Umbrellas at Dawn

‘I don’t think he’ll be remembered at all.’ The hugely successful novelist sat in his apartment at No. 90 Piccadilly confiding to his diary. ‘His only fault’, he continued, ‘was his pomposity about himself and his works.’ The year was 1937 and the man of letters, within weeks of being knighted for his services to literature, was musing on the passing away – prematurely at the age of 55 – of the poet and dramatist John Drinkwater.

From his desk overlooking Green Park, the richest novelist of his age was commenting on the foibles of a less successful colleague and competitor. At this moment he seemed master of all he surveyed – the purveyor of best-selling fiction with a literary gloss that placed him comfortably above the Howard Springs and Warwick Deepings of the world; recently returned from a profitable period in Hollywood writing screenplays for several directors, including George Cukor; a man whose vast wealth had allowed him to become a respected collector of books and paintings, and a well-known and generous patron and benefactor of the literary circle of the day. But four years later he too was to die prematurely, at 57, and, more shocking and difficult to credit, he was soon to be as forgotten as John Drinkwater. His name was Hugh Walpole. It is hard today to appreciate the extent of Hugh Walpole’s success. Not only did his novels – which had appeared annually since his first triumph, Mr Perrin and Mr Traill, in 1911 – consistently head the best-seller lists, but he was also a well-known public figure on both sides of the Atlantic. At the time of his death in 1941, he was giving a series of wartime propaganda broadcasts to the USA called ‘Hugh Walpole Talking’. His views were sought, his opinions respected. Hugh Walpole was master of his game. Yet there has always been a problem about the reputation of this seemingly dominant figure. Even within his lifetime, Walpole was treated by many as a figure of fun; infamously by W. Somerset Maugham, who caricatured him as the ghastly snob and intellectual mediocrity Alroy Kear in Cakes and Ale. The influential critic (and husband of Katherine Mansfield) John Middleton Murry listed Walpole in the same category of novelist as Sir Hall Caine and Ethel M. Dell – an insult which Walpole never forgave. Indeed, a weakness of this essentially kind and generous man was a pomposity about himself and his work – the very characteristic he was quick to point out in John Drinkwater. On the death of George Moore in 1933 Walpole wrote in his diary, ‘Very few English novelists senior to me now – Wells, Galsworthy, Kipling.’ There was also the obvious delight he took in receiving his knighthood, an honour that the arguably more worthy John Galsworthy had rejected some years earlier. Walpole’s long-standing feud with the playwright St John Ervine was much commented on at the time. It was based on an incident which parallels the famous umbrella war in Mr Perrin and Mr Traill. In this novel, the two central characters develop a hatred for each other that begins when the younger man accidentally helps himself to the umbrella of his senior colleague. The Walpole Ervine dispute began as a consequence of the housewarming party Walpole gave when he purchased his first substantial property – in Regent’s Park. ‘I have everything you could possibly want,’ he rather foolishly announced to his guests. ‘Brazil nuts?’ enquired St John Ervine. There were no Brazil nuts. Ervine was not forgiven. If Walpole did have a high view of his own worth though, it was shared by others. In 1914, Henry James had listed in the Times Literary Supplement the four young men he saw as the ‘rising stars’ of English fiction: Gilbert Cannan, D. H. Lawrence, Compton Mackenzie and Hugh Walpole. The list of names suggests that despite his mastery of style, James was no great judge of talent, for of his selection one name is now totally forgotten, two are half-forgotten, and the reputation of D. H. Lawrence is not as secure as it was. Nevertheless, Walpole’s appearance on the list, when he was only 30, indicates that his own generous assessment of his ability had some substance. In addition, Walpole became a critic and reviewer respected even by those who despised his fiction. Many of Walpole’s novels do stand up to the test of time. A modern reader might be best advised to begin with Mr Perrin and Mr Traill. Unlike later Walpole ‘blockbusters’, it is a succinct contemporary tale based upon carefully observed and psychologically subtle characters. Its background is an English public school on the Cornish coast, though all the details of the school are based on Epsom College in Surrey where Walpole had taught while undertaking his apprenticeship as a novelist. In exploring the bitterness which develops between a young, enthusiastic and energetic teacher and an older, long-serving senior member of staff, Walpole beautifully conveys the insularity and claustrophobia that can develop in a close-knit institution. The authorities at Epsom College, it must be said, were unhappy with the way in which Walpole portrayed the school, but the rift was eventually healed in 1937 when the newly knighted Sir Hugh presented the prizes at Speech Day. No appreciation of the works of Hugh Walpole, however, can be undertaken without dipping into at least several of the hugely ambitious and sweeping Herries series of novels, today largely forgotten and eclipsed by the Forsyte Saga, written at the same period. The Herries chronicle follows the fortunes of a prosperous Lake District family over a timespan – initially – of 200 years, from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. The novels were produced at rapid speed – four substantial volumes at a rate of one a year between 1930 and 1933 (Rogue Herries, Judith Paris, The Fortress and Vanessa). Walpole believed the chronicle to be his keynote work: ‘These four books shall clinch my reputation or I’ll die in the attempt.’ The novels are the essence of Walpole, for though they display his weaknesses – a sprawling plot and abundant minor walk-on characters – they are grandly constructed and contain fine evocations of landscape. Even today, the tiny hamlet of Watendlath, high above Derwentwater, plays host to Herries fans coming in search of Judith Paris’s cottage. Many might criticize Walpole’s literary style, but who could not be impressed by the beginning of the Herries chronicle?

