, and after that I had the fullest intention of strangling Debussy on the piano.
So he went away to enlist as a cook. I heard, however, that when he was told that, in addition to his duties as an army cook, he might be called upon to slaughter animals, he came away sad and dejected, and, I think, turned his mind to other things.
Where he is now, I do not know. The war has blotted most of us out, and few men know whether their best friends are at the other end of the world or fighting in the trenches in the very next sector on their right or left.
. . . . . . . .
I have said somewhere that singers do not interest me. Nor do they. But John Coates is something more than a singer—superb artist, generous friend, unflagging enthusiast, maker of reputations. He is at once a grown-up boy full of high spirits and a profound mystic. There are many men who have seen him on the stage in some light opera who have never guessed that his buoyant spirits are the outcome of a soul that is content with its own destiny. To me, his interpretation of Elgar’s Gerontius is one of the great things of modern times—as great as Ackté’s Salome, as great as Kreisler’s [262] ]violin-playing, as wonderful as the genius of Augustus John. “Honest John Coates!” is his title: I have heard him so described many times in London and the provinces. A man you can trust with anything: a very fine and noble gentleman, humble yet proud.
His reverence for Elgar is extraordinary. I have been told that, on one occasion, after being in the company of the distinguished composer for an hour or so, he joined a few friends who were sitting in another room.
“I have just been talking to the greatest man living,” said he, with deep impressiveness and in the manner of one who has been in the presence of someone holy.
I love such hero-worship. The man who can feel as Coates does about Elgar is himself noble and not far removed from greatness.
. . . . . . . .
Cyril Scott possesses a mind of such exquisite refinement that it can react only to the most delicate of appeals. He is perhaps a little exotic, like his swaying and deliciously scented Lotus Flower. Many years ago I was introduced to his music, and in pre-war days I very rarely let a week go by without playing something of his. On only one occasion was I thrown into his company, and even then I was not aware of the identity of the somewhat excited and, to me, extraordinarily interesting man who sat restlessly in his chair and spoke a little vehemently. He struck me as a man easily carried away by his ideals, carried away into a world where logic is useless and facts are worse than dust.
[263]
]CHAPTER XXII
PEOPLE I WOULD LIKE TO MEET
I suppose that even the most outrageously sincere of men are to some extent poseurs, if not to themselves, then to other people. The artistic temperament must either attitudinise or die. Posturing is the most delicate, the most dangerous, of all the arts. To pose before others is risky, but to pose before oneself is most hazardous, for no one in the world is so easy to deceive, and so ready to be deceived, as oneself, and to be deluded by a fancy picture that one has drawn and painted in hectic moments is to appear to the world as a fantastic clown.
Deluded thus, it appears to me, is W. B. Yeats. He is, of course, a fine though not a great poet: no reasonable man can question that. And there are lines and verses of his that have become woven into the very texture of my mind. Moreover, I recognise that it is futile to quarrel with a man because he is not other than he is. Yet I do quarrel with him. I remember a photograph of Yeats, a photograph I have not seen for ten or twelve years, wherein he appears conscious of nothing in the world but himself, conscious of nothing but his hair, his eyes, his hands—especially his hands. His fingers are so long that one is surprised that, his palm resting on his knee, they do not reach to the floor. It is, I concede, a human weakness for a man whom Nature has gifted (or do I mean cursed?) with the appearance of a poet, to play up to Nature and help her by delicate titivations. But to do this successfully, one must have an overwhelming [264] ]personality—a personality like that of Shelley, of Byron, of Swinburne. It is a simple matter to look like a poet, but to impose that look on mankind is given to few. It is not given to W. B. Yeats.
How is it, I wonder, that one rather admires Æ for believing in the objective existence of strange gods and spirits, and yet despises Yeats for sharing this belief? It is, I think, because one feels that Æ has a solid, even massive, intellect controlling his fantasy, whereas Yeats’ intellect is not distinguished either by subtlety or massiveness. Yeats believes what he wishes to believe; Æ believes only what he must. Yeats has an incurable aching for the picturesque, and whilst he believes that he is “helped” by the supernatural, I think that this help is derived from his own imaginings, if indeed the question of “help” comes in at all.
