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- Herausgeber: Olympia Press
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015
Kahane, father of Olympia Press founder Maurice Girodias, recalls his life and his incredible publishing run in Paris from '31-39.
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Memoirs Of A Booklegger
Jack Kahane
This page copyright © 2009 Olympia Press.
Jack Kahane
TO MY BROTHER
F.E.K.
BEST OF BLOKES
Chapter One
WE were drinking coffees together, Brighouse and I, in one of those dark underground dens for which Manchester in those days was justly famous. It was eleven o'clock in the morning, we were both in the cotton trade, and the hour had struck (as it did at the same time every morning) to discuss ways and means of getting out of it.
Both of us had been born into cotton. Brig was in his father's business, but my father had died when I was six and his business soon after him, so I had to find a job when I left school. We were both Manchester Grammar School boys and saw no reason to be ashamed of it. I had not known Brig at school. He was a few years older and on the modern side. By the time I had reached the Classical Transitus, next to the top, my interest in education had evaporated, and the cotton trade looked like heaven.
How to get out of it? Brig had definite ideas. I hadn't. He was going to be a playwright (it would have been affected to say dramatist): he was one already. I don't know how many plays he had written. All his holidays he spent in London, and went to a play every evening and to every matinée. When he got home from the office he wrote hard into the night. He wrote, thought, lived, dreamed, saw plays. He was unique—at least I thought he was until I met Stanley Houghton. Another playwright....
But how to get out of cotton? We sipped our coffee, and felt a little scornful. I had written a play or two myself, infected by the prevalent ardour, but my heart wasn't in it. I couldn't see myself a professional playwright. Whereas Brig-house (and Houghton) saw nothing else. “But playwriting, where does it lead?” I complained. “Look at all you've written, and you're still here, getting old selling cotton.”
Brig sucked at his pipe. I don't know that he appreciated the allusion to age. And I think he had the essential realism to argue that twenty-four wasn't really old.
“Well, Jack,” he said, his eyes glinting, “as far as I am concerned, the theatre's the only way out of here, and you must do as you like.” He jerked up his head, looking more like a neurotic bulldog than ever. I didn't feel happy about it. London was the Mecca, of course; we may have been decidedly not snobs about being Manchester men, but that didn't mean that we wanted to go on living there.
“Well, I don't think playwriting's the way,” I persisted. Brig looked at me scornfully. “Then what's your way?” Alas, I didn't know. I remained silent, and sucked at my pipe. One couldn't have literary leanings and not smoke a pipe. Je grillais quelques cigarettes. You recognize it? Balzac, Eugene de Rastignac, Lucien de Rubempre. Les Illusions Perdues. I had read the whole Comedie Humaine, from the beginning to end, the whole forty volumes of them, in French, and my entire outlook had been shattered and reformed.
Of course I didn't realize it then, while I was drinking coffee with Brighouse, but one of the many major tragedies of my life was that I was a romantic born in an age of realists.
“There is a way,” I said at last, firmly. Not for me the petty vie de province, even if I hadn't the playwright's sacred fire. “I'll bet you, Brig, I'll bet you that”—“What? In the name of God what?” How was I to prove beyond all words of doubt my defiance? Inspiration came. “I'll bet you I'm mentioned in a Manchester Guardian leader before you,” I gasped. Brig-house stared at me, eyes bulging out, jaws sagging. He left off smoking his pipe. I met his gaze firmly, my head high. Blasphemy I might have uttered, but I didn't retreat. I mentioned the stake, the amount of which I have forgotten. “Is it a bet?” I asked. He nodded and then: “Pshaw!” he uttered, practically as spelt. “Come on, let's pay for this coffee, I have to get back to WORK.”
Pretty proud of myself I strode away in my direction; six feet tall and about three inches thick. I passed a girl, hurrying along. She had liquid brown eyes as I could perceive because they were full on me for a moment, softly and amiably. I blushed and strode on. “Pshaw!” I said to myself, exactly as spelt. “A little soubrette. Somebody's plaything for an hour.” But of course, I looked higher. La Femme de trente ans was my mark.
My life until then had been an up and down affair with the downs in a large majority. My family seemed to be in a state of chronic impecuniosity, and poverty comes the harder when one has known another state. Moreover, few people can adapt themselves to poverty who have not been born to it. My family was no exception, and probably made the worst of such resources as they still possessed.
