The Man Who Enjoyed Everything

If Sir Edward Marsh appears in a few literary reference books, it is as the editor of five anthologies of Georgian poetry published between 1911 and 1922, the idea for which came from Rupert Brooke. As Brooke said, they ‘went up like a rocket’; ‘Yes, and came down like a stick,’ Marsh ruefully recalled. But his name pops up unexpectedly – usually just as ‘Eddie’ – in many memoirs and biographies of twentieth-century figures from Henry James to Ivor Novello, Somerset Maugham to David Cecil, D. H. to T. E. Lawrence. And he was for a quarter of a century the close friend and assistant of Winston Churchill.

He had an enormous talent for friendship, a lesser talent for discretion, and a love of a good story – displayed almost relentlessly in his memoir A Number of People, which came out in 1939. I bought my copy at least fifty years ago, from the tray outside Sheila Ramage’s wonderful bookshop just along the street in Notting Hill. It’s still marked 1/6, in pencil, and was certainly second-hand, if not third- or fourth-. The cover fell off on the way home. Did I really want it? Always a sucker for a good anecdote, it didn’t take me long to decide. Born in 1872, the son of a surgeon who became Master of Downing College, Cambridge, Eddie was fortunate in his mother, who read to him incessantly – he heard all the Waverley novels and all the major novels of Dickens between the ages of 10 and 12. He had a brilliant career at Cambridge, during which he excelled in Latin and Greek, passing the time while waiting for the papers to be turned out on the morning of an examination by making an elegant Latin translation of Wordsworth’s sonnet on Westminster Bridge. He went into the Civil Service, and worked as a Private Secretary to a succession of Britain’s most powerful ministers, beginning with Joseph Chamberlain. Much of his career was spent with Churchill, following him to every department he occupied until 1929. He got on as well with his master as they both did with Ivor Novello, and recalls an evening during which his two friends competed with each other in singing the music-hall songs of the 1880s – Ivor remembered all the tunes, while Churchill remembered all the lyrics. Whether Eddie rivalled Ivor in looks is questionable – in charm, clearly, but though some friends called him handsome, both his portrait by his friend Neville Lytton and a bust by Frank Dobson seem to focus almost entirely on what Graham Sutherland described as ‘those extraordinary upturned eyebrows’ which another friend termed ‘elfin’. Everyone agreed on his ‘high, light, slightly lisping, withdrawn yet infinitely persuasive voice, the quizzical regard and the tensed elegant body’ (Sutherland again), and Max Beerbohm drew him as an immaculately dressed figure with a monocle on a gold chain and four official keys dangling from another, silver one. His persuasive tact no doubt helped him in his career as a highly efficient civil servant. His knighthood, conferred on him in private audience by King George at a second attempt – he forgot to go to Buckingham Palace on the first date given him – was for services to Government. His heart, however, was in books, art and the theatre – and in making friends, some rich, some poor. Staying with Neville Lytton in his Paris studio they spent a whole night dropping bedbugs into a bath of insecticide, ‘in which they swam about triumphantly, like Rhine-Maidens, and in the end had to be burnt’. Maurice Baring however had enough money to indulge in such expensive jokes as producing an exquisite leather-bound book for his friends which, Everythingwhen opened, proved to consist only of a single page bearing the Lord’s Prayer, with a loose ticket stating that it came ‘With the author’s compliments’. No snob, Eddie certainly loved a lord – and a lady – and the more eccentric they were the more they delighted him. He either remembered their conversation vividly or jotted down the most memorable phrases in the small notebook he always carried. His friend Mrs Asquith (a.k.a. Margot Tennant, a.k.a. Lady Oxford) had a unique turn of phrase, ‘calling a visitor who “put on” a relentless American accent “an imitation rough diamond”’. Of another acquaintance, ‘so-and-so told enough white lies to ice a cake’, and of a certain politician, ‘of course he can’t see a belt without hitting below it’. Asked whether she believed in ghosts, she answered, ‘Appearances are in their favour.’ One of his closest friends was Lady Betty Balfour, whose general affability got her into trouble: she ‘once rode on the top of an omnibus all the way from Piccadilly Circus to Addison Road in colloquy with a working-man whose wife had just died, leaving him with a number of small children. Such was the sympathy and wisdom with which she counselled him that just before she reached her stop he asked her to marry him.’ Eddie was an unobtrusive homosexual, but even during his life-time there were certainly clues. A Number of People is illustrated with photographs which surely must have told a story, even in 1939 – there is little to choose, for stunning profiles, between Neville Lytton, Patrick Shaw-Stewart, Ivor Novello and Rupert Brooke. But he is of course reticent in what he wrote of them – and he barely mentions the painter Mark Gertler, with whom he had a passionate and turbulent relation-ship. Brooke, by general consent the most beautiful young man in England, was the love of his life, but sadly for him was not gay. However their friendship was deep, as their letters reveal, and Eddie’s introductory essay to Brooke’s poems, published posthumously, remains probably the most perceptive assessment of him. The Russell brothers were also close friends. Claude and Gilbert had profiles like Greek statues. Claude, having difficulty in packing his clothes after a weekend, remarked, ‘It’s astonishing how much more room dirty clothes take than clean ones – quite out of proportion to the amount of dirt;’ while Gilbert, discussing money with his friend the Aga Khan, recalled him saying, ‘I suppose a thousand pounds to me is about the same as sixpence to you.’ Gilbert promptly produced a half-crown and said, ‘Would you mind giving me change for this?’ Eddie’s taste in books was catholic: on a visit to Paris, he came back with a clandestine copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover but found himself ‘quite unable to get through it’, and lent it to T. E. Lawrence, who wrote: ‘I’m re-reading it with a slow, deliberate carelessness, trying to fancy I’ve never read a D. H. L. before . . . [he] has always been so rich and ripe a writer to me, before, that I’m deeply puzzled and hurt by this Lady Chatterley of his. Surely the sex business isn’t worth all this damned fuss? I’ve only met a handful of people who really cared a biscuit for it.’ Eddie more or less rescued D. H. from the authorities during the war, when he was accused of being a German spy. There is nothing about that in the book, and he was discreet enough not to say anything illuminating about life at the Foreign Office. His account of his 1908 travels with Churchill to British East Africa, Uganda, the Sudan and Egypt is, sadly, not especially vivid (though he was pleased when the elder of a Ugandan tribe called him Bwana Balozui, or ‘Big Noise’, because he looked ‘much the fiercest’ of the group of diplomats). He published verse translations of La Fontaine and Horace, edited several of Churchill’s books and was considered the best proofreader of his time. Among the authors who sent him their galleys and proofs were Maugham, David Cecil and Harold Nicolson. ‘To the onlie begetter of the ensuing commas,’ one of them inscribed a presentation copy; but, though he felt passionately about punctuation, he loved a good, readable style. ‘You don’t listen to what you are writing, you don’t listen enough,’ he would cry plaintively in his high, insistent voice. And his marginal comments were remorseless: ‘You really must have been feeling very tired when you wrote this chapter,’ or more tersely, ‘What on earth is this supposed to mean?’ If A Number of People is enjoyable to read, Eddie’s life was clearly enjoyable to live. He enjoyed his work, he enjoyed his friends, he enjoyed his life – everything about it. He enjoyed theatre ‘like a child’, and was completely undiscerning. When Arnold Bennett had a new play on, and the critic James Agate told him, ‘Eddie Marsh enjoyed it,’ Bennett replied, ‘Hang Eddie Marsh. He’s a miserable fellow – he enjoys everything.’ ‘I should rather like that on my tombstone,’ wrote Eddie.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 57 © Derek Parker 2018