Why, then, should I wish to meet this man whom, it is clear, I regard as self-deluded and for whom my respect is mingled with a feeling that is not very far removed from dislike? Really, I do not know. His attitude of mind is not uncommon, and I have met many men and women his equal in intellectual force. I think that perhaps I wish to study at first hand a mind that is so exquisite in its refinement, so sensitive in its moods, so invariably right in its choice of words. From all the tens of thousands of words that exist, how difficult it is to select the one word that is inevitable! And how slender and fragile a man’s work becomes when his mind must perforce invariably pounce upon the one only word! The great writers were not so fastidious. Scott, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Balzac and a hundred others: take, if you wish, any half-dozen words from almost any page of their writings and substitute six others, and what will be lost thereby? Scott and Byron and Balzac, and even Shelley and Keats, have, I think, not more than a hundred or so pages that could not with safety be tampered with in this manner.
[265]
]There is something lily-fingered and, to me, something disagreeable and effeminate in a writer who, at all times and seasons, searches and burrows for the mot juste. I am curious about such writers, curious though I know instinctively that they love letters more than they love life. To me such men are incomprehensible, and in them, somewhere, something is wrong. Men who do not feel lust for life have thin necks, or shallow pates, or neurasthenia.... Perhaps, after all, I am something of a student of nerve trouble, and wish to meet Yeats in order to satisfy myself what precisely is lacking in him.
. . . . . . . .
It is a popular fallacy that versatility is invariably accompanied by shallowness, whereas, of course, almost all men of great genius have been peculiarly and even marvellously versatile. For me, versatility has most powerful attraction. The man with only one talent is as uninteresting as the man with no talent at all. Perhaps Hilaire Belloc has retained his hold on me because he is continually surprising me. He has done so many different and opposed things so admirably, that it seems impossible he should strike out in yet another line; but I know very well that before twelve months have gone he will have turned his amazing powers in still another direction, and will accomplish his task better than any other living man can do it.
Nearly twenty years have gone since early one spring I walked alone across Devon from Ilfracombe to Exeter and from Exeter to Land’s End. Now, I went alone simply because Belloc had walked alone across much of France and Italy, and the spirit of imitation was then, as it is now, very strong within me. I had just read his glorious Path to Rome, and I carried a copy of the first edition in my haversack, reading it by the wayside and forgetting my loneliness (for I was many times pathetically lonely) in Belloc’s most excellent company. I pondered [266] ]over the nature of this man for many hours, envying him, and thinking that a man with such great and diverse gifts must be reckoned among the happiest people alive. I remember that during the weeks I walked in Devon and Cornwall I copied him as far as I could in the most minute particular, and at Clovelly, one golden evening as I stood talking with some tall, Spanish-looking fishermen, I suddenly made up my mind that I would write to him. I do not know what I wrote, but a couple of days later a reply came from him telling me that my letter had given him more pleasure than any of the enthusiastic reviews in the papers. This letter I pasted in my copy of The Path to Rome, and in 1915 a friend begged me to allow him to take it with him to France. He had a copy of his own, but he wished to take mine. That friend (our worship of Belloc was one of the many things we had in common) now lies dead, and I like to think that his comrades buried my precious book with him.
My imitation of, and devotion to, Belloc led me into several amusing scrapes, and I recollect arriving ruefully at Helston one wet afternoon and seeking shelter at an inn called, I think, The Angel. Having arranged to proceed to Penzance by train early in the evening, I went to bed whilst they dried my clothes. Whilst in bed, I recalled that Belloc had often praised Beaune and that I had never tasted it. So I ordered a bottle, drank it at about 4 P.M.—and promptly went to sleep for twelve hours!
Even now, on the borderland of middle age, I cannot pick up a new book of Belloc’s without a little thrill: he is so clean, so bravely prejudiced, so courageous. He is a lover of wine and beer, of literature, of the Sussex downs, of the great small things of life: a mystic, a man of affairs, a poet. What, indeed, is he not that is fine and noble and free?
. . . . . . . .
[267]
]In the musical world one is accustomed to infant prodigies; very rarely do they develop their powers. But in the literary world infant prodigies are rare, and at the moment I can recall among writers of the past the boy Chatterton and that not quite so remarkable but, nevertheless, very distinguished youth, Oliver Madox Brown. In our own days we have had two or three men of letters whose first work, written in their late teens or early twenties, promised more, I think, than their later books have fulfilled. I am thinking more particularly of Edwin Pugh and William Romaine Paterson, the latter of whom usually writes under the pseudonym of “Benjamin Swift.”
