but perhaps you have forgotten who stanley houghton was? well, not so long before the great war he was famous, both in england and america, as the author of hindle wakes, he was universally alluded to as a charming personality, and he promised to become one of the most prosperous playwrights in england. then, while still young and not yet accustomed to his fame, he died in italy. thereupon some thousand newspaper-writers recorded his death and wrote about him some of the most lamentable nonsense it has ever been my misfortune to read.
let me tell you all about it.
i was introduced to stanley houghton in manchester by jack kahane—the latter a most brilliant and engaging personality who knew everybody: or, rather, everybody knew him.
“this,” said kahane, indicating houghton, “is one of miss horniman’s pets. she is doing a play of his this week at the gaiety. now, let me see, stanley, what is the name of your little play?”
houghton laughed deprecatingly.
“oh, i saw it last night,” said i, “and jolly good it was. but i’ve seen another play of yours besides the younger generation; it was founded on a story by guy de maupassant. that, also, was tremendously amusing.”
he frowned, and i understood from the way that he 56looked over my head that i had displeased him. for a moment he was silent, then:
“i’ve just been reading some of your verses in the english review,” said he; “quite nice, quite nice.”
so then i examined him closely and saw a tall, fair youth, with plenty of straw-coloured hair, a prominent, rather crooked nose, and a manner of painful self-consciousness. i believe that, from that moment, we distrusted each other most heartily. we parted a few minutes later and i think houghton must have shared my suspicion and regret that we should often have to meet after that date. kahane was and is (though he has been in france these three years and i in macedonia) my most intimate friend, and had lately “taken up” houghton, and whenever kahane did a thing he did it pretty thoroughly. and friends of a friend are bound to tumble across each other continually.
later in the day i protested to kahane.
“what on earth has induced you to take up this man houghton?” i asked.
“he amuses me,” said jack. “and, really, you know, one or two of his little things are quite promising. when he bores me i rag him. and then he loses his temper. il m’amuse, and that’s all i require from him.”
shortly after i was elected a member of a funny little coterie in manchester, called the swan club. kahane had founded it. there were twelve of us altogether: kahane; stanley houghton; harold brighouse (whose play, hobson’s choice, is making “big money” in london at the moment of writing); charles abercrombie (now a lt.-colonel and a c.b.); walter mudie, the best of good fellows; ernest marriott, artist; w. price-heywood, accountant and leader-writer; myself and a few hangers-on of the arts. we used to meet for lunch at a shabby little restaurant in peter street, manchester, opposite the 57theatre royal, and we did our utmost to induce each other to talk about ourselves.
in this little coterie houghton was a veritable whale among the minnows. he was also a fish out of water. from the very first his success spoiled him. he would take himself ponderously. brighouse worshipped success, so he worshipped houghton. the rest of us, if we worshipped anything at all, worshipped genius, and as kahane was the only one among us who had a touch of that divine quality, we rather tended to worship him. but kahane frittered away his gifts; he made a lot of money by dint of working about an hour a day and by the sheer force of his personality. for the rest he played and played hard. he talked; he ragged; he listened to music and saw plays; he fell in love; he indulged harmless vices; and he wrote two wonderful plays, full of faults, but streaked with originality, with fire and with colour. in effect, he could beat both houghton and brighouse at their own game, and they knew it. but, at that time, playwriting with kahane was only a game; with the other two it was deadly earnest.
houghton and brighouse were something (and, i gathered, something not very brilliant) in the city. quite what that something was i do not know, though i remember seeking out brighouse once in a dark warehouse smelling of damp cloth. every afternoon houghton and brighouse would close their ledgers, or petty-cash books, or whatever it was they did close, and rush off home—brighouse to catch, perhaps, his six-five p.m. train to eccles, and houghton to jump gymnastically (he played hockey, i believe) on to a passing tram bound for alexandra park. after a hurried meal, out with the mss., the notebooks, the typescript and to work! and how hard they did work!
i remember brighouse telling me some years ago that he had written more than thirty plays, but i cannot 58conceive that anybody but himself has read them all. brighouse slogged, and he beat so long at the door of success that at last it opened to him. houghton also slogged, but in a dandified way. he was clever, he was cute, and he played his cards well.
