Getting ideas

Saturday, January 9th., Hotel Belvedere, Mont Pelerin sur Vevey, Switzerland.

Maiden, aged about 30. Self-conscious. Big nose and eyes, and big features generally. Badly dressed. What is characteristic about her is her pose in an armchair at night, needle-working. Looks intently at her work, with virginal expression, while others are talking. Then at intervals looks up suddenly; you can't see her eyes for the white gleam of her spectacles, and she seems to embrace the whole room, or perhaps the talker alone, in a wide candid, ingenuous glance, as of surprise, as if saying slowly: "What the hell are you talking about?"  I wonder what is going on behind those spectacles? Am I right in my assessment that she remains inviolate? How would she respond if an attempt were made at seduction?

I discussed this with Marguerite later. She too had noticed the woman and had drawn the same conclusion. She said you wouldn't find a Frenchwoman like that. She is right. We got on to talking about how a seduction might be carried out and, one thing leading to another, the evening ended most enjoyably. Naughtily, M. suggested that the seduction might be conducted as well by a woman as by a man. A stimulating idea I found.

A honeymoon pair came the other night. Gave me an idea for my novel. Across the dining room they looked immensely distinguished. He might have been a brother of Rostand. Fine nose. White hands. She seemed mysterious in a da Vinci way. I made sure he was some sort of artist. No, he proved to be in business. When we saw them close to in the little reading room - intense vulgarity of gesture, movement etc. He seemed more like a barber's assistant and she a vendeuse mal elevee. Long time since I have been so taken in. Interesting to watch how gestures effective at a distance (theatrical) grew vulgar close at hand.

I did four sketches and one watercolour today, and found all sorts of ideas for novel quite easily. My recent coorrespondence seems to have been mainly about "The Old Wives' Tale" which is now in a second edition and selling regularly. It has been better received than I expected. In fact things are going very well for me at present. My "Matador" story should be in the English Review alongside Hardy, Conrad, Galsworthy, Wells, and Tolstoy - I shall not feel ashamed of the company. Also I have been informed that my new play is 'simply terrific'.

Bathing in ideas

Monday, April 30th., Comarques, Thorpe-le-Soken.

Today, in accordance with time-table, I finished my novel "The Roll Call" at 4 p.m. 114,000 words. It is goodish I think, but that is it for the Clayhangers, unless I go further with my idea of writing an alternative ending to "Clayhanger" itself. It has been in my mind for a few days now and would be interesting to do. I don't think it's been done before and would generate some interest I think. And make a few bob! Probably write to Pinker about it.

I went to the Russian Exhibition today, not for pleasure but to put the sacred autograph into books and to answer questions by Lady Muriel P. and other toffs about how to make these enterprises hum. It is in aid of the Anglo-Russian Hospital.  The Russian theatre in the basement of the Grafton Galleries is most excellent. Plays by Tolstoy and Tchekoff. To see a play with ideas in it was like having a bath. It made me want to sit down and write more plays at once. The Russian pictures were terrible. It would have been better to have had none. I haven't tried the Russian restaurant, but I shall.

 

Perils of success

Thursday, April 24th., Comarques, Thorpe-le-Soken.

Finished "War and Peace" on Tuesday. The last part of the Epilogue is full of good ideas the johnny can't work out. The first part is as good as anything. All that domesticity is superbly rendered, with a natural and yet ruthless veracity. It has inspired me to a good basic theme for the third "Clayhanger". I shall give an account of the marriage between Edwin and Hilda which will shock because it is so true to real life, and touch the nerves of anyone who has experienced the conjugal battlefield. "War and Peace" is simply terrific. The battle of Borodino is fine. So is the Rostov family. And so are many of the 'set' descriptions of Russian life, such as the wolf-hunting on the Rostov estate. I wanted to write one of the same dimensions, and hope to yet.

I am just finishing instalment three of the Harper serial. It is sound but not brilliant. It is an infernal nuisance writing scenes which you know all through are only sound and not fine. Therein lies one important difference between myself and Tolstoy - I have to write all sorts of things just to make my living. Or at least the life we have grown used to living! Returns of "Great Adventure" at Kingsway going up. Over £150 a night now. Could scarcely be better. But current success is no guarantee for the future.