Many of us must remember Benjamin Swift’s Nancy Noon, a strange novel that jerked the literary world into excitement two decades ago. The writer of it was but a boy, and though a few critics declared that he “derived” from Meredith, it was almost universally acknowledged that, for sheer originality both in style and in its general outlook upon the world, the novel was head and shoulders above any contemporary literature. So we all kept a close watch upon Benjamin Swift, reading each fresh work (and there were many fresh works, for the new-comer was very productive) with an eager anticipation which, alas! was foiled again and again. I remember six or eight of his books, each lit with genius, but all a little crude and violent and not one of them indicating that the writer’s mind was becoming more mature. It was a vigorous, eruptive mind with which one was in contact, but it was also a mind in such incessant turmoil that one searched in vain in each of its products for that “point of rest” which Coventry Patmore maintains is a sine qua non of all fine works of art.
In some way that I forget Benjamin Swift and I got into correspondence, and I still possess a bundle of his letters, mostly about his work. I remember that in one [268] ]of my letters I ventured to indicate what I thought were some of his faults: I called in question his knowledge of music, I expressed disapproval of his violence, and I told him I feared that he was in danger of settling down to being a mere “eccentric” writer. My letter, as might have been expected, produced no effect, and though I have not read his latest works (in dug-outs and trenches one reads everything that comes to hand, but Benjamin Swift has to be sought), I am given to understand that they are in many ways like his first efforts—outré, violent, eruptive, yet distinguished and glowing here and there with a genius that is always hectic.
Years ago, Swift invited me to call on him whenever I should happen to be in town, and though I should very much like to meet him, I have never accepted his invitation. One is like that. One shrinks from satisfying one’s curiosity. I picture Benjamin Swift as bearing a resemblance to Strindberg, but in my mind’s eye his lips are thinner and straighter than Strindberg’s, and his eyes are more vehement.
What is it, I wonder, that prevents this writer from ranking among the great? His intellect is wide and deep enough, his literary talent is very considerable, and his experience of life has been exceptionally varied. There is a twist in his genius, a maggot in his brain. He sees life grotesquely; some of the people he creates are like the men and women one meets in nightmares.
. . . . . . . .
Sometimes I amuse myself by inventing conversations between people opposed in temperament—e.g. Sir Owen Seaman and Mr Hall Caine, Mr John Galsworthy and “Marmaduke,” Little Tich and Lord Morley, and I often wish a brain much brighter than my own (Mr Max Beerbohm’s, for example) would occupy its idle hours in writing a book of such conversations. I commend the idea to Mr E. V. Lucas, also, and to Messrs A. A.
Milne [269] ]and Bernard Shaw (only Shaw’s fun is apt to be so distressingly emphatic and double-fisted).
Among the dead, I make Sir Richard Burton meet and talk with Herbert Spencer, and I always call this conversation The Man and the Mummy. It is strange, but we have not, so far as I am aware, any record of Burton’s rich and provocative conversation, though I have been assured by men who knew him well that his talk was the best they had heard. Sir Richard Burton is one of the men whom I most wish to meet, and perhaps when my happy sojourn on this planet comes to a close, I shall be allowed to serve him in some humble capacity. To me he has always seemed to belong to Elizabethan times, and I think that he must often have cursed at Fate for placing him in the middle of a century that could not fully understand or appreciate him.
In our own days we have many young men of a spirit akin to that of Burton, though not one of them may possess a tithe of his genius or of his colossal intellect. I refer, of course, to our numerous soldier-poets—gallant young men of thought and action, of quick and generous sympathy, of noble aspiration. Most of you who read what I am now writing must know at least one man belonging to this type, for there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of them—men who, but for the war, would probably never have written a line of poetry, but whose souls have been stirred and whose hearts have been fired by the grandest emotion that can urge mankind to self-sacrifice: I mean the never-dying emotion of patriotism—that emotion at which the sexless sneer, which the “cosmopolitan” regards with amusement, and for which men of imagination and grit gladly die.
