The Centenary of 'Harmer John' by Hugh Walpole: A Guest Post by John Howard

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)

The Centenary of 'Crewe Train' by Rose Macaulay: A Guest Post by John Howard

 Novels can be journeys of discovery for their characters – and sometimes readers. Some describe development and bring revelation, while others expand on and confirm what has already been stated, perhaps early on. Among the latter is Crewe Train by Rose Macaulay (1881-1958). First published one hundred years ago, Macaulay’s fifteenth novel seems to have been in demand. There were four further impressions that year. The copy I read, discovered on the crowded shelves of a bookshop in Southeast London, was the sixth, dated June 1927. Full of wry and dry observation and comment, Crewe Train is one of those novels that cries out to be described as a ‘comedy of manners’. It is that, along with much else, including tragedy, misunderstanding – and love at cross-purposes. And perhaps above all, of a tremendous loneliness.

Denham Dobie – ‘named for her mother’s favourite Buckinghamshire village’ – was the daughter of a clergyman. Mr Dobie gave up his calling after his wife’s death because ‘he was tired of being so busy, so sociable, and so conversational, […] calling on parishioners and asking them how they did – an inquiry the answer to which he was wholly indifferent.’ Wishing to get away, he moved to Mallorca, taking his daughter, then seven, with him: ‘abroad you are less surrounded by inquisitive and sociable persons who wonder why you do nothing, and insist on conversing with you.’ After several years he found Mallorca had become too busy with visitors, so moved to Andorra, because it was difficult to get to. Rather to his surprise, Dobie married again and had two more children. But he still felt plagued by visitors who had discovered the ‘Hidden Republic’. Then he suddenly died.

Denham’s maternal aunt, Evelyn Gresham, who was visiting at the time, carries Denham, now 21, off to London – which from the outset she dislikes intensely. Denham, who had grown up to not like people and talking, must adjust to a crowded and frenetic life in London. She had been taken into a large and loud family of high achievers. In effect swallowed alive, Denham is embarked on an odyssey: that of an unconventional young woman made to feel that she must seek the ‘Higher Life’: the constant activity of socialising and talking, reading and playgoing, parties and dinners and weekends at country houses that is normality to the Gresham family.

In Crewe Train places are more than just settings, backgrounds. In such a character-driven novel they take on some aspects of characters, their own distinctions, especially the vibrant all-embracing London of crowds and incident that Denham detested and longed to escape. (This is in contrast to the tired. shattered London of Macaulay’s penultimate novel The World My Wilderness [1950], in which Denham would have felt much more at home.)

Denham remained an outsider: ‘Into their gay, urbane civilisation Denham returned, like an explorer from solitary places, full of secret, savage joys and cares’ (173). Crewe Train explores how someone such as Denham can live in the world – and the world live with her. Late in the book, a cousin speculates: ‘Suppose…that people always did literally and precisely what they were bidden to do, took what was said to them at the foot of the letter, what a different world it would be, and how oddly it would behave. A world of people all behaving rather like Denham, who was at present perhaps the only literal adult person in it’ (269).

This is the Denham who has fallen in love with Peter Gresham’s publishing partner, Arnold Chapel. They marry, Denham having converted to her husband’s Roman Catholicism. Her loathing of London does not decrease, but her husband’s work dictates that he must live there. Denham finds and furnishes a cottage in Cornwall, but holidays are not enough. In love but deeply conflicted, the couple come to find themselves periodically living separate lives. Questionings occur. ‘Perfect freedom was never attained, never while you had a companion. […] Did one, then, never break down the prejudices of the well-bred about how to live? Did there never come a day when the well-bred said, “Dash it all, we won’t wash to-day, neither our persons nor the plates and cups?”’ (191)

Eventually Arnold and Denham buy a house in Metro-land Buckinghamshire – within commuting distance of London. In a sense Denham has come to where she started, named before the beginning of the novel by a family member the reader never meets. She gets back, ‘numbly acquiescent, to acceptance of the Higher Life’ and becomes resigned. ‘Love broke one in the end, ground one down, locked the fetters on one’s free limbs. […] You might struggle and rebel but in the end love got you’ (299). Faced with the prospect of her life being run to a timetable, Denham ‘thought of it…’ (307)