My mother having died when I was eight (my father had preceded her by two years), I was brought up by a sister more than twenty years older than myself (I was the penultimate of a large family). I adored her. Unfortunately, from my point of view, she had two boys of her own, one a year younger than myself, the other a baby. It was on my elder nephew's account that I was so glad to leave school. I had a very average brain and as luck would have it his was one of the best of his generation. A first-class mind, bad cess to him. So I left school when I was nearing seventeen, and he went to Oxford—Balliol, where he got the Craven, the Ireland, the Gaisford Greek verse, and most else—and out of my life for ever.
And I went to business. I got a job in a shipping office which had advertised in the Manchester Guardian for a gentleman's son. As I got the job I must have been a gentleman's son. And the catch was that whereas ordinary men's sons were paid five shillings a week, gentlemen's sons were paid four shillings and prospects.
We were a perfectly new firm. The furniture was new and burnished, and brightly reflected the big cheerful fire. There were two partners, one of whom was a gentleman, the other of whom advertised for gentlemen's sons. We were engaged in the export of cotton goods to Shanghai, China, where we had “our own” branch. At first I took it very seriously, and worked hard. On three evenings a week I went to the technological branch of the Victoria University of Manchester, which was a high-sounding institution. I learned weaving, or rather didn't, as the simplest machine is beyond my build of mind to understand. I got a diploma for weaving without knowing at which end of the machine to put the shuttle, and then dismissed the matter from my mind.
As we were dealing with China I thought a logical thing to do would be to learn Chinese. For three years I applied myself to that amalgam of picture making and vocal acrobatics, and did better at it than at the weaving machines. I was first in Chinese from beginning to end, and enjoyed every moment of that experience. The professor was E. H. Parker, who had been British consul in various parts of China for countless years. He was a fascinating man to me, very gruff and eccentric, and I think he took rather a fancy to me. Perhaps that was why I was always first. He had been in command of the defence of Canton during the Boxer rebellion, for which he had received written thanks from the German Emperor, the Tsar and other monarchs. These he showed me one day, not without a certain shy pride, but I don't think he was really interested in them. He was deeply devoted to the language and literature and had written some excellent works on the subjects. I wonder why nobody has thought to reprint them at this time when China is such tragic news.
He lived in Liverpool—he was also a Reader in Chinese at the University — with his daughter Mary and two huge dogs who always dined at the same table. Other pupils were Sir Tom Ainscough who has made good, but in India, and Norman Melland, brother-in-law of Asquith, the Prime Minister, by his first wife, Helen. Norman Melland joined the class late and I was told off to bring him up to date. It was purely honorific, and I only remember it because it was in Melland's house I first smoked a supremely good cigar, my pay.
After about three years of drudgery, I found out that the moment had come to choose which of the young gentlemen should be sent to the Shanghai branch. There were only two of us in it: a boy called Rupert whose father was a neighbour of one of the partners, and who, although a good sport, was one of the most wooden-headed citizens that I have ever met. But his uncle was a professor of music and a prominent member of the bowling and social club to which the senior partner belonged; so Rupert had the advantage of birth and my weaving diploma and my considerable knowledge of Chinese went for nothing.
My only consolation was that in less than a year he was shipped back as hopelessly incompetent, both socially and mentally. I was delighted. I had come to loathe the senior partner, who was anyhow a scented and over-polished Cockney, and whose choice had been the cause of so much expense and humiliation.
I was fobbed off with the secretaryship of a tiny subsidiary company which had been in financial difficulties and had been taken over. But I was no longer interested in business. I dropped Chinese and began to be more interested in playwriting, and similar pursuits. Business, such as it was, had become a mere contemptible means to an end. I wasn't sure what the end was, but that didn't matter.
Velvet was the particular product my firm produced; a more important branch of the cotton industry than might be imagined. There is quite a “romance” of velvet, or there was as far as I was concerned. The surface of the cotton consists of invisible loops across the whole width of the cloth which are cut by a knife, the two halves of each loop, infinitely repeated, being the pile. The cutting operation is an industry of its own. It was still being done by hand, and was controlled by a group of men banded together into an association of incomparable toughness. The member of it with whom my firm was in touch, Roger Meanock, was the toughest of all. Today when I hear of tough Americans I think of Roger and smile. “What's mine's my own,” said Roger, “and I please myself how I spend it.”