One soldier of this type I knew intimately, and I would gladly know many of those others who have thrilled us with their poems. Let me describe my friend to you. He is no longer young: his precise age is thirty-five: but [270] ]he was among those who, early in August, 1914, after first putting his small affairs in order, enlisted in Lord Kitchener’s Army. He made no fuss about it, and told none but his most intimate friends what he had done. I met him a few months after he had joined up; he was then a Corporal, and seemed to me the happiest man I had met for many a day. He told me that he had begun to write “seriously,” for hitherto his scribbling had been of a cursory and trivial nature. But he showed me none of his work, and it was not until he had been in France some little time that his verses began to appear in one or two reviews. Having been granted a commission, he quickly rose to the rank of Captain. He was mentioned in dispatches twice and, having led a particularly successful bombing raid on the enemy’s trenches, was awarded the Military Cross.
There is, I know, nothing very unusual in this bare record as I have set it down; the unusual, indeed extraordinary, nature of this case is that before the war my friend had been a reserved, unadventurous but very capable bank clerk, quite undistinguished and apparently without ambition. But hidden fires must from his youth have been smouldering in his heart, and it required the war’s disturbance and excitement to blow these ashes into flame, and the war’s opportunity was needed to disclose of what fine material he was made. I flatter myself that I had always known his nature was fine and distinguished, for though he was a bank clerk one would never have guessed it from his conversation and demeanour. I also know that, generations ago, his forbears played a by-no-means ignoble part in our country’s history, and for that reason alone I felt that, though concealed, there were imagination and aspiration abiding in his soul.
. . . . . . . .
One of my friends, Anna Wickham, knows D. H. Lawrence very well, and one day I asked her if she [271] ]would arrange for me to meet him at her house. But she brushed aside the suggestion with the few words that she was not particularly interested in Lawrence and that my time might be wasted if spent with him. Such a suggestion amazed, and still amazes me, and I cannot but think that Anna Wickham had never troubled to read any of D. H. Lawrence’s writings, for it often happens among literary people that close friends do not look at each other’s work.
To me D. H. Lawrence is perhaps the most peculiarly original English writer living. In his poems he is so egoistic as almost to seem like an egomaniac, and in two or three of his novels he is obsessed and overwhelmed by the passion of sex. Yet in Sons and Lovers, and in that wonderful first book of his called, I think, The Red Peacock, he gets clean away from himself, and is as objective as all great creative artists are and should be. Every writer must, of course, portray life in terms of himself, but only small men continually thrust themselves and themselves only on to an embarrassed public. But Lawrence has an insatiable curiosity about himself, and it seems at times as though he is not anxious to discover or uncover life, but to penetrate to the deeps of his own nature and shout out at the top of his voice what he has found there. In such egoism, there is, of course, strength as well as weakness, and the very fault, so grave and so calamitous, that bars him from achieving great work is, nevertheless, an attraction to those who are much intrigued by psychology.
There are, are there not? two kinds of imaginative literature: the kind we read without more than a passing thought for the man or woman who has written it; and the kind we read primarily because we are enormously interested in the personality and temperament of the man or woman from whom that literature comes. In removing himself to Italy instead of throwing himself heart and soul into the ugly but extraordinary life that these years are [272] ]giving us, D. H. Lawrence is, I believe, evading his destiny and is thereby weakening the gifts and tampering with the intellect of a man whose name should stand near the head of all contemporary writers.
If Mr Lawrence should by chance read these pages, he will acquit me of impertinence if he remembers that he has taken the public into his confidence, and that he must expect the public to make some comment upon what he, uninvited, has told us.
[273]
]CHAPTER XXIII
NIGHT CLUBS
After what I have written you may find it difficult, if not altogether impossible, to regard me as a guileless youth. Yet I ask you so to regard me. For, if I be not guileless, how can one explain the whole-hearted enjoyment I used to derive from my occasional visits to the Crab Tree Club in Soho, and the Cabaret Club in Heddon Street during the twelve months before the war?
I had been a considerable time in London before it occurred to me that there was any other way of spending the night except in bed. Evenings, of course, were spent either at home, the theatre, the Café Royal, a concert hall, a music hall, or at friends’ flats and studios, and though it is true that sometimes friends induced you to stay, or you induced friends to stay, until dawn, yet these long hours were never deliberately planned beforehand.
But I had the Café Royal habit, and the Café Royal, in a sort of way, used to be an ante-chamber to various night clubs. At midnight, or shortly after, when I left the Café with my friends, I used to find that, instead of proceeding to their respective homes, they went to one place or another where you made revelry and talked nonsense and, perchance, drank what proved at eight o’clock next morning to have been a little more than was good for you.
