WHAT I MEAN TO THE FRENCH
By PETER FLEMING
THE document which I received from Paris two days ago would have given me pleasure at any time ; and today, with Anglo-French understanding so firmly to the fore, I need hardly apologise for making the gist of the document public, and thus (I hope) communicating to others some of the agreeable emotions which it has inspired in me.
It is called " Peter Fleming: Sa Place Dans la Litterature Anglaise." It has won a prize, or prix.
It would be idle and dishonest to pretend that the bare fact of anyone devoting 15 pages of typescript to so im- probable a subject (and getting a prix for it at that) is not in itself a cause for the keenest gratification on my part. It is. I admit that it had not, until two days ago, occurred to me that I was entitled to a Place in English Literature ; but now that somebody has been given a substantial sum of money for evaluating my true status I realise how slow I have been off the mark. My pleasure is not unmixed with pique. That it should be left to Gallic intuition—notoriously a hypersensitive agent—to stake out my claim argues an almost pointed lack of percipience among my fellow- countrymen. Perhaps it has been my own fault. Most of my literary contemporaries, after all, have not only pub- lished at least one volume of autobiography, but have also (this is particularly true of the poets) been the subject of scho!ariy critiques written by their friends. I ought, I see now, to have muscled in on this racket before. The nearest I ever came to its fringes was when someone published a book called The Fleming in Beethoven. " Recognition at last! " I thought when I saw this book announced ; but it turned out, most surprisingly, not to be about me at all.
Well, the old days of obscurity are past, thank goodness. Nor is this all. A great deal of fresh and valuable light has been thrown on my early career by this friendly and judicious chap (whose name, by the way, is Comte Henri Hacquart de Turtotz, and who must be out of what we used to call at the Sorbonne le tiroir le plus olive). Few, for instance, know, and I myself had forgotten, at how early an age I began my public school career, and with what remarkable rapidity I achieved distinction in it. " Fleming a dix ans quand it entre a Eton. . . . Extremement doue, it dirigera deux ans plus lard le journal de Reyes sans pour cela jamais negliger le criket et le foot-ball, acquerant par la cette resistance physique qui lui sera si utile plus tard." I suppose I must have been, at twelve, the youngest editor the Eton College Chronicle has ever had.
I had forgotten, too, what a whirlwind business my edu- cation was. "A seize ans it quitte la jaquette et le haul de forme de l'Etonian ' pour entrer a Christ Church, le college le plus exclusif d'Oxford." Under the Gothic arcades of this venerable building, the Count goes on, Fleming will rub shoulders with the future directors of the Empire, those from among whom one will choose the Ministers, the Governors, the Bishops.
To some, I suppose, physical proximity of this kind would have seemed an end in itself: but not to me. " Come on," I remember (now) my friends saying to me, " don't let's do any work tonight. Let's go and rub shoulders with a future Bishop." I held out against this foina of sensual indulgence, and the Count gives me full credit for it, noting that I had the distinction (among many others) of founding a weekly paper called The Isis, " qui parait encore aujourd'hui."
I left Oxford in a blaze of glory, and at the early age of twenty. To do what? The Count notes, with exquisite delicacy, the indecision which (as I now recall) clouded this important juncture in my career. Fleming " ne connait pas encore sa vocation. Devant choisir une carxiere it se fait inscrire aux ' Guards Reserve,' " where (as he puts it) " the young unemployed members of the aristocracy sacrifice a few hours of liberty .to the pleasure of wearing the glittering uniforms (each officer has four absolutely different ones) of this crack regiment." " One might," the Count very reason- ably observes, " surprise oneself that Fleming, who had until this epoch manifested a pronounced taste for action, an acute sense of observation, a limitless curiosity, should on leaving the University have chosen a life, comfortable and brilliant indeed, but nevertheless monotonous and rather static." He explains my motives far better than I could have ex- plained them myself. " Like a true Englishman, placed before an incertitude, Fleming awaits his hour with im- perturbable phlegm. This period of waiting, he will live as a " gentleman," as a pupil of Eton and of Oxford, in the ser- vice of the Empire, wearing his uniform."
I will not, for good reasons, dwell on my memories of that dazzling but uncertain period. The Count passes over it with his habitual briskness. Half a page later I am " crossing Mexico on foot and on horseback, stopping for preference in the villages." My own memories of this journey are dimmed, to an extent greater than I should have believed possible, by the passage of time, and I have mislaid the travel-book which, according to the Count, I published on my return to London, and which is " a medley of descrip- tions, of native legends, of observations on the flora and the fauna and also on the economic and political situations of the territories traversed." This book had a great success and got me a job on The Spectator. Its success, I imagine, is at the back of those unaccountable communications I keep on getting from the Commissioners of Inland Revenue. I wish I could remember how I spent the money.
Whether it was the severing of my connexions with the Mexican interior or (this is more plausible) my appoint- ment to a position on The Spectator, my life, in the Count's flattering reconstruction of it, now becomes easier to recall and more susceptible of documentation. The pace is still killing, but the milestones are recognisable as we flash past. If I cannot now trace my preoccupation with " le poete Woodsworth," that is not to say that I never had one ; and I should be the last to quarrel with the Count's estimate of my literary status. This is very high indeed, in spite of for- midable competition from " les Waugh, Evelyn et Alec, les Huxely, Osbert Sakeverlle-Sitwell, Lord Berness, Edward James, Beverly Nichols, David Garnett, Keith Winer, Richard Aldington, Christopher Isherwood, et bien d'autres encore." To say nothing of the girls. "Bien qu'elles fre- quentent rarement les Universites, les jeunes filler dc la Haute Societe Anglaise sont souvent passionnees de la Litte- rature. Virginia Wolf (le Marcel Proust Anglais), Rosamond Lehman, Edith Sitwell. Daphne du Mauner, Clarence Dane, Margaret Kennedy, Veda Sackville-West. . . ." It is, really, intoxicating to be bracketed thus.
The trouble is, of course, that I don't deserve it. It is ungracious in me to impugn in the Count that literary flair which he so enthusiastically ascribes to me ; and I should like, and am almost prepared, to believe that sonic at least of his tributes to my " don particulier de l'Understate- ment' " arc merited. I glow when I read them. But I stop glowing, I smell a rat and I revise my notions, when the Count proceeds to examine my second great virtue. This is the virtue of " exactitude and veracity."
Maybe I possess it. I think I do. I hope I do. I would like to. But I wish, in a way, that it had been someone else, and not the Count, who had discerned it in me.
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