The Rough Road (1918) by William J. Locke

Book Review by George S: Locke is a difficult writer to classify. In 1919, J.C. Squire wrote:

The position of Mr W.J.Locke has always been a little odd. no serious critic of literature can take him seriously as being in the category of great novelists. And yet no critic can withhold his unwilling admiration for an undeniable gift when one of Mr Locke’s novels falls into his hand.

Locke is above all a sentimental writer, and had a knack for adapting his sentimentality to the national mood. His books said what everyone wished they could believe.

The Rough Road is a book about the Great War, and its theme is that the war, though terrible, was also ennobling. As he makes one of his characters say: “It’s an ill war that blows nobody good. And I’m not complaining of this one.”

The book’s central character is Marmaduke Trevor, on whom Locke enjoys pouring scorn. Coddled by his foolish mother, he is brought up to be a ‘softie’

Under feminine guidance and tuition he embroidered and painted screens and played the piano and the mandolin, and read Miss Charlotte Yonge and learned history from the late Mrs. Markham.

He lives in Durdlebury, a cathedral town of extreme cosiness; Locke presents Marmaduke as the embodiment of everything wrong with Durdlebury, and Durdlebury as the embodiment of everything wrong with pre-war England. He editorialises:

We had all waxed too fat during the opening years of the twentieth century, and, not having a spiritual ideal in God’s universe, we were in danger of perishing from Fatty Degeneration of the Soul.

Marmaduke grows up charming but effete. Locke enjoys himself describing the aesthetic environment he has created for himself:

The wall-paper, which he had designed himself, was ivory-white with veinings of peacock-blue. Into the ivory-silk curtains were woven peacocks in full pride. The cushions were ivory and peacock-blue. The chairs, the writing-table, the couch, the bookcases, were pure Sheraton and Hepplewhite. Vellum-bound books filled the cases—Doggie was very particular about his bindings. Delicate water-colours alone adorned the walls. On his neatly arranged writing-table lay an ivory set—inkstand, pen-tray, blotter and calendar. Bits of old embroidery harmonizing with the peacock shades were spread here and there. A pretty collection of eighteenth-century Italian ivory statuettes were grouped about the room. A spinet, inlaid with ebony and ivory, formed a centre for the arrangement of many other musical instruments—a viol, mandolins gay with ribbons, a theorbo, flutes and clarinets. Through the curtains, draped across an alcove, could be guessed the modern monstrosity of a grand piano. One tall closed cabinet was devoted to his collection of wall-papers. Another, open, to a collection of little dogs in china, porcelain, faïence; thousands of them; he got them through dealers from all over the world.  He had the finest collection in existence, and maintained a friendly and learned correspondence with the other collector—an elderly, disillusioned Russian prince, who lived somewhere near Nijni-Novgorod. On the spinet and on the writing-table were great bowls of golden rayon d’or roses.

Marmaduke’s main project is writing a history of wallpaper… But he decides he should get married, and Peggy, a pleasant local young girl, with no better prospects, agrees to become engaged to him, though there is no passion on either side.

The war comes, just when it’s needed to save England’s soul from fatty degeneration. (Locke does the quite usual novelist’s trick of making us aware of the months counting down through 1914 while the characters are quite unaware of looming danger – June, July…

His boisterous cousin Oliver enlists. He had always despised Marmaduke, and it was he who gave him the scornful nickname of Doggie, because he is like a lapdog.

At last he received an anonymous letter, “For little Doggie Trevor, from the girls of Durdlebury,” enclosing a white feather.

This, and the attitude of Peggy, who is deeply embarrassed by his being out of uniform,, makes him seek a commission, and a relative wangles him into officer training. However, he totally fails at this, and is asked to resign his commission.

Humiliated, and unwilling to go home a total failure, he eventually decides that the only course open to him is to enlist as a private. Locke immensely approves of this. It is the manly thing to do. (Is it worth noting that Locke himself was in his fifties at the time, and well past the age when he might have ben expected to be a soldier?) By steps, Doggie is brought away from his pretty aesthetic fancies, to face ‘the brutality of fact.’

Life in the ranks is grim and uncomfortable, but eventually a deeply enriching spiritual experience. Doggie learns to live without comforts; he no longer plays the theorbo or mandolin, but plays ‘Annie Laurie’ on a penny whistle to entertain his comrades.

Late in the book there is a hymn of praise to the common soldiers:

the men he learned to know and love: the men to whom reading was little pleasure, writing a school-child’s laborious task, the glories of the earth as interpreted through art a sealed book; the men whose daily speech was foul metaphor; the men, hemi-demi-semi-educated, whose crude socialistic opinions the open lessons of history and the eternal facts of human nature derisively refuted; the men who had sweated and slaved in factory and in field to no other purpose than to obey the biological laws of the perpetuation of the species; yet the men with the sweet minds of children, the gushing tenderness of women, the hearts of lions; the men compared to whom the rotten squealing heroes of Homer were a horde of cowardly savages. They were men, these comrades of his, swift with all that there can be of divine glory in men

When stationed in France, Doggie gets to know Jeanne, a young Frenchwoman, for whom he develops feelings much deeper than those he had for his agreeable Durdlebury fiancée. He commits a heroic deed rescuing her uncle’s wealth from where it had been hidden in a well to protect it from the Germans.

The emotional tangle is sorted out when nice Peggy, the Durdlebury fiancée, falls properly in love with Oliver, the manly cousin, thus freeing Doggie to seek out French Joanne.. Everyone behaves with utter nobility, and it’s the war that has woked its magic in bringing everyone together. As Oliver says: “In many ways, it’s a jolly good old war, you know—for those that pull through. It has taught us both a lot, Marmaduke.”

Marmaduke’s progress is towards toughness, and a repudiation of the softness of his upbringing. (On a return to his childhood home, he deliberately smashes that collection of china dogs.) I’m a bit disturbed by hints towards the end that he might go into politics as a radical, but not a socialist – sounds a bit like Mussolini’s Blackshirts, who had many English admireres in the 1920s.

So the book is tosh, but it’s rather well-written tosh. Locke has the knack of readability, and an optimism that is infectious.

W. J. Locke

Virginia Woolf wrote a review of theis book in the Times Literary Supplement, that treats it ironically, but says:

The great charm of Mr Locke’s work lies in the assurance that is wafted to us by innumerable touches of irrepressible good nature that the worse the disease the more certain the cure; the darker the cloud the more silver the lining; the steeper the hill – but Mr Locke puts it at greater length and more persuasively than we can. His difficulty lies always in the first half of the proposition. It is amusing to see how persistently in spite of every effort his faith in human nature keeps breaking in… Mr Locke can hardly stay his hand until the outbreak of war to begin that process of unveiling and vindication and making good in which he delights so heartily that we can scarcely help enjoying it too.”

This was a re-reading of the novel, but – almost despite myself, I found myself caring about the characters, and I was truly delighted when Doggie and Jeanne were united at the end.