Читать книгу The Weald of Youth - Siegfried Sassoon - Страница 3

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Late one afternoon, at the end of May, in the year 1909, I was driving myself home from Tunbridge Wells in our new dog-cart, which was a very comfortable one, two-wheeled, rubber-tyred, nicely varnished, and much the same colour as brown sherry. Under the seat was my cricket-bag. And beside me, below my straw hat, which I had placed over it for safety’s sake, was this week’s number of The Academy. To call it this week’s number was an understatement of its significance; for it contained a sonnet to which my initials were reticently appended, and I was feeling appropriately elated. My sonnet wasn’t an exhilarating one, for it was about the poet Villon when he was rather more down and out than usual. But there it was, for everybody to read; and when I got home I would read it again myself, with due appreciation of its finely-cadenced ending.

In the meantime I just glanced in its direction occasionally while the bay mare trotted placidly along the main road which we both knew so well. The setting sun was behind me. To the left of the high ground along which I was driving, the Weald lay in all its green contentedness. I was feeling fine, and had played quite a decent little innings in the match. But when I came to the cross-roads a mile and a half from home and caught that favourite glimpse of Kentish distance above the foreground apple orchards of King’s Toll farm, the low-hilled blue horizon seemed alluring me toward my heart’s desire, which was that I might some day be a really good poet.

My connection with The Academy dated from about two weeks before. Several London editors having sent back my sonnets with no comment except the usual printed regrets, I had tried The Academy as a last resort. I knew nothing of it except that it was advertised as ‘liveliest of the literary weeklies’ and edited by a poet whose sonnets I had admired for their polished technical perfection. The prompt reply which I received is still in my possession, so I am able to transcribe it from the typewritten original—distinctive for its blurring purple-violet ink. ‘Dear Sir, I have looked through the poems you were kind enough to send us, and I think that some of them might be used in The Academy. If you happen to be in town any morning next week you might perhaps call here and we could talk the matter over. Yours truly ...’—for some time I couldn’t be sure about the signature, which started with a series of what I can only describe as squiggles and concluded with a detached and dashingly problematic d. After studying it intently and sketchily by turns I decided that its illegibility could only mean T. W. H. Crosland. I didn’t like this nearly as much as the rest of the letter. Crosland was remotely notorious to me as a powerful but repellently-pugilistic literary journalist; and although I was quite willing to talk the matter over with him on paper I felt averse to meeting him in the flesh, at his office or elsewhere. So I replied that I seldom came to London—which was true—but would be very glad for him to print some of my poems—which was also true. The immediate result was that he returned my poems with a brusquely impolite letter wherein he stated that as I couldn’t come to see him he could have nothing more to do with them. Perturbed by this, I sent him a telegram expressing willingness to call on him on Tuesday or any other day that suited him.

Tuesday having received his ratification, I arrived at Lincoln’s Inn Fields a little before the hour appointed. I had refrained from telling my mother the object of the expedition to town, merely saying that I had a new pair of riding-boots to try on and that I also intended to go to the Royal Academy. At that time Crosland’s reputation as an author rested mainly on a vigorously provocative volume entitled The Unspeakable Scot. My mother had read it with exasperation. She was fond of Scotland; Robert Burns was one of her best-beloved writers; and Crosland, I had gathered, was ‘unspeakably’ rude to both of them!

Anyhow there I was, sprucely but soberly dressed, climbing the steep stairs to the unexpectedly poky office of the liveliest of the literary weeklies. Climbing also, I hoped, toward poetic reputation; for my batch of sonnets was in my pocket; and had they not already been approved by the sub-editorial eye? I had never before entered a newspaper office, so I not unnaturally regarded it as a turning-point in my career. Having blundered into a darkish ante-room (with one step down that needed knowing) I was informed, by an apathetic young woman who had emerged from beyond a dull-glazed door, that Mr. Crosland would be free in a few minutes. She then returned to her purple-violet typewriter, leaving me free to look at the review copies which were piled and littered about the room. Selecting one, which, I happen to remember, was a novel by Rafael Sabatini, I settled down to an inattentive perusal of cloak-and-dagger romance in the days of the Borgias. For about half-an-hour nothing else happened, except in Sabatini’s novel and on the secretarial typewriter. Not that it mattered to me, for I had nothing to do before lunch except stroll about and restrain myself from spending money in second-hand bookshops. Meanwhile I wondered what Mr. Crosland was up to behind that other dull-glazed door with Editorial on it. Giving somebody beans in a slashing article, I assumed—no sound being audible except the occasional scroop of his chair as he pushed it back while searching his mind for a sufficiently rancorous epithet. Trenchant wasn’t the word for it when Crosland got to work about the Women’s Suffrage Movement, a pretentious minor poet, or the activities of almost all other literary editors, as I had discovered in my recent connings of The Academy. His personality, when I was at last allowed to sample it, proved to be very much what I’d expected. At any rate it seemed to have been so afterwards, when I was thinking him over and wondering how he could possibly have been different from what he was!

