Mumchance
RODNEY ACKLAND
No Leading Lady R. C. Sherriff (Gollancz 42s) R. C. Sherriff seems to have an image of R. C. Sherriff, a cherished image, which no one but himself is likely to believe in. The image is of R. C. Sherriff as 'an average man [or chap].'
Well, average men sit frustrate—or not so frustrate—in offices which may or may not be, as in Sherriff's case, insurance offices, and they dream of winning the football pools and some- times they even win them; other average men sit by their th ands in their offices knowing that they could? *rite a play (and thereby make their fortunes) 'if only they had the time.' But an average- man doesn't, as Sherriff did, find the time, write the play, watch it through a soul-shrivelling*round of West End manage- ments and rejections and finally see it through to its dazzling destination, a place in theatrical history. In any case, the average man doesn't write Journey's End, Before the war, when I was in my twenties, I sometimes used to meet R. C. Sherriff at the monthly luncheons of the British Dramatists' LeagUe. I don't suppose we ever had more than a casual conversation together or if we did not a word of it can I recall. But if I feed into my memory-computer the query `Sherriff?' I am instantly presented with a three-dimensional close-up of Sherriff as he was then, with his gentle voice and quick smile, his courteous manner and utter unpretentiousness, and become aware after all these years, as though the mind's image were the man himself, his human presence, that he has something of that same (quite unconscious) straight-to-every-heart best-boy-in-the-form appeal which has recently propelled Michael Aspel to the front page of the
Radio Times and Tv stardom. But when it comes to other names of playwrights—whether more eminent or less—who helped to eat those luncheons long ago, all the computer will cough up, and that reluctantly, is, for this one, a
glint of eye-glass; for that, the droop of a moustache, for the other, an impression of pallor or of chins.
So it was with more than casual interest that I picked up No Leading Lady, an autobio- graphy by R. C. Sherriff and with eager curi- osity that I started to read. 'What kind of man is he?' inquires invitingly the blurb. That, how- ever, is a subject about which the book has little, if anything, to say. Indeed, having finished it, I find I have nothing to add to the image of the author as memory presents it to my mind's eye.
Except perhaps that no one can know the height, the depth and the breadth and the absolutely unbreakable strength of Mr Sherriff's British reserve. With the exception of a casual allusion to his having attended a grammar school and an equally tenuous reference to hard times in the early days, he remains relentlessly mum- chance about his childhood and youth; tells us nothing of where he was born; or in what circumstances. Reticence is all. He keeps us at a distance; makes certain his readers shan't get
on first-name terms with him by never disclosing to them what the initials R. C. stand for. It has evidently never crossed his mind that anyone could be interested enough in himself—as apart from what he has to tell—to want to know.
His mother seems to have been the most im- portant person in his life, during the best years of which they kept house together. His father he
scarcely mentions. He and his mother went everywhere together, inseparable till the day of her death. We learn that she had a capacity for taking the rough with the smooth, that she encouraged him; and that, mum-like, on 'The Night,' the night of destiny for Sherriff, the
first night of Journey's End—triumph or disaster —she made him eat before setting off for the theatre a high tea of sauté potatoes and fillets of fish. Maddening as this must have been to Sherriff, it is rather endearing to read about. I only wish he had built up Mrs Sherriff's role with many more such /revealing 'touches.'
As for the company Mr Sherriff keeps, with -le exception of Molly Cazalet of whom he speaks with affection, he concerns himself only with 'famous people he has known,' acquain- tances and strangers (in the belief apparently that all of them are more interesting than him- self). He gives generous praise to his associates of stage and screen; sometimes far too gener- ous. His admiration for Korda, for instance.
seems excessive. 'It was left to a Hungarian to get British films on their feet.' But this was the man who shared with Gabriel Pascal the guilt of causing half the studios in Britain to close down; the same who, taking off for Hollywood at the beginning of the war, called a conference of American tycoons 'to combat the menace of British films,' and on his return was knighted for his services to the British cinema. 'He was quiet, courteous and modest,' happily continues Mr Sherriff. Well!
As for intimate friends, either Sherriff is a lonely man or he considers them none of the reader's business. A life of solitude, however, could only have been from Sherriff's choice and he'd have had to keep up a running battle to achieve it. For, abstain as he may from any attempt to 'project' himself from the pages of his book, he still emerges unmistakably as a man possessed of a modesty and an integrity as rare in the insurance world as in the theatre, a man, moreover, so immensely likeable that—to paraphrase Foss the Cat's old baggy-trousered :Bachelor—'How pleasant [to get] to know Mr Sherrill, who has written a volume of stuff.'
And what good stuff it is becomes evident as soon as one stops carping at the book for its shortcomings as autobiography and accepts it as, by and large, the history of Journey's End. Then irritation fades and entertainment takes over. Unexpected incidents and odd characters abound and there is a fascinating account of a tongue-tied cake-choked tea with J. M. Barrie that for sheer horror is worthy of M. R. James. All in all, in spite of being left with an uneasy feeling of having missed somehow Vol. I, No Leading Lady makes good brisk reading and one enjoys it even if, alas, there is no leading man.
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