Biography
Charles Langbridge Morgan was born on January 22nd, 1894 at Warreston, Rodway Road, Bromley, Kent, as the youngest of the four children of Sir Charles Langbridge Morgan (1855-1940) and Mary Morgan née Watkins, who died in 1907. CM’s parents had lived in Australia but returned to England; his father eventually became president of the Institution of Civil Engineers.
Morgan entered the Royal Navy in 1907, at thirteen; he was educated at Osborne and Dartmouth, where he was cadet captain. He then went to sea as a young midshipman, and served in the Atlantic Fleet, and later on the ‘China Station’ in the Far East. His first ship was H.M.S. Good Hope, where he suffered the relentless hazing of young midshipmen then common in the Service: this is described in his first novel, The Gunroom.
Later he was transferred to H.M.S. Monmouth, where his superior officer, Christopher Arnold-Forster, provided a kindlier atmosphere and encouraged Morgan’s steadfast desire to be a writer. Arnold-Forster, who was the great-grandson of Dr Arnold of Rugby School, believed in Morgan, and the two became fast friends.
Morgan’s father helped him to resign from the Navy in 1914, and he was entered for Brasenose College, Oxford, for the autumn of that year. After the outbreak of war, however, he rejoined the Navy and was sent as a subaltern with the hastily-formed Naval Brigades to the defence of Antwerp. In a confused and catastrophic four-day action, Morgan’s Hawke Battalion found itself first lost, then across the border in neutral Holland, where officers and men were interned in Groningen. Those officers who would not give their word not to attempt to escape were then sent to the ancient and secure fort at Wierickerschans near Bodegraven, a fortress on an artificial island. Here he stayed for around a year, before he and some fellow-officers were released on parole and went to live on the estate of Roosendaal Castle, the home of the aristocratic Van Pallandt family. Both the fort and the castle figure in Morgan’s 1932 novel The Fountain, although the Van Leyden family there portrayed is fictional. It was here that he was introduced to the French language and civilisation then still common in Dutch aristocratic circles, and which became for him a lifelong love. It was here also that he wrote the first draft of The Gunroom.
Morgan was interned in Holland until 1917, after which he was allowed to go on leave to England. While crossing to England, however, his ship was sunk and all his belongings with it, including the manuscript of the novel. Leave was extended, and he rewrote The Gunroom; he was in England when the Armistice was signed. In 1919, after some time in hospital, he saw The Gunroom published by A & C Black, and took his place at Brasenose, reading History and becoming president of OUDS, the university Dramatic Society, where he produced Hardy’s The Dynasts and met the author. Through OUDS he met the dramatic critic of The Times, A.B. Walkley, who gave him a job on the editorial staff. After five years, Walkley died, and Morgan took his place as the newspaper’s chief theatre critic.
An intense and reciprocated attachment to Mary Mond, daughter of Alfred Mond, Lord Melchett, was broken up by Lady Melchett who sent her daughter to India where she married another. Morgan, deeply affected by this, eventually met a Welsh fellow novelist, Hilda Campbell Vaughan, two years older than himself, and married her in 1923. Living in More’s Garden, a block of flats on the Embankment in Chelsea, they had two children, Elizabeth Shirley, born in 1924 (since 1948 Marchioness of Anglesey), and Roger, born in 1926, later Librarian of the House of Lords.
During this time Morgan published his second novel, My Name is Legion (1925), which introduces a number of the themes developed in his later work, and in which we can see his characteristic prose style beginning to develop. It is an uneven work, and he himself said that the man who completed it was not the same as he who had begun it four years earlier. Later he regarded it as an apprentice work and, though he never repudiated it, never urged that it be reprinted.