He greeted me abruptly and without geniality, half rising from his chair and pointing me to another one with a half-smoked cigar. A noticeable thing about him was that he had his hat on. It was one of those square high-crowned bowler hats which one associates with the judges at Cattle Shows, and while he was talking it was tilted over his nose. Crosland was evidently a man who never wore his hat on the back of his head, possibly because he had long since lost all hope of wearing a halo. He had a dark heavy moustache, short side-whiskers, a strong harsh voice with a Lancashire accent, and a truculent blood-shot eye. Everything about him was truculent, in fact; even his nose looked antagonistic to the universe. Waiting for him to mention my poems, I listened, with startled shyness, to a half-humorous grumble about his difficulties in carrying on the paper. ‘I’m always in a hobble about it,’ he complained, adding that last time someone put up some money the editor planked it on a horse and lost the lot. This caused me to feel both impressed and perplexed by being told the stable secrets so early in our acquaintanceship. Perhaps he’s mistaking me for a millionaire, I thought; but if he was hoping to persuade me to put up some more money he wasn’t going about it with much adroitness! Shortly afterwards, however, he came to the point, praised my poems for their melodious refinement, and asked if I happened to have brought them with me. ‘We’ll give you a guinea each for them,’ he remarked in an off-hand way when I had handed them over. A guinea each didn’t sound very high pay; but there were nine of them, and to have had so many accepted ‘all at one go’ could only be regarded as a veritable triumph.

Apart from my verse contributions in boyhood to Cricket, a Weekly Record of the Game, I had made but one appearance in public print. This was a roundel called ‘Dawn Dimness’ which I had sent to a poetry magazine called The Thrush. That short-lived songster had paid me three and sixpence for it—the first money I had earned by my pen, or by anything else. So I was getting six times as much from The Academy, I thought, while I walked exultantly away from Lincoln’s Inn Fields, never slackening my speed—except when I bumped into people and apologized—till I arrived at the quiet club in St. James’s Street to which I had been elected about a year before. Yes, one could do quite a lot with nine guineas, I decided; and it never occurred to me that I should never be paid at all, which was what did happen (if not being paid can be counted as an event). Nor, apparently, did it occur to me that my reputation would not be greatly increased by the poems being signed with my initials only. I had already adopted this procedure in The Thrush, and Crosland had accepted my similar reservation without comment. This instinct for anonymity has been with me all my life. Success was, of course, my objective; but when it came to the point of them being printed, I somehow preferred my poems to be more successful than myself. It was also a bit embarrassing to think of my poetry being read by the non-literary people I knew. Not that the general run of those with whom I hunted and played cricket were likely to be even casual readers of The Academy. But if someone did happen to come across it, how would he respond to such lines as:

Blind from the goblin-haunted glooms of night,

Passion with poisonous blossoms in her hair;

Then, crowned with rotted chaplets, wan Despair;

And Folly, from base deeds in headlong flight.

How? ... For that was how one of my Academy sonnets started off; and there was reason to believe that I should never hear the last of it if those lines caught the eye of certain members of the Blue Mantles Cricket Club. Already they were inclined to pull my leg, and it would never do for them to discover that I was what they would describe as ‘a budding bard’. I cannot claim that these ideas actually entered my head while I was lunching sedately in St. James’s Street; but they were somewhere in the offing—half-way between my boot-makers and the Royal Academy Exhibition, so to speak, these being the places where I occupied myself during the remainder of the afternoon.

