Blasting and Bomardiering Read online

  I show you myself to start with as a Bombardier. That is a non-commissioned rank in the Royal Artillery. It is to get you accustomed to me I do this, under conditions with which many readers will be familiar. After that, in Part II, I remove my uniform.

  Photographs of myself in both these roles are provided, in the body of the text, to help you out (facing page 32). First you see the man of war, and secondly the man of peace.

  The solde I took as a soldier, especially my bonus or 'blood-money' as an officer at the end of the War, paid my debts contracted in time of peace, in warlike operations upon the art-front.

  It costs a lot to be an artist in Great Britain. And to be a 'lion' is colossally expensive—especially if you are a real 'lion' and not a sham one. The weekly upkeep of a penniless 'lion' in a capitalist society (especially in the richest country in the world) comes to a tidy bit. I was both an artist and a lion in August 1914. Another six months and I should have been bankrupt.

  My attitude to the war was unsatisfactory. That has to be faced. I experienced none of the conscience-prickings and soul-searchings, none of the subtle anguish, of so many gentlemen whose books poured out simultaneously upon the market about ten years ago. I half thought that indeed it might be a war to

  xThese few sketches and stories are now included in this book.

  make the world safe for Democracy, which I thought, sometimes, I liked. This must seem extremely absurd. I thought the German Empire stood for an oppressive efficiency, over against the 'free' inefficient nations. This was tempered with an inclination to turn my back upon the soft things in life. But I fear that I was callous, and flung myself into trigonometry and ballistics as lightheartedly as Leonardo did, when he designed siege-sledges for the Florentine General Staff.

  I would not have you think that I am shut out from a sense of what is called by the Japanese 'the Ah-ness of things'; the melancholy inherent in the animal life. But there is a Ho-ho-ness too. And against the backgrounds of their sempiternal Ah-ness it is possible, strictly in the foreground, to proceed with a protracted comedy, which glitters against the darkness.

  In art I was a condotiere : in art as in war I was extremely lighthearted. I was very sans fagon about art. It seemed to me a capital game, at which I was singularly good. I must therefore apologize for my attitude as an artist, as well as for my attitude as a soldier. It is not satisfactory: it calls for some apology. Always very serious, I have yet always been lighthearted. On my deathbed I know I shall behave like Socrates, when he pained his friends by his references to the sacrificial cock.

  My disinvoluture in the temple of art, like my disinvoluture upon the field of battle—the latter tempered by a natural courtesy where shell-fire was concerned and a nimble old-world politeness in avoiding collision—calls for apology.

  I will solicit in advance your indulgence for a certain informality that is displayed throughout this book. If you will concede me that I am sure we shall get on splendidly.

  Have I 'that terrible gift, familiarity'? Or am I too unfamiliar? Time alone will show. I should say off-hand myself that it's the former.

  Much more concerned with ideas than I am with people, yet I have, all right, a familiar vein. Indeed, since people seem to me to be rather walking notions than 'real' entities, when I say I am more interested in the latter than in the former it is not true in any relevant sense. The look, the gait, the smell, the vocabulary of people excites me to the greatest interest. The whining accents of the Swede, the grimaces of the French, the impassibility of the Japanese, I can observe for hours together with unflagging attention. And it need not worry you from whence I derive this interest. Enough that we share a common excitement.

  I am not an anatomist. I enjoy the surface of life, if not for its own sake, at least not because it conceals the repulsive turbid-ness of the intestine. Give me the dimple in the cheek of the Gioconda or St. John the Baptist, and you can have all the Gothic skeletons or superrealist guts that you like! And what applies to the body applies likewise to the mind. I do not like all these doctors. Give me the surface of the mind, as well. Give me the outside of all things, I am a fanatic for the externality of things. Their ah-ness gives them too sickly a beauty. And Je hais le mouvement qui deplace les lignes! which I quoted once to a Wop with great effect.

  There is one point I must discuss at once. You quite realize that there are limits to the truthfulness in which I may indulge I hope?

