Settling down

Saturday, February 27th., Cadogan Square, London.

I am a little concerned about my niece Margaret who, judging by her most recent letter, has formed anti-semitic views. She is young and has apparently decided that Jews in general are 'beastly' on the evidence of some unpleasant Jews she has met. I have written to counsel her not to get up in herself any general prejudice against a whole race of people for such flimsy reasons. I told her that I know a considerable number of excellent Jews and I have not noticed that gentiles are superior in any respect. Strange how anti-semitism has persisted for so long and so widely. I have invited her to visit after Easter and hope to have a good influence on her attitude then.

Things may be coming to a head in my burgeoning relationship with Dorothy Cheston. She was here for a dinner tete-a-tete the other evening, a very intimate occasion as I intended it to be. Various things were said by both of us which, taken at face value, would indicate an inclination to 'formalise' our relationship. I sense that her mind is not made up and I do not want to swing her one way or another by direct persuasion. She must decide for herself and accept the responsibility of that decision. Though I feel clear in my own mind there is a part of me, typically, which fears commitment. It cannot be denied. But if she says "Yes", then I will do the honourable thing.

I am feeling quite well settled here now. Wells and wife are coming to dinner tonight and will give their verdict on the place. My health has been much better of late, as everyone remarks. I am trying to get to bed regularly at 12.30 and starting work at 8 a.m. That said, I was at a musical party at Harriet Cohen's last evening and didn't get to bed until 1 a.m. But I have worked well today.

Feted

Saturday, February 14th., Cadogan Square, London.

I had a great time in the Potteries. Sundry hours with Wilcox Edge in the train! He is a very interesting old man, and the Potteries is too much obsessed by his failings. He tells me he was Mayor of Burslem thirty years ago. Imagine that! Though born in Burslem he lived mainly in Wolstanton and had a scheme for the 'annexation' of Wolstanton by Burslem. It came to nothing in the end and Wolstanton remained instead in the clutches of Newcastle. Seemed philosophical about it. A lifelong Liberal.

I went to Hanley and did nothing whatever except ornament the proceedings with my presence, and I was told about forty times how much I had 'honoured' the said proceedings with my 'presence'. Not at all as I expected. The Mayor wore his two-ton chain. I sat on his right. I saw all sorts of people who knew me and whom I didn't know, and whom I admirably pretended to know.  Disconcerting to be feted in a place one has persistently described as being indifferent, if not inimical, to worldly renown. I arrived at 2.30 and left at 6.39, breathing a sigh of relief, and dozed on the train.

But I got home without a headache and the next three days did vast quantities of my novel. yesterday I reposed, and had Robert Loraines to lunch, and a musical supper party. At this party Arnold Bax and Eugene Goossens sat down at the piano and improvised, without a preliminary word to each other, a Spanish tango which lasted a quarter of an hour, and to which Tania danced. It was full of new tunes, and there was never the slightest hitch, discord, or fumbling. How they do it I know not but in that line it was the most marvellous thing I ever heard. Bed at 1.45. Tania was, of course, much admired.

Today I am writing the preface to "Don Juan".

Mixed feelings

 Monday, December 8th., Cadogan Square, London.

Dorothy is in Italy. I will be joining her there next week - arriving in Genoa a week today. In the meantime I have a great deal to do and so have had to neglect my journal. Also I had fantastic neuralgia last night from 2 - 5 am. So it would be fair to say that I have felt better than I do at the moment.. I intend to finish my Sunday Pictorial article this afternoon and proceed with my play tomorrow. In between I have four Harpers Magazine people dining here tonight. An arrangement with them should be lucrative.

There is a theme running through literature to the effect that people who are always right and always punctual are unbearable. It is in the letters of Cicero, and also in the moral works of a certain A.B. in various places. The converse is equally true, that people who are never right and never punctual are unbearable. As for myself, I can honestly say that my faculty for being right is often most annoying to me, and I would sooner be oftener in the wrong. But what can one do? On balance, I would rather be unbearably right than unbearably wrong.

What shall we find in Italy? Italians generally are charming but they only understand a small part of life. Their happy-go-lucky methods have resulted in the most appalling trouble several times in every century since Rome fell. Happy-go-luckiness is bound to end in a mess. I prophecy that there will be another big upset in Italy in a year or two. Hutton tells me that nearly all the English in Italy are in favour of Fascism. They would be. English colonies abroad are ever the same, a festering mass of reactionary political opinions. Would they welcome a 'Duce' in England? Some would.

Harriet Cohen honoured me with her company at lunch yesterday. She was, comparatively, humble. Dear Tania, as usual she wanted advice and I gave it to her. I think she considers me her best source of advice about matters of the heart, which pleases me in most respects but is also rather dissatisfactory. Clearly she perceives me as being of no sexual threat to her. Nor am I. But it diminishes the ego somewhat to be taken so much for granted in that way. She is very beautiful and it is hard sometimes to hear details of her various 'liaisons', to appear dispassionate, but at the same time to wish it were me. She would like me to introduce her to H.G. I know where that would end! How is it that some men have a sort of sexual magnetism and others don't. Mostly it doesn't bother me; in fact I think it would be more trouble than it is worth, but now and then ....

Strange people

Sunday, February 4th., 97 Chiltern Court, London.

Bernard Shaw came for lunch. He and Dorothy talked theatre all the time. He said that the first preliminary to her going in for theatrical management and acting was a divorce between us. I think he was joking. He was rather more sensible and agreeable than usual. He went with us to Harriet Cohen's Henry Wood orchestral concert at Wigmore Hall. The hall was full. I dozed off twice, being very fatigued and sleepy, but I still enjoyed it. We drove home in rain. Shaw left us to get exercise on foot, in the rain. He is a strange person.


