Being Ernest
PATRICK ANDERSON
The Story of My Days, An Autobiography 1888-1922 Ernest Raymond (Cassell 36s) In The Story of My Days the octogenarian novelist, Mr Ernest Raymond, has written an unusual, disturbing book which is of consider- able interest for the light it throws upon some aspects of late Victorian morality and for its expression of the dreadful eagerness with which many young men went to war in 1914. Highly selective in his choice of material, Mr Ray- mond describes his upbringing to the age of sixteen when he was forced to leave his public school and forgo a place at university in order to earn his living as first a clerk and then a prep-school master and clergyman.
A second section is devoted to his wartime years as an idealistic young padre, with the emphasis lying on the more glamorous occa- sions: the Gallipoli campaign which 'assumed the perfect pattern, the Attic shape, of a Greek tragedy . . . And had I not loitered, waiting. on the Island of Lemnos, where Vulcan in his smithy forged the weapons of Achilles?'—to- gether with service in Sinai and Mesopotamia and at the evacuation of Baku. Here, to his delight, Kipling's 'Stalky' was his command- ing officer. A year on the Western Front is passed over briefly. The Ypres Salient repre- sented 'a season in a grey and dreadful limbo. but not to be written of here.' The book con- cludes with the story of the publication of Mr Raymond's first novel, Tell England, which. after being rejected by a succession of pub- lishers, burst into best-sellerdom in the vintage year of 1922, memorable for masterpieces by Joyce, Eliot and Proust.
Many men now middle-aged will recall read- ing this excessively romantic account of schoolboy •friendships and of the glow of adolescent athleticism and scholarship followed
by self-sacrificial Christian deaths on the Galli- poli beaches. I myself read Tell England at my Anglesey prep; I associated its youthful soldiering with Beau Geste and The Four Feathers, while its picture of life at a great school resembled The Hill or David Blaize; within a few years one was to find such estab- lishments rather different—more boring and bureaucratic, more stultifyingly philistine, and even more saturated with heavily, inter- minably suppressed sex than the superficially innocent and sunny stories suggested, with the result that I have often wondered whether it is wise for twelve year olds to anticipate- ex- periences in so •misleading a way. It is interest- ing to find the admirably modest Mr Raymond now admitting to many faults in his youthful work : 'the naive romanticism, the pieties, the too facile heroics and the too uncritical patriotism—at these I can almost cry aloud in distress.' It is interesting, too, that he should be astonished by 'the indubitable but wholly unconscious homosexuality in it.' But what I think most significant of all is that he was a day-boy at St Paul's, a failure at games, a daydreaming solitary who mentions not a single school friend, as well as an early leaver, and that it was his compensatory fantasies in early manhood 'which fed the pre-pubescent imaginings of us small boys reading him amongst the heath and the gorse. He did us some disservice.
But the real value of this autobiography lies in its account of his family relationships. Here his obvious gifts as a story-teller, his fondness for suspense, his old-fashioned ability to handle broad effects and dramatic emphasis, his humour, his ear for dialogue, his sensitive use of documentation (a poem read to him, an aunt's diary, his own facetious boyhood scribblings) all contribute to the readability-of what is at base the account of a most tragic situation.
Put briefly, he was brought up by an aunt who slapped, caned and bullied him until he gained a precarious independence by striking her in his turn, first physically and then by the sarcasm which his growing love of words made effective. Told that his parents were dead, he devoted almost all his love to this aunt's protector and intimate, a retired general who held posts in the City, was intermittently a member of the -household (though not the only male in the aunt's confidence) and had a wonderful way with young Ernest and the small girl who also lived in the house— mysteriously, because-she had a different sur- name. Meanwhile the boy was courted and petted by his Aunt Emily's sister, a pretty, silly, sentimentally evasive woman whose son, four years older than Ernest, became his hero and companion. Eventually the handsome and charming general married for the second time and left his former household in impecunious circumstances, the pawn-shop replacing the weekly At Homes and the tissue paper in which presents were wrapped being carefully retained for use in the lavatory.
As Ernest struggled to make a career, and had need of documentary proof with regard to his birth and parentage, it began to dawn on him that the sillier of these two aunts was in fact his mother, and that the general himself was much more than his guardian (while almost certainly being also, during the days of his childhood, the lover of Aunt Emily). It was,
in fact. a world of ,genteel lies and abrupt eva- sions. curiously airless, and it drove the boy into the Church and the war until, one abandoned and the other over, he found his true nature as a writer. It was only in her seventies that 'Aunt' Vida confessed in a few embarrassed words that she was Ernest's mother; after all, hadn't `General Blake always said that I wasn't to be troubled'? The general himself made no such confession.
There are signs in the book that this dreadful situation became understandably obsessional for Mr Raymond. He tries to be fair. he scrupulously examines any propensity on his part towards bitterness, but the absence of friends and experiences outside the family imbroglio—except for the discovery of Charles Dickens and escape into a too exotic and romantic war—tends to make the story as claustrophobic as the treeless Kensington streets in which so much of it takes place. There are many lacunae. There are certain in- triguing problems of tone, Mr Raymond's breezy zest playing against the awkwardness and misery of his subject-matter. We could have done with more about his mature per- sonality, or is a sequel intended? Nevertheless, the book stays in the mind. The skeletons still grin and nag amongst the tired old clothes in the family cupboard.
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