By COMPTON MACKENZIE H AVE many readers enjoyed the experience of
becoming a myth? In the spring of 1917, when I was Director of the ,Egean Intelligence Service with headquarters on the island of Syra, one of the anti-Venizelist papers in Athens began to publish a feuilleton called The Gentleman with the Black Fez, in which under my own name I was given a series of adventures that would have made the late Peter Cheyney sound like a Sunday-school teacher. I was flung out of railway trains to effect miraculous escapes. I was shut up in a lonely house on the outskirts of Athens, from which, thanks to my ability to charm the fair sex, I was helped to escape by a file concealed in a loaf thrown through a window. [ always swore by ten thousand devils. I had a new disguise in every chapter. I was tortured to reveal the plans of the Salon ica defences, but hostile propaganda was gentlemanly enough in those days to make me survive the ordeal without opening my mouth. In the last number of the paper published before it was suppressed by the troops of the Provisional Government who had entered Athens I was lying gagged and bound in a German motor-car on the way to a rendezvous with a submarine in which 1 was promised fresh tortures.
The Greeks since time immemorial have been recognised as champions of the mythopceic art, but in our quiet way we in Great Britain are not bad at it. Our speciality at present is building up myths about the recent past, which has been sedulously and sentimentally encouraged by the BBC. We have a mythical decade called the Nineties and another mythical decade called the Edwardian age. The survivors of the Twenties are now engaged in building them up. I would not put it past the middle-aged who were young in the Thirties to spangle even that decade with tinsel romance.
A month ago in the Spectator this sentence appeared in a review of The Way of My World by Ivor Brown: 'What can we make of them now, as we see' them, their pipes aglow in the Café Royal? Bennett, Chesterton, Belloc, Wells, Shaw, a roll-call of unread resonance.'
One of the fruits of victory in the First World War was the transformation of a noble French café into a German bierhalle, but not even then did anybody see Bernard Shaw sitting there with a pipe aglow. The Lernean hydra would have been a less conspicuous client; the Calydonian boar would have looked ordinary in comparison. I would wager that during the few years left to it after King George V ascended the throne the old Café Royal never saw the tip of Bernard Shaw's beard, except perhaps in a private room where the Critics' Circle were entertaining guests.
I never saw H. G. Wells in the Café Royal, and, anyway, resonance is the last word to use for his high-pitched, breathless voice which would have been shrill if it had had to compete with the noise of dominoes being shuffled on marble-topped tables. Arnold Bennett may have sat talking in the Café Royal: I never saw him there. The Reform Club became his pulpit when he returned 'from living in Paris to England. Again, resonance is no word for his voice. But perhaps I have missed the meaning of 'unread resonance.' Perhaps it refers only to the writing of the figures named. It remains an infelicitous word. Neither Wells nor Bennett wrote with resonance. G. K. Chesterton was certainly resonant as a writer of verse but never as a talker; he may have visited the Cafe Royal, but he was to be seen much more often at a' tavern in the ,Strand or Fleet Street. I once sat talking with Hilaire Belloc in the Café Royal, but the weather was hot, and we soon left to drink wine at the back of some cool, shady French restaurant off Oxford Street. the figures in this new myth being created about the years just before the First World War was an absorbing conversationalist except from his own point of view. Belloc suggested a brilliant lecturer. Shaw was another lecturer by the time I knew him, but it was easy to fancy how dazzling he had appeared in the Nineties before credulity overtook him and he became an iconoclast of shadows. I preferred Chesterton the writer to Chesterton the talker. H. G. Wells was by far the most vital in conversation.
But of their contemporary talkers Logan Pearsall Smith, Robert Ross and his brother .Alec, Lord Chalmers, Norman Douglas and Ford Madox Ford were all much more stimu- lating than any of those names first mentioned. And why all this gloom about the talkers of today? Cyril COnnolly, Harold Nicolson, Gilbert Harding, Isaiah Berlin, Eric Linklater, J. B. Priestley, and twice as many more besides,' could hold their own easily with those mythical giants and their mythicalpipes.
Golden decades usually turn out to be silver-gilt at best when examined critically. If those young men of today who are lamenting their misfortune in not having lived; in the mythical paradise which people of my age are supposed'to have enjoyed would read a little more widely, love a little less psycho- analytically, and despise safety-first as the philosophy of a mouse, they might waste less time in simultaheously envying and decrying their seniors.
We who were in our teens in the mythical Nineties thought it the dreariest decade time had yet produted. The great poetry had all been sung, the great battles had all been fought, the great pictures had all been painted, the great plays had all been written. Some of us were able,to detect a gleam of hope for the future of poetry in the verse of the French symbolists, but when we went up to Oxford (or Cambridge) in the first year of the century we found that a reaction had set in against whatever we had thought worthwhile in the Nineties and that, though Queen Victoria might no longer be on the throne, the spirit of her outlived age still brooded over our youth. Not until the victory of the Liberals in the General Election of 1906 did we feel the country was showing signs of life, but just when we were beginning to think that VIctorianism was dying it seemed revived by the accession of King George V. No wonder we welcomed that August night in 1914.
`Mr. Ivor Brown . . . paints a picture of a most beguiling London, a clubbable place, where talent is the password and all the prizes glitter fetchingly.'
I cannot for the life of me see that London was a more clubbable place in 1910 than it is today, or that talent is no longer a password. I agree that it must be depressing to read one's 'cheque-stubs on the last train back to the Green Belt's fringe,' but when the Green Belt's fringe was no further away than Chiswick it used to seem just as depressing. I pray that 1 may live long enough to hear the young lions of the Seventies moaning about the romantic Fifties, when a lean and slippered pantaloon will give a wheezy chuckle to himself.
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