Colin Wilson on anecdotal lives
Bound Upon a Course John Stewart Collis (Sidgwick and Jackson £2.75) Pilgrim Son John Masters (Michael Joseph £2.50) Young in the Twenties Ethel Mannin (Hutchinson £2.00) My Lives Francis Meynell (Bodley Head £3.15) As a species, writers are prone to egoism, romanticism and alcoholism; and these qualities, which may produce fine novels or poems, are likely to kill them off before they get around to autobiography. The ones who reach old age usually owe their survival to peaceful, eventful lives, and their autobiographies have to rely heavily on that dubious quality, charm.' The result may be delightful, but can be oddly unsatisfying, like one of those Chinese meals that leaves you hungry two hours later. I have just read four autobiographies that are full of charm, and now I feel like a good session with Arabia Deserta. John Stewart Collis is an Irishman who wrote abook about Shaw at the age of twenty-three. (It was the first book I ever read about Shaw and I still recall it with affection.) Since he was born in 1900, it follows that much of his autobiography is devoted to the literary scene in the 'twenties and 'thirties. With his Irishman's eye for a good anecdote, these chapters are fascinating. He describes that remarkable Dublin sage, AE, whose books failed to make any great impact, but whose mystical and oracular talk shaped the minds of a whole generation of Irish intellectuals. When L.A.G. Strong had been granted an interview, he went away with the request : "Give me a word of power." (That, says Collis, is the sort of thing people said to AE.) Without batting an eyelid, AE replied significantly: "Seek on earth what you have found in heaven," and Strong, deeply Impressed, departed — without, apparently, wondering when he was supposed to have been in heaven. How I wish we had a few intellectuals of that calibre around today. . . .
Yeats, according to Collis, was a bit of a phoney: he quotes Robert Graves's dictum to that effect with approval. Collis describes Yeats at a meeting of the Oxford Poetry Society, and how he "waved his arms about, raised his voice and flashed his eyes" (presumably like turning an electric torch on and off). Collis was much impressed by the cynical remark of a Balliol man, who said: "Yeats doesn't behave like that when he goes to see his publisher." But I would like to bet that he did. And another story Collis tells of Yeats simply contradicts the view of him as a phoney. In a hotel in Switzenland, Yeats, Lennox Robinson and Laurence Housman gave a reading in a depressing and unsuitable lounge. The audience was small, and well-spread-out, and Robinson and Housman fell rather flat. Yeats, within minutes, had the audience leaning forward in their chairs, totally absorbed as he read and commented on poem after poem. Yeats could do this kind of thing, because he was fascinated by ideas, and could convey it to other people. That is also why his autobiography is a great work, an ex ception to the general rule about writers' autobiographies. Yeats's phoniness was intended as such: an 'act,' a mask.
It is also interesting to learn that Shaw believed he possessed the gift of the evil eye, remarking in a letter that " all the people I ever hated died"; in old age, Granville Barker's wife came close to killing Shaw by the same method.
For all its charm, Mr Collis's anecdotage should not be taken too literally; he manages to get a number of well-known facts wrong, as when he says that "Shaw was so afraid of the influence of the Celtic Twilight that he sought refuge in Eng land" — when, in fact, the movement was unheard of in 1876. He also tells the story of "the only occasion when James Joyce met Yeats," and Joyce earned Yeats's everlasting enmity by saying, "I'm afraid that you are too old for me to be able to help you." In fact, they remained friends and met on many occasions. (The usual version of Joyce's remark — which both later denied — is "We have met too late. You are too old to be influenced by me.") AE made one of the best remarks on Joyce. After telling Collis that he had ad vised Joyce to give up poetry because he didn't have enough chaos in him to make a poet, AE added: "I didn't know then that I was speaking to a man who had enough chaos in him to blow up the world."
After all this, it is sad to learn that Collis had to face the usual writer's prob lem: the extreme difficulty of making a living by the pen. At the beginning of the war, he decided to give it up and become a farm labourer. And although the end result was some fine nature books, Mr Collis cannot keep a note of resignation and defeat out of the later chapters of his autobiography — which ought to rank as his best book.
The point is underlined with irony in the third volume of John Masters's personal odyssey,' Pilgrim Son. Masters was born in India, son of five generations of AngloIndians. When the British were thrown out, he returned to England for a while, then went to America, where he made the decision to try to become a writer. An odd decision, for Mr Masters comes over very clearly as the soldier type, British Empire to the backbone. When he tells humorous anecdotes, they sound the kind General Montgomery kept for putting young officers at their ease in the mess. An autobiogra phical book, unpromisingly titled Brutal and Licentious, was turned down by dozens of American publishers. (The record of rejection slips becomes physi cally wearing.) So was his first novel, Nightrunners of Bengal. Then, against all expectation, it was published and made him a best-seller. And Mr Masters has never looked back. The writing in this volume is unpretentious, and such charm as it possesses is soldierly rather than literary. And somewhere there seems to be a moral in all this : that a down-to-earth sol dier, with no interest in literary anecdote or intellectual conversation, a man whose idea of literary excellence is Gone With the Wind, should end as an established best-seller. Perhaps it was the same point that Shaw made about the English in John Bull's Other Island.
Ethel Mannin's Young in the Twenties is also her third volume of autobiography, al though it is designed to be self-complete, a kind of nostalgic memoir. I have a tempta tion to refer to her as 'this young lady,' because the style has a jaunty, perky charm, rather like Iris Storm's green hat.
The blurb remarks that her first autobiography, Confessions and Impres sions, created something of a scandal in the late 'twenties, although she herself now regards it as rather impertinent and brash. Without wishing to be anything but complimentary, I would say she still preserves much of this quality. The Diaghilev ballet, The Well of Loneliness, Michael Arlen, Boughton's Immortal Hour (why doesn't someone record that fine work?), Mary Webb and , Tallulah Bankhead fly through her pages like autumn leaves. Typically, one of the few contemporary successes for which she hasn't much praise is A Farewell to Arms, because she didn't like Hemingway's 'aggressive masculinity.' My only complaint about the book is that after telling how she was invited to dine with Yeats after his monkey gland operation — presumably to find out if it worked — she draws a polite veil over the end of the story.
Sir Francis Meynell's autobiography starts off with some marvellous pen-pictures of his childhood in the household of Alice and Wilfrid Meynell, with anecdotes of Francis Thompson, Coventry Patmore, and other late-Victorian celebrities. After his college days (in Dublin) he became a socialist; he does not explain why, and one gets the impression he drifted into it. Some of the most remarkable pages in the book contain his description of how he forced the army to discharge him in 1914 by going on a hunger strike, and doing his best to catch pneumonia by climbing into a tub of freezing water, then lying out in the snow. Still, one has the feeling that he is not really the martyr type: the temperament is distinctly aesthetic and hedonistic, and he is naturally at his best in talking about his Nonesuch Press ventures and discussing food and wine. He also has an excellent line in anecdotes, the best of them tinged with acid, like this one about Joad: Cyril had a series of love affairs. When I met the girls I found to my surprise that every one of them was called Maureen. Cyril explained: "I tell each of them that It is my favourite name and that it specially suits her. But of course my real motive is that it avoids the embarrassment that I might utter another girl's name in my sleep."
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