  Vexatious laws abound. But it is not that. Nor is it anything to do with any major characters. I need not be afraid of wounding their susceptibilities. We are made of sterner stuff than that: the 'Men of 1914' are not unduly sensitive. Mr. Joyce or Mr. Eliot would thank me for painting in all the hairs (and even putting in a few that are not there). I do assure you of that. It is not from that quarter that the trouble would come. The laws of this country do not allow you to show a living character consuming a highball or a pint of beer, it is true. But it is not that.

  It is—how shall I convey to you the nature of this subtle blight?—it is a belief in the existence of something described as 'the Library Public'. A mythical moron is supposed to exact that everything which issues from the Press should be genteelly doctored and censored so that it becomes perfectly meaningless. I am sure no such collective imbecile exists. But those who pay the piper think it does. So it is doubtful if half that I scribble off will ever be printed.

  One of the things that this brutally stupid monster is supposed to put its foot down about is what is termed 'savagery'. But let me give you a concrete example. A passage from Mr. W. B. Yeats' recent book of reminiscence will serve our turn very well. In his Dramatis Personae 1896-1902, he has the following description of his friend George Moore, where he is dealing with the latter's difficulty with his pants :

  'He reached to middle life ignorant even of small practical details. He said to a friend : "How do you keep your pants from falling about your knees?" "Oh," said the friend, "I put my braces through the little tapes that are sewn there for the purpose." A few days later, he thanked his friend with emotion. Upon a long country bicycle ride with another friend, he had stopped because his pants were about his knees, had gone behind a hedge, had taken them off, and exchanged them at a cottage for a tumbler of milk.'

  Now what, I should like to know, could be more pleasant and inoffensive than that story? Yet I have heard it cited as an example of 'savagery'. But it is not even malicieux!

  Obviously it is the sort of story that people repeat about a deliberate buffoon (and George Moore was a deliberate buffoon) as an exquisite example of his comic art, in the deliciously clumsy conduct of his life. After hearing it, when people think of George Moore they will see him, in their fancy, behind a hedge removing his pants, and then, at the next cottage he reaches, producing them, to trade them against a tumbler of fresh milk.

  A delightful bucolic picture, of an Irish literary clown, one who realized at an early age that he was 'a man carved out of a turnip, looking out of astonished eyes,' (as he is aptly described by Yeats) and who was perfectly satisfied with this arrangement, and who heightened in every way the turnip effect. He gazed out with more and more surprise at all and sundry. And how could a turnip be expected to keep its pants up? They would of necessity slip about and give their wearer a great deal of trouble, so that really a glass of milk was of far more use to this turnip-man than those articles of gentlemen's wear.

  As to being 'astonished', that was as much the style proper to Mr. George Moore's personality as to be dreamy was the destiny of Mr. Yeats. Mysticism and amazement sat with equal aplomb upon these two so differently endowed figures. It was as natural and unexceptionable that Mr. Yeats should describe Mr. Moore as a 'man cut out of a turnip', as that Mr. Moore should describe Mr. Yeats as looking like a half-opened umbrella stood up to dry. The wandering minstrel with his dank cape would approximate to a tented umbrella without embarrassment, indeed would court the comparison; and the outlandish sophist—stemming from a long line of sleep
y squires, vegetating in shabby grandeur as the potentates of some obscure bog—would welcome the comparison to the unlovely root in question. Both Moore and Yeats are intelligent men.

  I am quite certain that Mr. Aldous Huxley, for instance, with his natural-historical antecedents, would not object to being described as a moonstruck and sickly giraffe; and did not Mr. David Low chop Earl Baldwin every day of the week out of something less appetizing than a turnip, in his cartoons in which he featured 'Old Sealed-lips'?