★★★

Early in the spring of the previous year I had put forth my second privately-printed volume. This was a typically juvenile performance, though a shade more sophisticated than the naïve 1906 Poems. Entitled Orpheus in Diloeryum, it was in the form of an unactable one-act play which had never quite made up its mind whether to be satirical or serious. Sometimes I was pouring out my own imitative exuberances; sometimes I was parodying the preciosities of contemporary minor poetry; on one page I parodied Swinburne (crudely, but to me it sounded rather fine, all the same). Orpheus himself, by what I considered an effective dramatic device, made but one brief appearance, at the end, to admonish and stampede a clique of pseudo-artistic persons who had failed to recognize that he was the real thing, though disguised in a shepherd’s cloak. Re-reading it now I don’t altogether dislike it; there is something attractive about the unrevisable immaturities of one’s youth. And Mr. Edmund Gosse—to whom I sent a copy at the suggestion of his friend my uncle Hamo—responded with a letter of lively encouragement. ‘Your delicate and accomplished little masque,’ he called it, adding that it reminded him of the strange entertainments of the early Renaissance, and of Italian humanism generally. What exactly was Italian humanism, I wondered, wishing that I knew him well enough to discuss the matter with him. As yet, however, I scarcely knew him by sight, though Mrs. Gosse had stayed with us several times. I had, in fact, seen him but once, and that had been long ago, when I was only about seventeen and far too shy to ask him anything at all; in addition to which the place where I had gazed upon him had been the Hampstead Town Hall—the occasion being a dance given by Mrs. Gosse and my aunt Mrs. Hamo Thornycroft. Mr. Gosse had looked a little agitated, I thought, as though he wasn’t addicted to giving dances—or even going to them. All the young people were in fancy dress (what did I ‘go as’? I wonder) and his professorial evening clothes and gleaming spectacles suggested that he would be more authentically ‘at home’ were he delivering a lecture on Congreve or someone like that. It wasn’t a bit like the strange entertainments of the early Renaissance, but I thoroughly enjoyed myself. Meanwhile Mr. Gosse ended his letter by saying that he had observed, with great satisfaction, my richness of fancy and command of melodious verse, and hoped that I should make a prolonged study of the art of poetry and advance in it from height to height. I happen to remember that I received the letter while staying at Rye for a week’s golf, and with such commendations in my pocket I could well afford to refrain for awhile from swearing at my wayward iron-play and the soaring wildness of my wooden club shots. My prospects of ever entering for the Amateur Championship were derisory; but Mr. Gosse was a champion among critics, and if he foresaw that I had a literary future, what mattered the loss of two brand new balls at the old dog-leg hole? (One in the dyke and one in the whins.)

More than twelve months after Orpheus, I was yet again employing The Athenaeum Press to print a thin volume. The rough proofs of Sonnets and Verses had already reached me when Crosland started sponsoring my poesy, but the piquancy of proof-reading was rather diluted by four of my pieces appearing in The Academy in five weeks. I began to feel that my initials were almost a public character! Then, after a fortnight’s absence, I was again in the limelight with ‘Passion with poisonous blossoms in her hair’ and her symbolical associates. On that same day arrived the package containing copies of Sonnets and Verses—thirty-five in stiff white cartridge-paper covers and three on hand-made paper bound in black buckram. Resolved to do it in style this time, I had instructed the printer to use some red ink on the title-page. Sonnets was in bold scarlet type, and so was Verses. And (smaller) was in black, as was ‘Printed for Private Circulation’. 1909 was red. Where my name might have been there was only a quotation from Pliny which I had culled from Montaigne’s Essays. ‘There is no such kinship between heaven and us that through our destiny the shining of the stars should be mortal as we are.’ Printed in the original Latin, it supplied, I thought, a nice touch of scholarship, though I was no scholar, and many of the poems more than hinted that I differed from Pliny about heaven. There was also a bill for seven guineas, which was three pounds more than they had charged for Orpheus in Diloeryum. But I was already owed five guineas by The Academy, so I was more or less holding my own on the business side of poetry, though still obliged to economize as the result of having bought—toward the end of last hunting season—a glum iron-grey horse who wouldn’t jump timber, had since become a confirmed crib-biter and wind-sucker, and was now being got rid of for a good deal less than I’d given for him.