. . . . . . . .
houghton was, not without full justice, called the leader of the manchester school of dramatists. he was hard; he was unimaginative; he was unromantic. but he was extraordinarily apt, and he had a neat and tidy brain. close must have been that union of souls that bound his soul to the soul of miss horniman. miss horniman never (well, hardly ever) produced a romantic play, and stanley houghton never wrote one. he was out to “make good,” and miss horniman helped him to go one better.
i need scarcely say that houghton was, so far as his plays were concerned, an industrious man of business. when the real artist has finished a work, he ceases to take interest in it; but, with houghton, when a play was completed his interest in it immediately intensified. he sent his plays everywhere: to the provinces, to london, to america, to agents. as soon as a play came back, “returned with thanks,” out it went again by the next post. and he pulled strings—oh! ever so gently, but he pulled them.
though quite a few of his plays had been produced in the north, and though he had written some clever dramatic criticism for the manchester guardian, he was unknown in london till the stage society produced hindle wakes. then fame came to him and knocked him off his feet. it is impossible to imagine a man more conscious of his success. his consciousness of it made him, on occasion, tongue-tied. in conversation he could be ready, and his repartee was frequently brilliant, but during the years i knew him his attitude always suggested that he 59anticipated and feared attack. i saw him once at the bar of the gaiety theatre, manchester, in the midst of a group of friends. i was not of their company, but i noticed that he stood silent, erect and strained, his head a little thrown back, his face set. then, and on many other occasions, it seemed to me that he longed to break down the feeling of awkwardness—to throw off the obsession of self-consciousness—that overcame him.
but i must confess that i rarely saw him in company in which there were not two or three who were hostile to him; therefore i saw him but seldom at his best. not infrequently, there was a “dead set” against him, and if the banter were edged with malice (as it not infrequently was) he withered like a lily under the grip of a frost. the truth is, he was not modest and he could not feign modesty. his vanity was neither charming nor aggressive; it was cold and distant, without geniality, without humour. genius is one of the wombs of vanity, but houghton had no genius; there was not a trace of magic in him; he was merely extraordinarily clever, closely observant and possessed of an instinctive sense of form and of literary values.
. . . . . . . .
there came a day when it entered my head to interview him for the manchester courier, a paper for which i wrote musical criticism. he accepted my proposal with alacrity, invited me to the winter garden of the midland hotel, and provided me with coffee, liqueurs and cigars.
he began by telling me that this was the first time he had been interviewed for the press.
“an uncomfortable half-hour awaits you, then,” said i, and, on the instant, he began to fidget.
i noticed that he was dressed for the occasion; he looked prosperous and literary and there hung about him just a suspicion of cosmopolitanism. not only sartorially was he prepared; his mind was in tune to the occasion 60and the right pose was donned. that is to say, he was determined not to appear conceited or self-satisfied; but he did not succeed. he made light of his success in a heavy, emphatic way. he praised hindle wakes with faint damns, and suggested that this play would soon cease its successful run in london. he was careful not to evince any pleasure in his success, any natural buoyancy of spirit, any momentary delight. in a word, he was dull, tactless and insincere. there was nothing boyish or charming or graceful in his words; he had on all his heavy armour and it banged and clanged as he moved.
when the interview was over he invited me to his father’s house for the evening meal. i went. i went out of curiosity. he did not amuse me, but most certainly he did interest me.
when we had finished our meal he took me to his study. near the window was a typewriter; in the typewriter was a sheet of paper half covered with script. there were very few erasures.
“i always compose straight on to the machine,” said houghton.
“ah yes,” said i, “and so did j. m. synge. it has always seemed to me remarkable that synge should do that; in your own case, of course, it is not quite so remarkable.”
“it is a comedy for cyril maude” (i think he said cyril maude). “he wired to me the other day to go up to london to see him. yes; he wanted a comedy, and he wanted me to write it. that was about a fortnight ago. well, the thing’s nearly finished; in another week it will be on its way to london. rather quick work, don’t you think?”
“quite. but all that you have told me i know already, and, really, you must know that i know. you see, brighouse comes to the swan club day by day, drinks his 61beer—you know, the conventionally british pint he will have in a pewter mug——”
“yes; harold is very british,” interrupted houghton.
“isn’t he? well, as i was saying, brighouse drinks his beer, fixes his eyes on his plate, and then spasmodically tells us all the news about you. he told us, for example, about cyril maude giving you a hundred (or was it a thousand?) guineas for the sight of a new comedy; he told us about the daily mail wanting articles from you at some colossal figure; he told us about the host of people who send you wires every day; he told us about——”
houghton stirred uneasily, but he looked intensely gratified.
