My Brother Evelyn & Other Profiles (6 page)

It was an awkward time for Richards's authors. He had never been a prompt settler of his royalty accounts and the delays now became exceedingly inconvenient to a race that lives upon a shoestring. I learnt from another of his authors that he preferred to settle his accounts with acceptances at six months. That seemed in keeping with his optimistic, improvident temperament, and I accepted the solution. ‘Grant,' I would say, ‘it looks as though my next royalty account which is due in November will total about eighty pounds. I'm short of money. Do you think you could let me have a bill at six months that I can discount?' He would stand against the light, benign and bland. He would nod his head. Yes, he thought he could manage that. He was generous, always anxious to help a friend. He might not be in a position to cash a cheque for twenty pounds but he would always sign a bill for fifty. And he looked so sleek, so prosperous; his manner was so assured, so reassuring that it was impossible not to believe that the situation was sound at base. For a year, two years, it went on like that. Then the day came when a bill was not honoured.

It was a major shock to me. I was young and selfish, ambitious and self-absorbed. I thought of my own temporary embarrassment, not of the permanent predicament in which the man who had launched and befriended me now found himself. A sheltering presence had dissolved. I shivered. ‘You now go out into the wind,' I told myself. During those months I was one of many, very many.

Richards was then in his middle fifties. It was too late to make a third come-back.

Author Hunting
seemed to me in 1960 a better book than it had in 1934. It was also a different book. It had had on its first appearance a melancholy quality. Everyone knew about his difficulties, of his attempt to come back with insufficient backing and the public's faith in him diminished. It was hard not to think, reading it, ‘Poor Grant, why couldn't he have pulled it off?' He was not, let it be understood, in a desperate position. He returned to authorship. He was far from being negligible as a novelist and a reprint company might well do worse than reissue
Bittersweet. The Coast of Pleasure
, about the Riviera, is far more than a guide-book. Max Beerbohm in his preface to
Memoirs of a Misspent Youth
, wrote of him as an author who ‘knows just what he wants to say and can say it—always lightly, firmly, vividly, amusingly, endearingly'.

I often saw Grant during the 1930s. His wife had a flat in Monte Carlo. He never forfeited her devotion. His zest for life was unabated. He still added to the enjoyment of any party he attended. He was still, moreover, operating as a publisher, in a restricted way. I remember a party in 1930 which Betty Askwith and Theodora Benson gave to celebrate their
Lobster Quadrille
of which Richards was the publisher, and how we lingered long into the morning at Cadogan Gardens with Grant not seeming by any means the eldest. But the big days were over. A curtain fell in 1927.

Reading
Author Hunting
in 1934 one felt one was following the story of a failure. But in 1960, ten years after Grant's own death, I felt that I was reading the story of a success. Events have fallen into focus. We can see the literary history of an era in perspective. We can see how much Grant achieved.

The small magazines and the small publishing houses—how would authorship fare without them? The big firms—the Heinemanns, the Cassells, the Macmillans—are on the look-out for budding talent. But they cannot devote to apprentice work the attention which the young writer needs. A writer is self-taught. He teaches himself by writing. He needs to see himself in print. Until he does, he cannot judge himself, cannot assess himself. He needs to talk his work over with his contemporaries. The young must have something in print to show each other. That is how they become writers. And how can they do that without the small magazines, without the small publishers? Literature stands in the debt of those who give the young that opportunity. They do not, the men who fulfil that function, finish rich, with titles and large houses in the country. But they have their reward, in the history of their country's literature.

We make and pass and our place knows us no more. Nothing is more dead, nine times in ten, than the last decade's best-seller. But there are those who do not ‘all glut the devouring grave'. There are those who set their names as publishers on books which are part of our eternal heritage; men who enrich the world by the work they do in it. Who can think of the eighteen-nineties without remembering Elkin Mathews, John Lane and Leonard Smithers? Who could write of the years 1910 to 1925 without paying tribute to Martin Secker? And the name Grant Richards will be always honoured on account of the authors that he sponsored.

Nocturne

I told in my autobiography of the lucky concatenation of circumstances that made a best-seller of
The Loom of Youth
. The timing was lucky and 1917 was a lean year for novels. Nineteen-sixteen had been a very good year, and 1918 was to be, but when I read after Christmas, in my dug-out, north of Arras, the various estimates of the year's books, I recognized how little competition I had had to face.

The year's best-seller was H. G. Wells's
Mr Britling Sees It Through which
had been published in the preceding autumn; Stephen McKenna's
Sonia
came second and that too had been published in 1916. Arnold Bennett had not published a novel, one of the few years in which he had not; Galsworthy had published an astonishingly poor book. J. C. Squire, reviewing it in
Land and Water
under the heading ‘Galsworthy gives them Gyp', started with a quotation, then went on: ‘you recognise the style? It is the Family Herald, it is Mrs Barclay, no, you are wrong. It is Mr John Galsworthy in his novel which for some reason that is beyond me, he calls “Beyond”.' Conrad was silent. None of the younger novelists, Hugh Walpole, Compton Mackenzie, Gilbert Cannan, D. H. Lawrence, W. L. George, was represented. Gilbert Frankau, who up to then had been known as a writer of light Kipling-esque verses, began his career as a novelist with
The Woman of the Horizon;
it sold fairly well, but was not accorded much critical attention. Norman Douglas's
South Wind
had, indeed, come out during the spring,
but that kind of book does not create an immediate stir, in war-time. I did not myself order a copy until January. It was a lean, lean year and as I read the various critics' assessments of the year's output, I could myself recall only one novel that had struck me as important; a book that had been highly praised but had had little public success—Frank Swinnerton's
Nocturne
.