“Come with us to the Crab Tree,” said two or three friends on one of these occasions.
[274]
]And go I did. It was my very first visit to a night club, and I expected to find I know not what scenes of dissipation and naughtiness. I imagined that I should meet women even more strange than some of the strange women of the Café Royal, that I should behold dresses so daring that they could no longer be called dresses at all, that the music would be ravishing, the conversation sparkling, the men distinguished, the food delicate beyond words, the wine of a perfect bouquet. Instead, after walking up a flight of stairs, I found a large bare room with five men in it, one of them being the bar-tender who, behind rows of bottles of whisky and stout, was polishing glasses. Of the other men, three were members who had just arrived, and the fourth was the pianist who, later on, was to play rag-time for the dancers.
I stood for a moment on the threshold of this empty room, feeling rather exasperated that I had come hither.
“It’s all right,” said one of my friends, a little pugnacious Scotsman with a nose and chin like Wagner’s; “wait a bit. Things will soon brighten up.”
So we stepped to the bar and engaged the pianist in conversation. He was something of a scholar and had made a study of rag-time from the historical point of view. He played me two or three examples of rag-time which he declared occurred in Bach, and I accepted his word, though I looked at him incredulously.
The note of that night was youth. There was no hectic excitement, no Bacchic frenzy: everybody was jolly glad to be alive. Somebody has defined happiness as conscious pleasure. If that definition holds good, then I was happy that night, for I remember saying to myself: “I am coming here again.” I loved the feeling of life the place gave me; the exhilaration of it seemed to pierce into my marrow. I did not want to talk to anybody. I merely wanted to sit back and watch everything: the [275] ]furtive smiles of half-shy women who, happy in the arms of those they loved, were afraid to reveal too much of their happiness; the most delicate ankles of a slim girl I knew, but whose name (was it Kitty or Mimi?) I only half remembered; the kaleidoscope of colour on the platform where the dancers were. The women were like flowers—orchids suddenly endowed with movement.... I compared the scene with the spectacle afforded me by Murray’s Club a few nights previously, when Ivan Heald and I were taken there for an hour or two. Some ladies at Murray’s had had green hair, but only a poet like Baudelaire can wear green hair with success. But at Murray’s the people were all old. Young girls of twenty were old. Everybody was old except the aged, and they pranced and frisked to prove their unconquerable youth.... But at this jolly Crab Tree youth was in the air, in the music, in the laughter.
And, feeling a little intoxicated with happiness, I allowed a gentle melancholy to steal over me, as one sometimes does in certain moods. I thought of Paris, for this scene reminded me of Paris: I was full of longing for Paris, and I remembered how in the spring of 1912 I used to sit in an attic in the Quartier Latin wondering and wondering. By that curious power that the mind, when a little excited, seems to possess—I mean the power of transferring one from a scene where one is happy to a scene where one would be still happier—I saw myself aimlessly strolling beneath the plane-trees on the banks of the Seine. I took out a pencil and wrote:
PARIS DAYS
These days, the bright days and white days,
These nights of blue between the days,
These streets a-glimmer in the haze:
These are for you, but you come not these ways:
Paris is empty in the light days.
[276]
]These songs, the glad songs and sad songs,
This amber wine between the songs,
This scented laughter from dim throngs:
These are for you, Paris to you belongs:
Paris is mournful with her mad songs.
These breezes, the high breezes and dry breezes,
These stillnesses between the breezes,
These purple clouds the sunset seizes:
These are for you, but underneath the trees is
Paris a-sighing with her shy breezes.
These days, these breezes and these nights,
These streets, this wine, these songs, these sighs;
Paris with all her myriad lights,
Paris so careless yet so wise:
All in the black sea would I spew
If I could win an hour of you.
These verses (though you would hardly think so) cost me infinite trouble, and when I had finished them I looked up from my scrawl and saw that the room was half-empty.
“Is it so late then?” I asked a man sitting next to me. I saw it was Aleister Crowley, and he looked at me rather balefully.
“No: so early. Six o’clock, to be precise.”
And he turned his back on me and gazed at a wall on which no pictures hung.
So I picked up my straw hat and tried to find my Scots friend. He was sitting behind the piano, talking very earnestly to a man I did not know.
“Oh, Nicol Bain,” said I, “I am so hungry.”
