War efforts

Friday, December 28th., Comarques, Thorpe-le-Soken.

What a way to run a war!

Captain Hill told me how after a long period (several weeks) of 'special vigilance' he was sleeping in a blanket on the floor of the gardener's cottage at Thorpe Hall when a despatch rider burst in, just like a stage despatch rider, at 3 a.m. The despatch contained one word which for Hill had no meaning. The rider couldn't tell him anything and only insisted on a signature in receipt, which of course Hill gave. Hill then got up and went to see another O.C. nearby. This O.C. had received the same message, and also had not the least idea what it meant. Other O.C.'s were afterwards found to be in the same case.

Hill asked another O.C. to ring up the staff but he was afraid to do so, so Hill did it himself. He asked the telephone clerk what the message meant. The clerk replied that he knew but he daren't tell. Hill then told him to summon the Brigade Major. The clerk said he positively dare not. Hill insisted and took the responsibility on himself. The Brigade Major came to the phone using terrible language. It then appeared that the incomprehensible word was a code word signifying that the period of vigilance was over. Only no O.C. of unit had been previously informed of the significance of the word. The whole episode with its middle-of-the-night busness, absurd secrecy etc., was thoroughly characteristic. I would have put it down as a tall story had I not experienced similar imbecilities myself.

 

My own war effort is to try to organise a high-class concert at the Haymarket on behalf of the Wounded Allies Relief Committee. I am aiming for some time in February. I have recently written to Max Beerbohm to ask if he will design a cartoonish sort of cover for the programme. He has a great gift for that sort of thing. I think we are doing some good. I hope so.

Old-world charm

Saturday, November 6th., Villa des Nefliers.

I received copies today of the U.S.A. edition of "The Glimpse". Horrible binding. In glancing through it I noticed several misprints. The American spelling of course one accepts, though I have noticed that American novels published in England retain their spelling. Why is this?

I had a superb walk in the forest. This has been a marvellous autumn but must now be coming to an end. I fear we will have a sharp frost and/or a high wind and the trees will be left bare. Before long it will be difficult to recall that they ever were clothed.

At 9.30 I began, very unwillingly, the last day on my second act. I was rather pleased with it at lunchtime. After repose I threw my painting over  and finished the act. What a relief! I then fiddled about with tea and Max Beerbohm and the proces Steinheil until 4, when I was obliged by my conscience to go to the barbers. I am always loathe to get my hair cut and yet invariably glad when it is done. I don't seem to learn from the experience.

Happily it is a stately barbers where hair cutting and friction are treated with adequate solemnity. In the half-light, with its mirrors and rococo woodwork and complicated apparatus, it had 'due style' tradition behind it. A little framed notice was hung up as always on hunt days."Rendezvous de chasse. Croix de Toulouse" All this kind of thing will belong to a past generation probably before I am dead. I shall recount it as something antique, quaint and scarcely conceivable. The entire atmosphere was old-world. I have often noticed how elderly people delight in detailing how different (usually better) the world was when they were young. I haven't reached that stage yet, but I sense it in the offing!

I came home when there was star in a field of blue-green above pink, above purple-grey that mingled with the smoke and roofs of the houses. A simplified tableau seen from the lower corner of the Rue Bernard Palissy. Then I came in and read my dose of Taine.



 

Moving around

Sunday, April 23rd., Whitehall Court, London.

Irene Rooke

I lost my notebook of the Potteries, and only began a new one two or three days before I left. On Tuesday the 11th. I went to Manchester to stay with Mair till Thursday. I met the usual fine crowd and also Stanley Houghton, who impressed me; and Irene Rooke, currently playing in Miss Horniman's company at the Gaiety, whom I liked; and in particular a certain Hughes, of Sherratt & Hughes, the largest booksellers in Manchester, who told me he had sold 950 copies of "Clayhanger", and over 400 of the cheap edition of "The Old Wives' Tale" in three weeks (I think).

Irene Rooke (1878 - 1958) was an English theatre and film actress from Bridport, Dorset, England.

Marguerite came to the Potteries on Thursday. On Saturday we went down Sneyd Deep Pit, and on Monday to Rode Heath. We came to London on Tuesday, and Marguerite went direct to Pinner. I came to Whitehall Court, and what with the Authors' Club, and the N.L.C. next door, and a fine bedroom on the 7th. storey, I ought to be comfortable.

I took up Hilda Lessways again on Thursday afternoon, and shall finish reading what I have written this morning. better than I expected. There are some smashing pages. If only I can give it a sufficiently brilliant ending! 

I met Rickards at the Cafe Royal where we had a good dinner in the most horrible atmosphere. He was expecting friends who did not arrive.  Later, there we were at the Palace music-hall to see the Russian dancers. Pavlova is really very good. She was dancing the dying swan when a feather fell off her dress. Two silent Englishmen. One says: "Moulting". That is all they say. The Galsworthys were there. Also a half-caste tart whom Rickards sleeps with at present. He says that she is very fine and that her shoulders are a very beautiful colour. I told him that I have always wanted to sleep with a negress. He offered me the half-caste. I took fright and went no further. We did not get into conversation either with the Galsworthys or with the whore. 
For more on Rickards see 'Eating companions'

I am talked about a great deal in this club. Indeed I am its star member. I constantly come across couples whispering: "He ... The Old Wives' Tale ... Very good ... Very fine". And they fall into embarrassed silence when I approach.

Max's caricature was reproduced in yesterday's Manchester Guardian. It is not very good.

