BOOKS

Man of Letters

BY ANGUS

WILSON

T KNEW Sir Edward Marsh only at the very end jof his life. He was by thiS time an impoverished, rather lonely old man whose memory was fail- ing. Yet it was not at all difficult to see the man he had been, for he was one of the old, who, believing only in this life, treated each new moment with all the vitality and interest at his command; and this interest was always so com- plete and genuine that there could be no patronage of him as 'plucky' or `gallant'—although he undoubtedly was both—far less as 'clinging to life.' He wanted always to live in the present and he gave his reminiscences of Lawrence or Gaudier-Brzeska, for which I was very eager, and more still his brilliant set-piece imitations of Henry James as a sort of social concession to the younger generation's rather tedious fascination with the past. Amid the many faces of :esthete- don, 'Establishment' man of affairs, old-fashioned and Pedantic 'man of letters,' basker in youth's vitality, clubman and plain gossip that his quickly revolving conversation preSented to me, I was always conscious of a set of moral values that defied me to classify him as any of these easy types or even as all of them put together. The types he offered were so exactly those that I delight to draw with what critics seem to call alternately and at random 'compassion' or 'cruelty,' but I should never have liked to portray Eddie Marsh as such a 'character,' not because he was too complex, but perhaps because he was too innocent. It was not his extreme courtesy and consideration that defied me; these are the requisites of many Establishment men. It was not the extreme certainty of his views upon literature or painting—a' certainty •so striking in one whose views on most matters seemed all too adapted to please; I am not admiring of stiffly held views, however sincere, where I do not agree with them and I seldom agreed with his. It was neither his charm nor his wit, which were both considerable. It was, I think, at bottom his ex- treme selflessness, so unexpected in a man whose exterior completely suggested a cultivated Major Pendennis.

It comes out most clearly in the two sides of Mr. Hassall's life of him"—the public ser- vant and the patron of the arts. The high-up

civil servant who is also an homme du monde, a than of fashion, is rare but by no means un-

paralleled in English life. He is bound to be a snob—Marsh, I suppose, was this, but not in the unpleasing way that marked, for example, Gosse,

----and he is likely to be a man bound by every

finger and toe to the Establishment. Marsh, it is true, found his place in that best of the English Establishments, the Asquithian Whig one that came to an end in 1916; yet I do not think it was pure chance, though so much in the life of so quiescent a man seems like chance, that he should have found a hero and almost a life ser- vice in the rogue elephant of the Establishment herd, Winston Churchill. Marsh's selflessness made him in personal relationships an innocent

* EDWARD MARSH. By Christopher Hassall. (Long- mans, 42s.) romantic, .a characteristic deeply inimical to Establishment worship. As a patron of the arts, too, it is not now his devotion to Brooke and all that it led to in slim volumes of Georgian poetry, nor his atttaction to Duncan Grant's 'Parrot Tulips' and all that it led to in the buying of the 'modern' English school, that are so striking in his life, fascinating though they are as records in the history of his taste. What endures most is simply the spectacle of a man of very moderate means and expensive tastes devoting the greater part of his small private income to the financial assistance of hard-up poets and painters. He seems so much to have taken this extraordinary generosity for granted as the necessary conduct of a cultivated man that it makes him a very exceptional cultivated man indeed.

It ,was this sense of Eddie Marsh's rarity, I think, that made him, on the only occasion that I saw him in distress, seem to me a tragic rather than a pathetic old man. He was to come to visit me in Dolphin Square and was half an hour or more overdtie when one of my thousand neighbours—a stranger to me—rang to' say that an old man, a rather strange one, had been seek- ing me at her flat many blocks away. I imme- diately went in search of him and found him, like many another visitor to that labyrinth, lost and wandering. But his lostness had a peculiarly sad quality. On that squally autumn day by the riverside, his hair, his monocle, everything about him, seemed to be at the mercy of the wind; he held his hat and his stick in one hand and with them waved signals of distress. He seemed a very King Lear-like figure. He was distressed at being so impolitely late, more distressed at having been lost, deeply distressed that the lady at whose flat he had mistakenly called had clearly thought him 'odd' and in alarm had not been very polite, in general distress at old age and the tricks it was

playing upon him. I was very angry with my unknown neighbour for her rudeness to him, unfairly angry, for no doubt he was both in- coherent and abrupt; but my anger, I know, arose not from the contrast between the person he wished to be and the person that circumstances

now too often made him, although that, as always with the old, was sad enough. I was peculiarly

angry because a man, always so selflessly generous to people of imagination who were in need, should now through no one's fault be open to the unkindness of those with no imagination.