The streets were strewn with sunshine, and Bain took off his hat and looked long and long at the blue sky.
“How damned fine to be alive!” he exclaimed.
“How long have you been alive?” I asked.
“Only since I came to London.”
“I was alive for three years in Manchester, but during all those years I sat at a desk pretending to be a clerk, [277] ]I was dead, quite dead. So, you see, we really are young. You are about five, and I am nearly seven.”
He steered me into a restaurant which appeared to cater specially for night-birds, and Bain ate bacon and eggs, whilst I feasted on a dish of strawberries, brown bread and coffee.
“I would,” said I, “much prefer to have bacon and eggs, but strawberries seem to be more in the picture, don’t you think? I am sure I am behaving very nobly to fit into the picture at the expense of my yearning inside.... And now, where can we get a bath?”
. . . . . . . .
After that first visit I went frequently to the Crab Tree Club. There I met many poets and journalists and artists, and there, one night, a poet—a great strapping fellow, all bone and sinew and muscle—loudly challenged me to fight him. He is a man of some genius, well known both here and in America. The exact cause of his quarrel with me I have forgotten, but it appeared that, unwittingly, I had done him some real injury—or he thought I had. He spoke heatedly to me and I replied still more heatedly. Suddenly, he rose, faced me menacingly, and shouted:
“All right, then. Come and fight it out. Come and fight it out downstairs.”
He looked at me with loathing.
I must have paled, I think, for I know that his terrific anger was like an onslaught. But I realised that I must accept his challenge. I hated the thought of what was before me, and hoped it would soon be over.
“Very good. We’ll go downstairs.”
I felt a hand tighten approvingly on my arm and, looking round, saw Ivan Heald. He came with me.
“Slog him, Gerald,” he said earnestly.
But I felt most unheroic, and I know that as I made my way to the door I was trembling a little.
[278]
]The whole room was interested now, and I realised that we were going to have spectators. And then the unexpected happened. The Club Secretary and a few committee men rushed between us, dragging my sudden enemy away. I was glad to be separated, for I was afraid of him.... Is it possible that he was afraid of me?
. . . . . . . .
Augustus John used to come sometimes, and I remember chatting with P. G. Konody about Byzantine architecture, about which I think I know something. But one did not go to the Crab Tree for serious conversation. It was the diversion of excitement we all sought....
I think that for some weeks in the spring of 1914 I felt like a character in a rather second-rate novel. Literally, I was intoxicated with life. And so full of vitality did I feel that I scarcely found time for sleep. I remember walking with my wife from Soho to Battersea Park in the early hours of a June or July morning after being up all night. Several friends accompanied us, and though we ought to have felt extremely jaded, we were as fresh as paint at our seven o’clock breakfast of cherries and coffee and honey. I tried to feel like George Meredith as I ate, for I had read somewhere that he frequently breakfasted on honey and coffee and fruit.... The imitative instincts that we little artists have! How strange it is! We can never be ourselves for long. We are always imagining ourselves to be someone else more distinguished, or more interesting. We are always insatiably curious about the feelings and thoughts of others. Pale imitators we are. And when we snatch at our personalities, how feeble they seem ... how feeble they are.
. . . . . . . .
One frightfully busy week an invitation came to us from Madame Strindberg to sup with her at the Sign of the Golden Calf, popularly known as The Cabaret. We [279] ]did not particularly want to go, but I had been deeply interested in August Strindberg ever since I had read Max Nordau’s Degeneration (that, I think, is not the title, but you know the book I mean) and I had wished to learn more about this strange vitriolic personality, and since Strindberg himself was dead, Madame Strindberg seemed to be the best person to whom to go for information.
The Cabaret was in a large cellar at the end of Heddon Street, and the narrow way was blocked up with taxis as our own cab sped round the corner from Regent Street. The place was nearly full, and a Frenchman with a little waxed moustache was singing Two Eyes of Grey, with his eyes glued to the ceiling in a stupidly sentimental manner, and I recollect that our first impulse was to turn and flee. One hears such songs, I am told, in Bolton and Oldham, and, I dare say, in the London suburbs, but that Madame Strindberg should come all the way from Sweden and bring a man all the way from France to sing the latest inanity was incredible. But my eye caught some fantastically carved figures that leered and leaned from the great, thick posts supporting the roof. These painted creatures were attractive and promising and futuristic, and:
“At all events, we’ll drink a bottle of champagne before we go,” said I, as a waiter drew us to a table and announced that supper was about to be served. “For champagne always helps,” I added.