“he told us about everything,” i added, after a slight pause. “what you tell him he tells us. but why don’t you come and tell us yourself, houghton? we never see you at the swan club nowadays. it must not be said of you that you desert old friends, that success has made you careless of those you once liked.”
he darted a glance at me and decided, as was indeed the case, that i was attempting to be ironical.
“the truth is,” said he, “that the company i find at the swan club is not always very congenial. one or two new men have been lately introduced——”
he looked away from me meaningly.
“quite,” said i, unperturbed; “oh, quite.”
“and,” he continued, “i am kept very busy with one thing and another. it is true that i have given up my business and now intend devoting all my energy to literary work, but just at the present moment i am kept at it from dawn to dusk.”
silence fell upon us, a rather oppressive silence, i think, for i remember hunting about in my mind for something to say. i noticed a copy of the playboy of the western world on the little table before us.
“still reading synge?” i asked.
62“yes; still reading synge,” he replied. then, after a pause: “a great man, synge.”
“an interesting man, a curious man,” said i, “but great? only g. h. mair, willie yeats and high school girls think synge great, houghton.”
“is that so?” asked he languidly.
i invited him to have a cigarette, but he refused. in truth, we were both very uncomfortable and, by the subtle understanding and inverted sympathy that hearty dislike engenders, we rose simultaneously to our feet, rather hurriedly left the room, and soon found ourselves in the hall downstairs. he opened the front door and we stood for a moment, looking around us.
next day my interview with houghton appeared in the manchester courier, with a portrait of the young dramatist. i do not remember a word of that article, but i am quite sure it was insincere, without distinction, and full of inanities; indeed, i would bet at least ten drachmæ that there occur in it such expressions as “inherent modesty,” “charming personality,” “interesting outlook on life,” and so on. a journalist (must i say it?) is like a barrister: he is fee’d to say what is required to be said. at all events, the interview pleased houghton, for he sent me a copy of hindle wakes with a jocular inscription on its title-page.
. . . . . . . .
the friendship between brighouse and houghton increased in intensity, and when arnold bennett publicly referred to brighouse in terms of no small admiration houghton decided that his eager disciple could be received into the inner sanctum of his coldly fraternal breast. and brighouse, grateful to bennett, loudly proclaimed that milestones was “the greatest play since congreve.”
“but why congreve, brighouse?” i asked. “surely you mean h. j. byron?”
63but no! he said he meant congreve.
“i do not,” i said, considerably perturbed, “i do not like to think, brighouse, that you have stained your virgin mind with congreve.”
“i’ve looked at him,” said he icily. “he wrote comedies. milestones is a comedy.”
now, i was used to brighouse for, from the age of eleven to thirteen i had been at the same school with him, and i remembered how enormously sensitive and how self-contained and how stubborn he was. i also remembered that rabelaisianism, or congrevism, or, indeed, any ism that denoted the real philosophic vulgarity of the human mind, or any jolly indecent wit, was repellent to him.
“there are, i suppose, expurgated editions of congreve, brighouse. i imagine you as a collector of expurgated editions.”
but he buried his nose in his pint of beer and refused further converse.
now, such are the influences that one man may have upon another, it came about that the more successful houghton became, the harder worked brighouse. said brighouse to himself, i imagine: “if stanley can do all this, why not i?” so he worked desperately, sloggingly, overwhelmingly. yet, in spite of all his hard work, he kept a most watchful and jealous eye on his contemporaries, and i remember meeting him at one of miss horniman’s orgies at the gaiety theatre when a new play of galsworthy’s was given. it was a beautiful play (galsworthy has not written many beautiful plays), but i regret to say i do not remember its name. at the end of the first act brighouse was disgustingly “superior,” and at the end of the second he was contemptuous. so i sought a quarrel with him. there are, i think, few emotions so devastating, and so difficult to control, as the anger that surges upon one when one hears a beautiful work of art, noble, subtle and full of humanity, treated 64with contempt by a man whose vanity has blinded the eyes of his soul. but i do not remember making any attempt to control my anger at brighouse; rather did i nurse and nourish it, and, when the proper time came, i poured it upon him with generosity. harold—or “brig,” as we used to call him—is too much a man of the world not to know how to deal with an excitable man in a temper, and i remember coming away from our quarrel feeling rather foolish and having a disturbing admiration for brighouse’s dignity. after this little episode, we were always very polite to each other, and, later on, when we met in london, our meeting was not without some cordiality.
since these days brighouse has scored a big success with hobson’s choice. he will score other successes. he will die reputed and rich. he will live, some day, in a west end flat and have a cottage in the country from which he will issue at regular intervals and take long walks in muddy lanes. i believe he will sedulously cultivate the friendship of those who may be of service to him, and he will drink his pint of beer every day of his life. he will be praised twice a year by sir william robertson nicoll. yes, he will be praised twice a year by sir william robertson nicoll. and when sir william dies, mr st john adcock will take up the cry. and, when the war is over, our successful young dramatist will go to america, where the money comes from.... i should like to see harold in america.