I have dwelt rather at length upon my own few impressions from a short friendship with Eddie Marsh. This may seem, I am sure, exces- sive in a review of a life by one of his closest friends, yet it must be said that Mr. Hassall's biography, though clearly a painstaking labour of love, is not entirely successful. Marsh and, above all, his extraordinary connection with so many aspects of English life from 1900 to 1940 would, of course, make a far worse book well worth reading; yet it is not altogether easy to

read. Inevitably I contrasted .it with Mr. Hart- Davis's life of Hugh Walpole—two knighted men of the Arts Establishment, who went everywhere

and knew everyone, romantic-minded bachelors. more important for their contacts than for them- selves, kind, likeable, a bit absurd (Marsh, it seems, resolved after staying with Walpole not to think him so absurd). Mr. Hart-Davis's book wins all the time over Mr. Hassall's. Both, think- ing no doubt that the changing scene was ulti- mately more important than the principal, have

chosen a chronological method, anecdotal and

full of extracts from journals and letters, to present their material; yet, whereas Mr. Hart- Davis seems to force a shape from his unrelated mass of material, Mr. Hassall seems too often lost in catalogues of names, parties and changing pursuits. Every now and again Marsh and some other figures—Flecker, Brooke's mother, the young Ivor Novello, Winston Churchill shooting rhinos, the young Stanley Spencer and his family —emerge from the general haze to show us how well Mr. Hassall could have done it, but on the

whole the book is too long and often too gossipy. Yet perhaps for future historians this may be its very merit. By virtue of Marsh's ubiquity, historical treasures seem to fall upon the reachn- from every side : Margot Asquith surprised at

'unnatural practices' because the only pleasure of sex---procreation—is lacking; Katherine Mans- field, lips painted, in a brawl with an anti- suffragettist woman on a bus; a Wadsworth-Roger Fry row at the Omega workshop; Gorse's dislike

of Howards End; Gertler's disgust' that Marsh

should have Tonks in the house; Emerald (then Maud) Cunard, J. H. Thomas, Lady Tree, Shaw, Haig, Isaac Rosenberg, Robbie Ross and the home life of Lascelles Abercrombie. It is per- haps easier and 'oddly instructive to enumerate

the lacunae: America (only as a place where

Rupert Brooke went for a journalistic visit): the country (only as a house-party centre, Marsh first saw the country in all seasons during his Second World War exile); provincial towns (nowhere); the colonies (as a job and on official, much big-game hunting, tours with Churchill); Asia (nowhere); the working classes (nowhere unless we count Mrs. Elgy, the beloved house- keeper); the East End (in the Sidney Street siege); abroad (for perfecting languages and holidays); Russia (the Ballet and Chekhov). To enumerate these is no priggish censure on Marsh, but only to wonder at the vitality and strength of a highly cultivated English civilisation that was so bounded by London west of Temple Bar.

But there is so much to wonder at in that won- derful period from 19(x to 1929 (for despite his success with J. H. 'Thomas it was never to t)e the

same again for Marsh with Churchill out of office)—the deep sense of personal loss of the Great War (Marsh here 'almost a syinbol with the death of Brooke); the strength of the Georgian literary revolt and yet its stillborn nature (so many of the poets in the first anthologies had moved on to wider revolt before the volumes came out and the younger generations with

Wheels and Blast'were so hot on their tails); the great break between cultufe and government that came with the fall of Asquith; .a Civil Service that still had room for a brilliant patron of the arts and a superb translator of La Fontaine. It seems in so many ways a good world that-allowed a

scholar like Marsh to be a man about town and

a public servant. Yet, as always where his own life and not his esthetic views were concerned, . he seems to have been strangely passive about the choice of his public career. His mother, that:

high-born, strict Evangelical, whose dominant

love left him a lifelong unbeliever, no doubt decided that he should try for the Civil Service.

He might so easily have been that ordinary thing, a worldly don. As it was, he became a rarer person—an innocent homme du monde.