Chapter X: Mr. H. M. Tomlinson

Mr. Tomlinson is a born traveller. There are two sorts of travellers--those who do what they are told and those who do what they please. Mr. Tomlinson has never moved about the world in obedience to a guide-book. He would find it almost as difficult to read a guide-book as to write one. He never echoes other men’s curiosity. He travels for the purpose neither of information nor conversation. He has no motive but whim. His imagination goes roaming; and, his imagination and his temper being such as they are, he is out on his travels even if he gets no farther than Limehouse or the Devonshire coast. He has, indeed, wandered a good deal farther than Limehouse and Devonshire, as readers of _The Sea and the Jungle_ know. Even in his more English volumes of sketches, essays, confessions, short stories--how is one to describe them?--he takes us with him to the north coast of Africa, to New York, and to France in war time. But the English sketches--the description of the crowd at a pit-mouth after an explosion in a coal mine, the account of a derelict railway station and a grocer’s boy in spectacles--almost equally give us the feeling that we are reading the narrative of one who has seen nothing except with the fortunate eyes of a stranger. It is all a matter of eyes. To see is to discover, and all Mr. Tomlinson’s books are, in this sense, books of discoveries.

As a recorder of the things he has seen he has the three great gifts of imagery, style and humour. He sees the jelly-fish hanging in the transparent deeps “like sunken moons.” A boat sailing on a windy day goes skimming over the inflowing ridges of the waves “with exhilarating undulations, light as a sandpiper.” A queer Lascar on a creeping errand in an East-end street “looked as uncertain as a candle-flame in a draught.” How well again Mr. Tomlinson conveys to us in a sentence or two the vision of Northern Africa on a wet day:

As for Bougie, these African villages are built but for sunlight.
They change to miserable and filthy ruins in the rain, their white
walls blotched and scabrous, and their paths mud tracks between the
styes. Their lissome and statuesque inhabitants become softened
and bent, and pad dejectedly through the muck as though they were
ashamed to live, but had to go on with it. The palms which look so
well in sunny pictures are besoms up-ended in a drizzle.

Mr. Tomlinson has in that last sentence captured the ultimate secret of a wet day in an African village. Even those of us who have never seen Africa save on the map, know that often there is nothing more to be said. Mr. Tomlinson, however, is something of a specialist in bad weather, as, perhaps, any man who loves the sea as he does must be. The weather fills the world for the seaman with gods and demons. The weather is at once the day’s adventure and the day’s pageant. Mr. Conrad has written one of the greatest stories in the world simply about the weather and the soul of man. He may be said to be the first novelist writing in English to have kept his weather-eye open. Mr. Tomlinson shares Mr. Conrad’s sensitive care for these things. His description of a storm of rain bursting on the African hills makes you see the things as you read. In its setting, even an unadorned and simple sentence like----

As Yeo luffed, the squall fell on us bodily with a great weight of
wind and white rain, pressing us into the sea,

compels our presence among blowing winds and dangerous waters.

But, weather-beaten as Mr. Tomlinson’s pages are, there is more in them than the weather. There is an essayish quality in his books, personal, confessional, go-as-you-please. The majority of essays have egotism without personality. Mr. Tomlinson’s sketches have personality without egotism. He is economical of discussion of his own tastes. When he does discuss them you know that here is no make-believe of confession. Take, for instance, the comment on place-names with which he prefaces his account of his disappointment with Tripoli:

You probably know there are place-names, which, when whispered
privately, have the unreasonable power of translating the spirit
east of the sun and west of the moon. They cannot be seen in print
without a thrill. The names in the atlas which do that for me are
a motley lot, and you, who see no magic in them, but have your own
lunacy in another phase, would laugh at mine. Celebes, Acapulco,
Para, Port Royal, Cartagena, the Marquesas, Panama, the Mackenzie
River, Tripoli of Barbary--they are some of mine. Rome should be
there, I know, and Athens, and Byzantium. But they are not, and
that is all I can say about it.

That is the farthest Mr. Tomlinson ever gets on the way towards arrogance. He ignores Rome and Athens. They are not among the ports of call of his imagination. He prefers the world that sailors tell about to the world that scholars talk about. He will not write about--he will scarcely even interest himself in--any world but that which he has known in the intimacy of his imaginative or physical experience. Places that he has seen and thought of, ships, children, stars, books, animals, soldiers, workers--of all these things he will tell you with a tender realism, lucid and human because they are part of his life. But the tradition that is not his own he throws aside as a burden. He will carry no pack save of the things that have touched his heart and his imagination.

I wish all his sketches had been as long as “The African Coast.” It is so good that it makes one want to send him travelling from star to star of all those names that mean more to him than Byzantium. One desires even to keep him a prisoner for a longer period among the lights of New York. He should have written about the blazing city at length, as he has written about the ferries. His description of the lighted ferries and the woman passenger who had forgotten Jimmy’s boots, remains in the memory. Always in his sketches we find some such significant “thing seen.” On the voyage home from New York on a floating hotel it is the passing of a derelict sailing ship, “mastless and awash,” that suddenly recreates for him the reality of the ocean. After describing the assaults of the seas on the doomed hulk, he goes on:

There was something ironic in the indifference of her defenceless
body to these unending attacks. It mocked this white and raging
post-mortem brutality, and gave her a dignity that was cold and
superior to all the eternal powers could now do. She pitched
helplessly head first into a hollow, and a door flew open under the
break of her poop; it surprised and shocked us, for the dead might
have signed to us then. She went astern of us fast, and a great
comber ran at her, as if it had just spied her, and thought she was
escaping. There was a high white flash, and a concussion we heard.
She had gone. But she appeared again far away, forlorn on a summit
in desolation, black against the sunset. The stump of her bowsprit,
the accusatory finger of the dead, pointed at the sky.

We find in “The Ruins” (which is a sketch of a town in France just evacuated by the Germans) an equally imaginative use made of a key incident. First, we have the description of the ruined town itself:

House-fronts had collapsed in rubble across the road. There is a
smell of opened vaults. All the homes are blind. Their eyes have
been put out. Many of the buildings are without roofs, and their
walls have come down to raw serrations. Slates and tiles have
avalanched into the street, or the roof itself is entire, but has
dropped sideways over the ruin below as a drunken cap over the
dissolute.

And so on till we come to the discovery of a corn-chandler’s ledger lying in the mud of the roadway. Only an artist could have made a tradesman’s ledger a symbol of hope and resurrection on a shattered planet as Mr. Tomlinson has done. He picks out from the disordered procession of things treasures that most of us would pass with hardly a glance. His clues to the meaning of the world are all of his own finding. It is this that gives his work the savour and freshness of literature.

As for clues to Mr. Tomlinson’s own mind and temper, do we not discover plenty of them in his confessions about books? He is a man who likes to read _The Voyage to the Houyhnhnms_ in bed. Heine and Samuel Butler and Anatole France are among his favourite authors. There is nothing in his work to suggest that he has taken any of them for his models. But there is a vein of rebellious irony in his writing that enables one to realise why his imagination finds in Swift good company. He, too, has felt his heart lacerated, especially in these late days of the world’s corruption. His writing would be bitter, one feels, were it not for the strength of his affections. Humanity and irony contend in his work, and humanity is fortunately the winner. In the result, the world in his books is not permanently a mud-ball, but a star shining in space. Perhaps it is in gratitude for this that we find it possible at last even to forgive him his contemptuous references to Coleridge’s _Table-talk_--that cache of jewels buried in metaphysical cotton-wool.