His first major success was Portrait in a Mirror (1929), originally called First Love, the Bildungsroman of a young painter, which won the Prix Femina-Vie Heureuse the following year. By now Morgan was a successful novelist, and the family moved to a tall house at no. 16, Campden Hill Square in Holland Park. Here Charles and Hilda each had a workroom on the remodelled top floor, and here Charles completed his next novel, The Fountain (1932). This was an even greater best-seller than Portrait, being selected as the Book of the Month in America and selling over 100,000 copies – somewhat to the author’s surprise, as it is a novel about a man’s search for what he called ‘singleness of mind’, one of Morgan’s abiding subjects. The Fountain won the Hawthornden Prize in 1933, and Morgan at once began work on another long novel, Sparkenbroke (1936), which unites his three great preoccupations, as he put it to George Moore: ‘Art, Love, and Death’. Meanwhile, he had intended to write a biography of the novelist George Moore, but owing to Lady Cunard’s refusal to allow him access to her correspondence with Moore had to settle instead for a shorter but elegant and affectionate essay, Epitaph on George Moore (1935). Morgan now tried his hand at writing, as well as reviewing, drama, and wrote a play, The Flashing Stream, with a prefatory essay ‘On Singleness of Mind’. It was produced in London in 1938.
As the Second World War began, Morgan was at work on a novel set in late 19th-century rural France, The Voyage, which was published in 1940, dedicated (without dangerously naming names) to his great French friends, Jacques and Germaine Delamain, the latter being his remarkable French translator.
Morgan spent most of the war in London working for Naval Intelligence and writing. His first short novel, The Empty Room, came out in 1941, and two selections of his weekly columns for the Times Literary Supplement, ‘Menander’s Mirror’, were published as Reflections in a Mirror, first and second series, in 1944 and 1946 respectively. One essay was on the idea ‘that France is an idea necessary to civilisation’, and his involvement with France was intensified as that country’s troubles grew. In 1942 he wrote an Ode to France; and when in September 1944 the Comédie française was reopened, Morgan was asked to read his Ode from the stage – a moment Paul Valéry remembered as unforgettably moving in his Preface to The Voyage’s French translation two years later.
In 1947 Morgan continued his format of the shorter novel with The Judge’s Story, a captivating Miltonic tale of good and evil, of temptation and deliverance. Two years later he wrote a novel about the French Resistance and its ‘passing’ of downed British airmen, The River Line, and subsequently rewrote this as a play, performed in 1952. Another feature of Morgan’s postwar work was his increasing preoccupation with totalitarianism and its conjunction of science with control: this found expression in a 1951 book of essays, Liberties of the Mind and in The Burning Glass, his last play, published in 1953.
He was not completely dominated by these fears, and one of his finest short novels, A Breeze of Morning, about an adult love affair witnessed by a young boy, came out in 1951. His final novel, Challenge to Venus, featuring an Englishman in Italy and revisiting in brief some of the themes of The Fountain, appeared in 1957.
Charles Morgan’s love of France was reciprocated: he had been made an officer of the Légion d’honneur in 1936, and five years after his appearance on the reopened stage of the Théâtre français he was made a member of the Institut de France, the body of which the Académie française is also a part. This induction, wearing the habit vert, the Institut’s magnificent embroidered uniform, was perhaps the proudest moment of his life: the hilt of his ceremonial sword showed the tomb if Ilaria del Carretto by Jacopo della Quercia in the cathedral at Lucca, mentioned in Sparkenbroke.
Though Morgan’s work was read with attention and affection by many British readers, his greatest successes were abroad, especially in America and France. He was a Romantic, and claimed to be a Platonist: his influences include his wife’s ancestor, the seventeenth-century visionary Welsh poet Henry Vaughan, the Romantic poets, especially Keats; and George Meredith. His distinction as a writer was twofold: in the first place the novels lead the reader through extraordinarily vivid descriptive passages to characters distinguished not only by action and emotion but also by thought; secondly, the craftsmanship of his prose was unequalled if in no sense ‘modern’. No twentieth-century author worked with more absolute attention at the English language. A posthumous book of essays, The Writer and his World (1960) discusses this craft, to which he had devoted a lifetime and at which he had become a master. Among his acknowledged influences were the Book of Common Prayer, Keats’s letters, and the prose of Addison; he admired Churchill also.
Morgan was not at ease with a world of modern art founded on irony, and a culture of strident vulgarity. At no time is his work precious, but it is unabashedly distinguished.
