Ways of Escape, Page 2

  The main characters in a novel must necessarily have some kinship to the author, they come out of his body as a child comes from the womb, then the umbilical cord is cut, and they grow into independence. The more the author knows of his own character the more he can distance himself from his invented characters and the more room they have to grow in. With these early novels the cord has not been cut, and the author at twenty-six was as unreal to himself, in spite of psychoanalysis at sixteen, as Oliver Chant, the hero of The Name of Action, is to the reader. Chant is only a daydream in the mind of a young romantic author, for it takes years of brooding and of guilt, of self-criticism and of self-justification, to clear from the eyes the haze of hopes and dreams and false ambitions. I was trying to write my first political novel, knowing nothing of politics. I hope I did better many years later with The Quiet American, but how little I had learned of life and politics during three years in the sub-editors’ room of The Times.

  Even the setting of The Name of Action is fantasy. I imagined a dictator established in the city of Trier which I had visited soon after the French occupying force had abandoned the idea of forming an independent Palatinate state. The idealistic and wealthy Oliver Chant, contacted by exiles in London (an echo of my unpublished novel The Episode), goes to Trier to meet the leader of the opposition, a Jewish poet. He meets the dictator’s wife in quite incredible circumstances and falls in love with her. He is invited improbably to the palace where he begins to develop a romantic admiration for the dictator. He sleeps with the dictator’s wife who takes him out of boredom and lust and betrays the fact that her husband is impotent. When she refuses to leave her husband Chant tells the Jewish poet of the dictator’s impotence. Guns, bought with Chant’s money, are smuggled in barges from Coblenz, riots take place, the poet writes satirical songs about the dictator which are sung in the street. The book ends with Chant leaving Trier by train in charge of the defeated, wounded and unconscious dictator. What happened to the wife? It is only a matter of months since I drove myself to reread The Name of Action and I’ve already forgotten her fate, so little does she live or matter.

  I can only wonder why the book was accepted for publication – I even received a congratulatory telegram from my publisher, Charles Evans of Heinemann, after he had read the typescript. Perhaps he was as innocent and romantic as his author. He once told me he had only once been sexually moved by a novel and that was by Mademoiselle de Maupin.

  Here are examples of my style in those days and my terrible misuse of simile and metaphor. Even the good can corrupt and perhaps I had been corrupted by much reading of the metaphysical poets. ‘A revolver drooped like a parched flower to the pavement.’ (I like to reverse this simile – ‘A parched flower drooped like a revolver to the pavement.’) ‘The sound of far voices sprinkled over him like the seeds of a poppy bringing rest.’ And here’s a piece of pomposity which I had learned from Conrad at his worst: ‘A clock relinquished its load of hours.’

  In a book of 344 pages I can find only one redeeming scene – twelve pages of moderate suspense when the barge with its load of smuggled guns passes through the customs – and one redeeming character – the American arms-dealer who appears for eight pages and might well have earned a place in The Quiet American a quarter of a century later.

  Rumour at Nightfall, the third published novel, began better than its predecessor and ended even more disastrously. I knew next to nothing of Spain where the story takes place (at sixteen I had spent one day between Vigo and Coruña), and all I knew of the Carlist war was drawn from Carlyle’s Life of John Sterling. Again only one scene bears rereading. It is in the first chapter when an ageing tired colonel takes the place of a priest and extracts a confession from one of his men mortally wounded in an ambush – a scene which perhaps foreshadows the confessions of the American gangster in The Power and the Glory. As in The Quiet American the principal character Chase was a newspaper correspondent but unlike Fowler of that novel a most unrealistic one.

  Rumour at Nightfall sold only twelve hundred copies (The Man Within had sold eight thousand). An unfavourable criticism by Frank Swinnerton opened my eyes to the defects of what I had believed to be true art, and so reality, blessed reality, broke through in the form of financial anxiety, the approaching birth of a child and, for I had left the paper after the success of The Man Within, the refusal of The Times to have a deserter back.

