I remember talking once with W. L. George of the eternal appeal of a good story, and of how the first business of the novelist was to tell a story. “Possibly,” he said, “but I will tell you a true story, a universal story, and you will not dare to write it. It is the story of Edwin and Angelina. Edwin is a clerk in the office of Angelina’s father. He is sent up to the house with messages for his employer, and passes Angelina in the hall. Their eyes meet and he knows that he is in love. A few days later there is a football match between the office team and that of a neighbouring factory. Edwin wins the match with a brilliant last-minute goal, but in doing so he breaks his arm. Angelina is watching the match. Edwin becomes her hero. Soon afterwards they again meet in the hall. She asks him about his arm. They talk together, and discover in a short while that they are in love. Of course, Angelina’s father refuses to countenance the match. He has his own plans for his daughter. The lovers are forbidden to meet. Angelina falls sick. They send her to the South of France; but she grows worse. She is listless and despondent. The doctor says that unless she is given an interest in life she will die. All that money can provide is showered on her. But she becomes thinner and paler every day. At last the mother intervenes, ‘She must see Edwin.’ The father tardily assents. There is a reunion of the lovers, and the miracle happens. The book ends with marriage bells. It is a true story,” he concluded, “but you wouldn’t dare to write it.”
I agreed. “Only two people could write it,” I said. “Turgenev, or a merchant of popular fiction.”
Turgenev is always obvious. He employs none of the devices of surprise and of suspended interest on which the writer of talent depends for his effects. The waters of Turgenev’s narrative are so smooth, so clear, and bring the river bed so close to us that we hardly realise how deep they are. It is not till we see the blunders that others make with the Turgenev technique that we realise to what an extent he is supreme. And it is such a simple technique. The passage of youth; the waning power of love; the recompenses of middle age; memory and regret, and a serene twilight that harmonises and consoles. It is of these things that Turgenev speaks—simple things, and he speaks of them simply, through a technique that is miraculously adequate and sure. A man in the middle years finds under two layers of cotton a little garnet cross; three men sitting round a table talk of love; a young man, betrothed and happy, returns at night to his hotel to recapture, in a room filled with the overpowering scent of heliotrope, the buried anguish of an earlier love. A man sits in a garden, and remembers. It looks so easy; and yet, in mediocre work, how the machinery creaks. How artificial become the excuses for recollection. A violin playing in a certain restaurant, after many years, a tune to which the hero danced when young. A narrative that closes where it began, in the same place, on the same note, with the same sentence. What is pattern in Turgenev becomes in lesser writers a series of devices.
And yet it is thus that life is always getting its effects; sometimes with our co-operation. We return after certain months to the ball-room where we first encountered love, to the restaurant where we first spoke of love, to the woods that were the shelter and the screen of our first love-making. But at such moments the scene has been set too carefully; the climax is manufactured. We have known beforehand the nature of the emotion we are to experience; we force it to the required pitch of intensity. And that is bad technique. Only if we stand aside and let life tell our story for us, shall we happen on the inevitable, the unpremeditated moment.
In the early spring of 1921 I wrote a sketch of an ex-officer; it was an attempt to interpret the spirit of post-war disillusionment, and I selected as its subject a clerk in a large advertising agency and christened him Evan Miller.
He occupied in Johnson’s renowned establishment an obscure position. He sat in a small room with two male typists at the top of three flights of stairs. He sorted out press cuttings, despatched the right copy to the right papers, entered up the proofs in a large folio, checked the returned slips, supplied a head clerk with lists giving the space rates and percentages allowed to agents. It was routine work that required an orderly mind; that quality Miller possessed, and his employers estimated its value at three pounds five shillings a week. An unexciting job for a man who three years earlier had been in command of a company of Fusiliers.
But it was the best he had been able to find, and his friends had assured him that he had been remarkably lucky to get it. As soon as the Armistice was signed he had commenced a series of desperate assaults on the War Office; he had claimed in turn to be a pivotal man, an educational authority, a university student. He had even considered an appeal on sympathetic grounds. Finally, he was allowed to transfer his commission from the regular army to the reserve of officers, and in April he was able to walk a free man down Savile Row and carefully finger the tailor’s samples of tweed and serge. Great days, undoubtedly. He had a good balance at Cox’s; a large gratuity was due to him. For two months he enjoyed himself. Then he began to look for a job. He had hoped vaguely for some sort of Government post with a good salary and not a great deal of work. But he soon discovered that Whitehall was more than full, and that civil service jobs abroad were going to the men from the Universities. He felt lost in a world that moved so fast and with such complete detachment from his interests.
At last, through the influence of a fellow-officer, he had got this advertising job. “And very lucky too,” he had been told.
Miller did not appreciate his fortune. At first he had managed to work himself into a mood of self-complacence; every evening, as he walked home from the office, he had reminded himself that a year ago he had been standing in a narrow trench waiting for the stand to, with the prospect of a cold night, to be spent either in patrols or in working parties; whereas now he was going back to a good dinner, a warm fire, and, afterwards, a soft bed—a very different proposition. And, as he sat reading the paper, he remembered pleasantly the cold wind that swept over the lonely hills. He always thought of France as he walked home. “A year ago,” he would say to himself, and try to reconstruct the scene; where had he been, what had he been doing, what had he thought; only twelve months ago he had belonged to a different life.
And then, when November had passed, it was “two years ago” that he found himself saying, for, after the Armistice, there had not seemed anything particular to remember. “Two years ago”—and he saw himself once again in the mud and cold of Bullecourt during those dark weeks over which had hung the menace of the great advance; strangely quiet days. There had been rain in January, cruel driving rain; the main trench had been three feet deep in mud and men had stuck in it for hours. But February had been fine and warm with a suggestion of spring. They had been out of the line just then, and he had gone for long rides to Peronne and Baupaume in the faint mild sunshine. He had been very happy, and the memory of that happiness caused him an insidious disquiet. As he walked back from the office he found himself thinking less of the mud and cold, the fatigue and danger, than of the warm comfort of the mess; the friendliness of those long evenings, when they sat round the stove and had opened bottle after bottle of port. In particular, he remembered that last night at Ervillers, when they had collected a huge beam from a neighbouring ruin and had piled up an enormous fire; he remembered how they had undressed before it, and how the light had flickered on past midnight, and that when he had woken at three o’clock, it had still glowed dimly. They had had good times, and he could not help contrasting them with this present uneventful routine of home and office. Nothing unexpected ever happened. An evening of desultory conversation. Bed. Next morning the hurried breakfast; the scramble for shoes and hat and coat; the uncomfortable journey in the tube, with the same faces opposite him, the same heavy, taciturn, discontented faces; and the squash in the lift; the bad-tempered, ill-mannered crowd; and, afterwards, from 9.30 till 5.30 in that small room at the top of the third flight of stairs with two male typists, with neither of whom he had anything in common and who were both secretly a little glad to see an ex-officer reduced to the same position as themselves, he sat arranging proofs, checking the copy, filing lists.