Free Did You Really Shoot the Television? by Max Hastings

quick… Victory , don’t forget, has come out of my innermost self.’ They met often, usually at Conrad’s urging, when somespecial 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