Charles Morgan died of a bronchial ailment at his Campden Hill Square home on February 6th, 1958, at the age of 64. He is buried in Gunnersbury Cemetery in West London; his gravestone reads ‘Charles Morgan, Author, Membre de l’Institut de France’, followed by the following verses from Sparkenbroke:
Weep thine own exile, not my life.
With Earth for mother, Sleep for wife,
Here in the tomb is winter spring.
Who stays? A fool. Who knocks? A King.
Charles Langbridge Morgan was born on January 22nd, 1894 at Warreston, Rodway Road, Bromley, Kent, as the youngest of the four children of Sir Charles Langbridge Morgan (1855-1940) and Mary Morgan née Watkins, who died in 1907. CM’s parents had lived in Australia but returned to England; his father eventually became president of the Institution of Civil Engineers.
Morgan entered the Royal Navy in 1907, at thirteen; he was educated at Osborne and Dartmouth, where he was cadet captain. He then went to sea as a young midshipman, and served in the Atlantic Fleet, and later on the ‘China Station’ in the Far East. His first ship was H.M.S. Good Hope, where he suffered the relentless hazing of young midshipmen then common in the Service: this is described in his first novel, The Gunroom.
Later he was transferred to H.M.S. Monmouth, where his superior officer, Christopher Arnold-Forster, provided a kindlier atmosphere and encouraged Morgan’s steadfast desire to be a writer. Arnold-Forster, who was the great-grandson of Dr Arnold of Rugby School, believed in Morgan, and the two became fast friends.
Morgan’s father helped him to resign from the Navy in 1914, and he was entered for Brasenose College, Oxford, for the autumn of that year. After the outbreak of war, however, he rejoined the Navy and was sent as a subaltern with the hastily-formed Naval Brigades to the defence of Antwerp. In a confused and catastrophic four-day action, Morgan’s Hawke Battalion found itself first lost, then across the border in neutral Holland, where officers and men were interned in Groningen. Those officers who would not give their word not to attempt to escape were then sent to the ancient and secure fort at Wierickerschans near Bodegraven, a fortress on an artificial island. Here he stayed for around a year, before he and some fellow-officers were released on parole and went to live on the estate of Roosendaal Castle, the home of the aristocratic Van Pallandt family. Both the fort and the castle figure in Morgan’s 1932 novel The Fountain, although the Van Leyden family there portrayed is fictional. It was here that he was introduced to the French language and civilisation then still common in Dutch aristocratic circles, and which became for him a lifelong love. It was here also that he wrote the first draft of The Gunroom.
Morgan was interned in Holland until 1917, after which he was allowed to go on leave to England. While crossing to England, however, his ship was sunk and all his belongings with it, including the manuscript of the novel. Leave was extended, and he rewrote The Gunroom; he was in England when the Armistice was signed. In 1919, after some time in hospital, he saw The Gunroom published by A & C Black, and took his place at Brasenose, reading History and becoming president of OUDS, the university Dramatic Society, where he produced Hardy’s The Dynasts and met the author. Through OUDS he met the dramatic critic of The Times, A.B. Walkley, who gave him a job on the editorial staff. After five years, Walkley died, and Morgan took his place as the newspaper’s chief theatre critic.
An intense and reciprocated attachment to Mary Mond, daughter of Alfred Mond, Lord Melchett, was broken up by Lady Melchett who sent her daughter to India where she married another. Morgan, deeply affected by this, eventually met a Welsh fellow novelist, Hilda Campbell Vaughan, two years older than himself, and married her in 1923. Living in More’s Garden, a block of flats on the Embankment in Chelsea, they had two children, Elizabeth Shirley, born in 1924 (since 1948 Marchioness of Anglesey), and Roger, born in 1926, later Librarian of the House of Lords.
During this time Morgan published his second novel, My Name is Legion (1925), which introduces a number of the themes developed in his later work, and in which we can see his characteristic prose style beginning to develop. It is an uneven work, and he himself said that the man who completed it was not the same as he who had begun it four years earlier. Later he regarded it as an apprentice work and, though he never repudiated it, never urged that it be reprinted.