Perhaps only a reader as literal-minded as Denham Dobie would wonder about the title Crewe Train: although there are trains in the text, none of them go to Crewe. On the title page Macaulay quoted two lines from the music hall song “Oh Mr Porter” in which – as it’s surely not possible not to know – a young female train passenger laments: ‘Oh Mr Porter, whatever shall I do? / I want to go to Birmingham, but they’ve sent me on to Crewe!’ The lost young lady had found herself on the wrong track. She had missed her intended destination and ended up somewhere that only existed because it was a vast junction.

It was not Denham’s fault that she had the same experience: her father, through his outlook and example, had determined her direction and then abdicated all responsibility. Rose Macaulay dedicated Crewe Train to ‘The Philistines, The Barbarians, The Unsociable, and those who do not care to take any trouble’ – and showed that Denham was one of them. At the other, far, end of the book Denham came to a halt as if having hit the buffers. Or will she realise that the terminus was a junction after all and it might still be possible to change and set out again on the right track? Or was remaining on the platform, lost among the branching tracks, the only way for Denham to be true to herself? Any journey is made at a cost. Whatever should she do?

(John Howard)

The Centenary of 'Dreads and Drolls' by Arthur Machen: A Guest Post by John Howard

Arthur Machen regularly contributed short stories, vignettes, and articles to literary periodicals from early in his career. Never able to make a good and reliable living by journalism – let alone his books – after the death of his first wife Machen went on the stage, joining Frank Benson’s touring company. He continued to publish articles and reviews in numerous London literary magazines, but still found it necessary to seek steady employment to gain the regular income only that could provide.

In 1910 Machen became a full-time journalist, joining the London Evening News and settling to write what was assigned to him, in its required style and to its length. However, he was also allowed something of a ‘roving commission’ and the newspaper would publish his story “The Bowmen” and serialise the original versions of The Great Return and The Terror. It also serialised “Confessions of a Literary Man”, published in book form as Far-Off Things (1922). Machen worked at the Evening News until 1921 when he had to resign over an obituary of Lord Alfred Douglas, who, as he lived to 1945, had been in a position to sue Machen’s employer for a large sum in damages. Machen made no secret of his loathing of his time on the newspaper, referring to it in The London Adventure as ‘a prostitution of the soul’. But he still needed to earn a living, and continued to write for newspapers and magazines.

During the 1920s, when his work was finally but rather fleetingly in demand from trade book publishers, Machen was able to reprint some of the essays that he had published over the years. Two selections were included by Vincent Starrett in his American compilations The Shining Pyramid (1923) and The Glorious Mystery (1924). In the UK Machen collected 27 essays in Dog and Duck (1924) and there was a revised edition of The Shining Pyramid. There were two collections in 1926: Notes and Queries appeared late in the year, having been preceded by Dreads and Drolls a century ago this month.

Dreads and Drolls collected 29 articles that Machen had published in The Graphic, a weekly newspaper which had been founded in 1869 to compete with The Illustrated London News. While he was preparing the book Machen was still contributing to The Graphic – this came to an end at about the time Dreads and Drolls was published, with 60 articles written in total (all of which were finally collected in the expanded edition published by Tartarus Press in 2007). In a prefatory Note Machen wrote that his ‘“Dreads” and “Drolls” were gathered from all sorts of sources. Most of them are strictly veridical, but it may be confessed that here and there imagination plays a small part.’ That was certainly quite a get-out clause.

In “The Man With the Silver Staff” Machen wrote of the clown Joe Grimaldi and how he fell foul of Old Lucas, the notoriously corrupt Parish Constable of Clerkenwell, whose perjuries against the innocent had never been successfully challenged. But the mere appearance in the police office of a mysterious stranger brandishing a silver staff made Lucas retract his accusations against Grimaldi. Machen gave no explanation or theory: he seemingly did no more than recount a strange, old, story.

