My Brother Evelyn & Other Profiles (10 page)

Morning after morning we assembled the five of us in the Alcove, with our books and pens and papers. There was no privacy and no attempt was made to impose silence. We talked to each other as we wrote, consulting Roget's
Thesaurus
for a synonym, reading out loud a passage from a book that struck us. Holms in particular provided interruptions. He always carried a school exercise book, a number of whose pages were covered with illegible pencil-inscribed sentences. I never saw him write anything in it, and he refused to read us what he had written, but he was never without that notebook. Occasionally he would pick it up and read a page or two, nod approvingly, lay it down and take up a book; after a few pages he would emit a snort of disgust and turn to Kingsmill. ‘Listen to this, old man, isn't it revolting.' It was in the Alcove that I acquired the useful habit of working in public. Some of my pleasantest writing hours have been on the terrace of the Welcome Hotel in Ville-franche, at a round blue-topped table with friends breakfasting all round me.

Kingsmill was then working upon a novel
The Will to Love
. He had been captured a year earlier than I and by the time I arrived it was a third finished. In appearance he was an untidy man; loosely built, stocky rather than fat, with his short hair half brushed; he walked with a lurching gait. On his arrival at the Alcove he would take off his tie and collar and wrap round his neck a thin dark
green velvet scarf. One needed to be physically at ease, he explained, if one's mind was to function freely. But though he was untidy in his personal appearance, he was punctilious in his habits. He would arrange neatly in front of him his pipe and tobacco pouch, his dictionary and
Thesaurus
and write his story in a clear, open script, keeping an exact tally of his words and averaging three hundred words a day. He copied each chapter as he finished it into another notebook, but he made few revisions.

He was equally precise in the arrangement of his day's routine. He drew up a time-table; so many hours for reading, so many for chess, so many for exercise: he allotted himself four pipes a day; the half-hour between 2 and 2.30 was devoted to sensual reverie.

He was then twenty-eight years old, and fourteen months' captivity had not damped his spirits. He had a basically sunny nature. He was warmhearted and affectionate. He had a great booming laugh. It is not easy to convey in writing the quality of conversational humour. You need the look, the gesture, the pitch of voice. Kings-mill's sallies were spiced with bawdy. ‘Matthew Arnold,' he once flashed out, ‘grew sidewhiskers to intimidate his J.T.'

His parody of ‘A Shropshire Lad'—which Housman himself is said to have approved—is an example of his written wit. It begins,

What, still alive at twenty-two

A fine upstanding lad like you

and contains the couplet,

Bacon's not the only thing

That's cured by hanging from a string.

During the early post-war years we saw a lot of one another, Hopkins, Holms, Hayes, Kingsmill and myself.
Hopkins had a place waiting for him with the Oxford University Press. Kingsmill returned to his father's travel agency. Holms prepared—if prepared is the right word—to produce a masterpiece. He had by birth well-placed connections; he was never completely without money; he was strong, and with his vivid red hair and striking appearance, those women to whom he appealed found him irresistible; his fortunes may be said to have risen and fallen in accordance with the financial status of the particular woman of whom he was the consort.

During the early ‘twenties his fortunes ebbed. In January 1919 I saw him for the first time in civilian clothes. He had been to a good tailor and looked very smart. Up to then I had only seen him collarless in ragged khaki. He was full of confidence: he was in love—'a sultry, savage passion after the long Sahara of captivity'.

‘I shall soon be ready,' he informed us, ‘to start on the works of my immaturity.' He always saw himself in terms of his future biographers.

The spring of 1919 was a boom period with war gratuities in the bank. They were soon spent, however, and Holms found himself with negligible resources. Kingsmill was at his side. Kingsmill had no doubt that Holms would produce a series of masterpieces one day. The problem was to find the right conditions for their creation. Kingsmill had through his family firm many facilities for finding his friends jobs. But Holms considered such employment menial. At least that was what he appeared to be telling us but it is possible that Sir Henry had doubts about his suitability as a courier. By the autumn of 1919 Holms was wearing pre-war shabby clothes, but he wore them with an air. He had grown a short pointed beard and looked like a Spanish grandee. People stared at him when he came into a room. His manner became more sombre; he was clearly the prey of
intense and violent emotions. He was how I expected a genius to look before he had found his medium.

