Hugh Walpole: An Appreciation

by Joseph Hergesheimer

Here particularly, in Katherine Trenchard, the individual and universal humanity are woven one into the other; an immeasurably greater accomplishment than the projecting of mere eccentricity, called, I believe, by the doctors, the creation of character. Anyone, almost, can invent a set of whiskers, a stuttering speech, write imposing indignations into mechanical masks; but only a few have put all youth into a girl of their imagination, on almost no pages do we find the truth that is ourselves.

IV

For Mr. Walpole, however, the dark secret of being was always hidden in the heart of Russia. It has been his land of enchantment, of magic and desire; and it possessed him in the way that Shelley and Browning were Italianate. The English Merchant Marine had the same fascination for Mr. Conrad, the same fascination and incalculable influence. Throughout Hugh Walpole's novels there is the persistent turning to the dream forests and night-ridden cities of Russia, to the mingled simplicity and inexplicable complexity of its men and women.

Russia presented the greatest possible contrast to the England, the English he knew; and, although Mr. Walpole's descriptions of London are steeped in beauty, he has been unable to find there--even in the serenity of March Square--any such creative impulse as Petrograd held for him.

The Russian character, too, with its peculiar freedom from the British defects that he specially hated, offered him an uncommonly broad means of expression and intelligibility. Philip Mark's years in Warsaw, his mistress there, Anna, formed an ideal background for the utterly different purity of Katherine Trenchard. So it was inevitable that Mr. Walpole should invade Russia not only with the spirit, but, as well, with the body of his books. This, of course, was brought about by the war, and resulted in the publication of The Dark Forest and The Secret City.

The Dark Forest was, in many ways, a prelude to the latter. Semyonov, the doctor with a square, honey-colored beard, the fatal spirit of the former, accomplishes his final fatality in The Secret City; the narrator of one novel is the narrator of the other; but in The Secret City a great deal that was nebulous--but in no way ineffective--is exactly weighed and expressed.

The surprising quality of The Secret City, and which makes any description of it difficult, is that while it is a tragedy, it is nowhere oppressive. The obvious reason for this is that the story is vividly interesting--not because it includes a remarkable description of the Russian Revolution, but on account of the humanity and variety of its characters, the depth of emotion and brilliancy of surface. In reality, the Revolution constituted a very serious danger, for in creative fiction, the author, the novel, must be greater than the event. A novel holds within its covers a world of its own, a complete reality which, for the moment, must take the place of all other reality; and the presence in it of an overwhelming contemporary event may well crush the illusion, the shining ball, into dull fragments. But this Mr. Walpole avoids in his concentration upon the essentials of his purpose; the Revolution, as a fact, fades before the more enduring veracity, and importance, of his imagination.

Vera and Nina, the fretted Markovitch, and Jerry Lawrence, tied in a knot of passion and longing and bitterness, now struggling blindly and now illuminated with devastating flashes of realization, are more compelling than the accidents of wars and shifting governments. They are the human means of the drama, but--again--it is a pressure lying back of living that is mainly important. In The Secret City, Petrograd itself controls the mood of the action. Mr. Walpole has seen it in a unity of tone far more perfect than his grasp of London. He sees it impressively somber, an iron city mostly in the grip of winter, its blackness emphasized by glittering, immaculate snow, remote and thinly pure skies, and the crystal stars to which he is so individually sensitive. It is, in The Secret City, an evil place, with bare, wind-swept files of apartment houses, broad avenues emptied by the staccato rattle of machine guns and suffocating slums with dead canals stirred with the vision of slow-rising, scaly monsters.

Against this, however, there are glimpses of a peasant, a symbolical reality, deeply bearded and grave and patient, standing, it might be, on a bridge or disappearing into the dark. Yet there are no prophecies, no auguries of a future regenerated from without. Mr. Walpole is not concerned with the temporary plasters, the nostrums, of propaganda. He rests serene in the novelist's isolation from small responsibilities, addressed only to the qualities at the base of humanity from which current fevers rise.

And here, at last, he has combined the inner and outer pressures of which I spoke at the beginning. While it is true that Petrograd strikes the persistent keynote of The Secret City, while he sees monsters stirring and records dreams woven into the texture of actuality, these are projections of the deep significance of Lawrence and Markovitch; signs and visions are unnecessary with their complete expression of the states of the spirit. Lawrence, the Englishman, slow, fixed in honor and duty, romantically pure, and the Russian, worn by doubt, forever lost in the waste between performance and idea, oppose, perhaps, in little, their countries. Certainly they illustrate Mr. Walpole's own questioning and offer facts, entirely convincing, for the support of his intricate structures.