In my note on ‘Trying to Find a Corridor of Mirrors’, I explained that both the author, Chris Massie, and his book, were unusually elusive. Readers kindly contributed thoughts and information about these, and I have followed up the suggestion by one reader, Gali-Dana, of looking at his book The Confessions of a Vagabond (1931).
Wandering and hiking books were popular in the Thirties, but this is not a chronicle of agreeable amblings in the byways of Britain. It is instead a record of the poverty and hardship of Massie’s early days, especially as a struggling writer. This book itself is quite uncommon, so it may be worth recording what it tells us about Massie.
It begins: ‘It was after the war and I was a partially disabled ex-service man, destitute in London’. He had been a hospital orderly in France during the retreat of March 1918, at one point with sixty badly-injured patients under his care and very little he could do to help them. He was himself wounded and concussed during the war.
He confirms that his first books were accounts of serving with the Royal Army Medical Corps, Reflections from France (1916) and Red or Khaki, or Impressions of a Stretcher-Bearer (Manchester: Blackfriars Press, 1918), adding ‘Much of my work was done there in the evening by the light of two sputtering candles in a dug-out.’ He is forthright about the futility of the war and the brutal discipline meted out to independent-minded soldiers like himself by their own side, in his case resulting in lasting injuries.
In his Confessions, Massie explains that he was born ‘in needy circumstances’ and had to leave school at 14 to start work. He was already absorbed by books, and would have liked to educate himself further, but his family needed the money. He was apprenticed to a goldsmith: not an opulent job, as it may sound, but hard work ‘from dawn to dark’. The work, he said, ‘filled me with cynical contempt. We were turning out luxury goods for the idle rich’.
He lists many other jobs he did for a while: ‘I have been a soldier, a tramp, a goldsmith, a sign-writer, and a costermonger. I have been a carpenter’s mate, a clerk at a Labour Exchange, a bottle washer at a beer bottling factory, and a dramatic critic. I have written books, reviewed books, been a reporter, and addressed envelopes for a living.’ But what he really wanted to do was write. He did succeed in placing articles in Labour newspapers and periodicals and a miscellany of other places, but not enough to make a living.
In 1913 he sent an artfully composed begging letter to H.G. Wells asking for £3. Unfortunately, ‘it failed gloriously.’ Wells replied: ‘Dear Massie, I put your letter on one side to think it over, and I won’t do as you ask. You have a gift; you have genius. Your work in its way is as good as my work in my way; and why the devil I should have to do the finance business for you is more than I can understand.’ However, this was not Wells’ final word: he was in fact ‘most generous’. He also sent two of Massie’s stories to the prestigious English Review, who took them.
In 1922 he also had help from John Galsworthy, who sent him £15 so he could get married and write a bestseller he had in mind. Neither plan worked out: instead, he became a down-and-out, tramping the roads, spinning a yarn to strangers and seeking, but not always getting, alms. ‘I have written three novels in a workhouse’ he notes. They were his three earliest novels: Lady (1925), Peccavi (1929) and They Being Dead Yet Speak (1929). He gives a strong, unalloyed description of his workhouse days and the hopeless fates of his fellow inmates, though also with respect for their individual characters and peculiarities. He also gives account of others on the margins of society, beggars, match-sellers (‘timber merchants’ in the trade), hawkers, and some with sly and not quite legal routines.
Massie says at the end of his book that it is a confession of failure, but that his experiences have brought him into contact with the generosity and dignity of people living in the hardest of circumstances. He much prefers these to the sleeker sort in greater prosperity.
Soon after, Massie’s dedication to writing finally began to be recognised. He became a regularly-published novelist, with a new title every year or two: and, as we have seen, some of his novels were made into films. However, without doubt his upbringing and early vicissitudes and his own sense of failure made their mark: many of his books are about harried individuals in desperate circumstances.
(Mark Valentine)
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