After a quick re-reading of the handwritten version forty years later I can only hope the final typescript was some improvement. Paul Henderson saw it, as did Ruth, but their comments were not positive, and I see why. The story opens with John Landor, modelled perhaps on me, in so far as I was able at that time to know myself, coming home after three years in the army. During that period his mother’s last letter had promised a further one that never arrived, which was to make dreadful revelations about his father, Ralph, who was some kind of businessman. On the first day home John visits Larry, a character who seemed to have been suggested by my friend John Moult, and they sit in a pub discussing the possible contents of the missing letter.
The next chapter described John’s visit to his Aunt Rhoda, who lives in the country (strong echoes of The White Peacock here) and who also intimates sinister behaviour on his father’s part in connection with his mother’s death. John’s old girlfriend Helen is now an art student, and on meeting in the local gallery their conversation is full of callow intellectual chit-chat. Helen takes painting lessons from an opinionated artist called Tom Ransom, based as much on my Uncle Frederick as Helen is on Sybil his girlfriend, and in his studio they talk endlessly in a very faux-Aldous Huxley fashion:
‘In a way, though,’ said John, ‘I like to believe in immortality, but mainly in that of the Greek religion. I like to think that when I die, someone will put a gold coin between my teeth, so that Charon can take my fare when he rows me across the Styx into Hades. I like the Greek religion altogether. As far as I’m concerned, Homer is my bible. The Iliad and Odyssey. The Greek religion is romantic, it is sheer poetry, not sombre like the Christian religion. When I think of God I like to imagine Zeus sitting laughing on Olympus, looking at the antics of the world with one eye, and keeping the other anxiously on Troy and Agamemnon.’
Then: ‘I believe too much in freedom to be sympathetic to communism, though maybe I could believe in it if I was the absolute boss.’ And: ‘In order to eliminate wars we have to get rid of the surplus population by some means of perfect birth control, educate people into having only two children per family.’ And, lastly: ‘People worship God out of pity for Him, not because they need love and guidance.’ And much more of the same kind.
One evening John sees his father in town with a strange woman, suspects him of having pursued an affair with her throughout his mother’s illness. On getting home — this part of the yarn turning very Dostoevsky — he finds his favourite kitten dead, and is convinced his father killed it in a fit of homicidal madness.
The plot begins to sicken, rather than thicken. An account of listening to Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony at a concert has overtones of E. M. Forster, though only in so far as to indicate that nothing has been learned from him. John also has an association with a girl called Ada who works in a hosiery factory. She shows understandable irritation at his self-indulgent talk, her character being the composite of my pre-service girlfriends.
The title By What Road, a phrase lifted from Sir Edwin Arnold’s version of the Bhagavad-Gita, indicates the uncertain direction of the story, but the upshot is that John’s father is given to having sexual intercourse with his wife’s corpse in the graveyard. Moira, his girlfriend, has long been trying to cure him of the habit, but in the end Ralph kills her, and hangs himself. Such a vainglorious mish-mash of terminal horror leads me to wonder whether I read about a case of necrophilia at the time, or if it had been discussed at the Hendersons’, and if so why was it used as the theme of my novel?
Such an avalanche of pages can only be put down to an unbridled Stakhanovite determination to concoct a novel at any price. The mechanism employed was, simply, to begin, and then let rip with whatever thoughts or people came to hand. One situation gave birth to another, with dire results, each character dragging in someone else in conditions of maximum anguish and forcing them also to participate in the progress of the juggernaut.
It must have been on a day off from the fabrication of By What Road that Ruth and I visited Alderman Willie Hopkin at Eastwood. Now nearly ninety, he had been a friend of the young D. H. Lawrence, and I was interested, even eager, to know anything about the great writer. Hopkin had responded kindly to our letter with an invitation to tea, and we sat on the top deck of a trolley bus through the twelve miles of a bleak November landscape of head-stocks and pit villages to get there.
For a couple of hours he answered our questions, and talked about ‘Bert’ as if he still lived around the corner. We had read most of Lawrence’s work, as well as some biographies, so kept the conversation going, while Hopkin added many details, and told anecdotes about the young writer and his friends. Some account of the meeting went into a notebook, which has since disappeared.
At the beginning of April 1951 I went to stay at my Aunt Amy’s cottage near Aylesham in Kent. Her coalminer husband, Richard Richardson, known for some reason in the family as ‘Mimic’, had been killed a few years before on his motorbike, she being injured in the same accident. Four of her eight children were still at home, though now grown up, and I was generously fed and looked after during my stay.
Neither gas nor electricity in the house, I wrote by the light of an oil lamp in one of the bedrooms, left as much to myself as I cared to be, though sometimes going for a walk or a drink with one of my cousins. They were helping to repair and paint old woodwork in the village church, which they still attended on Sunday, having been in the choir as children — a strange life to someone who had grown up even below the religion line.
I met the vicar on my way to the post office one day, a handsome angular-bodied man of about fifty who wore spectacles. During a recent sojourn in hospital his dog had died, and he had since written its life story in verse so as to remember their friendship. ‘I used one long and two shorts for the rhythm.’
I put on a suitably erudite expression, yet wondered if he was testing me. ‘Oh yes, dactylic hexameter, if there were six feet to one line.’
‘That was it,’ he smiled, ‘but whose metre was that?’
‘Homer’s?’ I suggested. He queried whether the village of Nonnington had inspired any poems, at which I supposed my cousins had said something about me. ‘Not so far, but it may one day,’ I said.
I saw the films Samson and Delilah and Pygmalion in Canterbury, and from the public library in Dover took out books by James Joyce, Stephen Spender and Karel Capek, as well as Walter Raleigh’s Style and A Treatise on the Novel by Robert Liddell. Poems went to Outposts, but with no luck. The countryside was in the full cool flush of spring, and I walked in fields and woods that were coloured with anemones and celandines, violets and primroses, wood sorrel and forget-me-nots.
One of my cousins worked at a farm, and I helped him — not very successfully — to milk the cows. The family’s brute of a bull terrier called Major had to be exercised, and I got into trouble when it grabbed someone’s pet mongrel and half killed it. Another day it charged salivating across a field after a cluster of sheep and nearly got shot by the justifiably irate farmer.
A group of poems, and ‘The General’s Dilemma’, came back from World Review. To console myself I ploughed stolidly through USA by John dos Passos, read David Gascoyne’s Short History of Surrealism, and C. Day Lewis’s work. I wrote more poems, and a couple of stories, sending poems to The Listener, and ‘The General’s Dilemma’ to Orpheus. The Song of Solomon seemed good to read while in our letters Ruth and I were planning to meet in Folkestone.