  What do I find when I painfully reread the novel today? The author is too much concerned with style and the style is bad and derivative. A few years later I would be attacking Charles Morgan, like a reformed rake, for the sin I had abandoned. All is vague, shadowy, out of focus – there are no clear images, but the same extravagant similes and metaphors as in The Name of Action. ‘The small drift of papers lay like winter between them, across the blown petals of the carpet.’ There are far too many adjectives and too much explanation of motive, no trust in the reader’s understanding, and overlong description.

  The dialogue is ambiguous and dialogue in a novel as in a play should be a form of action, with the quickness of action. Here the dialogue has to be explained to the reader. I find ‘he thought’ ten times in ten pages. I am reminded of the young Stevenson teaching himself style by imitation – I was imitating badly a technique, the technique of ‘the point of view’.

  Perhaps all writers are superstitious. The hero of The Name of Action was called Chant, the two protagonists of Rumour at Nightfall were Chase and Crane. The books were failures and failure seemed to cling around the letter C. I abandoned C, I thought for ever, and a sense of doom descended on me when I named the chief character in The Human Factor Castle. I tried my best to give him another name, but there is a magic quality in names – to change the name is to change the character. Castle it had to be, but I went ahead with a sense of almost certain failure.

  3

  I had now published three novels of which the first had some success and the other two had deservedly failed, and I felt the desolate isolation of defeat, like a casualty who has been left behind and forgotten. The sudden arrival in 1931 down a muddy Gloucestershire lane of a Norwegian poet whom I didn’t know from Adam seemed unaccountable, dreamlike and oddly encouraging. Like the appearance of three crows on a gate, Nordahl Grieg was an omen or a myth, and he remained a myth. Even his death was to prove legendary, so that none will be able to say with any certainty, ‘In this place he died.’ He was shot down in an air raid over Berlin in 1943.

  I can remember with distinctness only three meetings. Each of our meetings was separated by a space of years from the next, yet I would not have hesitated to claim friendship with him – even a degree of intimacy. I was unable to read his books – for only one had been translated into English (in any case his poetry would have been untranslatable) – and so he struck me less as a fellow author with whom I must talk shop than as a friend I had grown up with, to whom I could speak and with whom I could argue about anything in the world.

  I can’t remember what we talked about that first time, when he came ‘to look me up’, as he put it as sole explanation, in the cottage my wife Vivien and I had rented in the village of Chipping Campden, but I immediately felt caught up into his intimacy which seemed as impersonal – in the sense that I did not have to deserve it or work for it – as sunlight. The dreamlike atmosphere of his friendship remained: it was a matter of messages, warm and friendly and encouraging and critical, mostly in other people’s letters. The only time I visited Norway he was away living in Leningrad, but the messages were there awaiting me. Nordahl Grieg, like a monarch, never lacked messengers.

  I sometimes wonder whether he didn’t also leave spells in far places which drew me there long afterwards. Why did I take a solitary holiday in Estonia in the thirties? Was it because I was following in his footsteps? And Moscow in the fifties? It was no longer any use then going to Room 313 in the Hotel Novo Moscowskaja, the address he had given me in case ‘you one day suddenly find yourself in Moscow’, his ghost had moved a l
ong way on.

  I have a letter which he wrote to me from Estonia with the sole address ‘Poste Restante’ and the year missing from the date as it always was, as though only the day of the month was important and the mere years could be left to look after themselves. ‘I assure you that you before or later must come to Estonia, and please come now. It is a charming country, absolutely unspoilt, and the cheapest in the world. I am a very poor author, but here I can afford absolutely everything – a strange and marvellous feeling. If the weather is good, do let us hire a sailing boat and go for a week among the islands. The population there has scarcely seen a white man before, and for a few pieces of chocolate we could certainly buy what native girls we wanted to. Do come.’