From Whinlatter to Black Combe, the clouds are never still. The tarns like black, unwinking eyes, watch their chase, and the colours are laid out in patterns on the rocks and are continually changed. The eagle can see the shadows rise from their knees at the base of Scafell and Gable, he can see the black precipitous flanks of the screes washed with rain and the dark purple hummocks of Borrowdale crags flash suddenly with gold . . . there is no ground in the world more mysterious, no land at once so bare in its nakedness and so rich in luxury, so warm in sun and so cold in pitiless rain, so gentle and pastoral, so wild and lovely . . .

For Walpole, the Herries chronicle was a statement of love for the part of the country that he had adopted and that had adopted him. He had stumbled upon north Lakeland by accident and had purchased a home, ‘Brackenburn’, overlooking Derwentwater, in 1924. Many of his later works, including the Herries novels, were written there. And at the end of his life, with the war going badly and diabetes destroying his fragile health, he returned to Herries. He had not intended to do so, but seven years after Vanessa had concluded the Herries chronicle, he began work on two preludes – The Bright Pavilions, set in Tudor England, which appeared in 1940, and the unfinished Katherine Christian, set in the Civil War, which was eventually published posthumously in 1944. The return to Herries was an act of catharsis for an ailing man in despair as he witnessed the seeming collapse of all the values he admired and loved. So the Herries chronicle does not deserve its current obscurity. It is a bold, colourful, panoramic sequence of novels underpinned by a love of England, and it is the central work of a hugely influential literary figure of the earlier years of the twentieth century. Those interested in Walpole might also look at his biography by Rupert Hart-Davis, published in 1952. While the book has been taken to task for ignoring Walpole’s homosexuality, it has to be remembered that it appeared long before the ground-breaking biographies of Michael Holroyd, which helped remove the taboo on exploring a subject’s sexuality. It is a fine book, motivated by a true admiration for its subject. Pompous he might have been, but Walpole was also extraordinarily generous towards fellow creative artists. His support for young writers was legendary. The poet William Plomer was a recipient of Walpole’s time and money, and J. B. Priestley expressed his gratitude by dedicating The Good Companions to him. Walpole also helped the dramatist Rudolph Besier with the plot and construction of a play about Elizabeth Barrett Browning. When The Barretts of Wimpole Street became a commercial triumph, Walpole said he did not want any recognition, so Besier was able to take all the credit and much of the profit. ‘He has done more than any man alive to make modern English writers familiar to a wider public,’ wrote Frank Swinnerton in 1931. When Walpole’s novel The Old Ladies was dramatized in 1935, the author encouraged the young John Gielgud to take it on as one of his early directorial engagements. The success of the play was a landmark in the career of the great man. But it was not only the young who benefited from Walpole’s kindness and encouragement. When the elderly and increasingly neglected writer J. Stanley Weyman was in physical decline in the mid-1920s, Walpole wrote him a lengthy letter of appreciation. So the Somerset Maugham-inspired caricature of a mediocrity relishing his unjustified commercial success is unfair, though not without some substance. Hugh Walpole was a considerable literary figure of the second rank, and it is pleasing to see that an enterprising publisher has reissued some of his best works. Sometimes, on weekday afternoons, the film of Mr Perrin and Mr Traill is shown on TV – with Marius Goring and David Farrer fighting it out over the umbrella. The George Cukor classic David Copperfield, with the immortal W. C. Fields as Mr Micawber, is shown more frequently. As the credits roll, the name of Hugh Walpole appears in two guises – as writer and actor – and at the beginning of the film he can be observed in his one professional acting engagement. It is not a bad way to be remembered – but he deserves more.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 20 © Richard Hughes 2008