Additionally for April 23rd., see 'Sailing East'

I didn't have a great deal of sleep, but felt that I had had enough sleep.
Sore throat which I might have cured if I could have stopped smoking; but I couldn't. The thing would have been much more serious to make me give up this habit even for a time.
I thought about an article on Syracuse; so soon I was determined to write it today.
I was chatting with the Chief Officer on the poop before 6 a.m. Perfect morning. Saw one sail, a brig, about ten miles to the north going westward. Saw nothing else all day. There was a slant of wind, and I reckon that the ship was making 3 or 4 knots under sail only. Four sails set, 2 topsails, 1 top stay-sail, the sky sail and three jibs.
Bridge has been played nearly the whole day. And it has been a simply magnificent day.
Captain Davies said that he was not a yacht-captain but a captain in a yacht. Well, the yacht shows it.

Liverish

Monday, April 21st., Comarques, Thorpe-le-Soken.

We went to London on Thursday. I for dinner at Omar Khayyam Club. Interview with Pinker who lunched with me, and told me privately of his scheme for increasing dramatists' royalties according to length of run. This at Reform Club.

Exhibition of Max Beerbohm's cartoons at Leicester Galleries. Crowd. I was at once recognised  - with a certain lack of politeness - by two men. I was ill all day. Probably liver - anyhow pains in back - very mysterious and disconcerting. Bad night. Same illness on Friday complicated by dyspepsia. I went to Leicester Galleries and bought my caricature. Then to Agnew Galleries to see alleged finest collection of watercolours by Turner ever got together. I thought both the Blue and the Red Righi rather over-praised, and I preferred the "Scarborough" picture - marvellous microscopic figures of women in the foreground. A few loud-voiced English upper-classes patronisingly present. This show superb, but still I left it with slight disappointment - a flat feeling, a suspicion of prettiness and academicism. Perhaps, had I been feeling better, my pleasure in the show would have been enhanced.

Lunch alone at Reform. Ill.

Additionally for April 21st., see 'Illumination in Syracuse'

I knew nothing of The Clouds except its title and the outline of its plot. My mind was a clean slate. The first impression was not good, for I certainly could not admire the scenic background. But as soon as the piece actually began, within two minutes of the opening, I had the exciting joy of new perceptions about classical drama. Obviously the thing was being very well done. I could hear every word plainly across a space of some seventy five yards - and in the open! (Oh, West End of London, where I must strain my ears at a distance of ten yards and withal be resigned to miss much!) The austere simplicity of the construction of the play, the rise and fall of its emotion, its disdain of what we call realism, and its respect for that truth which the West End of London will not tolerate save under compulsion - these matters were rendered movingly plain to me.

Identity and disguise

Tuesday, April 7th., Cadogan Square, London.

Max Beerbohm, with others, dined here last night. I hadn't seen him for ten years (at the Reform Club). He was more delightful than ever. His mind is sound right through; and he is often witty. Some people have told me that he would dine out and say nothing but the most ordinary things. Last night he said scarcely anything ordinary. He was unaffected, modest, and thoroughly wise, and made a great impression on everybody. After the Maughams and the Parsonses had gone he expanded even more to Kathleen Long, Dorothy and me.

Kathleen Long (1896-1968) was a concert pianist and piano teacher. In her repertoire was Ravel's 'Ondine', and she told an interviewer in 1950 that Ondine had been taught her by the composer himself, ‘a dried up little man’ to whom she was introduced one afternoon by the novelist Arnold Bennett, an erstwhile London neighbour with whom she used to enjoy playing duets.

I asked him what kind of cigarette he preferred, Eastern or Western. He said it didn't matter. He just took whatever came. He didn't care about many things, and as soon as he owned something that he had wanted it ceased to please him.

Sir Henry Maximilian "Max" Beerbohm (1872 – 1956) was an English essayist, parodist, and caricaturist best known today for his 1911 novel Zuleika Dobson. In 1910 he married and went to live the rest of his life in the Villino Chiaro, a small house on the coast road overlooking the Mediterranean at Rapallo, Italy. Max and his wife seem to have had a thoroughly happy life together. There has been speculation that he was a non-active homosexual, that his marriage was never consummated, that he was a natural celibate. The fact is, not much is known of Max's private life. Beerbohm defined caricatures as "the delicious art of exaggerating, without fear or favour, the peculiarities of this or that human body, for the mere sake of exaggeration... The whole man must be melted down, as in a crucible, and then, as from the solution, be fashioned anew. He must emerge with not one particle of himself lost, yet with not a particle of himself as it was before."

His age proved to be 52, whereas mine was 58 in May next. He said he wanted to be 58 - every year was a conquest. He did not envy young people; in fact he felt sorry for them. Their lives also were precarious. They might die any day, and if they did die - what a suck-in for them! How much they would have missed without knowing it. He said he had no feeling for London. He liked to visit it but only on condition that he could leave it and return to Rapallo. He said that he couldn't possibly have the romantic feeling for London that I have, because he was born in it. "The smuts fell on his bassinette." Whereas I could never lose the feeling of the romanticalness of London.


Beerbohm wrote to me once (nearly 20 years ago now) as follows:
"... When I had finished 'The Old Wives Tale' (having gone slow in the later parts of it, being so loth to have no more to read of it), I felt a real void in my life; and this void I instinctively tried to fill a little of by writing a letter to the man who had laid so large an aesthetic debt on me. I wrote the letter and meant to send it, but I said 'Why?' I am always saying 'Why?' That is the curse of the twentieth century (and metropolitan and non-Bursley) nature ..."

Last evening he told me that I was in his new series of "Old celebrities meeting their younger selves", shortly to be seen at the Leicester Galleries. The legend under the drawing of me was:
Old A.B.       Everything worked out according to plan.
Young A.B.  My plan.
What a depth and width of criticism of me in this!




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.