One day, a friend, Price-Heywood, said he could get me a better job. A big merchant he knew wanted to start a velvet department. We met. He was a gigantic German, with a yellow hat and a flower in his buttonhole, and bunions. I had recently mastered the art of conversation, so I quietly listened to him while he talked himself into giving me the job. I began with about six times as much money as I had been getting; a fine office, a secretary, and forty per cent of the profits.
The first job was production. The cloth was easy to buy, but at the next stage, cutting, I struck my first snag. Roger Meanock refused to cut for me. There were enough people in the velvet trade. I should have stayed with Harry Ross, my previous boss. I tried every means to persuade him to alter his decision, but he refused to budge. I was spoiling the market. And Roger was the Association.
I went to see my new chief and put the situation before him. “Well, vat are you going to do about it?”—“I don't know yet.”
He gave me a bleak look. “Veil, you had better find out.” I went back to my office and thought. By then I had the offer of a good many orders from friends, but no way to execute them. It was winter. I went out into the Lancashire and Cheshire wilds where the cutting was done. In a pub I met a man who had been a cutter's foreman and who was out of a job. We had a few drinks and talked and had a few more drinks. He was a bad hat, that became more evident with every drink he swallowed. But he told me he could get a few people together, here and there, if he had the money. Never mind the money. How many pieces a week? That night I slept where I drank. The next morning I hired a car and we went round the snow-covered country-side. In three months my business was well away. I had a cutting business consisting of over a hundred branches, each branch having a staff of at least one. The cutting was bad and expensive, and as I had foreseen, my foreman friend was soaking me to the limit of endurance. But I was delivering the goods.
And one morning four months after I had driven round the country-side Roger Meanock walked into my office. “Anything fresh?” he said, sitting and lighting a cigarette. I had won. I had busted a trust. I gave Roger an order for the rest of the year on our account.
Chapter Two
ON the momentous morning of my bet with Brighouse I was still a young and hard-up clerk or secretary or something of the sort. The Manchester Guardian was a divinity towards which all we young men shaped our ends, and its leaders were the oracular emanation of godhead itself. In those days, Edward VII still reigned, the M.G. had begun to prove itself right about its unpatriotic policy in the Boer War; in fact there were so many high problems to be settled in its august columns that it seemed to me improbable that there ever would be an occasion to settle my bet with Brighouse.
Manchester at that time was known in the world of art principally as the habitat of the Hallé Orchestra, whose conductor was Hans Richter. A big, snuffy, bearded, fat German, Richter was a god, a German god, but a god. About him had collected a thick and even impenetrable bunch of sycophantic worshippers, Germans and others, who would allow no word of criticism against their cigar-smoking, beer-drinking, potato-salad-devouring darling.
In spite of his attendant mob, Richter was a great man. His Beethoven and his Wagner have never been equalled except, and in a very different and personal way, by Toscanini, the Duce of music today, who has said that in Richter alone he could recognize his master. Richter was a very great conductor. He had been one of the little band that had played the Siegfried Idyll in Wagner's garden one early morning as a birthday surprise for him. He conducted the Ring at Covent Garden, and I have heard no one pretend that he has had a successor greater than himself.
He was massive, Olympic, immutable, and so was his conducting, and so, generally, was his music. He was an intolerant, tyrannical giant and he ruled music in Manchester with a baton of toughened steel. And all the sycophants, ninety per cent of whom couldn't have told the difference between an andante and a pizzicato, fawned on him and found him lovely.
My musical experience consisted of desultory violin playing during about eleven years. I played in amateur orchestras for a time, very badly, and then I did the one really musicianly thing of my life: I gave up playing for ever. The last orchestra I had played in was one run by the musical section of the Old Boys' Association. I was secretary of the section and I think my administrative abilities were superior to my musical gifts. But the section was small and parochial and I lost interest in it pretty soon. I hate the type of man who is a successful leader of associations. They have a smug smiling amiability, an odour of efficiency and disinterestedness, and generally a large secret axe to grind. One sees the same type of people on the executive committee of Chambers of Commerce as one did in the Old Mancunians' Association of my youth: worthy, efficient, communal-minded people, but...
The musical section was one of the first societies I joined and, after creating a good deal of commotion in it, not without fracas I left. One of them, however, in which I was perfectly happy, was the French Club, or Society. I forget exactly what it was called. I had always had an impulse towards France, and Balzac, Hugo, the Symbolists, and all the other literary adventurers had increased it to the point of being a permanent consideration. Most of the French Club's interests were literary and dramatic, but a few members were musical, and one day a French member wondered about why one never heard French music in Manchester.