It was at the beginning of “The Mystery of Mr Haddock” that Machen stated what was in effect his manifesto for the type of work he preferred to write, not only in the series for The Graphic, but for most of his contributions to the periodicals: ‘Everything that is old is dear to me, but more especially the old which is ramshackle, disreputable, up a court or down an alley. […] I cannot define this curious joy of the down-at-heel hidden in a dark place…’ Machen took his readers along such a route to recount some possibly inexplicable events at “7B Coney Court”. Set in a favourite region of London, he went for the verisimilitude of sense of place – but declared that all names and places were fictitious. However – ‘assuming for the moment that names and places are as true as the tale’ Curzon’s Inn lies ‘somewhere between Fleet Street and Holborn. It is approached by a maze of crooked courts and paved alleys, guarded by iron posts…’ Coney Court itself is ‘of a dim red of ancient brickwork; the entrances are enriched with Corinthian pilasters, in the manner of the older doorways in King’s Bench Walk in the Temple; and the carved wooden penthouses over these doorways have been attributed to Grinling Gibbons…’ The story is told at one remove at least, and is a remarkable piece that has the characteristics of what might now be called an urban myth – if it was not an outright piece of fiction. 

He returned to favoured subjects. “Casanova in London” describes some amusing (and possibly not so amusing) things that happened to him during his visit, which ended with Casanova's departure, as he ‘wisely posted away with all speed on the Dover Road.’ In  “The Little People” Machen described the Asiki or ‘Little Beings’ who lived in the French Congo – finding similarities with the ‘fairies’ of Welsh and Irish folklore, and theories of the small dark indigenous inhabitants of the land who had retreated from the invading Celts. There were essays that reported on topical and current issues, if only so Machen could use them as reasons to reminisce or recount anecdotes gathered from wide reading and innumerable encounters. He could never keep away from the eighteenth century and the London that Dr Johnson knew. For example, although Machen began “Before Wembley” with the British Empire Exhibition of 1924-25, he gave most of his space to London’s vanished pleasure gardens, declaring that he was ‘for a return to Vauxhall’.

The years Machen spent as a newspaper journalist covering stories in all parts of London and throughout the country, much as he hated them, had provided him with the ability to write, apparently at least, with an easy facility – although, to some extent, at a cost to his earlier style. Even so, his articles and essays possessed a vivid and distinctive quality that only a thoughtful and accomplished writer – one with a deep ‘hinterland’ – could have given them. Their hearty individuality shone through and engaged the reader as Machen expressed his opinions and prejudices in a combative yet usually good-humoured manner. With their alluring and evocative titles, Machen’s best essays were discursive and leisurely as they developed their themes along wandering paths that could end far from the beginning and in unexpected places. ‘This is a great gift: to be able so to tell the bare truth that it seems a magnificent lie. To many of us it is rather given to invent elaborate fictions which are plainer (and duller) than the plainest facts.’

(John Howard)

The Centenary of 'The World of William Clissold' by H.G. Wells: A Guest Post by John Howard

H.G. Wells’ novel The World of William Clissold opens with precision set in time: ‘Yesterday I was fifty-nine, and in a year I shall be sixty.’ First published one hundred years ago, appearing in three volumes over three months from August 1926, both author and his protagonist-author celebrated their sixtieth birthdays that year. It was an appropriate time for Wells to make his most determined – and certainly longest – attempt through fiction to create and portray – to embrace – a world.

During his long career Wells was many things – and certainly a ‘novelist of ideas’. Colin Wilson – who was another – discussed some of them in the long preface to his novel Man Without a Shadow (1963). He made the case that Wells was the ‘finest – and most underestimated’ novelist of ideas. This was because of the ‘characteristic that distinguished all his later work: a desire to write with urgency about real problems – the problems he felt at the time of writing – as well as telling a story. Sometimes the result was superb […] Sometimes it was indifferent […] In The World of William Clissold he tries to make the novel as big as life, and fails.’ This was not due to Wells’ want of ambition or willingness to experiment: ‘As a novelist, Wells lacked what [Henry] James possessed – the desire to give his books reality, even if it took a thousand fine brush strokes. He can write well only about his own life and experiences, but not about other people’s. Still, what he wanted to do to the novel was in no way as old-fashioned as the followers of Joyce and Eliot pretended.’