In the spring of 1920 he fell in love with a young woman who had once worked in Chapman & Hall. She was slim, very pale, with bright red hair. W. L. Courtney had once when walking through the counting house, held his hands suspended in benediction above her head, murmuring, ‘I warmed both hands before the fire of life.' Her association with the firm was brief and marked by absences.

Holms was in an ecstatic trance. ‘She has the most wonderful hair,' he droned. ‘Even more wonderful than mine'—he had little sense of humour—then he would quote in his sing-song voice:

Why liked me thy yellow hair to see

More than the boundaries of mine honesty?

Why liked me thy youth and thy fairness

And of thy tongue the infinite gentleness?

It was a tempestuous romance. They had very little money and when they were turned out of their flat Holms was in difficulties.

He sought my assistance. I could not follow the story in exact detail, his account was so peppered with quotations, but I gathered that the final provocation had been a revolver discharged at midnight. At length, at long length, the purpose of the visit became plain. I had a small bungalow in Sussex and Holms considered the easiest solution for his problem would be for me to come up to London and stay in my father's house while he and his lady moved out to Ditchling. In the quiet of the country he would start upon his novel. London, that was the cancer eating at his heart. Oh, to escape from London.

I had no doubts about Holms's genius. I held it to be my duty to do anything within my power to smooth
the path of genius, but the bungalow was a small frame construction that I had bought as a unit and had had fitted by a local builder. Its walls were very thin. ‘That revolver,' I objected.

‘But that's all over long ago,' he said.

‘You said it was last Friday.'

He shrugged, despairingly, at my obtuseness. ‘Time, time, old man, eternity within an hour.' And he was off on a quotation-punctuated discourse on the infinite divisibility of time; different parts of your life moved at very different paces, you travelled in so many different trains along parallel tracks, some were non-stop expresses, some dawdled, stopping at every halt—one's friendship with men, for instance, but love, how could you measure love in minutes, who could compute in seconds the agonies, the anxieties of a day-long separation. Yesterday was a century ago. This little moment mercifully given.

It wandered on, a trailing anapaestic anacoluthon. There was no doubt that he was a genius. But common sense counselled me to retain my bungalow.

Holms died in October 1934. I cannot remember when I saw him last. I lost touch with many friends when I began to travel, and Holms was not the man to send Christmas cards or change-of-address notes.

In
Memoirs of a Polyglot
, William Gerhardi described his first meeting with Holms, whom Kingsmill had sent down to him as a herald in the South of France, ‘a gaunt redbearded young man who had never published a book but accepted the description of him as a genius without a wink or smile'. Gerhardi, who was enchanted and impressed by his conversation, and was at that time writing for
T.P.'s Weekly
, suggested that he should introduce Holms to the editor. Holms looked at him
with pity. ‘T.P.'s,' he murmured with infinite sadness, ‘T.P.'s'.

Holms left behind with Gerhardi a battered copy of
The Calendar of Modern Letters
which contained his one short story, but Gerhardi never finished the reading of it as a telegram demanded its return. Holms needed it as a proof that he was a writer in order to obtain a
carte d'identité
.

This must have been around 1927. In the long two-column obituary essay that he contributed to the
Daily Express
, Gerhardi said that Holms spent his last five years in affluence. Brian Lunn, describing this period in his autobiography
Switchback
, wrote, ‘He had settled down in a house near the Parc Montsouris with an American woman slightly younger than himself, dark haired and of a pleasant figure. She had plenty of money but he had a sufficient personal income and a nature which easily accepted affluent surroundings without imposing a sense of obligation upon the person who provided them; and besides he was very fond of her.' The lady was Peggy Guggenheim.