But then, authors are strange people. I am one myself, and I probably know as many authors as any living man - except literary agents and income tax inspectors. Authors are ticklish, sensitive people, and, more than most categories of persons, they are victims (generally willing enough) of the astounding, and to me incomprehensible, mania for 'meeting' celebrities, notorieties and infamies. Why do I say so? Because it has been my observation over a long period of years. Why is it so? I don't know!

I regard myself as the exception that proves this particular rule. So far as I am aware I have never had the desire to meet a celebrity because he was a celebrity. On the contrary I have had, and still have, a desire to avoid him. "But you are a great admirer of his books!" said an acquaintance to me once, when I had demurred to an encounter with a genius. "Yes I am," I said. "That's why I don't want to meet him. If I run across him by chance, all right! But deliberately to go out of my way to meet him - No!" And I never did meet him.

Rightly or wrongly one has one's sense of dignity. I have been acused of having an over-developed sense of dignity, and that may be the case. But it is my sense of dignity and I cling to it. In my defence I will assert that my antipathy towards celebrity is by no means uncommon in the Midlands where I grew up. There were men in the Five Towns (and probably still are) who would not cross the street to acknowledge the existence of some local celebrity or other; they would be ashamed to do so. They would regard it as a matter of personal pride and self-respect not to acknowledge a celebrity. I have introduced them into some of my novels and stories. "The Death of Simon Fugue", which some suggest is my best short story, is a case in point. 

Were I to go to the Potteries myself, which is unlikely, I would have no expectation of acknowledgement and I expect that when I die there may be a brief obituary in The Sentinel, but not such as to draw attention away from 'real' news - the football results for example.

Tea and mystery

Thursday, September 8th., Cadogan Square, London.

Dorothy and the Swinnertons for lunch, and we settled our course of conduct - I mean F.S. and me, - to be followed when Doran at last wrote to us to say that he had sold his business to Doubledays.
See also, 'Russia and revivals' - March 9th.,
http://earnoldbennett.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/russia-and-revivals.html

Harriet Cohen came for tea - hadn't seen her for months. I had to leave her, and Dorothy had to leave her to see the actor Charles Laughton, whom I had to pass as a possible "Prohack". He passed with honours in about 5 minutes.
See also, 'First night adventurers' - November 16th., 
http://earnoldbennett.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/first-night-adventurers.html

DAME HARRIET COHEN (1895-1967) was a giant figure in the musical world of the first half of the 20th century. She gave many world premiere performances including Ralph Vaughan Williams' Piano Concerto (which was written for her), and made the first recording of Edward Elgar's Piano Quintet with the Stratton Quartet under the composer's supervision. A number of the important composers of the day composed works for her, including John Ireland, Béla Bartók, Dmitri Shostakovich, Ernest Bloch, Dmitri Kabalevsky and E. J. Moeran. And Sir Arnold Bax, who was Harriet Cohen's lover, wrote most of his piano music for her. In the 1930s, she was actively involved in making the plight of the Austrian and German Jews known to the world. She played concerts to raise money to help Jewish scientists get out of Germany. Her efforts won her the friendship of such notables as Chaim Weizmann, the first president of Israel, Eleanor Roosevelt and Ramsay MacDonald. Harriet Cohen numbered among her close friends the likes of Elgar, Walton, Sibelius, Vaughan Williams, George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells and D. H. Lawrence, and Arnold Bennett, as well as many important politicians and businessmen. She was certainly one of the most famous musicians of her day and was was named a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1938. As a pianist, Harriet Cohen had a tremendous range, from Orlando Gibbons up to the music that was still being written as she practised.

http://www.forte-piano-pianissimo.com/Harriet-Cohen.html

In my Evening Standard article this week I have been writing about the art of the crime story. For years past I have been disastrously disappointed with my adventures among mystery fiction. I think that even Poe is over-praised as a mystery novelist, for the reason that the interest of his tales is too exclusively limited to detection. I want more than merely detective ratiocination in my mystery stories. I want love, romances, and all sorts of things besides.

The finest of all mystery novels is in my opinion "The Mystery of the Yellow Room" by Gaston Leroux, which I regard as a masterpiece of its kind. The solution of it turns on one single moment of misapprehension, a moment which requires, and which gets, the very nicest skill for the success of its effect on the reader. 

Then of course there is Conan Doyle, whose early work really thrilled me. I gladly admit it! But Sir Arthur never (so far as I know) wrote a full-length crime novel. He excels in the short story, which demands far less power and invention and ingenuity than a novel, for the maintenance of interest at full-strength throughout. Chiefly I admire Sir Arthur for his Dr. Watson. Dr. Watson is an authentic human creation. Sherlock Holmes himself is not.

Additionally for September 8th., see 'Alpine heat' - http://earnoldbennett.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/alpine-heat.html

This was our hottest day so far. I began a rough preliminary sketch of my new film and I did about a third of it in the morning before a bathe. We bathed with Diana Cooper, Lady Horner, who had her two grand-daughters, Lady Helen and Lady Perdita Asquith with her, and the boy, Lord Oxford. I talked to the old lady while on the raft. The Diana-Horner party went off to lunch at Talloires. Duff Cooper had arrived in the early afternoon from Geneva. He and Diana were returning from a rowing excursion (and reading Wells's new novel aloud to one another on the lake) just as Dorothy and I were finishing tea on the terrace.