In the meantime I was admiring the buckram copies by the yellow light of two candles on the writing desk in my lofty book-room out in the Studio. One was for my mother; one for myself. To whom should I present the third? Now at the beginning of the second part of the book—Verses—I had inserted a prose quotation from C. M. Doughty. Why not send him a hand-made paper copy, I thought, never doubting that he would at any rate read it all through. The phrase ‘read it all through’, took me back to the day, nearly two years before, when I had discovered Doughty’s enormous epic The Dawn in Britain, which, as everyone should know, is three times as long as Paradise Lost, pre-Miltonic in language, and comprehensive of about five centuries of ancient history. Made aware of its existence by a long and respectful review, I acquired the six green volumes and prepared to plough through the lot. This I did, though my attention wandered fairly frequently from the printed page. It was unlike anything I’d experienced in verse; and often, when I was becoming admittedly bored, I was rewarded by passages of enchantingly archaic beauty and poetic freshness. Realizing that this C. M. Doughty was an important writer, I took the liberty of congratulating him on his immense achievement, which—as my letter somewhat gauchely informed him—I had ‘read all through’. I wanted him to know that fact, because it seemed to me that the number of people who had done so must be, for the present, small. At that time I was ignorant of the existence of his Travels in Arabia Deserta, little known then, but since acknowledged as a masterpiece of unique quality. So I took it upon myself to suspect that Doughty needed encouragement from the public, although I had an idea that most authors rather disliked receiving letters from total strangers. I did not anticipate that a reply would be forthcoming. As well might one expect any response to an epistle addressed to Mount Everest. Reply he did, though, and from no farther away than Eastbourne (which, by an odd coincidence, was where the dealer lived who had sold me my crib-biting grey). ‘My dear Sir,’ he began (had anyone ever addressed me as my dear sir before?) and continued as follows, with most charming courtesy ... ‘I am much obliged to you for your kind letter. I hope that the Dawn in B. may be and continue to be of service to the Patria. I remember when I returned from Arabia in ’78, I had the pleasure of meeting some kindly there resident members of the Sassoon Family, at Poona (India). Your neighbour, Major Horrocks, is also a friend of mine. Believe me yours very faithfully, Ch. M. Doughty.’

‘Well I’m blowed! Fancy Doughty knowing old Major Horrocks!’ I exclaimed to myself, dismissing the ’78 Poona-resident members of the family as hopelessly beyond my latter day cognizance. And a few weeks afterwards, happening to meet the Major in the road on my way home from a bad day with the West Kent hounds, I asked him if he remembered knowing an old chap called Doughty.

‘Know him?’ he replied. ‘Of course I do! Lived in Tunbridge Wells till a few years ago and came here quite often. Used to buy his potatoes from me too. Great traveller, Doughty—knows the Near East as well as the palm of his hand!’

Jogging on up the hill, I marvelled at the smallness of a world wherein the author of the Dawn in B. had been putting the finishing touches to it within seven miles of our house and driving over to have luncheon with the Major at Mascalls. But when I had seen the frontispiece photograph of him in the abridged edition of Arabia Deserta (published about two months afterwards) I decided that Doughty was just the sort of delightful bearded old buffer one would expect to meet at Mascalls—the Major being a man who had somehow collected an admirable assortment of fine-flavoured cronies, aristocratic, unconventional, and connoisseurish. Over and above all that, the wonderful opening paragraph of the Travels took me by the arm and made me follow the narrator wherever he went on his immortal pilgrimage. ‘A new voice hailed me of an old friend’ ... Those are his first words; and thuswise, in a sense, it happened with me. The epic poem had been a voice which sometimes sent my mind to sleep. To the Arabian traveller I listened with close attentiveness, accepting from the outset those quaint quixotries of style which are essential to his idiom. Here and there I found sentences of such memorable loveliness that I transcribed them in my manuscript book of favourite poems; and it was one of these that I had taken as the motto for my Verses. ‘In the first evening hour there is some merrymake of drum-beating and soft fluting, and Arcadian sweetness of the Persians singing in the tents about us; in others they chant together some piece of their devotion.’ The connexion between these words and my Verses will have been, I take it, that my supposed Persian ancestry qualified me to claim that I was singing in my tent, and that some of my pieces were devotional. (I may even have remembered my tent on the lawn during childhood recovery from an illness, when I sniffed the phial which had formerly contained attar of roses.)

