Some years ago a mixed vermouth at the Café Royal resulted in my inclusion in a general invitation to a studio party. An obscure musician was celebrating his wife’s elopement. There were prodigal promises of gin and whisky. Everyone would be there, I was informed. I had nothing to do that evening. I went, in search of life.
It was a surprise. We all have our illusion of Bohemia; all of us, that is to say, who study modern fiction and frequent the cinema. At the back of our mind there is a vivid picture of Bohemia as we would have it; an affair of half-lights and perfumes, and cushions and clinging draperies. Perhaps such a Bohemia exists somewhere. It may do; certainly it ought to. But it had no counterpart in that studio party.
By the time I arrived the party had been in progress a couple of hours. The atmosphere was thick. The floor was covered with cigarette ends and the splinters of broken glass. In various corners of the room partially inebriated couples were lost to the world in amorous abandon. An unwashed, unshaved Italian was strumming on a fiddle. There was a little dancing. A number of loose collared Americans were talking in art jargon at the tops of their voices. In a deep armchair, his nose broken, his forehead and eyebrows cut and swollen, a man slept. Whether he had disputed a brother artist’s claim to some lady’s favours, or whether his legs had been unequal to their task and he had collapsed upon a broken bottle, I was unable to discover. At any rate, he slept. He was a loathsome sight; and, for that matter, the whole party was a pretty loathsome sight. But I was impressed. I was just free from the shackles of military discipline and etiquette. Here, I thought, was life. Here was a society that had won to freedom, that was divorced from all preconceived opinions, from every super-imposed tradition of taste and conduct. It was, indeed, somewhat of a shock to me that the only man in the room who appeared to possess a razor should say in a dry voice, “What a show. Look at all these idiots pretending to be Dostoieffskies.” He was right, of course. London is full of people trying to be Dostoieffsky, nursing secretly the grief that they are not epileptic. Dostoieffsky preached the gospel of suffering, and because he spent his life in poverty, the modern idea would appear to be that the only real suffering is material privation, that the man has not lived who has not starved. It is the new snobbery. Once everyone was anxious to establish his descent from a baron. Now everyone is grieved if his pedigree does not contain a dustman.
James Joyce is like that, I fancy: or rather I should say the stuff he writes is. And he could have been so great a writer if he had not been led astray by that reckless heroism of his, that determination at all costs to transcribe life. Perhaps, though, Ulysses is more than Journey’s End for a certain type of fiction: it may be that it is Journey’s End for the novel as a vehicle for narrative; it may be that the novel is played out.
Since the beginning of time the world has had stories told to it. But always in a different form. There was the epic, and that has gone; the ballad, and that has gone; the drama, and that is passing; the novel, and who knows but that the novel as a medium of story-telling has served its turn, that it is through the cinema that the twentieth century will elect to have its stories told, and that the novel will become a weapon of dialectic, a glorified form of journalism, or purely a medium of psychological investigation.
XIII
I AM uncertain as to the official highbrow attitude towards the “Movies.” I am indeed doubtful whether there is one. Highbrowism is supposed to turn on all objects of popular enthusiasm a cold judicial eye, to weigh and compare the manifold futilities of each fresh expression of humanity’s imperfect reason, and to deliver a final, an irrevocable judgment. That, at any rate, is what the jaundiced writer would have us think. “A coterie of the intellectuals,” he will say. And I suppose it is all right. I suppose that somewhere, in some form, highbrowism does exist. I can only say that I have not met it. The men and women who have been described to me as “impossibly highbrow” reveal themselves for the most part on acquaintance as very simple, ordinary folk who are more interested in cricket than Russian politics, and more interested in law reports than either. This may only be additional evidence of cunning. But, as I say, I have a very real suspicion that highbrowism is nothing more than a popular conception, and that to talk about a “highbrow” attitude is about as sensible as to call seventy million people France and treat them as one person.
But whether highbrowism exists or not, a popular conception is always a useful peg to hang a chapter on. In the days when I sat at the foot of the history sixth and was driven to deploy, as a screen for my ignorance and idleness, many ingenious devices, I had resort frequently to a ruse which has no doubt in its time assisted many another harassed historian, but which I should like to think was of my own invention. I would manufacture some startlingly dogmatic exaggeration, attribute it to a writer whose name I was careful to conceal, and proceed to illuminate the quotation with historical illustrations. The answer to a question on Prussian diplomacy would, for example, open thus: “A certain eighteenth-century essayist, a writer more remarkable perhaps for the vigour than the accuracy of his assertions, once stated that to be successful it was necessary to be unscrupulous, and though there are fortunately many careers against which no such charge could be rightfully directed, there are others, among which must be unquestionably included that of Bismarck ...” etc. etc. Such an opening set a note of erudition that would, I hoped, for at least a page and a half, prevent its reader from discovering that the meal I set before him contained “a deal of sack and very little bread.”
And so I return to my opening sentence: that though I do not know what is the official highbrow attitude towards the cinema, I should, if I had to define it in a hundred words for a symposium, write something like this. “The highbrow professes to despise the American sobstuff drama: he objects to the conversion into films of plays and novels. He searches in classical presentations for anachronisms and historical blunders. He enjoys, however, the gymnastics of Douglas Fairbanks, the knockabout comedies, Charlie Chaplin and the Pathé Gazette.” And were my opinion to be invited further, I should pronounce myself to be in complete disagreement with this attitude. I enjoy American sobstuff; I feel the right emotions at the right moment. I pray that the misunderstanding between the hero and the heroine may be speedily and effectively removed. It is with extreme difficulty that I restrain myself from rising in my seat to explain to the young ass that the affluent and middle-aged person with whom he saw her at the opera was in fact her uncle. In these days of infinite compression it is not unpleasant to have told one in eighty minutes a story that it would take a day and a half to read, and told on the whole, I find, more entertainingly than in a full-length novel. There are no psychological or sociological interludes; one gets on with the business. Indeed, for ninety-nine per cent. of the long films that are put upon the market, I am, I take it, the sort of person the producer has in mind when he produces them. As the dramatic critic says, “For those that like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing they like.”
But by the short, one-reel affairs I am, I confess, unmoved. It does not amuse me to see the Duke of York inspect Boy Scouts at Northampton, nor am I anxious to learn by what process sardines are transferred from the Atlantic to the breakfast table. Films that are described as “interest” weary me. Nor can I believe that Larry Semon is a comedy king. Rarely can a civilised people have allowed itself to be entertained by more primitive, less subtle humour. It is entirely of the “top-hat-on-the-chair” variety, and it ends like the Harlequinade, in a chase.