And, really, for an hour or two I required a little artificial stimulus in order to survive the dullness of the musical programme.
“Whoever the people are who run this place,” I said to a pale, elderly man who sat opposite to me, “they are extraordinarily stupid. They get Frank Harris to lecture one evening and give us inane music the next. One doesn’t come to a night club to be flapdoodled.”
“Flap——?” he queried.
[280]
]“Flapdoodled. Yes. I mean these people who sing and recite like a Penny Reading. They do these things in Higher Wycombe and Bluzzerby-on-Stream. They should not be done here.”
The pale man did not understand. He coughed behind a very white hand and delicately selected a nut.
. . . . . . . .
And then Madame Strindberg approached our table. She had been pointed out to me half-an-hour previously and I had noted a pale little woman who appeared to examine her guests rather nervously. She looked cold and careworn. She was very silent, and her black clothing and white face struck a sombre note in all the moving light and colour of the large, warm room.
She came to the table and introduced herself to us, sitting down and placing a nervous little hand in mine. I soon discovered she had no conversation, for, try how she might, she could not say anything that mattered in the least. She chattered a little, made a few exclamations, and then sat silent. To me she seemed full of negations, denials. Personality she had, I daresay, but it did not arouse my interest in the least, and after I had paid her a few insincere compliments concerning the Club, I also sat silent. After a while, she was taken away to another table by some friends.
On subsequent occasions I saw her, but I do not remember that I had further communication with her except when I was made an honorary member of the Club, when I wrote to her a short note of thanks. She was no key to Strindberg: at all events, no key I could use.
. . . . . . . .
Later on that night, the room roused itself from its semi-lethargy, and golden confetti and balls of coloured paper were thrown about by ladies and gentlemen who, not knowing each other, desired an acquaintanceship. The balls of paper unrolled themselves into long ribbons [281] ]which, catching on to projections from the supporting pillars, hung in long loops and festoons which, thickening, soon began to resemble a gigantic spider’s web. Silly musical toys were given us, and men and women—but especially women—made silly noises on them and giggled, or else shrieked uproariously.... Except for the supper, which was excellent, the evening was not a success, and I do not suppose I should have gone there again if I had not been in search of Frank Harris, or if Jack Kahane had not insisted upon my accompanying him.
. . . . . . . .
I made a fairly extensive examination of London night clubs during the ensuing few months. One, near Blackfriars, admitted me to full membership on the payment of the sum of one shilling, and I used to go there—why, I know not—and throw darts at a board and drink beer. If I did not throw darts, I found I was deemed eccentric. So I threw darts.
Murray’s was beyond my means, and I found the people there untalented and plethoric. They ate too much. And another club devoted to “the” profession was full of trifling women and jaunty men. Actresses are dear children, but at night they become tiresome. And actors always want me to praise them. They always pretended to be quite familiar with my name, and invariably invited me to “have one.” Quite nice people, though, I assure you.
. . . . . . . .
A night club is never for the old. Grey-haired people should always be at home after midnight. And there should be no card-playing. Dancing one would have of course, and music of the finest. And wine, and many pretty women, and a certain quietness, and invisible waiters, and a perfume of roses.... As I write, I ask myself: “Why should I not establish a night-club different from all the others?” It would be so easy to be [282] ]different; it would be so difficult for me not to be different.... One wants space, of course: I hate being crushed against very full-bosomed ladies.... Oh, and above all, I would have a big room set apart for the hour that comes after dawn. Empty bottles, spilt wine, stale tobacco-smoke, cigarette ends, all kinds of untidiness: how horrible these are in the sun of a May or June morning! Yes, we would all go at dawn into another room, a room coloured green, with narcissi, and jonquils and hyacinths on the tables: a room with open windows: a room with fruit spread invitingly: a room where one could still be gay and in which one need not feel sordid and spiritually jaded and spiritually unclean.... If you have the right mental outlook, you will never feel spiritually unclean after a night of riot, but all our London night clubs in pre-war days seemed to conspire together to make enjoyment unhealthy, gaiety a matter for after-regret, and exaltation a little disgraceful.... If someone will lend me a lot of money (or give it me—why shouldn’t he?) I will found a night club that will knock all the others into a cocked hat....