Meanwhile I was still out in the Studio making up my mind to send Doughty a black buckram copy. This I proceeded to do, enclosing a short letter of homage to his Arabia and drawing attention to the quotation. Assuming that he perused this extract, Doughty must also have at any rate observed the presence of the little poem (in prelusive italics) on the opposite page, and for that reason I am reproducing it here.

What shall the minstrel sing,

Touching his lute by the way,

Ye who are sad for the spring

Or for summer arrayed like a rose,

When evening comes to your day

And autumn draws to a close?

To them that are weary and gray,

Whose delight like life taketh wing,

Touching his lute by the way,

What shall the minstrel sing?

Worse lyrics have probably been written at two-and-twenty. But the question—what exactly should I sing?—was one which I had not so far asked myself with any awareness of the circumstance that, like many minstrels of my age, I had nothing much to sing about. All the same, I choose to perceive in the pensive ditty some tenuous prediction of my present occupation as a stereoscopic memoirizer; because it is indeed for ‘them that are weary and gray’ that I am wearing out my eyes and elbows over these unlurid and localized reminiscences.

After which pardonable parenthesis I resume my industry at the stereoscope. Within a week I received a brief but urbane acknowledgement from Doughty (whom I was unable to think of as Mr.). From Kirkby Lonsdale he wrote that my book had reached him ‘in this upland of fells and burns’, and that he ‘would now read it with interest and pleasure’. Whether he did so will never be known. Nor did he surmise that the word ‘burns’ had since acquired an associative significance in connexion with my book. For I must explain that his copy had narrowly escaped becoming unique! Was there a conflagration in the Studio? you speculate. Yes; there was; but it was a deliberately contrived one. After giving away one ‘ordinary copy’ I had destroyed all the others with the exception of the ‘black buckrams’, which I couldn’t quite bring myself to put on the fire.

I cannot clearly recall the exact cause of this impulsive holocaust. Examining my work in perhaps too critical a mood, I had found a good many lines which obtrusively demanded revision, and several of the short poems had for the first time revealed their full feebleness. I had been polishing them for several months; but why, O why hadn’t I waited a few months more?—I asked of the Studio skylight. For the impeccability of print and paper made my inadequacies only too apparent. ‘Old days that are filled with the fragrance of dream’ ... How ever had I overlooked the banality of a line like that? I began to suspect that even the Academy-accepted sonnets weren’t as Parnassian as I had hitherto believed them to be.

I had already conferred a copy on our old friend Helen Wirgman, who happened to be paying us one of her long summer visits. ‘Wirgie’, who hasn’t appeared in these pages since some way back in ‘The Old Century’—it will be remembered that we took temporary leave of her just as she had unfolded her parasol on the morning of Diamond Jubilee Day—Wirgie, I repeat, (the name being dear to my memory) uttered nothing, when next I met her, to suggest that my latest poems had disappointed her; but she did somehow imply, by her manner of commenting on them, that I should beyond all doubt do better next time. Anyhow I got myself into a tantrum about them, and without allowing my mother a glimpse of the volume went back to the Studio, lit a blazing fire—though the evening was warm and we had been sitting in the garden after dinner—and with self-martyring satisfaction fed the flames until my thirty-four copies, torn to hapless halves, were no more than a shuffle of smouldering ashes. When I confessed to Wirgie what I had done, she gave me one of her slow sad looks and remarked that I sometimes reminded her vividly of my Aunt Lula. And I remembered how Aunt Lula had, in that very Studio, long years ago, smashed her newly-finished bust with a hammer!

My own copy of the book survives as a sad reminder of seven guineas thrown away. What I did with the third one I am unable to remember. But I can assure the hypothetical owner that only its black buckram binding saved it!