For some three decades Hugh Walpole (1884-1941) was a
popular and prolific author who was capable of writing (if not publishing) at
least one novel per year. These were substantial books, with heft not only in
weight but scope and intention: products of a man who loved the work of
Victorian novelists skilled in the creation of wide worlds to be entered and
explored at leisure, settings teeming with characters and incident that
reflected society – even as they could also lean towards its darker and more sensational
aspects. Walpole would throw himself into his own novels with an engagingly
childlike enthusiasm, writing swiftly and fluently with a reliability that
enabled his books to be announced and published with an almost clockwork
regularity. However, there was one novel that did not follow this established
routine: Harmer John, first published one hundred years ago in October
1926.
In his biography Hugh Walpole (1952), Rupert
Hart-Davis described how Walpole began his new novel at the end of 1922 but had
almost immediately to put it aside for work on another novel that he could have
complete and published in a magazine and in book form before the more complex and
reflective Harmer John could have been ready. (The ‘extra’ novel,
written over a few weeks, was The Old Ladies, which became the second of
the ‘Scenes from Provincial Life’ set in the Glebeshire cathedral city of
Polchester, preceding Harmer John, the third.)
Problems over scheduling were not the only reason for
Walpole’s atypical delay in finishing Harmer John. In 1920 he had
attended a concert and heard the young Danish tenor Lauritz Melchior
(1890-1973), who was ‘the joy of the evening […] quite superb. Just the voice
for me’ (Hugh Walpole 197). The two men met – and Walpole embarked on
one of his most important and intense voyages of friendship, one which
survived, despite initial discomfiture when Melchior remarried, until Walpole’s
death. It was during that period of emotional and time-consuming distraction
that Harmer John was written; it was perhaps out of relief as much as
gratitude that Walpole dedicated it to Melchior, under the name he always used
for him, ‘David’.
Subtitled ‘An Unworldly Story’, Harmer John is the
account of the Dane Hjalmar Johanson’s time in Polchester from his arrival
during a storm in December 1906 to his sudden and violent departure less than a
year later. It dramatizes the conflict between the unworldly and the world,
narrated in hindsight from 1926 by an unnamed native of the town who later
reveals himself to have met and helped Johanson at the time.
Characteristically, Walpole did not only show Polchester as a community
consisting of people, but broadened his gaze to also take in and involve their
setting: the streets and buildings of the town with its great cathedral, under
all kinds of weather and effects of sunshine and moonlight.
Johanson was an innocent and rather naïve young man when he
found refuge at Mrs Penethen’s boarding house. Handsome and with a superb body,
a qualified instructor in gymnastics and masseur – ‘personal trainer’ –
Johanson set himself up in business. Polchester quickly seemed to catch his
enthusiasm and embrace him, accepting, on the surface at least, the novelty of
his foreignness even as it stumbled over his name and adopted him as ‘Harmer
John’. Johanson wanted to be friends with everyone, no matter who they were –
and expected the same in return. He saw the best in everyone and always tried
to do the right thing: to do what he thought was right. From that basis Walpole
worked out and depicted the consequences of such an attitude – especially when
held by a visitor, an immigrant – in a small, isolated, rather conservative
community.
Book I, ‘His Arrival’ portrays Johanson’s ambition to
transform Polchester and improve its people. He will have ‘a school for
sculptors and artists and painters and make this town beautiful, keeping the
old lovely things and making new things in tune with them’ (66). Things seem to
be going well for the new inhabitant, yet he is unaware or unwilling to
acknowledge that in his drive to make his mark he has also made enemies –
including the unscrupulous and driven Samuel Hogg, owner of most of the property
in Seatown, Polchester’s small but shamefully nasty and repulsive slum
district.
It is Seatown, rather than Polchester, that would determine
Johanson’s fate. Angered by what he had heard, he goes exploring for himself
and enters a house lived in by a woman nursing her dying child. Perhaps
thinking him the doctor, she allows him to stroke the girl’s forehead. ‘Over
all the house there stood silence. For a long time his hand moved, then, the
child gently sleeping, he took her and laid her gently in the bed’ (206). Soon
rumours that Johanson had healed her start to spread; and from that time Hogg
takes for himself the role of ensuring that Johanson’s plans come to nothing
and will lead to his departure. Johanson’s developing relationship with
Polchester, and several of its key citizens, is elaborated in Book II, ‘Of How
He Stayed With Us’. Setbacks occur and relationships turn sour due to
misunderstanding and intransigence. To his friends Johanson still ‘has the
divine gift of tenderness and compassion’ – but for all his desire to ensure
the best for Seatown, he still fails to realise that many of its inhabitants
hate him (350ff).
In Book III, ‘How He Left Us’, despite the escalating gossip
and misinformation about him, Johanson does not lessen his ambitions for change
(422f). Johanson’s visit to a dying woman in Seatown and her death while there,
gives Hogg and his associates an opportunity not to be missed. The incited riot
is a fine example of one of the outbursts of violence and physical expressions
of hatred and abuse that occur throughout Walpole’s work, as if he had been
saving and impounding them for release at climactic moments. Left for dead,
Johanson is thrown into the river: but his body is never found. Years later
rumours still persist that ‘Harmer John’ did not die – and might return.
The date of Johanson’s death is given as 7 October: as well
as the date of a fictional death, was it also that of a real birth? Walpole’s
dedication to ‘David’ also included the date ‘October 7th, 1920’. Was this the
date, a fortnight or so after Walpole first saw him, that he considered the
inauguration of his deep friendship with Lauritz Melchior, another handsome
blond Dane? Walpole always maintained a special fondness for Harmer John,
one of his most ‘intensely personal books, into which he felt he had put more
of himself than he had bestowed on any of his others’ (Hugh Walpole
358f). Friendship is never wasted.
(John Howard)
