Typescript 3: A short autobiography

I was born outside Liverpool, where the Mersey is wide (as English rivers go), the eldest of four children, three girls and a boy.[1] Almost my earliest recollections are of ships in dock. In my childhood I was generally acting some story or other with a friend; at one early period, I remember the current[2] was concerned with Red Indians. and involved a good many[3] letters, which were sometimes written in “invisible ink” (i.e., milk or lemon juice), sometimes burnt in places to simulate survival of a prairie fire which must have raged with a good deal of regularity.

I was educated at private schools.[4] At ten years old I went to boarding school at a place near the sand-dunes of the Lancashire coast, and when I was sixteen to the largest girls’ school in England, the Ladies’ College, Cheltenham, which I left as head of one of the two co-equal top classes, at nineteen, with a scholarship for St. Hilda’s College, Oxford, where I took an Honours degree in Modern History.[5] (At that time the actual degree was not conferred upon women, though the examinations were open to them; but when the degree itself was given in 1920, I was in the first batch of those upon whom it was conferred.)

After passing my final examinations I then became secretary to the Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, and was for some years helping him in the literary and research[6] side of his work. This left me little time for writing—which had always been my aim—though I managed occasionally to produce a short story or some verses and to get them published. Finally my college friend, Miss G. W. Taylor, and I contrived to finish CHANTEMERLE, the long historical novel dealing with the War of La Vendée which we had had on the stocks for some years, and this was published in 1911 and favourably received. Encouraged by this, we set to work on one of the ‘Oxford Movement,’ and of the France of I.ouis Philippe, THE VISION SPLENDID, which appeared in 1913. Both these have this year been reissued by Heinemann in a cheaper form.

Then came the war, which uprooted me from Oxford. At the end of 1914 I was in Kent, nursing Belgian soldiers from the Yser; in April 1915 I was sent out to France under the auspices of the Anglo French Committee of the British Red Cross, and for the rest of that year I was nursing French soldiers at Yvetot, the little Norman town between Le Havre and Rouen, whose name at least is familiar to readers of Béreanger. The hospital was an Anglo-American foundation staffed entirely by English and Americans, and occupying all but one wing of the big disused seminary where, as I afterwards discovered, Guy de Maupassant had been a pupil. A couple of wards were run by the American Red Cross, of whose members I retain very pleasant memories. The poilu was an excellent patient, and all the more interesting to me since I had always been attracted by the French and had the advantage of a good knowledge of the language. I spent a good deal of my time there as what the soldiers called “la Meess de nuit,” i.e., on night duty.

However I was invalided home at the New Year of 1916 with a stiff knee due apparently to some obscure trench germ. I never went back, nor did my knee, though it ultimately quite recovered, allow of much more nursing, though I tried again in England later on.

Before the outbreak of war I had started my first uncollaborated story, SIR ISUMBRAS AT THE FORD, but it was impossible to give one’s mind to fiction in those days. Later I took it up again and it was published in 1918, and since then I have gone on writing.[7] After that came THE YELLOW POPPY (the best of my books, I think), THE WOUNDED NAME (perhaps my favourite), “MR ROWL” and the first of my Scottish stories, THE FLIGHT OF THE HERON. (These four were all published in the United States by McBride, Doubleday Page, and Dodd Mead, respectively; but my last, THE GLEAM IN THE NORTH has not found a publisher on your side. (I was told, by a firstclass firm, that “they did not believe the public in this country was sufficiently familiar with Scottish and English history to understand the background as easily and quickly as an English public would”: and also that “historical novels that succeed in this country, though less ably written than yours, are nevertheless carefully documented so that American readers reading them need never know anything about the historical background against which the novel is portrayed.”)

I am now just finishing the third and last of the Scottish tales, THE DARK MILE, which is going to run for the latter half of this year (under a different title) in “The British Weekly” and will be published in book form by Heinemann early in 1929.

Although I have by now pretty well forgotten all the history I learnt at Oxford, the impress of the training still, I suppose, survives, and that is why I cannot help taking a great, perhaps even an unnecessary amount of trouble, and spending an immense amount of time occasionally, in securing what accuracy I can, even in small details. And thus one amasses, when reading round a subject, pages of notes which have in the end to be thrown away, since they cannot be utilised. But perhaps they are not really wasted, since to ‘soak’ in a subject or period affords the best chance of getting to know it.

Yet it is not easy to make a good blend of history and fiction, when one does really care that the historical part shall be correct and that the story itself, on the other hand, shall have plenty of movement and not be overshadowed by the historical background. The public care very little, I fear, about the accuracy of the history. If it is not correct “the old girl won't know any different,” as I believe one of Mark Twain’s ‘Innocents’ was wont to say as he collected to take home to his aunt the bone which he cheerfully labelled ‘Ass’s jawbone with which Samson slew the Philistines,’ and the like. It is one’s own historical or artistic conscience which clamours for satisfaction.