His first major success was Portrait in a Mirror (1929), originally called First Love, the Bildungsroman of a young painter, which won the Prix Femina-Vie Heureuse the following year. By now Morgan was a successful novelist, and the family moved to a tall house at no. 16, Campden Hill Square in Holland Park. Here Charles and Hilda each had a workroom on the remodelled top floor, and here Charles completed his next novel, The Fountain (1932). This was an even greater best-seller than Portrait, being selected as the Book of the Month in America and selling over 100,000 copies – somewhat to the author’s surprise, as it is a novel about a man’s search for what he called ‘singleness of mind’, one of Morgan’s abiding subjects. The Fountain won the Hawthornden Prize in 1933, and Morgan at once began work on another long novel, Sparkenbroke (1936), which unites his three great preoccupations, as he put it to George Moore: ‘Art, Love, and Death’. Meanwhile, he had intended to write a biography of the novelist George Moore, but owing to Lady Cunard’s refusal to allow him access to her correspondence with Moore had to settle instead for a shorter but elegant and affectionate essay, Epitaph on George Moore (1935). Morgan now tried his hand at writing, as well as reviewing, drama, and wrote a play, The Flashing Stream, with a prefatory essay ‘On Singleness of Mind’. It was produced in London in 1938.
As the Second World War began, Morgan was at work on a novel set in late 19th-century rural France, The Voyage, which was published in 1940, dedicated (without dangerously naming names) to his great French friends, Jacques and Germaine Delamain, the latter being his remarkable French translator.
Morgan spent most of the war in London working for Naval Intelligence and writing. His first short novel, The Empty Room, came out in 1941, and two selections of his weekly columns for the Times Literary Supplement, ‘Menander’s Mirror’, were published as Reflections in a Mirror, first and second series, in 1944 and 1946 respectively. One essay was on the idea ‘that France is an idea necessary to civilisation’, and his involvement with France was intensified as that country’s troubles grew. In 1942 he wrote an Ode to France; and when in September 1944 the Comédie française was reopened, Morgan was asked to read his Ode from the stage – a moment Paul Valéry remembered as unforgettably moving in his Preface to The Voyage’s French translation two years later.
In 1947 Morgan continued his format of the shorter novel with The Judge’s Story, a captivating Miltonic tale of good and evil, of temptation and deliverance. Two years later he wrote a novel about the French Resistance and its ‘passing’ of downed British airmen, The River Line, and subsequently rewrote this as a play, performed in 1952. Another feature of Morgan’s postwar work was his increasing preoccupation with totalitarianism and its conjunction of science with control: this found expression in a 1951 book of essays, Liberties of the Mind and in The Burning Glass, his last play, published in 1953.
He was not completely dominated by these fears, and one of his finest short novels, A Breeze of Morning, about an adult love affair witnessed by a young boy, came out in 1951. His final novel, Challenge to Venus, featuring an Englishman in Italy and revisiting in brief some of the themes of The Fountain, appeared in 1957.
Charles Morgan’s love of France was reciprocated: he had been made an officer of the Légion d’honneur in 1936, and five years after his appearance on the reopened stage of the Théâtre français he was made a member of the Institut de France, the body of which the Académie française is also a part. This induction, wearing the habit vert, the Institut’s magnificent embroidered uniform, was perhaps the proudest moment of his life: the hilt of his ceremonial sword showed the tomb if Ilaria del Carretto by Jacopo della Quercia in the cathedral at Lucca, mentioned in Sparkenbroke.
Though Morgan’s work was read with attention and affection by many British readers, his greatest successes were abroad, especially in America and France. He was a Romantic, and claimed to be a Platonist: his influences include his wife’s ancestor, the seventeenth-century visionary Welsh poet Henry Vaughan, the Romantic poets, especially Keats; and George Meredith. His distinction as a writer was twofold: in the first place the novels lead the reader through extraordinarily vivid descriptive passages to characters distinguished not only by action and emotion but also by thought; secondly, the craftsmanship of his prose was unequalled if in no sense ‘modern’. No twentieth-century author worked with more absolute attention at the English language. A posthumous book of essays, The Writer and his World (1960) discusses this craft, to which he had devoted a lifetime and at which he had become a master. Among his acknowledged influences were the Book of Common Prayer, Keats’s letters, and the prose of Addison; he admired Churchill also.