Today that book is an established classic. It holds a unique position. It stands in a field of its own. It is under fifty thousand words long; which is an admirable length by artistic standards; since such a book can be read in a single evening and the author can impose and maintain his hold upon the reader through its entire course, but it is a bad length commercially. It was, then, too long for a magazine, and circulating libraries do not like it; subscribers need a book long enough to last them over a week-end. A novelist faced with a subject suitable to such a length preferred to compress it into a long short story or enlarge it into a 75,000-word novel.
Nocturne
was, so it seemed to me, an exceptional example of literary integrity. Swinnerton had felt that this particular story could be told only in this way, and had eschewed the possibility of greater emoluments in the resolve to make his book as good as possible.

On my return to England, when I spoke of this to Gilbert Cannan, I was greeted with a smile.

‘There was a sound commercial reason for
Nocturne
,' I was informed. ‘Swinnerton had one more novel to deliver under an old contract with Martin Secker. He had been offered a very much better contract by Methuen; he wanted his next major novel to be published by them, so he decided to polish off his Secker contract with a short novel.'

That story had always seemed to be an excellent example of the fortuitous nature of creation. Great books
often are produced by a fluke. I had meant to quote
Nocturne
as an example. Before I did, however, I took the precaution of writing to Frank Swinnerton to ask if the story was true. In return I received the following letter, which he has been kind enough to allow me to quote.

What a good job I'm still alive to tell you the true story of
Nocturne!
What you were told was, as they say in
Alice in Wonderland
, ‘all wrong from beginning to end'. All the same, I think the true story is just as illuminating of the casualness of events. What happened was this. In 1911 or so Algernon Methuen, hearing that Arnold Bennett thought well of my prentice work, made a contract for two books with an option on a third. The second of these books,
On the Staircase
, was published in the Spring of 1914 and pleased old Methuen (whose wife apparently read it to him in bed) so much that he took up his option on the third book and made a contract for 3 more books. I was thus bound to him, when the 1914 War broke out, for no fewer than 4 books.

Methuen, as you remember, thought books would be absolutely ruined; so he wrote to his famous authors, Wells, Bennett, &c, offering
advances, while to me he suggested that a suspension of authorship for the duration would be desirable. This must have been in 1915; and I had written or was writing a novel called
The Chaste Wife
. Not to have published it would have been a financial embarrassment, as I had relied on advances of £75 apiece from England and the U.S. At this point Secker, who had published my much decried book on Stevenson in 1914, said ‘I'll publish it'. So he did, by arrangement with Methuen, who allowed this one book to be interposed without regarding it as a breach of their contract.

Then, one day, Secker and I were lunching with Nigel de Grey, who remarked incidentally ‘I wonder nobody has ever written a novel about the events of a single evening'. We couldn't remember that anybody had done this: & I said it wouldn't be easy to do it. As Seeker and I walked away after lunch, he said (I think with a memory of Oliver Onions's
In Accordance with the Evidence
) ‘I wish you'd write me a novel
under
the Methuen contract length—say fifty thousand words'. I said ‘I will. I'll write one about the events of a single evening.'

I can't remember how soon I began the book; but it was being set up from my MS. while I was still writing it; and I think Seeker brought me the first galleys the day after I had delivered the last chapter. He said ‘It begins well.' When he brought the second batch of galleys he said ‘I think
it's very good.' And when he brought the end he said ‘I think it's a masterpiece.'

I have never thought much of it myself; but of course I'm much obliged to it. I'm also much obliged to you for your praise of it. Thank you. I am delighted that it should still please.

Yes, I'm very well, thank you. Rather overworked at the moment, as Penguins are bringing out half a dozen Arnold Bennetts next year (including the O.W.T.) and I have been writing introductions to the books and making a frightful butchery of the Journal to make a single volume. I have mentioned that the publishers were rather horrified by the O.W.T.'s [
Old Wives' Tale
] length; but the Journal makes it clear that your Father soon realised its virtue. I think one always has to remember that the publisher sees a book as typescript, with no aura of prestige; and in 1908 Bennett, though recognised as a clever fellow, had never had any sale. In fact he had just left Chatto & Windus for Chapman & Hall because he was not (I think I am right in saying) earning the small advances Chatto' gave him.

With all good wishes

Yours sincerely

(signed) Frank Swinnerton

A postscript about
Nocturne
. I offered our then maid the MS. for fire-lighting. She said the paper was too stiff. I told Secker, who said ‘Oh, give it to me!' I did so; he had it bound, and kept it. When he was terribly hard up he sold it to Hugh Walpole, along with the MS. of ‘Sinister Street' and perhaps others. Walpole gave his collection of MSS., I believe, to King's School, Canterbury. Secker could tell you about this. He could also confirm what I have said about the writing of
Nocturne
. The book sold 1500 copies; was then out of print for a year owing to Secker's absence from the office; and was later reprinted several times. Then it was put into ‘The World's Classics'. Then Hutchinsons, by their marvellous mass salesmanship, sold enormous numbers at 6
d
or 1/6
d
. The result of this is that the book has lost all computation. Rather an amusing history.

In the New Year Honours list appeared the names of several men of letters. Anthony Hope was honoured with a knighthood, so was John Galsworthy. Next day it was announced that Galsworthy had declined the honour but that his letter had not reached the appropriate authorities in time. The
New Statesman
on the following Saturday
devoted its entire ‘Books in General' page to the subject. It opened with the following three paragraphs: