A Writer's Notebook (70 page)

Cordova. Plaza del Potro. It is a long, narrow place, with small white houses on each side of it, and at the end the river. Towards the upper end is a fountain with a prancing horse on a pedestal. Hither come the neighbours with earthenware jars to fetch water. They take it from jets through a hollow bamboo. Donkeys and horses are watered from the basin. On the left as you look up from the river is the Posada. From the front it looks a modest house; it has two storeys, it is whitewashed and has a large door which is closed at night. But inside is a great courtyard, very roughly paved and uneven. There are stables, each just large enough for a single horse, beside which the groom or boy could sleep. There are no more than two or three horses now. One of the stalls is occupied by an itinerant flower-seller who comes in chanting his
pregon
. In the broad archway that leads from the street to the courtyard girls are ironing linen. There are two small kitchens for common use. The upper storey is reached by rough stone stairs. There is a wooden balcony all around, jutting
out, with a rickety balustrade, and this balcony gives access to the rooms. Here Cervantes lived.

La Mancha. The oak trees. They stretch for miles along the gently undulating country. They are not very high and magnificence is not theirs, but they look immensely sturdy, and their trunks are gnarled and twisted, so that they give you an impression of violent effort. They have battled with rugged energy against the assaults of time and wind and rain.

Then for miles as far as the eye can reach you have the monotonous lines of the furrows.

Sometimes you pass a peasant ploughing his field with a wooden plough, like the ploughs they used in Roman times, drawn by two mules. Sometimes you pass a peasant on a donkey, or another, with his son riding pillion, on a horse. The wind blows cold and they are huddled in their brown blankets. Sometimes you pass a shepherd, wrapped up, guarding a flock of sheep that nibble the scanty grass, or, more scattered and active, a herd of goats. They are spare old men, the shepherds, clean-shaven, with small, sharp, pale eyes, and their earthy faces are thin and lined and astute; and the bitter cold of winter, the heat of summer, seems to have dried them up. Their movements are slow and you guess that they are sparse of words.

In the villages the houses, built of stones and clay, have the colour of the barren soil, and they look like temporary shelters that soon will crumble away again into the ground on which they have been built.

Alcalá de Henares. It has a large plaza with arcades, and a street with arcades and two-storey houses of modest appearance. It is an empty, dead little town. Down the street wander few people, a cart with a great hood drawn by a mule, a huckster on horseback with his two big baskets on either side.
The university, with its handsome patio, has a plateresque façade of no great importance. The other streets are narrow and grey and silent.

Las Meniñas. The first thing that strikes you is its gaiety, and then you realise that this comes from the warm light of common day that miraculously envelops the figures. Velasquez painted no picture in which his cheerful, equable nature is more evident. It has the
alegria
which is the Andalusian's most cherished and characteristic grace.

Velasquez's dwarfs and fools are painted in the Shakespearian spirit, with frank amusement, gaily and without the slightest feeling for the horror of their deformity or the misery of their lot. His sunny temper made him look upon these loathsome, aborted creatures with the good humour of one who knows that the Almighty had created them to be the playthings of princes.

Velasquez suggests in none of his portraits a criticism of his sitters. He takes them at their face value. His charm seems joined to a sort of gay heartlessness. I suppose no one can deny his wonderful skill; the dresses of some of these infantas are amazing, but while one admires one has a slight sense of uneasiness and asks oneself whether this marvellous skill is worth very much. It reminds one of a writer who says things with exquisite sobriety, but says nothing of any great consequence. There is no reason to depreciate breadth in favour of depth, but it is hard to resist the impulse to do so. Velasquez may be superficial, but he is superficial on the grand scale. How beautifully he places his figures on the canvas so that they make a pattern charming to the eye! He was the greatest court painter that ever lived.

London. The barber. He got his job when he was sixteen. He was then a well-grown boy big enough to pass for the
eighteen which he said he was, with a mop of curly fair hair the luxuriance of which had encouraged him to enter his trade. He was fond of reading poetry, and on Sundays—in those days a barber worked six days a week—he made pilgrimages to the various places which were connected with the poets he was at the time interested in. He visited Chalfont St. Giles while he was reading
Paradise Lost;
he had seen the birthplace of Keats and the house in which Coleridge had lived; he went to Stoke Poges and wandered in the churchyard which had suggested Gray's
Elegy
. He had a delightful and naïve enthusiasm. All his spare money he spent on books. He had his midday meal at an A.B.C. and while he ate his scone and butter and drank a glass of milk he thumbed a precious volume. It was at an A.B.C. that he first saw the young lady who afterwards became his wife. She worked in a dressmaker's shop in Dover Street. Then he had a son. While he was courting her his wife had admired him because he was so well-read, but when they were married it made her impatient to see him constantly poring over a book. When he got back from his work and they had eaten their supper she wanted him to take her out for a walk or go to the pictures. They had been married for seven or eight years when the war broke out. He enlisted, and by the influence of one of the men whom he had shaved habitually was sent out to Russia with armoured cars. He was away for the duration of the war. The end of it found him in Rumania. At last he came back and returned to his job. He was a young man still. He was thirty-three. The prospect of cutting hair and shaving chins for the rest of his life dismayed him, but he did not know what else to do. That was all he knew, how to shave chins and cut hair. His wife thought he ought to be thankful to have a good job to come back to. He did not get on so well with her as he had done before he went away. She thought him crotchety and fanciful. He was impatient because she was so well satisfied with the life she led. He saw that he would never escape from the necessity of earning a decent living so that he could support her and the boy.
The boy was ten now. He began to loathe his customers. I asked him if he still read. He shook his head. “What's the good?” he said. “It'll never get me anywhere.” “It'll take you out of yourself,” I replied. “Perhaps it will. But I've always got to come back.” He had only one thing left, the determination to give his son the freedom that was denied to himself. He was beaten, he had no longer any hope; but savagely, vindictively, he looked forward to his son revenging him vicariously for the loss of his own illusions. When his son grew up he went into the hairdressing business, but for ladies, because it pays better.

The Recipe. The young are earnest. He was a young man with a pugnacious but rather attractive face and a shock of thick brown hair, brushed straight back from his forehead, to which he sought by the lavish application of oil to give the fashionable sleekness. His inclinations were vaguely literary and he asked me how to make an epigram. Since he was in the flying corps it seemed natural enough to answer: “You merely loop the loop on a commonplace and come down between the lines.” His brow puckered as he turned my reply over in his mind. He was paying me the compliment of giving it his serious attention: I only wanted the tribute of a smile.

Once a lady who had a son of a literary bent asked me what training I should advise if he was to become a writer; and I, judging by the inquirer that she would pay little attention to my answer, replied: “Give him a hundred and fifty a year for five years and tell him to go to the devil.” I have thought of it since and it seems to me it was better advice than I imagined. On such an income a young man will not starve, but it is small enough for him to enjoy little comfort; and comfort is the writer's bitterest foe. On such an income he can travel all over the world under conditions which will enable him to
see life in aspects more varied and multi-coloured than a man in more affluent circumstances is ever likely to happen upon. On such an income he will be often penniless and so constrained to many pleasant shifts to earn his board and lodging. He will have to try his hand at a variety of callings. Though very good writers have led narrow lives they have written well in spite of their circumstances rather than on account of them; many old maids who spent much of the year at Bath have written novels, but there is only one Jane Austen. A writer does well to place himself in such conditions that he may experience as many as possible of the vicissitudes which occur to men. He need do nothing very much, but he should do everything a little. I would have him be in turns tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor; I would have him love and lose, go hungry and get drunk, play poker with rough-necks in San Francisco, bet with racing touts at Newmarket, philander with duchesses in Paris and argue with philosophers in Bonn, ride with bullfighters in Seville and swim with Kanakas in the South Seas. No man is not worth the writer's knowing: every occurrence is grist to his mill. Oh, to have the gift, to be twenty-three, to have five years before one, and a hundred and fifty a year.