“French music?” I asked innocently. “Do you mean Carmen?”
“That's the point!” the Frenchman said. “Here every one seems to think that Bizet, Massenet, and Saint-Saens are the only French composers. They've never heard of Debussy, Franck —”
“Oh! Come —”
“d'Indy, Dukas, Faure, Ravel, Duparc...”
He began to talk of French music, and we agreed that we inhabitants of Manchester were entitled to hear the French as well as the Germans. And for my part I said that I was going to see about it.
In a little while we had organized a deputation to call on Richter. “Herr Doktor,” we asked him, with carefully prepared humility, “may we occasionally, very occasionally, be given an opportunity of hearing some French music?”
He stared at us malevolently. “French music?” He grunted. “There is no French music.” And shrugged us out.
The disgusting old despot! I raged. Who the devil did he think he was? Did he imagine we owed allegiance to his beastly emperor? To hell with German music and German conductors and Germans generally. We were all furious anyway, but I more than the others, because I was the youngest, the least experienced, and consequently the most intolerant of such blatant bullying. And also the vestments of brief authority have always got my goat.
At that time I belonged to a little luncheon club, about which I shall have something to say elsewhere. Foaming at the mouth, I asked the members what they thought of it. Reaction was mixed, but I collected those on my side. One of them was Gerald Cumberland, as he was afterwards generally known. “And there's English music, too.” I looked at him doubtfully. “Yes, modern music; as well as Elgar, there's Delius, Holbrooke, Bantock, Boughton.”—“You don't say so!” I exclaimed, and then, “Look here, we're going to form a society, the Manchester Musical Society, and we're going to do things.”
We did. In a very short while we had hundreds of members, nice Manchester people of all social grades who wanted to hear French and English music at prices they could afford. We had fortnightly club concerts of very high merit, and two or three full-dress affairs. We gave Debussy and Delius, Holbrooke, Boughton, and other French and English moderns whose names were unknown to our public. We made a stir, we were well talked of: our concerts were small affairs at the best, but they had the right idea; our audiences forgave technical shortcomings, and applauded our adventurousness and goodwill.
And then there happened something that could not but favour our cause. The Hallé Orchestra, conducted by the unique Hans Richter, the divine Doktor, showed a deficit. The guarantors were squealing.
The finances of the orchestra, I should explain, were guaranteed by a group of people of social eminence, whose names were printed in the programmes of the concerts and who got a good deal of kudos out of their disinterested generosity. For years all had gone well. The Thursday evening concerts were the only artistic-social rendezvous the city of nearly a million inhabitants possessed, and when a guarantor took his seat ordinary mortals eyed him reverently and gratefully as he looked about him and bowed gravely to other guarantors sitting in adjacent seats. They were all wreathed in dignity and altruism. Thanks to these high-minded gentlemen, merchant princes for the most part, we had the best orchestra in England; they guaranteed us the Doktor for our pleasure and uplift. They were the wealthiest, the most important, and the most respected inhabitants of no mean city.
But no mean city may get singularly mean elder citizens. And when there was a deficit they squealed. Not only did they squeal, but there was talk of resignation. In an early book James Agate poured good-natured contempt on me for pointing out that the function of guarantors is to guarantee. (Parenthetically I would like to point out that James Agate showed special regard for me and distinguished me from the rest of the world in that his contempt for me was good-natured.)
It seemed to me that the guarantors, having had the respect, the admiration and the gratitude of the public for being the well-advertised guarantors, should even take pleasure in putting their hands in their pockets when the time came along. Not so the Hallé guarantors. For them the position of guarantors was merely a mutual compliment paid by them to the eminent social institution that were the Hallé Concerts, and by the Hallé Concerts to their eminent social positions and even more eminent banking accounts.
I saw a big opportunity for the Manchester Musical Society. As its secretary I wrote a letter to the Manchester Guardian, pointing out the hollow pretensions of the guarantors, the bullying intolerance of the conductor, and, as long as the guarantors objected to honouring their guarantees, the indefeasible rights of a free people to choose the music they, in the event, would have to pay for. The guarantors had called the tune and refused to pay the piper, and so forth. Above all I asserted that Richter was growing old, and stale, had the natural tyrannical disposition of all descendants of Attila, and that, if he refused to take into consideration the natural tastes and desires of his public, then it was time he retired from conductorship and handed over his baton to a younger and less barnacle-ridden leader.
