This article was published in the Evening Standard on 3 March 1982.
DORNFORD YATES: a biography by A J Smithers (Hodder £8.95)
DURING the ’20s and ’30s there grew up a generation of readers for whom the name Dornford Yates on the cover of a book was a guarantee that here was a thoroughly good read.
A Dornford Yates was an annual event.
Berry, Adele, Mansel and Chandos were household names and conjured up a fantasy world of laughter, light banter, wealth and servants loyal to the point where, in Blind Corner, Chandos’s servant having received £100,000 as his share of the spoils of war nevertheless prefers to keep his place. And of course there were incredible adventures with Rolls-Royces racing across the roads of Europe to rescue heroines or in pursuit of villains.
In short Dornford Yates knew how to write a rattling good yarn and provide an escape from an increasingly uncertain world. His heroes were heroic, his villains murderous and as a result were frequently hanged or died deservedly terrible deaths at the hands of Mansel or Chandos and his heroines were so at one with nature that they made Snow White seem positively sophisticated.
But behind Dornford Yates, the writer, there was Cecil William Mercer, the man, who lived in Pau and then Eaux Bonnes in the Pyrénées and who never mixed with the literary world. A J Smithers’s biography tries to bridge the gap between the author and the man.
For the dwindling band of fans it offers a great deal of genealogical information about his ancestors, and very little that couldn’t be gleaned from the books themselves. For those like myself who have discovered for ourselves that Mercer, the man, was an extremely complex and devious character it comes as a disappointment. It is in fact a defence in which the case against Mercer is never properly stated or examined but is waved aside.
I admit to being biased. On a visit to Pau in 1971 I found that, far from being the man I imagined, a writer who had something vaguely in common with the characters he had created, he had been generally disliked.
I also came back with his letters to his executor, Mr Carter, and found them to be full of malice and vindictiveness particularly towards his old servant, Therese Capdevielle, who had been his confidante since 1922, had risked her life by corresponding with him under the German Occupation when he was safely in Rhodesia, and was subsequently sacked and later reviled in As Berry and I Were Saying.
On later visits to Pau I interviewed Therese and her husband, Joseph, who were clearly mystified by his actions. From Therese I obtained all Mercer’s letters to her. And on each visit I was confronted with fresh evidence that Mercer had been capable of acts of violence, deceit, particularly to his first wife, and inhumanity for which there could be no excuse.
I gave Mr Smithers my material and tried to obtain from another source letters and material I had been shown. Mr Smithers was denied access to it. He was also denied access, as he acknowledges, by the Ministry of Defence to Capt Mercer’s duties at the Ministry of Labour from 1917 to 1919. He was curiously unlucky in his efforts with the Divorce Registry to get at the details of Mercer’s very shady divorce in 1933.
He did not extend his researches to Pau or check the case allegedly brought by Eugene Ascaso, a young servant, who was beaten by Mercer for failing to close the curtains and protect a painting from the sunlight. Nor is there any explanation why Mercer’s own solicitor was so disgusted with his treatment of his first wife that he refused to have any more dealings with him.
All in all, Mr Smithers has written a biography that might have been edited by Mercer himself. Instead of a rounded personality, warts and all, there emerges only the literary equivalent of the romanticised portrait of Dornford Yates that appeared on the jackets of his books.
The photograph on this one is a truer likeness. It reminds me, as did the house he built in the Pyrénées, of a certain unlamented Führer.
Pleasure from Yates’ books
This follow-up letter to Tom Sharpe’s article was published in the same newspaper on 15 March 1982.
YOU recently published a review by Tom Sharpe of Colonel A. J. Smithers’s biography of Dornford Yates (C. W. Mercer).
I am aware that Mr Sharpe has himself done a certain amount of research on the subject, and he probably knows much more about Mercer’s earlier life than I do.
On the other hand I can assure you from personal recollection, and from a large number of photographs in my possession that Mercer’s appearance did not correspond with the apparently retouched picture Sharpe chose to illustrate the shabby little aside with which his article ended.
I did not meet Mercer very often. About forty years in age and usually much distance lay between us. My recollection is of an elegant, courteous but distant personality, probably born well outside his time.
I am sure he would hope to be remembered mainly for the large amount of very genuine pleasure his books have given to a surprising number of people of all generations.
— D. C. Humphreys, North Drive, Virginiawater, Surrey.