  But it was a long time before I could afford the fare, and by then Nordahl had entered his Russian period. Strange to think that it was the Russia of Stalin. Which of us now, in the days of Brezhnev, can stay for months in Moscow and borrow the flat of a poet? ‘I have just returned to Moscow from the country … What fun to meet you here! I am most likely to stay here the whole of May; but there is a vague possibility of me going to Tiflis and Caucasus (in that case perhaps you will come with me?)’ And in another letter: ‘I have borrowed the flat of Boris Pilnyak who had written Volga falls out in the Caspian Sea. (Of course, all Russian writers call their books after some river, they are even worse than you English who always find some very exclusive quotation as a title), and here I am working in the strange bourgeois atmosphere (of blue lilacs and wooden houses) that is the Moscow summer … I am sure you will like to live in Moscow, there is such an enormous mass of people – a vast multitude of races, hopes and disappointments. And your hatred to nature can easily be satisfied here, here is no nature for many hundred miles, only something flat and stupid under an idiotical sky. So come here for some months or more.’ Any plan seemed possible for a few hours after I had read one of Nordahl’s letters.

  And then, with the shadows falling over Europe and only a few years left him before the raid over Berlin, back he went to Norway: ‘I have just started a new, very left periodical to fight the rising wave of fascism and reaction in Norway. I have had the insolence to advertise you among my future contributors. Are you angry? If you forgive me for old days’ sake, please then send me an article, something hair-risingly good. … My Moscow days are over. I have written a play – a violent attack on our ‘neutrality’ during the last war, which has caused very much bitterness. I am living in a ski-hut near Oslo in a forest. If you and your wife should like to come over, there will always be a room for you.’

  How I wish I had borrowed, begged or stolen the necessary funds and replied to at least one of those messages – ‘I arrive on Saturday.’

  I suppose we may have met between 1931 and 1940, but I am not sure. Suddenly, instead of a message in a letter, he was a voice on the telephone. I was at the Ministry of Information by that time, in a silly useless job, the German invasion of Norway had begun, and here he was, just arrived from Narvik and war. His voice pulled me out of the great dead Bloomsbury building into his bedroom at the Charing Cross Hotel which was full of his countrymen, sitting about on the bed, the dressing-table, the floor, propped against the mantelpiece, discussing, planning, hoping while the telephone rang, with Narvik and disaster just behind them and an immense confidence and the future all round them (a confidence you couldn’t have found except in official handouts in the building I had left). And even in that setting I felt the old intimacy like sunlight; while everyone was talking plans, propaganda, future campaigns, Nordahl, making a private corner between bolster and bedpost, was talking of anything that seemed at the moment to matter – Marxism or the value of history or the Spanish war and Hemingway’s new book, neglecting even the extraordinary adventure from which he had just emerged with the gold of the Bank of Norway. That I had to piece together while his cabinet in exile chattered around him.

  Nordahl, waking one morning in Oslo to gunfire, had gone to his window and seen the German warships entering the fjord. He dressed and without so much as taking a spare pair of socks took to the mountains. There he encountered a military patrol and found himself recruited into the army without uniform or weapon as a private soldier. The patrol had with them in sacks the gold from the Bank of Norway and Nordahl was appointed to command a party to take it to Narvik, about five hundred miles by sea after a long journey through the mountains. I never heard the details of that journey – there were always too many other things for Nordahl to talk about – only the comedy of the ending.

  He arrived safely at Narvik, a private soldier dressed as a fisherman, with his sacks of gold, and reported to a spick-and-span naval officer who turned out to be our mutual friend, the translator of The Man Within, Nils Lie. Nordahl was told to accompany the gold on an English destroyer to our shores, where the gold had to be delivered to the Bank of England. He argued that he wanted to stay in Norway to fight. Anyway what would the English think if they sent all that gold – Maria Theresa thalers and all – in the care of a private soldier? It wasn’t suitable.

