Hugh Walpole
[4] In 1889, two years after the birth of the couple's daughter, Dorothea ("Dorothy"), Somerset Walpole accepted a prominent and well-paid academic post at the General Theological Seminary, New York.
Though he missed his family and felt lonely he was reasonably happy, but he moved to Sir William Borlase's Grammar School in Marlow in 1895, where he was bullied, frightened and miserable.
[17] Walpole was also attempting to cope with his homosexual feelings, which for a while focused on Benson, who recorded in his diary in 1906 an unexpected outburst by his young admirer: "[H]e broke out rather eagerly into protestations – He cared for me more than anyone in the world.
[31] The Observer gave the book a favourable review: "The slow growth of the poison within [Perrin] is traced with wonderful skill and sympathy ... one feels throughout these pages a sense of intolerable tension, of impending disaster";[32] The Manchester Guardian was less enthusiastic, praising the scene-setting but calling the story "an unconscientious melodrama".
"[34][n 7] Arnold Bennett, a well-established novelist seventeen years Walpole's senior, admired the book, and befriended the young author, regularly chiding, encouraging, sometimes mocking him into improving his prose, characters and narratives.
[37] This was of no practical consequence, as he had no intention of returning to the teaching profession, but it was an early illustration of his capacity, noted by Benson, for unthinkingly giving offence, though being hypersensitive to criticism himself.
[38] In early 1914 James wrote an article for The Times Literary Supplement surveying the younger generation of British novelists and comparing them with their eminent elder contemporaries.
[n 9] James said that agreeing to write it had been "an insensate step",[41] but from Walpole's point of view it was highly satisfactory: one of the greatest living authors had publicly ranked him among the finest young British novelists.
[46]While in training for the Sanitar, Walpole devoted his leisure hours to gaining a reasonable fluency in the Russian language, and to his first full-length work of non-fiction, a literary biography of Joseph Conrad.
The writer Arthur Ransome, Petrograd correspondent of The Daily News, had successfully lobbied for the establishment of a bureau to counter the German efforts, and the British ambassador, Sir George Buchanan, wanted Walpole to take charge.
[30] Sadleir writes that this novel and The Dark Forest "take a high place among his works, on account of their intuitive understanding of an alien mentality and the vigour of their narrative power.
[66] What Sadleir describes as Walpole's "genial and attractive appearance, his complete lack of aloofness, his exciting fluency as a speaker [and] his obvious and genuine liking for his hosts" combined to win him a large American following.
[30] The success of his talks led to increases in his lecturing fees, greatly enhanced sales of his books, and large sums from American publishers anxious to print his latest fiction.
His main British publishers, Macmillan, found it expedient to appoint a senior member of staff to edit his manuscripts, correcting spelling, punctuation, inconsistencies and errors of historical fact.
The reviewer Ivor Brown commented that Walpole had earlier charmed many with his cheerful tales of Mayfair, but that in this novel he showed a greater side to his art: "This is a book with little happiness about it, but its stark strength is undeniable.
"[69] The Illustrated London News said, "No former novelist has seized quite so powerfully upon the cathedral fabric and made it a living character in the drama, an obsessing individuality at once benign and forbidding.
His large income enabled him to maintain his London flat in Piccadilly, but Brackenburn, on the slopes of Catbells overlooking Derwentwater, was his main home for the rest of his life.
He enjoyed his brief change of role from writer to bit-part player: in the film he played the Vicar of Blunderstone delivering a boring sermon that sends David to sleep.
In 1939 he was commissioned to report for William Randolph Hearst's newspapers on the funeral in Rome of Pope Pius XI, the conclave to elect his successor, and the subsequent coronation.
A fellow correspondent was Tom Driberg, whose memoirs tell of a lunch à deux at which Walpole arrived flushed with excitement from a sexual encounter that morning with an attendant in the Borghese Palace.
[92] In the weeks between the funeral and Pius XII's election Walpole, with his customary fluency, wrote much of his book Roman Fountain, a mixture of fact and fiction about the city.
He overexerted himself at the opening of Keswick's fund-raising "War Weapons Week" in May 1941, making a speech after taking part in a lengthy march, and died of a heart attack at Brackenburn, aged 57.
[104] In his adopted home of Keswick a section of the town museum was dedicated to Walpole's memory in 1949, with manuscripts, correspondence, paintings and sculpture from Brackenburn, donated by his sister and brother.
He was more taken with a darker, Dostoyevskian, side that he found in the writing: "suddenly it will transform the pleasant easy scene he is giving us into transparency behind which are bright stars and red hellfire ... No matter how jolly and zestful he may appear to be, the fact remains that he possesses an unusually sharp sense of evil.
"[122] On the other hand, Walpole stood out as one of the few literary figures willing to go into court and give evidence for the defence at the obscenity trial after the 1928 lesbian novel by Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness, was published.
In the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Elizabeth Steele summed up: "His psychology was not deep enough for the polemicist, his diction not free enough for those returning from war, and his zest disastrous to a public wary of personal commitment".
The Herries stories have seldom been out of print, and in 2014 WorldCat listed a dozen recent reissues of Walpole's works, including The Wooden Horse, The Dark Forest, The Secret City, Jeremy, and The Cathedral.
[n 21] Writing when homosexual acts between men were still outlawed in England, Hart-Davis avoided direct mention of his subject's sexuality, so respecting Walpole's habitual discretion and the wishes of his brother and sister.
Much shorter than Hart-Davis's biography, at 178 pages to his 503, it dealt mainly with the novels, and aimed "to show the sources of Hugh Walpole's success as a writer during the thirty-five years and fifty books of his busy career".
[134] Steele concentrated on half a dozen of Walpole's best books, each illustrating aspects of his writing, under the headings "Acolyte", "Artist", "Witness", "Evangelist", "Critic" and "Romanticist".
