Sentimental Egoist

HUGH WALPOLE (503 pp.) -- Rupert Hart-Davies--Macmillan ($5).

Something was the matter with Hugh Walpole's pants. "Suddenly the back of my bags split." says his diary in October 1906, "and I had to rush home." Same thing at a dazzling ball in 1914: "Saw everyone--great fun only my trousers split." But it was not only his trousers which kept leaving Walpole open to ridicule. All prepared to lecture on Charles Dickens, he would mount the platform only to find the subject was expected to be "Life Begins at Fifty." In Westminster Abbey, at George VI's coronation, it was Walpole's invitation card which slipped from its holder's tremulous fingers and floated down upon members of Parliament.

All men suffer such humiliations. But it is insecurely successful men like Hugh Walpole--craving dignity as others crave alcohol--who not only suffer most from them but seem always to invite them. Walpole, it might be supposed, had every reason to be cocky and self-confident. He belonged to one of Britain's best-known families. His 50-odd books (Fortitude, The Dark Forest, Rogue Berries) brought him fame, Rolls-Royces, a flat in Piccadilly, a knighthood, a superb collection of paintings, a library of first editions and valuable manuscripts. He received compliments even from Queen Mary and T. S. Eliot. And yet he never felt safe; he was never sure that he was even a good writer, let alone a great one.

A Ripping Girl. Rupert Hart-Davies, one of Walpole's executors and a close friend, has not attempted in his biography to psychoanalyze Walpole. He has simply drawn, from a mass of hearsay, letters and diaries, a completely detailed portrait which each viewer may appraise for himself. The only warning Hart-Davies gives the appraisers is not to suppose that Walpole (as is often suggested) was a potentially "great writer" who "deliberately surrendered this possibility in favor of money and popular success." Says Hart-Davies: "Every book he wrote contained all that ... he knew how to include."

Walpole's father was a kind, reserved Anglican bishop. His mother, when her death approached, welcomed it with a remarkable phrase: "You don't know what a comfort it is to think that I am never going to be shy again." With two such restrained parents, it is no wonder that "Hughie" developed an insatiable appetite for romance and popular approval, and that he spent much of his life searching for the "ideal friend"--one over whom he could pour buckets of love and "understanding."

No woman, it seemed, could fill the bill. But at 34, he chose "a ripping girl," and proposed as follows: "I've always thought of you more as a man than as a woman . . . Later on, say in two years' time, if you want a house and would like to settle down, I'd like to marry you." The ripping girl wisely said no. Years after, when Hughie had found more than one ideal friend among his own sex, she asked him: "What would you have done if I'd said yes? . . ." "Oh," he answered airily, "I should have rearranged my life accordingly." "Certainly," says Hart-Davies, "a great deal of rearrangement would have been necessary."

The Unsleeping Critics. Walpole entered literary life on bended knees. A pulsating fan letter to the aged Henry James touched the old man's heart. "I am deeply moved," he wrote Hughie in his inimitable manner, "by your word to the effect that you will 'love me till you die'; it gives me so beautiful a guarantee of a certain measurable resistance to pure earthly extinction." He suggested that Hughie address him as "Tres-cher Maitre." Thereafter, Hughie sat at the Master's feet, imbibing his literary lore, craving his compliments. He didn't always get them, but he could always depend on the Master to respect the onion-paper thinness of his skin.

Unfortunately, the Master's tender approach was not followed by coarser critics. All agreed that young Walpole was a genius of productivity, but many found his work slipshod, uninspired, and even rather empty. And it was Walpole's curse that he was incapable of letting sleeping critics lie. He wrote them injured letters, protesting their right to have a "dig" at him. As he soared into the big money and ran into the big competition of such as Arnold Bennett and John Galsworthy, Hughie's claws became sharper. But so did his rebuffs. When he wrote to Critic James Agate: "I doubt if you've ever read a whole book by anyone right through in your life! Have you? If so, what?" Agate retorted: "Have you ever in your life re-written a sentence? If so, which?"

The Essential Thing. And so it went, year after year--multitudinous pinpricks impinging like driven sleet, culminating in Somerset Maugham's merciless caricature of Walpole as Alroy Rear in Cakes and Ale. Being popular and fashionable didn't help; on the contrary, Hughie yearned to be as "difficult" as his friend Virginia Woolf. "How nice if they said: 'This new novel of Hugh Walpole's may be very beautiful, but we can't be sure because we don't understand a word of it.' I'd truly love that."

He poured out his money on objets d'art, lavishly furnished (and loved) his homes in London and the Lake district. He had a box of carnations (his favorite flower) delivered every week, took to churchgoing every Sunday. But, as with his novels, he kept finding that "the essential thing has escaped me" and that the world seemed to be dead-set on plunging him into confusion. Why, he asked, did he suddenly find himself "guest of the Estonian government at their National Festival?" Why, when invited to Hollywood to write either Kim or Oliver Twist, did the moguls put him to work on The Prince and the Pauper"? And why, after a week's toil, did they switch him to Kim? Next morning, when they offered him Burn, Witch, Burn, he declined angrily. So they suggested "a film about Oxford." He finally did Little Lord Fauntleroy.

When he died in 1941, at the age of 57, the London Times printed a cadaverous obituary, describing him as a "sentimental egoist" who was "not popular among his fellow writers." Even his fiercest critics joined the resulting chorus of protests. These protests--which spoke of Hughie's affection and unselfishness, his readiness to aid young writers, his generous appreciation of writing superior to his own--might, Hart-Davies suggests, have gladdened Hughie's heart, had he heard them in his lifetime. But this is a doubtful matter. For once, on being told that a certain editor was helping, not harming him, Hughie turned white as a sheet. "Don't tell me that," he entreated. "You mustn't, you mustn't. Don't take away my enemy."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.