  When Mr. Robert Ross—who was at Oscar Wilde's deathbed and a great coiner of phrases after the Ninetyish fashion— called me 'a buffalo in wolf's clothing', I was not offended. I would rather be a buffalo than a wolf. I have never thirsted for the blood of Little Red Riding Hood. If he had called me a dirty menagerie bison or a papier-mache-boaconstrictor, it would have been all one to me.

  Mr. Mencken—editor of the American Mercury and author of the American Language—who was much attacked at one time, even published a book containing all the passages from book-reviews and speeches in which he had been compared to one of the lower animals. It is all very harmless. 'Turnips' and 'scorpions' do not kill, as they exist in the high-spirited ink-slinging of literary exchanges. A literary lion is all the more of a lion after he has been called a skunk, a rabbit, and a polecat. We thrive upon these innuendos. I have been called a Rogue Elephant, a Cannibal Shark, and a crocodile. I am none the worse. I remain a caged, and rather sardonic, lion, in a particularly contemptible and ill-run Zoo. I am not at all proud. You cannot make my position any more disagreeable by spitting Stoat at me, or changing the card at the base of my cage with that of the Chimpanzee.

  Finally, as to my Dramatis Personae. These range from battery-cooks to Prime Ministers. This, as you may have guessed, is not a book of random reminiscences, but rather, in the form of gossip, a history of sorts. It shows you the origin of all the ideas that are in the ascendant to-day.

  When the other day I remarked to a doctor—with a view to relieving him of a certain self-consciousness I believed I had detected, 'You remind me of James Joyce,' he blinked. His self-consciousness merely became more pronounced. He looked uncomfortable and puzzled.

  'James Joyce?' he repeated. 'I am afraid that conveys nothing to me.'

  He was standing beside his electrical apparatus, in his spotless clinical jacket of white drill, with portentous spectacles of smoked glass. And he did in fact bear a striking resemblance to James Joyce's favourite cliche of himself; for he had a frivolous little beard, and his face was hollowed out, with a jutting brow and jaw, like some of the Pacific masks.

  But he had never heard of James Joyce; the name evidently 'conveyed nothing' to him. Ignorant clinical counterpart of Ireland's premier Penman!

  Here I am perforce assuming, however, that the reader has heard of James Joyce, author of Ulysses. Also I am compelled to assume that Mr. T. S. Eliot, Mr. Pound, or Mr. W. B. Yeats, conveys something to him.

  If these names awaken a suitable echo, the reader will have an unrivalled opportunity of an unorthodox hob-nob with this group of people, whose less official goings and comings are the subject of these pages.

  With what assurance people compose accounts of the demeanour and most private thoughts of the departed great! Every 'great man' to-day knows that he is living potentially a life of fiction. Sooner or later he will find himself the centre of romance, and afford some person incapable of true invention the opportunity of stealing the laurels of the fictionist. Or if he is a great swell, The Barretts of Wimpole Street will be the sort of thing that is in store for him.

  Now for a decade or two those of the Strachey kidney have made a corner in the eminent dead. It was essentially a 'generational' success—a playing off of one generation against the other: the theory being that all the living, more or less, were better and brighter than all the dead. For is it not just that which the belief in 'progress' guarantees?

  But I, for a change, will stake out a modest claim in the living. Let there of course be no misunderstanding; it will not be in order to show you how contemptible they are, and how inferior to yourself. On the contrary, if anything I shall contrive to suggest an even deeper cleavage than you had, in your most pessimistic moments, supposed. If I do not succeed in doing this, it will not, at all events, be through any fault of mine. For I am myself of that company. And I fully realize what, when I shall no longer be here to defend myself, is in store for me. Who would not, in my position, and seeing the execution done amongst our dead peers daily by the little bows and arrows of the passerine intelligentsia?

  When Colonel Lawrence visited Doughty, he asked him how he came to go to Arabia. The reply made by the author of Arabia Deserta was that he went there 'in order to rescue English Prose from the slough into which it had fallen.'