Nevertheless correct history alone will not (obviously) make a story. I once heard John Masefield lay stress on those early days when the story teller really told his tales to his audience in the flesh,[8] and when, if he failed to interest them, they would either throw something at him or go away. Fortunately for the author, perhaps, such direct criticism cannot now be indulged in; but the need to hold the attention of his audience remains, even though he is not actually sitting in their midst.

Another point. A character in (if I remember rightly) an excellent ‘mystery’ story written by an Oxford woman graduate[9] makes a pithy remark about fiction being largely divided now a days into “good stories written in bad English,” and “bad stories written in good English.” But why should not a good story be clothed in good English? Again, one is, or was, constantly coming up against that annoying and question-begging assumption of some reviewers that what they are pleased to call “the novel of action” either should, or can have no deeper interest than that of ‘things happening.’ But though things must happen too it is character which matters most and is most interesting, and itself makes ‘things happen.’ I cannot remember who it was that said ‘character makes plot’ but I firmly believe it. The clash of character is far more vital than the clash of swords; but there is no reason why one should not, so to speak have both[10] between the covers of a historical novel. I have always at least aimed at the conjunction of the two.

The main idea of a given plot[11] I have almost always found to spring from a sort of vision of one person ‘felt’ as to character and seen more or less distinctly in some incident, not necessarily the central one. The rest will blossom out of this. I have no idea whether this is the way a novelist usually starts; perhaps it is the common method.[12] But the germ idea of THE YELLOW POPPY cannot be of quite so common inception, for it did not originate in the waking world at all. I dreamt—I have a habit of dreaming vividly—that I saw the house of a great French noble, deserted after the Revolution, and that noble’s wife going to it, unknown and shabbily dressed, to drink tea with the caretaker in what had been her own proud mansion. I knew nothing else whatever; but hence came the Château de Mirabel and Valentine Duchesse de Trélan and all that follows in that rather long book.

Until three years ago my books had all had either an entirely or a partially French setting. But in 1923, as it happened, I paid a first visit to Lochaber, that district in the Western Highlands of Scotland so saturated with memories of the last Jacobite Rebellion of the ‘Fortyfive.’ I was there five weeks, (in almost constant rain) and had not when I went there[13] the slightest intention of writing about the Fortyfive which, as an overwritten period and one which I knew very little about, rather bored me. But the spirit of the place got such a hold upon me that before I left I had the whole story of it[14] planned almost in spite of myself. Directly I came south I started to read for it. And I can only ascribe it to a perhaps unusual sensitiveness to historical localities that THE FLIGHT OF THE HERON, published two years later, besides being now, I understand, on most bookstalls in Scotland, was acclaimed by the late Dr Horatio Brown, the wellknown scholar and historian of Venice, himself a Highlander—in fact the grandson of the ‘last Chief’ of Glengarry, Sir Walter Scott’s friend, who is supposed to have been the model for Fergus MacIvor in Waverley—in terms so flattering that I cannot refrain from quoting them. He wrote to my publishers (thinking me a man):

“I have just finished the book, which has moved me more profoundly than anything else I have read for years. I had no notion I was so Highland and so Jacobite. . . . The landscape is marvellously true; not a false touch, not an overstrained note. . . . He has touches, too, that only a poet could have written, so quiet and so full. . . . But how the devil, (damn him!) did the author get this intimate, inside knowledge of the Highland character? . . . It is marvellous, and makes this book far and away the finest Highland Jacobite story I know.”

And Dr W. B. Blaikie of Edinburgh, that recent heavy loss to Jacobite lore, of which, until less than a month ago,[15] he was until less than a month ago the greatest living exponent, said of the book “As good as you'll get. She is extraordinary in the hold she keeps on facts.”

I am now [illegible] being a Scotsman—yes, a man, and even “an old man with a beard” as [illegible] not long ago.[16]

One writes, of course, because one wants to and cannot imagine not doing it. At the bottom I believe one is really telling oneself a story. The interest in working it out is a kind of exploration, to find out ‘what happened next’. Occasionally one goes along a wrong track in this quest, and has to come back. But it still remains a strange fact (Kipling, I think, has somewhere called attention to it) that when one has a pen in one’s hand (and sometimes when one hasn’t) situations and ideas come into the mind quite unsought, as from an entirely outside source. And when one is really ‘going well’ (which doesn't happen too often) one is not quite conscious until the fit stops, of what one has written; such results may of course be bad as well as good. I often find that if I am in a difficulty about some point in the plot, and if I cannot discuss it viva voce with a friend,[17] that I can usefully conduct this discussion with myself on paper, and can nearly always get some solution in that way. My plots are of course always worked out first in outline, and sufficiently far ahead in detail.