Yacht Velsa arrived at Brightlingsea from Ostend on Wednesday, and yesterday we went over to see her lying in the Creek. Lovely weather but barometer falling quickly and wind from the South East. She looked superb in every way except inside the engine case. Entirely Dutch crew, of whom two cannot speak English at all. I liked the aspect of the cook, but it was impossible to communicate any ideas to him direct. We got home at six o'clock. So excited that we forgot the dog absolutely but he was collected by the harbour master and saved for us.

I now notice one or two devoted heads amongst critics who lose no opportunity of going for me both tooth and nail. And it is astonishing how this small minority of criticism, convinced that one may be that it is obviously wrong-headed, and perhaps malicious or prejudiced, has a capacity for annoying the successful person surfeited with money and laudation.

Other ways

Monday, April 7th., Comarques, Thrope-le-Soken.

Last week being in need of an inspirational bucking up, I dropped "War and Peace" and read Balzac's "Cure de Tours" and "Pierrette". Latter better than Saintsbury says it is. Balzac was an ignorant and crude man, often childish in his philosophising. But if he had been properly educated and influenced he would have been a great social philosopher. His apercus are often astounding. And his vitality is terrific. He is full of inspiring and agreeable ornament.

Nothing of the kind in Tolstoy. All a flat recital. Often dull, unless you give yourself to it. But if you do, he is never dull. Some of Tolstoy's long descriptions (such as of the wolf-hunt on Count Izla's estate) are extremely beautiful. Natasha is the most beautiful character - anyway up to page 700 or so, where I am now.

I think of the contrast between life on an estate in Russia and my estate here in Thorpe. It's not just the scale, but the whole aspect of things, physically and socially. Tolstoy makes Russia seem untamed and exciting - not words one would use in describing Essex! And the women! How it must be to be loved and desired by a Russian woman. Makes my blood flow faster just thinking about it. I thought I was doing something exotic by marrying a Frenchwoman, but to think if she had been Russian. No prospect of peace and tranquility of course, but the passion!

All Russian!

Tuesday, March 20th., Cadogan Square, London.

The twelve finest novels in the world are all Russian!

First, Dostoevsky. Whenever my mind dwells on the greatest achievements in fiction I think, before any other novel, of "The Brothers Karamazov". I implacably affirm that no greater novel has yet been written. It will be written, I doubt not - for I have a dogmatic belief in progress. Further I rate "The Idiot" little lower than "The Brothers". On the same level is "The House of the Dead" which is lovely, and shorter. It is, in my opinion, the most celestial restorative of damaged faith in human nature that any artist ever produced; the most successful and touching demonstration of the truth that man is not altogether vile. Then fourth is "Crime and Punishment" which cannot possibly be omitted from the dozen.

Now Tolstoy. He wrote three terrific novels which must be included: "Anna Karenina", "War and Peace" and "Resurrection". All three took Europe and America by the neck, and they have never in the slightest degree relaxed their hold on the imagination of the Western literary world. You cannot get away from these books! They force themselves instantly into any general discussion of the novel. Everybody who has read them remembers them, and those who haven't read them must pretend to have done so to avoid ignominy.

I have now already mentioned seven books. Exclude any one of them from the twelve and what would you put in its place? Would you dare oust any of them in favour of Dickens, or Austen, or even Hardy?

Then Turgenev. He cannot quite so powerfully move me as Dostoevsky or Tolstoy, but he was certainly a more finished artist than either of them. Everything that he did shows a superb perfection of writing style, even translated into English. What form, what control of the vehicle, what grace, what tenderness! "Virgin Soil", "Fathers and Sons", and "On the Eve" must be included in the dozen. Together they mark an epoch in the sociological development of the novel.

Finally Gogol. He wrote one novel, "Dead Souls". Despite the indignities it has suffered in various translations, and at the hands of misguided individuals who had the impudence to 'finish' it, "Dead Souls" has taken its place in Europe as a comic, ironic masterpiece of the first order. "Dead Souls" is gorgeous reading. It is the greatest lark imaginable, and withal deadly.

That makes twelve.

 

This I believe to be true.

Tuesday, January 3rd., Fulham Park Gardens, London.

At the Burne-Jones exhibition. I was much impressed by the whole thing and especially by the superb richness and spirituality of the early "Annunciation" (two panels) and the "Adoration of the Magi", all three pictures being dated 1861. In some ways these surpass, or at least equal, any subsequent work.