Morgan was not at ease with a world of modern art founded on irony, and a culture of strident vulgarity. At no time is his work precious, but it is unabashedly distinguished.
Charles Morgan died of a bronchial ailment at his Campden Hill Square home on February 6th, 1958, at the age of 64. He is buried in Gunnersbury Cemetery in West London; his gravestone reads ‘Charles Morgan, Author, Membre de l’Institut de France’, followed by the following verses from Sparkenbroke:
Weep thine own exile, not my life.
With Earth for mother, Sleep for wife,
Here in the tomb is winter spring.
Who stays? A fool. Who knocks? A King.
"I am always, & I shall always be, the young man who hadn't a literary connection in the world & was terrified of drawing rooms & hated the very idea of publicity & who made himself face the world; and my happiness is to get away from luxury & hall-porters & newspapers & critics & the praise & blame, & to go on thinking my own thoughts in the unexacting company of plain people. That's why my father means so much to me. He is a real first-rater at his own job & he attaches no kind of false or glamorous value to mine. I am not an artist for him. I'm Charles who "has done very well" & "earns his own living" & "works hard" &, really, though his writing profession isn't a real profession like the Bar or engineering or something that requires qualifications, you can't ask more of a boy than that! When people speak of me & write to me as if I were some sort of rare & exotic genius, they seem to be talking to someone else. I am real when I do the things I have always done: think whether, if I have a hot bath, there will be enough for the others; save string; break off my working when there's a meal time because one must "consider the servants"; be endlessly polite to well-meaning people. That's what I like. Often it is inexpressibly boring but it makes one safe; it puts a wall round me in which I can live & think & imagine. It is literary parties & the bright, pretentious chit-chat of arrogant & temperamental second-rate artists that kills the soul. And I loathe incompetence & excuses. Oh God, how I love ordinary people who do their own job & aren't everlastingly on the red hot bricks of popular opinion. That is our peril in London. It is awful. For example, one little thing. People think I grow my hair long as an affectation. The honest to god truth is that I am frightened of barbers as I am of all the "luxury trades." It is misery to me to go into any shop large or grander than a village post office. If I am with anyone, I always wait outside while they go in. And to go into a shop and be touched is hell. Hence a hair cut only in dire necessity."
Letter to Margaret Rawlings, 14 July 1938
Letter to Margaret Rawlings, 14 July 1938
An (Auto)Biographical Note
The following note appeared at the back of the US edition of My Name Is Legion, in 1925 and in the 1932 Borzoi Books reprint. These were editions for the American market only, by CLM's US publisher Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. It was clearly written, in 1925, by CLM himself. (Thanks to Graham Shipley for scanning it from his 1932 copy.)
A BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
ON THE AUTHOR OF THIS BOOK
Charles Morgan was born in Kent on January 22 1894. He is the son of Sir Charles Morgan, a director of the Southern Railway and other companies, and President of the Institution of Civil Engineers, 1924.
His boyhood was in outward events similar to the boyhood of most sons of the English professional class. He went to a private school at the age of eight and heartily loathed it, for he was from the outset deeply reserved and, apart from a few quiet friendships, found little pleasure in the companionship of children of his own age. Before he had learned to write, he had continually told himself stories; as soon as he could use a pencil he began to set them on paper. His chief pleasures at that time were found in the company of older people who would tolerate his timidity, or alone in his father’s library or on his father’s lawns. In the library he came upon books not always accessible to children. Tales of physical adventure, though he read them, attracted him less than work of a stronger sort. “Wuthering Heights,” Poe’s Tales, “The Ingoldsby Legends,” the verse of Blake, Keats and Gray were among the earliest prizes of his random wanderings, and whatever was broadly humorous in “Ingoldsby” left him cold. Blake, the Brontës and the Bible were his jewels then and are still. Milton, too, was read.
