The last thing I wish to give you is a list of his plays, with the comment that they were a success or the reverse, adding what eminent critics said of them. I want only to tell you how he wrote his plays, and try to make you understand why he wrote as he did. If I quote what critics said of his work, it will not be because in this or that extract I find undiluted praise, but because that critic has—or, at least, so it seems to me—found truth.
Harry’s first play I have still; it is written in an exercise-book, and is called Geraldine, or Victor Cupid, or Love’s Victory. It is a highly coloured piece of work, which has never been inflicted upon the public; written, I imagine, when he was about twelve years old.
Not until we had been married for some years did Harry realise that he could write plays; he was passionately fond of acting, and wished to take up nothing that might interfere with his profession, but gradually the knowledge came to him that he could create characters on paper as well as on the stage.
He made his plays long before he wrote them; I mean he thought the whole play out in its entirety, lived for weeks with the characters in his mind, came to know them intimately and to be absolutely at home with them, before he began actually to write the play in black and white.
I have known him to write the last act first, simply because he had planned the play so entirely before he put pen to paper. Often when at “Apple Porch” he would write for an hour, then go out on the golf course, knock a ball about for two or three holes, then return to his desk, and pick up the scene just where he had left it.
Grierson’s Way he wrote straight off in three weeks; there is hardly an alteration in the manuscript. He was intensely happy when writing; talked very little about his work, as a rule, but lived in two worlds—his friends in the play, and his family. He thought sad and gloomy plays were a mistake, and should not be written, or, if written, whatever the subject, the author “should be able to let in the sunshine somewhere”. He never wrote another Grierson’s Way.
The Wilderness was written under most difficult circumstances. Jack was three months old, he was frightfully ill for weeks, and I was up night after night nursing him. Harry used to sit in the study at the end of the passage, writing, writing, coming in now and again to see how we were getting on. Later, when Jack was better, Harry took a table and put it up in the loft over a wee stable we had, where the car was kept; there, daily, he and his big dog Diana, which George Alexander had given him, used to climb up the ladder that was flat up against the wall, and do his writing. The going up was all right, but the coming down was the difficulty. Harry put a heap of straw on the ground, and, after he had got half-way down the ladder, Diana used to put her fore paws on his shoulders, then Harry would drag her till her hind legs got to the edge of the trap-door, when she would drop on Harry, and together they would fall on to the straw; this went on for weeks.
His first play to be produced in London, with the exception of a one-act play called Rest, was Bogey; and here I must quote the Standard critic, who wrote of the play: “A fairy tale, if you will, but a fairy tale which deals with the passions of men and women.” That was so very true of so many of Harry’s plays; they were “fairy tales”, because that was how he saw life—as a wonderful fairy tale, with an ending that was intended to be happy, and, if it failed to be, was so because mortals had meddled with the story and spoiled it. A playwright should “hold the mirror up to Nature”, but the result must depend upon what he sees in the mirror; if he sees stories which have the gold and glitter of romance, then, in writing his play, which contains both, he is only depicting truly what he has seen.
Bogey was not the success that it might have been, but it was sufficient to prove finally to its writer that he had the power to write, a power which only needed developing. It lacked the concise beauty of his later work; he had not then learnt his craft; but, as many of the critics testified, it was the work of “a dramatist, a writer of plays, born, if as yet not fully made”.
He began to write other plays, and gradually, if you read them, you will find how he advances in his knowledge of words. He would seek for hours for the right word. He used to say that a word which was not exactly the one he wanted, and for which he was seeking, hurt him like a discord on the piano. From the actor’s point of view, Harry was generous; that is to say, every part he wrote was “worth playing”, and every part had a line which would appeal to the audience and stamp the actor on their minds, no matter how small the part might be. For example, in the first act of Eliza (a play for which Harry had no very great affection), the carman who brings in the rocking-horse has two lines to say, and two only, but one of them will gain a laugh from the audience, and lifts the part from being nothing but a “one-line part”.