Three Men in a Boat - Jerome K. Jerome [10]
Jerome enjoyed public speaking, and was not afraid of making his views known, in person and in print. While editing Today he had condemned Turkish massacres of the Armenians; he campaigned on behalf of the badly-off, including his fellow-writers; a keen animal-lover, he berated the Belfast City corporation for its treatment of its tram-horses. His most dramatic outburst occurred in 1913, on his second tour of America. After one of his public readings, in Tennessee, he was moved to protest against the lynching of Negroes in the Southern states. ‘The treatment of the Negro calls to Heaven for redress,’ he wrote in My Life and Times. ‘I have sat with men who, amid vile jokes and laughter, told of “Buck Niggers” being slowly roast alive; how they screamed and writhed and prayed; how their eyes rolled inwards as the flames crept upwards till nothing could be seen but two white balls… These burnings, these slow grillings of living men, chained down to iron bedsteads; these tearings of live, quivering flesh with red-hot pincers can only be done to glut some hideous lust for cruelty.’ This is forceful writing, strongly felt, and provides further evidence of Jerome’s awareness of the harsher sides of human nature. After he’d finished his tirade, he ‘sat down in silence. It was quite a time before anybody moved. Then they all got up at the same moment, and moved towards the door.’
Round-faced and ruddy, with large, straight features, dark eyes and a thatch of thick white hair, Jerome in his fifties and sixties looked more like a benign English farmer than a desk-bound literary man. Conservative in dress, he continued to favour the tubular trousers, high-buttoned jackets and virulent tweeds of a late-Victorian man-about-town. On one occasion he was attacked by suffragettes who had mistaken him for Mr Asquith, the Liberal Prime Minister, and had to be escorted to safety by two policemen. He had a hatred of litter – hence, in part, his liking for Germany – and carried a sharpened stick with which to pick up rubbish; he once asked an eminent Turk what most impressed him about England, and was distressed to learn that it was the ‘dirty paper’ blowing about the streets. He remained a prolific writer, notching up – by the end of his life – some eighteen novels and collections of stories, twelve plays, three volumes of essays (including a second instalment of ‘Idle Thoughts’), a travel book and an autobiography; his secretary remembered how ‘he would walk up and down the study floor with his hands behind his back and dictate with marvellous ease page after page of pathos and humour. He would occasionally refer to his shorthand notes, and he would often rearrange the ornaments on the mantelpiece while dictating.’
When World War I broke out, Jerome found himself torn between his dislike of German militarism and his fondness for the Germans themselves. He recalled seeing German officers strutting three abreast down the street, ‘insolent, conceited, overbearing, civilians compelled everywhere to cringe before them’, but he hated the wave of Germanophobia that swept the country in 1914, bearing dachshunds and mild-mannered German waiters in its wake, and distrusted atrocity stories about bayonetted babies and ravished Belgian nuns. He longed to enlist, and see something of combat for himself. Too old for the British army, he wangled his way into the French ambulance service at the age of fifty-six. Helping wounded men behind the front line at Verdun, amid the rain and the rats and the rotting corpses, he was sickened by what he saw, and filled with rage against the politicians whom he held responsible. He also ran a hospital for wounded animals, among them a donkey recently