The sight of Burne-Jones's aloofness, of his continual preoccupation with the spiritual, to the ignoring of everyday facts, served to complete in me a modification of view which has been proceeding now for a year or two. The day of my enthusiasm for 'realism', for 'naturalism', has passed. I can perceive that a modern work of fiction dealing with modern life may ignore realism and yet be great. To find beauty, which is always hidden, that is the aim. If beauty is found then superficial facts are of small importance. But they are of some importance. And though I concede that in the past I have attached too high a value to realism, nevertheless I see no reason why it should be dispensed with. My desire is to depict the deeper beauty while abiding by the envelope of facts. At the worst the facts should not be ignored. They might for the sake of disclosing the beauty, suffer a certain distortion - I can't think of a better word. Indeed they cannot be ignored in the future. The achievements of the finest French writers, with Turgenev and Tolstoy, have set a standard for all coming masters of fiction.

What the artist has to grasp is that there is no such thing as ugliness in the world. This I believe to be true, but perhaps the saying would sound less difficult in another form; all ugliness has an aspect of beauty. The business of the artist is to find that aspect.
 

The old days

March 14th., 1929
75 Cadogan Square, London

A woman, an experienced and abandoned reader, lamented to me the other day that the domestic novel was disappearing. I could not agree and told her so. At any rate I, who do indeed glance at novels now and then in my spare time, have observed no sign of it. The great majority of novels have been and will be essentially domestic in matter. Even Tolstoy in "War and Peace" had to come down to the bedrock of domesticity in the end. To my mind the last 100 pages of that perhaps supreme work, dealing in the main with very narrow domesticity, are the most poignant in it - and the most effective. It is certainly not essential for the action of a novel to be confined to a traditional home, with the characters engaging in conversation across the kitchen table, for it to be regarded as domestic. Of course I am well aware what the lamenting lady meant. She meant that the old-fashioned domestic novel was disappearing. Naturally it is. The old-fashioned everything is disappearing, and has been disappearing steadily for thousands of years.

Yesterday I met an American, clearly a man of taste and discernment, who asked me for the name and address of the artist who had created the suit in which I happened to be clad. He said that in the old days he used to order all his clothes in London, but he had given up London tailors because they demanded so many tryings-on. However he was now inclined to return to them. I then told him my most famous experience: how I had spent three months, and given at least twelve tryings-on, and exhausted two tailoring firms, in the attempt, ultimately successful, to obtain three evening waistcoats that would fit without crease. Not that I am hard to please!

Wherever I go it seems that people of a certain age are complaining to me about things 'not being as they were in our day'. And they seem to take for granted that I will agree with them. Only today a neighbour, rather older than myself, was bemoaning modern food, the difficulty of getting 'real' meat and 'proper' vegetables such as were, apparently, in abundance when he was a boy. Is this a sort of resentment that life has been so unaccountably unfair as to make us old? For myself, if I were offered the opportunity to relive my youth I would politely decline - once has been sufficient for me.

Social philosophy

Monday, April 7th., Comarques, Thorpe-le-Soken.

Last week, being in need of inspirational bucking-up, I dropped "War and Peace" and read Balzac's "Cure de Tours" and "Pierrette". Latter better than Saintsbury says it is. Balzac was an ignorant and crude man, often childish in his philosophising. But if he had been properly educated and influenced he would have been a great social philosopher. His apercus are often astounding. And his vitality is terrific. he is full of inspiring and agreeable ornament. Nothing of the kind in Tolstoy. All a flat recital. Often dull, unless you give yourself to it. But if you do he is never dull. Some of Tolstoy's long descriptions (such as of the wolf-hunt on Count Ilza's estate) are extremely beautiful. Natasha is the most beautiful character - anyway up to page 700 or so, where I now am.

Will I be thought of as any sort of social philosopher in the future? I should certainly think that my Five Towns books will be useful as social history, but have my characters any universal significance? I would like to think so. And when I think for example about the marriage of Edwin and Hilda, as described in "These Twain", it seems to me, and others have told me, that I have captured something important, if not profound. Also death has featured in several of my books and I think I have shown something of the variety of human response to that most troubling of experiences.

Additionally for April 7th., see 'Identity and disguise'

Since the war I have naturally become a target for satire, and I know it. It is partly the price of fame and partly because I have deliberately courted publicity and made myself into a 'character'. I have become a popular cartoon subject, turning up in various guises - at first nights, in the barber's and in the cartoon above. All publicity is essentially good publicity and I have given the press and cartoonists things to seize on - very fine lace shirts, the quiff of my hair, and my fob. I consider these to be both an identity and a disguise.