At home, he grew up in a mildly bohemian literary world, focused upon family homes with such coy addresses as Wella Willa, Pickwick Road, Dulwich; then later in rented country cottages, of which the longest-tenanted lay near Winchester. He sat at the feet of such friends of his father as Hilaire Belloc, whom he asked breathlessly whether he had indeed, as he recounted in print, walked from London to Paris with only sixpence in his pocket. ‘Young man,’ responded Belloc magisterially, ‘I am a journalist.’ Mac remarked later that this exchange provided him with an early hint about the merits, when composing contributions for newspapers, of tempering a strict regard for truth with some savouring of romance.
G.K. Chesterton, another Catholic author, likewise favoured him with advice: ‘As I went out into the world,’ the old sage said, ‘I would meet two sorts of great men: there were the little great men who made all those around them feel little; and the great great men, who made all those around them feel great.’ Mac shook the hand of Kipling, and was much in awe of his father’s familiarity with such literary stars as J.M. Barrie and James Agate, as well as of his constant appearances in newspapers and on theatre bills. Yet Basil’s efforts to repeat the success of The New Sin yielded continuing disappointments.
His first post-war play, A Certain Liveliness, opened at the St Martin’s in February 1919, then swiftly closed. A month later, his dramatisation of Joseph Conrad’s novel Victory received its first performance at the Globe. This was a project which had been almost three years in the making. In July 1916 the actor-manager H.B. Irving had written to Conrad, then fifty-eight, urging him to agree that Basil, ‘a dramatist of some standing’, should adapt Victory for the stage. Here was implausible casting. The novel is a dark work which ends in wholesale death and tragedy, while Basil was at his best composing light pieces. But Irving persuaded both playwright and novelist that a collaboration was feasible. A month later the three met at the Garrick Club for discussions.
Basil wrote a vivid account of his first encounter with Conrad, whom he found surprising. ‘Unlike my books?’ demanded the novelist with a smile. Basil replied: ‘On the contrary – just like your books, and not in the least like a retired captain of sailing-ships.’ Conrad put his head on one side,
a birdlike gesture that was common with him. When he talked to me he showed enthusiasm only when I said anything challenging. His eyes would light up, and he would argue eagerly, at the same time giving the impression that he was trying to satisfy himself that I was right. Never was there a more flattering talker. He raised all those with whom he came in contact. It was as if one had been blessed. I do not suppose he bared his soul to anyone save in his books. He charmed you into telling your thoughts. Never was there a more courteous man, and I think he was conscious of this quality and proud of it.
Basil wanted to create the play in active collaboration with Conrad. At the outset, the novelist insisted that the theatrical adaptation should be the dramatist’s work alone. But over the next two years Conrad wrote Basil many letters, advising on passages of dialogue, details of clothing and sets. He explained, for instance, that the character Jones is ‘at bottom crazy…a psychic lunatic’; that the façade of Schomberg’s Hotel on Java, the principal setting, had three arches, with wooden tables beneath them. ‘A play must be written to seen situations,’ he observed. Sometimes Conrad was moved to write to the dramatist explaining the profound emotions which stirred him in passages of his own novel: ‘I give you my word, Dear Hastings, I wouldn’t have let out a whisper of it if your letter had not prodded me to the quick…Victory, don’t forget, has come out of my innermost self.’ They met often, usually at Conrad’s urging, when some special problem was identified. Basil sustained deep respect for the passion and intellect of the novel’s originator. Yet he became increasingly doubtful about the commercial prospects of the play. He was eager to ensure that both he and Conrad received the cheques for their parts in the production well before its opening. Basil felt that the novelist’s ‘mental attitude…did not allow him to appreciate what was theatrically significant’. As he urged Conrad that the plot must be modified to take account of the requirements of the stage, Conrad replied that he did not wish to see the stuff of his novel become too diluted: ‘Not too much water! My dear Hastings, not too much water!’
Basil’s first draft was finished in the spring of 1917, but Irving then changed his mind about which character he himself wished to play. This meant substantial script changes. By autumn, Irving had lost confidence in the whole project, and decided to abandon it. But Conrad had become enthusiastic about Basil’s work, so much so that he contributed an article to Roosters and Fledglings under the title ‘Never Any More’, about his own sole experience of taking to the air. The two men obviously liked each other. Conrad suggested that once Victory had reached the stage, Basil might dramatise his novel Under Western Eyes. In place of Irving, the actress Marie Lohr, who was co-lessee of the Globe Theatre, agreed to stage the play and herself play a leading part. The script was heavily rewritten – yet again – after a brief and unsuccessful American production of an early draft. After Conrad attended the first rehearsal, he declared that he ‘carried away an intense impression of hopefulness and belief in the play’. It opened on 26 March 1919, received some warm notices, and ran for eighty-three performances. Basil made useful money. But literary and dramatic critics never thought much of his dramatisation, and it has rarely been revived. This reflected two realities. The first was that Victory was illsuited to the stage. Basil, who himself became conscious of this difficulty early in the drafting process, wrote after the event: ‘It was really a crime to turn that wonderful novel into a play.’ Second, though Basil was a successful entertainer, he was out of his depth realising themes of the intellectual profundity addressed by Conrad.
There is an exchange in The New Sin where one character says to another, who is a playwright: ‘Bah! Your plays are just prostitution.’ The playwright answers: ‘I’m not proud of them, but I’m proud of the fact that I can sell them.’ Basil was a professional, wholly unembarrassed that he wrote for money. At his first meeting with Conrad to discuss collaboration, he said frankly: ‘There are not two forms for a work of art. This thing is only worth doing for the money there may be in it. If you are rich, it would be absurd for you to agree.’ In truth, Conrad was anything but rich – at that time, his income was smaller than Basil’s. But the playwright minded about the money much more than did the novelist. Having experienced middle-class poverty after his father Edward’s death, Basil was determined to cling to the place he had won for himself, significantly higher up the economic and social scale than that of his nineteenth-century forebears.
Hanky-Panky John, a farce of his creation, achieved a modest success in 1921, but by that date he was earning much of his income as a dramatic critic and journalist, mostly for the Daily and Sunday Express. The tenor of his essays is well captured in a sample from the index to one of his published collections, Ladies Half-Way: ‘Actresses, insulted; Americans, affectionate; Bennett, A., prostrate; Carnations, eating; Conrad, letter from; Crocodiles, kinder to; Eggs, awkward with’. Basil was a humorous columnist whose pieces about – for instance – the merits of cocktails and changing women’s hairstyles would fit as readily into the feature pages of a modern newspaper as they did into those of the 1920s. At that time also, he published a bad novel entitled The Faithful Philanderer, but we should not hold that against him.
I am a shade doubtful about the quality of Basil’s judgement. He opposed the mooted creation of a National Theatre, on the grounds that such an institution would encourage endless productions of Shakespeare, an author whom he thought better read than performed: ‘All the world’s worst actors, the offspring of what is known as Shakespearean experience, would flock to the stage door.’ When he was theatre reviewer of the Daily Express, he incurred the wrath of Arnold Bennett, a director of the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith. Basil dismissed a Chekhov production at the Lyric as ‘fatuous drivel’, and described its author as ‘a great writer of stories, but a paltry dramatist’. In similar vein, Basil listened to some 1926 radio broadcasts by Winston