It was a well written, closely reasoned letter, but of so revolutionary a nature that I was afraid it might be received with silent contempt, and that did not suit my game, as I wanted to arouse a high-powered and violent controversy. So I wrote a reply to my letter, cleverly but speciously demolishing its arguments, and signing the name of a barrister who was delighted to lend himself to the scheme. And in reply to that letter I wrote another, showing up with angry derision the sophistries of letter No. 2. Where-upon the public took a hand. Letters poured into the Guardian from everywhere, heaping contumely on me, backing me up, quoting what their great-grand-father had said in 1770. Here was a full-dress newspaper controversy that aroused the attention of the whole musical world.
I wrote another letter, recapitulating my arguments, the objections that had been made to them, and drew the manifest conclusions. On the morning of its appearance, I opened my Guardian, and in the principal position on the chief news page saw in letters inches thick: Resignation of Doktor Richter. The first leader was devoted to Richter, his resignation, and his unassailable grandeur. And there was a rude remark that this grandeur would subsist however young revolutionaries like Mr. Jack Kahane gnashed their teeth....
Well, I had deposed one of the greatest conductors the world had known and—won a bet with Brighouse. Soon after Richter went back to Germany, and when the war broke out signed the manifesto. He was very virulent about England which had paid him for many years the highest salary of any conductor in Europe, and returned with much publicity all his English decorations.
Chapter Three
THROUGHOUT my adolescence my family seemed to have struck a bad patch from which they were unable to emerge. And unfortunately they made the worst of it instead of the best. They cannot be blamed for that. They were not used to polite penury and didn't know how to adapt themselves in order to escape either the pity or the condescension of their kind. After living in a fine house on the outskirts, with the Bishop and the Dean as close neighbours in a district that was then celebrated for its merchant princes, they were reduced to a small house in a “coming” suburb and the policy of plain living and high thinking. So no more entertaining, no more theatres, amusing holidays, and other distractions.
Faute de mieux, during that period I read enormously everything I could lay my hands on. I chose big books. I read the Bible and Paradise Lost through from beginning to end, the Iliad and the Odyssey in translation, practically all Virgil, Ovid, Horace in Latin. I read the whole of the Comedie Humaine, the whole of Hugo, all the French poets: I translated Goethe's Hermann und Dorothea into English hexameters—what tosh that must have been! I read Dickens and Thackeray, Hardy, Meredith, from one end to another. My method was simple and comprehensive. When I tackled an author I began with his first book and ended with his last. I don't know whether that is a good method, but I certainly covered immense ground, and assimilated more than might have been imagined.
In due course I came to Henry James. A hard nut to crack, but I cracked it. Altogether, I think James was my most entirely satisfying experience, and I still look upon him as the greatest of novelists using the English language.
But reading did not suffice for a youth eager to know the world. At the same time I was so abominably shy that I had to think out every kind of pretext in order to be able to cultivate a friendship.
The truth was that I was starved of human contacts and consequently was a-crawl with inferiority complexes. I was a gawky youth, length without substance, with the profound conviction that I was the ugliest of my generation. My clothes were very so-so. I was young, clean, and broke.
So that I might be able to know better one man, Walter Mudie, of the Library, who seemed to me a youth of Apollonian beauty (and perhaps was) and limitless intellectual attainments (which he hadn't), I suggested to him that I should teach him French. By some happy chance Mudie wanted to learn French, so the path was cleared and we became friends. Then I met Gerald Cumberland, and I struck up a real friendship with him that lasted intermittently until his death. C. F. Kenyon, which was his real name, was a man of unquestionable genius. His poetry had real inspiration, and in Tales of a Cruel Country he has written some of the best short stories in the English language. His book of reminiscences, written with more verve than propriety, brought him fame. Unhappily his mind was warped for reasons beyond his control, and for that reason alone his talents did not come to full fruition.
Each one of us had definite artistic ambitions that made a convenient link: Brighouse sternly intent upon dramatic laurels; Mudie's head ringing with musical compositions; Kenyon already with some reputation as a book critic, a poet and a biographer; I with play-writing as my intellectual stand-by, but perhaps merely delighted to bask in the friendship of the others, who, because they had obviously nothing to fear from me, spoiled me.