Wells felt the need to justify ‘what he wanted to do to the novel’. In ‘A Note Before the Title Page’ (five pages in my edition) he asserted: ‘Novels with prefaces are like pictures with inscriptions below them; there is a confession that something was left over and had to be expressed by an addendum. This book […] is claimed to be a complete dress-novel, that and nothing more. William Clissold is a fictitious character, and his thoughts and ideas throughout are the thoughts and ideas natural to his mental and social type. He is (to the best of the author’s ability) his own self and not his author’s self, in his emotional reactions, in his hard wilfulness, in his faith, in his political ideas, in his judgements. He is a specimen of modern liberalism, using liberalism in its broadest sense. He is a study of a modern type seeking modes of self-realisation. […] If you are the sort of person who will not accept it as a novel, then please leave it alone. You are not getting sly peeps at something more than the reality of art, and your attempts to squint through will only make you squint very unbecomingly.’

When we get there, squinting or not, it is William Clissold who must justify himself: ‘It is not exactly an autobiography I want to write, and not exactly a book of confessions. […] I should say that a description of my world best expresses what I have in view; my world and my will. I want it to be a picture of everything as it is reflected in my brain. I want it to be a comprehensive picture.’ Clissold describes how he sees the world and human life, including the loss of his religious faith. He goes on to recount his early life and that of his brother Richard (usually referred to as Dickon). Dickon marries, raises a family and becomes successful in advertising, and is awarded a knighthood. William puts his scientific training to good use as a researcher and inventor, so that his employers ‘came to realise that they had to pay fairly for the science and initiative I could give them’. He runs a profitable subsidiary, the Clissold Mineral Paint Company. Unlike his brother’s, Clissold’s love-life is intense and fraught. But after a failed marriage and several affairs, he meets Clementina. Their relationship, while not conventional, is loving and provides the stability both desire.

Much space in the later part of the novel is devoted to the ‘Open Conspiracy’. (Wells went on to publish an entire book on his scheme, The Open Conspiracy: Blue Prints for a World Revolution, in 1928.) Clissold describes it as the belief that humanity is on the brink of ‘complete metamorphosis’ and those who are able perceive it must work to ensure it succeeds. Otherwise it could only proceed ‘against such increasing resistances that it may even fail to achieve itself, and end in the failure and death of the species.’ Clissold declares that ‘we can build up the monetary and economic world republic in full daylight under the noses of those who represent the old system. For the most part I believe that to understand us will be to be with us… It is not a project to overthrow existing governments by insurrectionary attacks, but to supersede them by disregard.’

Clissold also writes about his personal plans – but his intentions are to be unrealised. An epilogue by Dickon explains that his brother and Clementina were killed in a car accident, and his work left unfinished. Dickon closes the book with the Greek phrase: ‘Panta rhei [Everything flows]. He has passed. These words, and they are wonderful words and come like a refrain throughout his book, shall be put as his sole epitaph upon his grave.’

Having informed the reader about his intentions with an introductory note, Wells also gave a hint through the subtitle: ‘A Novel at a New Angle’. As Adam Roberts stated in H.G. Wells: A Literary Life (2019): the ‘“new angle” is more than simply the fitting together of equal parts narrative and disquisition to form one complete novel. It’s also that this novel includes among its fictional characters a great many real 1920s people, most of them friends of Wells’s… It is the admixture of the two modes, one fictional and one non-fictional, that had characterised Wells’s entire career, here worked more closely than ever before into a lamination.’

Wells bonded his layers so well and firmly that they cannot easily be prised apart – but had Colin Wilson still been right to believe that The World of William Clissold failed in its objective? Perhaps it could never have been otherwise. Yet: ‘Where William Clissold is good, it is […] electric with feeling, with personal intensity.’ That is where Wells truly succeeded – and still does. Wells made Clissold share the gifts he had. Everything flows. If Wells had been the one to die in 1926, his book completed by another hand, its last words would have still been accurate.

(John Howard)

Image: H.G. Wells by Walter Stoneman 1925

 © National Portrait Gallery, London