He always wanted and intended to write. Nothing else, at any period of his career, has ever seemed of comparable importance. But someone told him—a Victorian jest not intended to be taken seriously—that the fate of writers who had no other employment was to starve in garrets. This warning, confirmed by the discovery of a picture of Chatterton’s death, produced a profound impression. The child determined that he must have another employment that would enable him to see the world and give him leisure to write. The sight of cruisers off the coast tipped the balance. He decided to enter the Navy.
He went to the Royal Naval College, Osborne, at the age of twelve. Here and at Dartmouth he was trained for four years. Literature still remained his chief care, but other ambitions sprang up to accompany it. He attained to his own surprise high distinction in games—not because he had a natural taste or aptitude for cricket or football, but because he saw that among boys you obtained neither power nor peace without athleticism, and deliberately compelled himself to take a place in the 1st XI and 1st XV. He became, both at Osborne and Dartmouth, Chief Cadet Captain—a position which corresponds to that of Head Prefect at a public school, but is in fact more powerful because it is backed by the full strength of the Naval Discipline Act. He passed out from Dartmouth in the first class.
He then went to sea. After a few preliminary months in the cruiser Cumberland in the Mediterranean and home waters, he was appointed as midshipman to the Good Hope, the flagship of the 5th Cruiser Squadron of the Atlantic Fleet. Here he served six months and was then transferred to H. M. S. Monmouth. This took him to China and Japan. But it had at last been forced upon him that the profession of a naval officer was not compatible, in his case at any rate, with the profession of writing, and he determined to leave the Navy without loss of time. He resigned in 1913, having served altogether about seven years, and came home across Russia. In England, after a period of illness and delay, he buried himself in deep country and began to learn as much Latin and Greek as was necessary to enable him to enter Oxford University. A few months later he passed the required examinations and was to have gone up to Brasenose College when the academical year began in October, 1914.
He looked forward to Oxford with deep and passionate longing. During his naval years, Oxford had always been for him a symbol of that contemplative life of spiritual adventure towards which his instinct drew him. Oxford had been for him the unattainable city ever since, as a midshipman who felt himself exiled from all that he cared for most, he had read in his hammock Mr. Thomas Hardy’s ‘‘Jude the Obscure.”
Now, when at last the unattainable seemed about to be attained, the war intervened. He volunteered in the first days without eagerness or reluctance. Detachment and contemplation had become impossible; his essential life was therefore held in suspense; a mechanical instinct, bred of long discipline, took him again to the Admiralty from which he had so recently escaped. He was given a commission in the Royal Naval Division, served in the defence of Antwerp, and after the evacuation was made a prisoner of war in Holland together with the greater part of his brigade. Here, with other officers, he was shut up in the disused and moated fortress of Wierickerschans, near Gouda. He shared in several organized attempts to escape, particularly in the excavation of a tunnel, the work of several months. The tunnel was discovered and the fortress ultimately closed, the British government having ordered their officers to give parole in order to free the Dutch from the trouble and expense of guarding them. For the next two years Morgan shared a cottage with two other officers in remote Dutch country in the province of Gelderland. Here he was happy because he was away from crowds and happier because his friendship with the great Dutch landowner of the district admitted him to the intimacy of a curiously withdrawn aristocracy, still living in its old castles, proud, aloof, feudal within its own wide estates, highly cultured and at ease in at least four languages, but detached from politics and, indeed, from the mechanical progress of the modern world.
Here Morgan began to contribute verse and prose to English papers and to write his first book, afterwards published as ‘‘The Gunroom,” an immature novel, with the life of junior officers in the Navy as its background, which was damaged as a work of art by its directly propagandist purpose. It was written in order to make known the conditions in which midshipmen lived and the cruelty to which they were subjected systematically as an unofficial but condoned part of their training. This book had a strange history. It was originally written in the first person, but when it was near completion, Morgan was dissatisfied with it, destroyed it, and wrote it again in the third person. In November, 1917, he obtained leave from the Dutch to visit England on parole and took the second version of his novel with him in MS. Within an hour of England his ship was mined, and sank in seven min(346)utes. Morgan was picked by a destroyer but his MS. and all his belongings were gone. Because he had determined that what he had to say about the Navy ought to be said, he wrote “The Gunroom” a third time. It was published in 1919 and attracted considerable attention. Certain chapters in it were fiercely debated inside and outside the Navy and the book sold fast. Then, one day, when it was in the full tide of success, its sale suddenly and mysteriously stopped. It was not officially banned. But bookshops which had been displaying it, were found to be stocking it no longer. Assistants who had sold it the day before, now shook their heads and said that they had never heard of it. Of this there has never been an open explanation.