And thus the Swan Club was born. I think sincerely that it was I who was the founder of the feast, or anyhow Walter Mudie and I. But, as he had already quantities of suburban friends, he hadn't the same incentive as I, so probably I was the moving spirit.
We met for luncheon each day in a lugubrious upstairs room of a third-rate restaurant. We were not a social enterprise, but a school of thought. We were out to smite the Philistines. We were talkative young asses, but after all what did Samson use with which to smite the Philistines? We were each to produce works of art according to our genius, and when they were introduced to the public they were to bear our sign, the Swan. We were going to leave our mark on our generation and show the world that what Manchester writes to-day London will flock to see (if we were playwrights) or to buy (if we were poets, novelists, etc.) tomorrow.
Soon we had co-opted other members. Mudie brought Stanley Houghton, who was to achieve over night fame with his play, Hindle Wakes. Cumberland brought Price-Heywood, chartered accountant, leader writer, vegetarian, social reformer: one of the strangest mixtures of a man you could meet. Brighouse brought Ernest Marriott, a librarian, an artist of talent, and a man of many curious convictions, who died, a conscientious objector, during the war. I brought Basil Dean, who was then acting jeune premier roles in Miss Horniman's Company; I also brought the exotic Esme Percy, who is certainly one of the funniest companions I have ever rollicked with. However much we differed in essentials we had a sense of eccentric humour in common and we played a thousand and one tricks on our protesting co-citizens, Iden Payne was also a member, and the charming Charles Abercrombie, whose brother Lascelles, the poet, then resident in Liverpool, might have been called a corresponding member.
Not a bad list, as it turned out. Gerald Cumberland made a real reputation for himself: his short stories will live unquestionably. Harold Brighouse has written one big and deserved success, Hobson's Choice, but I think that his reputation will rest upon his one-act Lancashire plays, such as Lonesome-Like and The Price of Coal, as real manifestations of the Lancashire genius as were Riders to the Sea and other plays of the Abbey Theatre School of the Irish genius.
Iden Payne, a fine play producer, was professor of dramatic art in an American university, and later director of the Shakespeare National Theatre at Stratford-on-Avon. Basil Dean's reputation does not need me to advertise it. He was a very charming young man when I first knew him, amazingly keen and fiercely determined to get on. Well, he has got on and at one time a wife of his was an earl's daughter. And Lascelles Abercrombie had the distinction of being the only living poet whose works were included in the “Oxford Poets”. His brother Charles commanded a battalion during the war and got the C.M.G. and the D.S.O. Price-Heywood died during the war, Stanley Houghton before the war, in fact after his first reverse. Apparently he lacked the stamina to endure a set-back. Gerald Cumberland was wounded, I was disabled from further infantry duties by a shell explosion in a narrow and singularly damp and unpleasant trench.
Basil Dean became Amusement Director for the Rhine Army, which was quite an appropriate selection, mirabile dictu. I ran into Esme Percy in the Chatham bar one day soon after the Armistice. He was in kilts! I couldn't believe my eyes. In vain I pointed out that the fondest tradition of the Chatham Bar was that skirts were not admitted. He persisted in staying, and we drank profusely to all our comic memories. I forget what Highland regiment he had had the effrontery to join. That morning was one of the amusement high spots of a not unentertaining existence.
The death-roll of the Swan Club includes: Charles Abercrombie, who died after the war, and Gerald Cumberland in 1927. Two other members, Arnold Percy and Walter Burgess, also died. Seven out of twelve or fourteen.
I think only three or four works by members bore the Swan Club sign. There was a book by Brighouse, something by Marriott, a volume of two plays written by me which I bluffed the Manchester University publishers, Sherratt and Hughes, into publishing. They were published in 1912 and it is now 1938 and they are still not sold out.
One of the plays, a one-act called The Master, was taken by Iden Payne for Miss Horniman's Company. It was produced in Dublin with Esme Percy and Mona Limerick (Payne's then-wife) in the principal parts. It was put on as a curtain-raiser to a Shaw play. The first night was a gala performance and the Viceroy and the Vicereine, Lord and Lady Aberdeen, were present. On a sudden impulse I had travelled over with a Bacchic friend, who snored through the performance in the back of the “author's box.” I, too, had sampled the specialities of Dublin; my piece was what you might call a poetic tragedy and I was very angry when anyone laughed mistakenly. But my stentorian hushes neither calmed the risibility of the audience nor helped the performance. Dressed in the only suit I had with me, aggressively Donegal, I was presented to their Vice-majesties, and we passed together a brief and inarticulate moment from which I escaped with uncourtly abruptness and, awakening my friend, made a tour with him of what Dublin had to offer in the way of boites de nuit. A week after we returned I ran into W—, the friend in question, who flatly refused to believe he had ever been in Dublin.