  I have this from Colonel Lawrence, and as near as I can remember those were the words used. Well, I have a purpose not entirely unlike that of Doughty—all allowance made for the scale and very modest design of the present book, but produced from notes upon the living model: namely, I would rescue a few people I respect, and who are, for their sins, objects like myself, of great popular curiosity and liable to continue so, from the obloquy and misrepresentation which must be their unenviable lot.

  It is as certain as I am lying here in this hammock that no one will take the trouble to go into the private affairs of these contemporaries of mine—examine their old laundry bills, read their boring business letters, and so on, at any time in the future, except in order to betray them, and make them look bigger fools than in fact they are. No one, it is self-evident, will sit down to mug up and spit out a book about them, except to concoct a string of damaging lies, and worse, half-truths. Something has to be done about this. So here goes! But my rescue-work, it must be understood, is a mere beginning. It is a modest pioneer effort, nothing more.

  As to the people selected for this act of salvage, I choose those who are indicated, on account of my personal history. It is not an accident that I should have met this group rather than that. I and the people about whom I am writing are of course not a herd or flock, however small, in the sense of the French cenacle or the London 'Bloomsburies'. Inded that sort of grouping necessarily implies that the people composing it are of far more interest together than they are apart. I think I may claim for the individuals I treat of more particularly, in the present pages, that it would be pretty difficult to coexist with them communistically for many weeks at a stretch. They mean a great deal more apart than they would with their somewhat irregular contours worn smooth in log-rolling and in back-scratching.

  It is only natural that I should have intoxicated myself while forming an acquaintance with James Joyce, just as I certainly should never have drunk more than a cup of tea (as I did once or twice) with the author of Queen Victoria. I should not have been interested to meet D. H. Lawrence at all, to be specific. But I need not labour this point. I think it is clear what I mean.

  So we get down to the present moment. I was fresh and smiling at the end of the 'post-war' because I was so damned glad it was ending—much more glad than when the War ended—and because I was not involved in it even to the extent that my friends Joyce and Eliot were. Eliot wrote his Waste

  Land to express his feelings about it while it was going on. But that was so successful he got the 'waste' into his blood a little, it has always seemed to me. By the time I started, the Great Slump had just set in. And the Slump wrote finis to the 'postwar'.

  What would you say distinguished the Nineteen-Thirties from the 'post-war' ? For it is a very different time indeed. Well, first of all no one could call this a 'mauve decade' could they ? It's a canary-yellow. It's a good age, good and crude and very unsettled. I like it extremely. I'm glad I wasn't killed in the War—I wouldn't have missed this for anything. All the war hens are coming home to roost and I'm damn glad they are. I like being here to see this roosting.

  What we are seeing is this. The world was getting, frankly, extremely silly. It
will always be silly. But it was getting into a really sufficating jam—no movement in any direction. A masquerade, a marking-time. Nothing real anywhere. It went on imitating itself with an almost religious absence of originality: and some of us foresaw an explosion. There must obviously arrive a point at which a breath of sense would break into it suddenly, and blow it all over. It's only a house of cards. To-day we are in the process of being blown over flat.

  I'm talking no politics in this book. The character I am writing about (the 'blaster' and the bombardier) was no politician. So politics would be out of place, since it is his reactions to a great political event, not the mechanics of the event itself, with which we are concerned.

  On the other hand, no one in 1937 can help being other than political. We are in politics up to our necks. And I must start with some reference to 1937. It is better to do that because it is after all myself in 1937 who is writing about myself as 'blaster' and as bombardier.

  Nineteen-thirty-seven is a grand year. We are all in the melting pot. I resist the process of melting so have a very lively time of it. I know if I let myself melt I should get mixed up with all sorts of people I would sooner be dead than mixed into. But that's the only sense in which I'm conservative. It's myself I want to conserve. I wouldn't lift a finger to conserve any 'conservative' institution; I think they ought to be liquidated, without any exception at all.

  In 1937 everybody's talking about 'communism' versus 'fascism'. I am not one of those who believe that either 'communism' or 'fascism' are in themselves solutions of anything.