Meanwhile, since 1915, Morgan had been writing verse and prose in various journals, including the Times (which published his first poem, sent in as the work of an unheard-of contributor, on its leader page), the Fortnightly Review, the English Review, and the Westminster Gazette. In the spring of 1919, he went up to Oxford. Here he was President of the Oxford University Dramatic Society, a debater at the Union and Vice-President of the New Reform Club. He took his B.A. degree, with honours in Modern History, in June, 1921.
On coming down from Oxford, he worked for a few months in a publishing office until, in December, 1921, he was appointed to be Mr. A. B. Walkley’s lieutenant as dramatic critic to the Times. He still holds this position and is also a leader writer to the Times. In June, 1923, he married Hilda Campbell Vaughan, of The Castle, Builth, Breconshire, thus renewing his family’s original connexion with Wales.
The following note appeared at the back of the US edition of My Name Is Legion, in 1925 and in the 1932 Borzoi Books reprint. These were editions for the American market only, by CLM's US publisher Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. It was clearly written, in 1925, by CLM himself. (Thanks to Graham Shipley for scanning it from his 1932 copy.)
A BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
ON THE AUTHOR OF THIS BOOK
Charles Morgan was born in Kent on January 22 1894. He is the son of Sir Charles Morgan, a director of the Southern Railway and other companies, and President of the Institution of Civil Engineers, 1924.
His boyhood was in outward events similar to the boyhood of most sons of the English professional class. He went to a private school at the age of eight and heartily loathed it, for he was from the outset deeply reserved and, apart from a few quiet friendships, found little pleasure in the companionship of children of his own age. Before he had learned to write, he had continually told himself stories; as soon as he could use a pencil he began to set them on paper. His chief pleasures at that time were found in the company of older people who would tolerate his timidity, or alone in his father’s library or on his father’s lawns. In the library he came upon books not always accessible to children. Tales of physical adventure, though he read them, attracted him less than work of a stronger sort. “Wuthering Heights,” Poe’s Tales, “The Ingoldsby Legends,” the verse of Blake, Keats and Gray were among the earliest prizes of his random wanderings, and whatever was broadly humorous in “Ingoldsby” left him cold. Blake, the Brontës and the Bible were his jewels then and are still. Milton, too, was read.
He always wanted and intended to write. Nothing else, at any period of his career, has ever seemed of comparable importance. But someone told him—a Victorian jest not intended to be taken seriously—that the fate of writers who had no other employment was to starve in garrets. This warning, confirmed by the discovery of a picture of Chatterton’s death, produced a profound impression. The child determined that he must have another employment that would enable him to see the world and give him leisure to write. The sight of cruisers off the coast tipped the balance. He decided to enter the Navy.
He went to the Royal Naval College, Osborne, at the age of twelve. Here and at Dartmouth he was trained for four years. Literature still remained his chief care, but other ambitions sprang up to accompany it. He attained to his own surprise high distinction in games—not because he had a natural taste or aptitude for cricket or football, but because he saw that among boys you obtained neither power nor peace without athleticism, and deliberately compelled himself to take a place in the 1st XI and 1st XV. He became, both at Osborne and Dartmouth, Chief Cadet Captain—a position which corresponds to that of Head Prefect at a public school, but is in fact more powerful because it is backed by the full strength of the Naval Discipline Act. He passed out from Dartmouth in the first class.
