Set Down in Malice: A Book of Reminiscences

by Gerald Cumberland

It is some few years since I saw Newman in close intimacy, but when he was on the staff of The Manchester Guardian and, later on, when he removed to Birmingham, I was at his house very frequently, and a very small circle of friends used to pass long evenings in delicious fooling. In those days Newman could throw off twenty-five years of his age and become a high-spirited and impish boy. I remember one night when, a macabre mood or, rather, a mood of extravagantly high spirits having descended upon us, one of our company, a lady, simulated sudden illness and death. We dressed her in a shroud, placed pennies on her eyes and candles at her head and feet. But in the middle of this foolery, Newman disappeared, and when it was all over and he had returned, he was in a [148] ]sombre mood. It was not because we had trifled with a terrible fact in life that he was disturbed and distrait, but because we had unwittingly cut into his shrinking mind and hurt it by reminding him of something he would fain forget. Insanity repelled him in the same violent manner, and all who knew him intimately when he was writing his book on Hugo Wolf will remember that Wolf’s warped and poisoned psychology obsessed and dominated him.

But often Newman would spend an evening in playing modern songs to us—Bantock’s Ferishtah’s Fancies, Wolf’s Mörike Lieder, and so on. I can see him now as, his clever, rather saturnine face abundantly alive, he described Richard Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben, telling us how the music of the harps stained the texture of the music in a magical way, like one flinging wine on some secretly coloured fabric. Those evenings are to me among the most valued of my life. I remember how my wife and I used to walk home under a long avenue of trees very late in the spring nights, the gummy smell of buds in our nostrils, Newman’s voice still in our ears, and our minds fermenting deliciously with a kind of happiness we had not experienced before.

Those days are gone for ever: days of a recovered youth; evenings that were romantic just because they were evenings; nights when, in silence, one dreamed long and long, the body sunk deep in unconsciousness, the soul ranging and mounting and, in the morning, returning to its home subtly changed and infinitely refreshed.... Newman opened for me a world which, but for him, I do not think I ever should have beheld; nor, indeed, should I ever have been aware of that world’s existence.

. . . . . . . .

I have written of Samuel Langford elsewhere in this book, and I have little to add here. He succeeded Newman on The Manchester Guardian, and I recall the curiosity with which many of us read his first articles, fearing that [149] ]anything he might write must of necessity fall so far below Newman’s high standard as to be unreadable. We were soon reassured. Langford and Newman have little in common, and there is no basis upon which one can compare them. And, at first, Langford had to feel his way, to master his métier, to acquire some of his literary technique....

Our respective newspaper offices were situated near each other, and on our way from the Free Trade Hall he used often to persuade me to drink with him before we began our work. “We shall do each other good,” he would say. And his short, ungainly figure, with its thick neck carrying a nobly-shaped head, would make its way to the bar where, placing a pile of music on the counter, he would turn to me and talk, both of us forgetting to order our drinks, and neither of us caring for the lateness of the hour.... Next morning, he would frequently come round to my house immediately after breakfast, look in at the window of my study, and wave a newspaper in the air. I was always deep in work, for at that time I reviewed eight or ten books every week, but I remember no occasion on which I did not welcome him most gladly. And sometimes I would spend an afternoon in his great garden, worshipping flowers, and watch him as, with fumbling hands, he turned the face of a blossom to the sky and looked at it with I know not what thoughts. I know nothing of horticulture, but Langford knows everything, and often he would talk, more to himself than to me, about the deep mysteries of his science. And, saying farewell at the little gate, he would sometimes crush into my arms a large sheaf of coloured leaves and flowers, wave an awkward hand, and shamble back to his low-built, picturesque house set deep in blooms. Though twenty years my senior, neither he nor I felt the long spell of years lying between us. And sometimes I am tempted to go back to Manchester to renew a friendship for the [150] ]loss of which all the great happiness that London has brought me has, it seems at times, been but inadequate compensation.

. . . . . . . .

During my three years as musical critic on The Manchester Courier I had some curious experiences, and to me the most curious of them all was the persistent manner in which attempts were made by people in Berlin to enlist my sympathies on behalf of an extremely able musician, Oskar Fried. It almost seemed to me that a secret society existed in Germany for the sole purpose of getting Oskar Fried a job in England. Letters written in English came to me from total strangers, informing me at great length and with stupid tautology that Fried was the one hope of musical Young Germany. He had Ideals; he was a Leader; he had the Prophetic Vision; he was the man who was going to promote and lead a new Romantic Movement. “Very good,” said I to myself, “but what on earth has all this to do with me?”

I was not long in finding out. A young Englishman resident in Berlin, and obviously deeply saturated with the German spirit, wrote to me to say that, in his opinion, Fried was the only man in Europe to fill the post that Dr Richter had vacated as conductor of the Hallé Concerts Society in Manchester. The letter arrived at a time when various musicians were being, as it were, “tried” as conductors of the Hallé Concerts, and my unknown correspondent was anxious that Fried should be invited to conduct one or two concerts. To this letter I sent a polite but non-committal reply. I knew Oskar Fried’s name just as I knew the names of a dozen pushing German conductors; but I knew no more. My persistent correspondent, to whom I will give the name of Purvis, wrote again, sending me a typewritten copy of a book he had written on his friend. It was a highfalutin document of idolatry. Fried was his idol, and Purvis gushed and gushed [151] ]and gushed again. But the whole thing was done with truly Germanic thoroughness. I felt that I was being “got at,” and though I resented it, I was greatly amused. I led him on. I was anxious to see this gushing disciple, this seeming advertising agent, this, as it appeared to me, wholly Germanised Englishman. So I replied to him a second time, and one evening he called upon me. He was a boy of twenty-one with a beard, a manner that was intended to be ingratiating but was intolerably insolent, and a self-assurance truly Napoleonic. He tickled me hugely and, as I have more than a grain of malice in me, I opened out to him, flattered him heavily, and talked music with him. But, though he loved the flattery, he was level-headed enough to stick to his point—that I should do all in my power to secure for Oskar Fried the Hallé conductorship. And he ended the interview with the astonishing announcement that Fried had already been engaged by the Hallé Concerts Society to conduct two of their concerts.

By what devious and subterranean ways this was achieved, I do not know, but I have no doubt that scores of influential Germans in Manchester were approached in a similar way to what I was.