  So they gave him some kind of commission – I forget what – and he left for England. From Harwich I think it was he took a train, and there his romantic nature took over and he pictured the scene at the Bank of England and his greeting by the Governor, but his arrival was not like that at all. Only one plainclothes detective was waiting for him on the platform – of which station? – and they couldn’t drive to the Bank of England without the clerk who had been sent to meet him. But the clerk had gone to find the station master because the ticket collector wouldn’t let him past the barrier without a platform ticket and the clerk of the Bank of England absolutely refused to lower his dignity by buying one. So the detective and the poet waited there interminably with all the sacks of Norwegian gold until Nordahl got bored and left the detective alone with the gold and took a taxi to the Charing Cross Hotel.

  After our meeting in the hotel Nordahl disappeared again from my view – I suppose he was busy getting into the RAF and afterwards I was away for fifteen months on a hopeless mission in West Africa, trying to get information out of the Vichy colonies. A few months before his death we met once more and spent a long evening with other Norwegian friends, an evening of which, because I never imagined it could be the last, I remember only talk and talk, then an air-raid siren and some gunfire, and talk again. There were always arguments where Nordahl was and never a trace of anger. He was the only man I have ever met with whom it was possible to disagree profoundly both on religion and politics and yet feel all the time the sense of goodwill and an open mind. He not only had goodwill himself, but he admitted goodwill in his opponent – he more than admitted it, he assumed it. In fact he had charity – of greater value than the gold of the National Bank, and to me he certainly brought a measure of hope in 1931, carrying it like a glass of akvavit down the muddy lane in Chipping Campden.

  4

  That year, 1931, for the first and last time in my life I deliberately set out to write a book to please, one which with luck might be made into a film. The devil looks after his own and in Stamboul Train I succeeded in both aims, though the film rights seemed at the time an unlikely dream, for before I had completed the book, Marlene Dietrich had appeared in Shanghai Express, the English had made Rome Express, and even the Russians had produced their railway film, Turksib. The film manufactured from my book by Twentieth Century-Fox came last and was far and away the worst, though not so bad as a later television production by the BBC.

  I suppose the popular success of the film Grand Hotel gave me the idea of how to set about winning the jackpot, but as I had spent only twenty-four hours in Constantinople some years before, in the course of an Hellenic cruise, I had taken on a rather heavy assignment. I couldn’t afford to leave the cottage in the Cotswolds and take a train to Istanbul. The best I could do was to buy a record of Honegger’s Pacific 231 which I hoped, when I played it daily, would take me far enough away from my thatched cottage, a Pekinese
dog who suffered from hysteria, some barren apple trees, the muddy lane and a row of Cos lettuces.

  Reluctantly, I also bought a third-class ticket as far as the German frontier. Beyond it, in those happy pre-Hitlerian days, a writer could obtain a free pass on the State Railways, so that I could travel on as far as Cologne which I knew already, having found myself there in 1923 in the ambiguous circumstances I have described in my account of my early years, A Sort of Life. The Honegger record helped me more than the trip from Calais to Cologne, and another record less obviously relevant played its part too – Delius’s Walk to the Paradise Garden.

  The reader will probably notice more details on this first stretch of the line than I had the confidence to include later, for as I sat at my third-class window I made notes all through the daylight hours, and you may be sure the allotments outside Bruges were just where I placed them in April 1931. Darkness had fallen on the Orient Express before Liège was reached, and it would be wrong for the reader to have any confidence in my report when he reaches the Yugoslav frontier at Subotica. (A few years ago when I made the whole journey to Istanbul it was night when I arrived at Subotica and I was too sleepy to check the details of my almost forgotten narrative.)

  When the news came to me that the English Book Society had chosen Stamboul Train, I thought I was temporarily saved, and yet fate had still a flick of the tail in store, a threatened libel action from J.B. Priestley. Priestley, whom I had never met, had taken the character of Savory, in Stamboul Train, as a portrait of himself – I had described Savory as a popular novelist in the manner of Dickens, and Priestley had recently published to enormous acclaim his novel The Good Companions, which led some reviewers to compare him with Dickens.