He then went to sea. After a few preliminary months in the cruiser Cumberland in the Mediterranean and home waters, he was appointed as midshipman to the Good Hope, the flagship of the 5th Cruiser Squadron of the Atlantic Fleet. Here he served six months and was then transferred to H. M. S. Monmouth. This took him to China and Japan. But it had at last been forced upon him that the profession of a naval officer was not compatible, in his case at any rate, with the profession of writing, and he determined to leave the Navy without loss of time. He resigned in 1913, having served altogether about seven years, and came home across Russia. In England, after a period of illness and delay, he buried himself in deep country and began to learn as much Latin and Greek as was necessary to enable him to enter Oxford University. A few months later he passed the required examinations and was to have gone up to Brasenose College when the academical year began in October, 1914.
He looked forward to Oxford with deep and passionate longing. During his naval years, Oxford had always been for him a symbol of that contemplative life of spiritual adventure towards which his instinct drew him. Oxford had been for him the unattainable city ever since, as a midshipman who felt himself exiled from all that he cared for most, he had read in his hammock Mr. Thomas Hardy’s ‘‘Jude the Obscure.”
Now, when at last the unattainable seemed about to be attained, the war intervened. He volunteered in the first days without eagerness or reluctance. Detachment and contemplation had become impossible; his essential life was therefore held in suspense; a mechanical instinct, bred of long discipline, took him again to the Admiralty from which he had so recently escaped. He was given a commission in the Royal Naval Division, served in the defence of Antwerp, and after the evacuation was made a prisoner of war in Holland together with the greater part of his brigade. Here, with other officers, he was shut up in the disused and moated fortress of Wierickerschans, near Gouda. He shared in several organized attempts to escape, particularly in the excavation of a tunnel, the work of several months. The tunnel was discovered and the fortress ultimately closed, the British government having ordered their officers to give parole in order to free the Dutch from the trouble and expense of guarding them. For the next two years Morgan shared a cottage with two other officers in remote Dutch country in the province of Gelderland. Here he was happy because he was away from crowds and happier because his friendship with the great Dutch landowner of the district admitted him to the intimacy of a curiously withdrawn aristocracy, still living in its old castles, proud, aloof, feudal within its own wide estates, highly cultured and at ease in at least four languages, but detached from politics and, indeed, from the mechanical progress of the modern world.
Here Morgan began to contribute verse and prose to English papers and to write his first book, afterwards published as ‘‘The Gunroom,” an immature novel, with the life of junior officers in the Navy as its background, which was damaged as a work of art by its directly propagandist purpose. It was written in order to make known the conditions in which midshipmen lived and the cruelty to which they were subjected systematically as an unofficial but condoned part of their training. This book had a strange history. It was originally written in the first person, but when it was near completion, Morgan was dissatisfied with it, destroyed it, and wrote it again in the third person. In November, 1917, he obtained leave from the Dutch to visit England on parole and took the second version of his novel with him in MS. Within an hour of England his ship was mined, and sank in seven min(346)utes. Morgan was picked by a destroyer but his MS. and all his belongings were gone. Because he had determined that what he had to say about the Navy ought to be said, he wrote “The Gunroom” a third time. It was published in 1919 and attracted considerable attention. Certain chapters in it were fiercely debated inside and outside the Navy and the book sold fast. Then, one day, when it was in the full tide of success, its sale suddenly and mysteriously stopped. It was not officially banned. But bookshops which had been displaying it, were found to be stocking it no longer. Assistants who had sold it the day before, now shook their heads and said that they had never heard of it. Of this there has never been an open explanation.
Meanwhile, since 1915, Morgan had been writing verse and prose in various journals, including the Times (which published his first poem, sent in as the work of an unheard-of contributor, on its leader page), the Fortnightly Review, the English Review, and the Westminster Gazette. In the spring of 1919, he went up to Oxford. Here he was President of the Oxford University Dramatic Society, a debater at the Union and Vice-President of the New Reform Club. He took his B.A. degree, with honours in Modern History, in June, 1921.
On coming down from Oxford, he worked for a few months in a publishing office until, in December, 1921, he was appointed to be Mr. A. B. Walkley’s lieutenant as dramatic critic to the Times. He still holds this position and is also a leader writer to the Times. In June, 1923, he married Hilda Campbell Vaughan, of The Castle, Builth, Breconshire, thus renewing his family’s original connexion with Wales.