Modest Hack
Mark Amory
As I walked down New Grub Street Walter Allen (Heinemann pp. 277, £8.95) Walter Allen describes himself as a literary journalist and is indifferent whether you vary that with 'man of letters' or 'hack'. He has never faltered in his devotion to literature and has probably read and discussed as many good novels as any man alive; he has also written six of his own, the last of which, All in a Lifetime, was a bestseller. His autobiography is about books and writers, with no mention of sex, and hardly any emotion. We hear of his wife only that she was a physiotherapist and that they decided to get married within 24 hours of meeting. It is not stated whether they had children.
The facts of his life are unexciting. A working-class boy born in Birmingham in 1911 who is to become Literary Editor of the New Statesman must follow a predictable path quite closely. There will be Grammar School, a kind English master, University (Birmingham), reviewing and journalism, a book or two. Views will include reverence for D. H. Lawrence (yes), socialism (Gaitskellite), contempt for say, Evelyn Waugh (not really) and hostility to America (not at all). Allen escapes the stereotype only by being too tolerant. All this is a mere scaffolding from which to hang portraits of friends who wrote and writers whom he met. The index is packed with promising names. I settled down full of confidence.
Which soon turned to dismay. The stories were slight, his acquaintance with their subjects slighter. Wells and Shaw were read rather than met. Katherine Mansfield had once occupied a chair that he too sat in. John Wain was later to be taught by his tutor. Among the teachers under whom he might have studied, but did not, were Helen Gardner, who joined the staff a year or two later, and William Empson who failed to get the job. When in the Fifties Eric Linklater and Allen 'realised that if he had gone to be interviewed, he might well have taught me, we both became very excited'; an emotion I cannot share. Barrels are only scraped this bare when the search is for scraps concerning figures of the order of Christ or Tolstoy and we are hardly dealing with those. More famous names are to come however: Allen only just missed lunching with Hemingway in New York and has always regretted it, he was reviewed by Edwin Muir and indeed met him later, but has forgotten their conversation, he read Beckett's first novel for MGM but did not recommend them to film it. All this is not a sneer — it might happen, or just not happen, to anyone; but it is scarcely worth recording.
Then just as hope was dying, things improved, the gossip started to come alive. To be fair, Auden had already been mentioned entertainingly, though 'he was never a friend', as had Louis MacNeice, who was to become one. Now near the end of the war Allen met Henry Green and is interesting about him not only because while we wait in ignorance for Paul Bailey's biography almost anything about Henry Green is interesting, but because Allen is good at conveying what Green was like then, before he entered English Literature and his qualities became official, the stuff of exams. Soon we hear even more chattily that L. P. Hartley had constant trouble with his servants. His housekeeper left elaborate flower-arrangements on his bed. 'When one night however one appeared that was quite unambiguous in its symbolism — the stem of one of his pipes protruded towards him from a nest of primroses on his pillow — he was alarmed and consulted Elizabeth Bowen'. She said, 'Leslie, you must get rid of the woman at once', and he did. Allen describes meetings with writers he much admired — Wyndham Lewis, Joyce Cary, Richard Hughes — and skillfully blends in the reasons for his admiration. He also writes of lesser figures, his world overlapping that of Anthony Powell's excellent Books Do Furnish A Room: 'He [Julian Maclaren-Ross] chainsmoked cigarettes through an amber holder, for Edgar Wallace was another hero. And he carried a cane with a silver knob.
This, he said, was in case he should meet the critic John Davenport, who combined considerable charm with enormous strength and was given from time to time to beating up other people. I recall being at a party of Olivia Manning's, sitting in an armchair after midnight and becoming aware of a shadow looming over me. I looked up, and there was Davenport with his fist clenched above my head. I was terrified and waited for the fist to come down on my skull. Instead, Davenport leaned over and kissed the top of my head, saying, "Walter, I love you dearly". It has always seemed to me a narrow escape.'
Modest success had brought this modest man to a position from which he has written a hundred intensely enjoyable pages describing that milieu as well as anyone yet has. There is a slight falling off when he starts to travel. Teaching jobs in American colleges do not provide comparable material. He hears that Lionel Trilling likes the Beatles, finds Alistair Cooke a ruthless competitor for taxis and is told of a pleasant conversation between Huxley and Isherwood on Lope de Vega. Huxley had not read him; Isherwood, familiar with two of the 500 plays, said he had. Huxley asked what they were like; Isherwood replied 'Bloody awful'. Huxley smiled beautifully and said, 'Oh, Christopher, I'm so glad to hear you say so.' Nice, but then they are both Englishmen. Characteristically when in Russia as a guest of the Writers' Union Allen does not mention the Hermitage but is fascinated by the tenement building which was the model for the one in which Raskolnikov murders the pawnbroker — `Dostoievsky was one of the great literalists of the imagination, one of those in whom creation is fostered by the contemplation of the actual.' Allen seems to me a domestic who does not travel too well, in whom creation is fostered by contemplation of the familiar. On his home ground in the good years after the war he is first rate, worthy to be placed beside Memoirs of the Forties by J. Maclaren Ross.
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