Payne introduced me to some of the famous Abbey Theatre names, but the whole experience was so extravagant and hazy that Padraic Colum is the only one of them I remember.
The play was performed, I believe, a great number of times, and got some excellent notices. I had gone home and written it one evening after dinner in a fit of pique at having been told by some member of the Swan Club (Marriott probably) that I always talked and never did.
The other play in the same volume consisted of three acts. It belonged to the hysterico-romantic school, but there must have been some kind of quality in it because it earned me the sporadic friendship of Frank Vernon who was then, with Edward Knoblock, reading for Lena Ashwell. Gerald Cumberland, too, discovered some extraordinary quality in it and it was on account of it, presumably, that in one of his books James Agate referred to me as the poet of the purple socks and the passionate sunsets or vice-versa. James Agate is full of cultured charm, but he likes his friends to bite on the bullet whenever practicable.
Frank Vernon suggested that it should be performed by a stage society, but it was vetoed by George Bernard Shaw. I was glad to see a notice of Shaw's Apple Cart some time ago in a New York publisher's trade paper: The latest by Old Whiskers. All right for those who like that sort of thing. Reading that I felt, even if tardily, revenged for the veto.
I have written dozens of other plays, without so much as a smell of success. At one fine period of my life I collaborated with Frank Vernon. The procedure was that we should discuss an idea for a play together. I would re-write it; he would crab it and tear it to pieces; I would re-write it; the same again and then we would send it to a manager or producer or whatever the illiterate animals call themselves; they would chuck it away into a waste-paper basket; we would discuss an idea for a play; I would....
Chapter Four
IN those days of effort and action, between 1908 and 1910 we young Manchester men believed sincerely in an artistic risorgimento led by Manchester. In the Hallé Orchestra and Miss Horniman's Gaiety Theatre we had solid manifestations of our superiority over other towns, even London. The Manchester Musical Society was the emanation of the revolutionary spirit that is proper to youth and risorgimentos. Even the Playgoers' Club listened to me when I suggested that they had another mission than to listen on stated evenings to stage-struck members drivelling commonplaces.
They elected me to the committee, and in my year of office I got from London Galsworthy (then a rising star of the Theatre whose Silver Box Miss Horniman had recently presented with Basil Dean superb in the principal part), Hilaire Belloc, Frank Harris (he made a gorgeous and ill-mannered attack on conventional Shakespeare commentators and notably on C. H. Herford, professor of English literature at Manchester University, whom he had detected in the audience), and Gordon Craig, who gave us a wonderful description of his dreams of a future theatre. It is significant of England's essential indifference to art that Gordon Craig, a genius of the purest water who is responsible for the Moscow Art Theatre, for Max Reinhardt, for every inspired improvement in theatrical production, should never have been given an adequate opportunity of devoting his manifold gifts to the service and artistic aggrandisement of his country.
And I must not forget the Manchester Guardian, the old lady of Cross Street, to whose liberal skirts clung such notabilities and future notabilities as C. E. Montague, A. N. Monkhouse, Herbert (Scrutator) Sidebotham; Ernest Newman, the most important musical critic of the age according to the Germans who know something about music; G. H. Mair, a Scotsman of talent who with old (Lord) Riddell was in charge of Press relations at the Astoria, British H.Q. of the Peace Conference, and died untimely; James Agate coruscating like the very devil on off moments from selling cotton and training hackney ponies; Stanley Houghton, judge and jury and a pale imitation of practically everybody, and Brig-house. Of them only Agate and Brighouse still write for the Guardian!
What an intrinsically great paper is the Manchester Guardian! I bought a copy the other day, and nothing had changed, neither style nor appearance except that the halftone illustrations were so improved that they must be the best in journalism to-day. Everything else, the make-up, the attitude, the advertisements, the Births, Marriages, and Deaths, the “back-pagers,” that we all strove to contribute, partly for the glory, partly for the three guineas... Lord Northcliffe, a genius of the [...]