Usually the unproductive man grows bitter, but Holms, I think, never did. He believed in himself. He argued that when a man had a great deal in him, it took a long time to boil. ‘Though he displayed' (I quote Gerhardi), ‘an unnatural assertiveness that was like the exaggerated masculinity of a weak man, the protest of an inveterate passivity.' In his obituary article Gerhardi quoted Lord Beaverbrook's phrase ‘the genius of the untried'. “In every age, Goethe says,” so Gerhardi continued, “there are men who while achieving nothing give an impression of greater genius than the acknowledged masters of the day.”'

Holms's death was in keeping with his life. It was the question of a minor operation on his wrist. He consented
to chloroform though he dreaded it. He went under with remarkable ease, but he never recovered consciousness. ‘He had disdained to come back,' Gerhardi said.

Milton Hayes was the complete opposite of Holms in every way. He was a North Country man; he was nearly forty; he was brisk, assured, purposeful, with his eye on the main chance. He was the first person I had heard analyse success. I had thought of success as a capricious goddess whom you could not court, who gave and withheld her favours according to her changing moods. But Milton Hayes had his theories cut and dried.

‘I wrote “The Green Eye of the Little Yellow God” in five hours,' he said, ‘but I had it all planned out. It isn't poetry and it does not pretend to be, but it does what it sets out to do. It appeals to the imagination from the start: those colours, green and yellow, create an atmosphere. Then India, everyone has his own idea of India. Don't tell the public too much. Strike chords. It's no good describing a house; the reader will fix the scene in some spot he knows himself. All you've got to say is “India” and a man sees something. Then play on his susceptibilities.

‘“His name was Mad Carew.” You've got the whole man there. The public will fill in the picture for you. And then the mystery. Leave enough unsaid to make paterfamilias pat himself on the back, “I've spotted it, he can't fool me. I'm up to that dodge. I know where he went.” No need to explain. Then that final ending where you began. It carries people back. You've got a compact whole. “A broken-hearted woman tends the grave of Mad Carew.” They'll weave a whole story round that woman's life. Every man's a novelist at heart. We all tell ourselves stories. That's what you've got to play on.'

There was nothing particularly original in these
theories, but I was hearing them for the first time. He spoke as an actor rather than as a writer. He worked not at a reader in a study but at an audience in a theatre.

‘People don't go to shows by themselves,' he would say. ‘A thing that sounds silly to a man when he's by himself sounds very different when he's beside a pretty girl. Create a mood where a boy wants to squeeze the hand of the girl he's sitting next and the old married couple simper and think they've not had such a bad time together, after all.'

He talked about Edward Sheldon's play
Romance
which ran for two years during the war with Doris Keane in the lead. ‘The critics thought nothing of it,' he said. ‘But then they went there by themselves. They should have gone with a girl.
Romance
has everything, it's steeped in amber, the hidden sigh, the one passion, the woman who never marries. But it's not a show to go to by yourself.'

After the war Milton Hayes put his theories into practice. He was a great success on the halls with his
Monologues of Monty
. When he eventually retired to the South of France, it was with a large bank balance.

During the early years after the war, Gerard Hopkins and I lunched together regularly at each other's clubs. Though he worked for the Oxford University Press all his life, Hopkins is now primarily known as a translator, in particular of François Mauriac. I have had the good fortune to have been a close friend of C. K. Scott-Moncrieff, and to be a very close friend of Vyvyan Holland, two supremely good translators. The same criticism has been made of both—what a pity they did no creative work.

It is a short-sighted criticism. To recreate a masterpiece in another language, so that it remains, though told
in idiomatic English, a French, Russian or a German novel, needs high creative capacity coupled with a high degree of scholarship. To translate Proust and Mauriac and Morand in such a way that an English reader can get the sense, the particular individuality of the writer, is performing a great service to literature.

That particular criticism was not made of Gerard Hopkins, because he did during the ‘twenties write several novels. They were not sensational in subject or in treatment; a problem was set and it was resolved. There was no straining for effect. They were novels of undertones and understatement. Those who knew the author were inclined to say, ‘It's what you would expect of Gerard Hopkins. He's a man who can't let himself go.' Later when Hopkins began to make a reputation as a translator those same people said, ‘He's found his niche, at last. He would never have been a novelist. He's too held-in.'