. . . . . . . .
there came a day when a new one-act play by houghton was given at the manchester gaiety—a play i subsequently saw at a london music hall, its fit home; but i remember neither the play’s title nor its plot. i recollect, however, that three or four men and women met in the corridor of a london hotel and talked or suggested risky things. rather stupid, i thought it, and it certainly never occurred 65to me that it was immoral or nasty; it was merely a dramatic experiment that did not quite come off. but the dramatic critic of the manchester guardian—either mr a. n. monkhouse or mr c. e. montague (i think the former)—“went for” it tooth and nail on the score of its alleged immorality. the criticism was scathing: it made a wound and then poured acid into the wound. houghton must have felt the criticism sorely, but when i met him next day he pluckily treated it as a matter of no consequence whatever.
“a reasonable man cannot expect always to be understood,” said he, “and i suppose the manchester guardian, which has always been very good to me in the past, has a right to scold me if it thinks fit.”
“a scolding, houghton? why, you were thrashed.”
“well, i s’pose i was. but i can stand it.”
vain men are invariably supersensitive, and for that reason i think houghton felt every word and act of hostility; but he never showed weakness under opposition, and he could hit back when he thought it worth while.
i once witnessed a physical assault upon him after a rather rowdy dinner, when we all took to ragging each other. there was no excuse for the assault, except what excuse may be found in bitter feeling and enmity, but houghton received the blow without a word, and we who witnessed it neither expostulated with his assailant nor expressed sympathy with his victim. houghton paled and his large eyes gleamed, and i have no doubt that on a subsequent occasion he settled the matter with the man who was responsible for his humiliation.
only a very few men really understood houghton, and those were men who, like walter mudie, had known him intimately in boyhood. mudie swore by him and would hear no word against him. but there was something forbidding in houghton’s nature—a barricade of reserve that 66he himself had not wilfully erected, but which had been placed there by nature. it was impossible for people who met him casually a few times to form a high opinion either of his intellect or of his personality. i remember captain james e. agate, a most original and brilliant colleague of houghton’s on the manchester guardian, once saying to a group of people: “don’t you make any mistake about houghton. he’s not such a fool as he appears.” but it is a very incomplete man who requires such a double-edged defence as that.
though the contrary has often been stated, houghton did not, i believe, take much interest in anybody’s work except his own. he patronised a young bank clerk, charles forrest, who had written a promising little play that was subsequently, by houghton’s recommendation, i believe, given in manchester and liverpool; but when he came in contact with work that was, in many respects, superior to his own, he was airily superior and supercilious. he once asked to see a blank-verse play of my own that was given at the manchester gaiety, but as i was aware that he knew as much of blank verse as i do of conic sections—which is nothing at all—i refrained from passing on my ms. to him. in other men’s work he looked for faults; in his own he found perfection.
. . . . . . . .
i need scarcely say that when i went to london i did not seek out houghton, who had settled down in the metropolis some months before me. but we met in the strand, he wearing a fur-lined overcoat and looking a trifle like h. b. irving, and i carrying a load of review books under my arm. we looked at each other; we hesitated; we stopped. stanley was a trifle languid and, after a few inconsequent remarks, he began telling me the history of his fur overcoat. he had, he said, bought it for five pounds or seven pounds, or some such ridiculously low price, and he had bought it second-hand.
67and (fate wills these things) whenever i hear the name stanley houghton i think of that rather tall, rather aristocratic, figure in the strand wearing its second-hand fur-lined overcoat and talking, with embarrassment, about nothing in particular, standing first on one foot and then on the other.
it is, of course, impossible to predict with certainty what further successes houghton would have achieved had he lived, but there can be little doubt that his sharp and lively talents would have produced plays even more noticeable than hindle wakes. a little more experience of life would probably have shown him the futility and the destructive effects of his intellectual snobbery. he was raw and crude, and success did not mellow or enlarge him.
