STANLEY OLSON

Elinor Wylie

1978

WHEN STANLEY OLSON came to live in England early in 1969, he was 22. His ostensible purpose was to write something about Leonard and Virginia Woolf and their publishing venture, the Hogarth Press. One obvious person to interview on the subject was Frances Partridge. I had heard all about her from her son Burgo when both of us were employed by the magazine Time and Tide and before the heart attack that killed him prematurely. From his account, I had her logged as a bad mother, a self-satisfied Bloomsbury snob, amoral, and to top it all off, a pacifist in 1940 of all years. Stanley’s friendship with her for a while gave me reservations about him.

Quite soon he knew his way around literary London. He fitted in. In appearance and in manner he seemed older than his years, mysteriously middle-aged. A perfectionist in matters great and small, he also couldn’t help cutting a dash. There was nothing bohemian about him. It was his style to exaggerate praise and blame, to speak comically about what was serious and seriously about what was comic. I once wrote about him: “Moan, whine, impossible, ignorance, awfulness, boredom, were favourite words in his vocabulary. In every sphere nothing but the best would do.” Tish Lampert, a sometime girlfriend of his, was American but nothing in Stanley’s accent or clothing or habits gave away his nationality. I knew there were Midwesterners of Swedish origins and vaguely assumed he was one of them. The London literati couldn’t help thinking of him as a Henry Jamesian character at home in books and conversation.

He lived in a pretty mews at the back of an exclusive Georgian square in the West End. I first met Sybille Bedford there. She and Stanley had a lengthy discussion about the apparently inadequate facilities for storage of several leading wine merchants. Once or twice, I caught sight of him pedaling through the traffic on a tricycle. Attached to it was an open trailer in which he conveyed Wuzzo, a particularly playful cocker spaniel in need of exercise in one of the parks. Lunching at Claridge’s, he would leave with sheets of the hotel’s headed writing paper, giving the impression of being at home there. An invitation from the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire to spend the week-end at Chatsworth was a passport to the higher social reaches. For fear that a servant might unpack his suitcase, Stanley bought a roll of tissue paper to spread between his clothes to make-believe that he had a servant at home.

Most of his friends assumed that Stanley must have private money. The country might be experiencing economic crisis but his extravagance ran unchecked. As far as I was aware, he made no effort to find regular work; he did a little freelance journalism and book reviewing, not enough to pay the bills. Years in the writing, his first book, Elinor Wylie, the biography of a Twenties poet now read mostly by academics, came out in 1979. I was sent a proof copy whose cover and title page misprinted the author’s name as Stanley Owen, an unprecedented error but a good example of serendipity. The inscription reads, “To David, with great pleasure from Stanley Olson OWEN.” A graphologist would be in his element analyzing Stanley’s handwriting, the letters so identical and minute that the words can hardly be read even with a magnifying glass. It looks as if he was making sure not to give anything away. Here is a sentence I have deciphered. “I absolutely detest Jacques-Emile Blanche: such a painful snob and such a poseur.” Or another, “How I agree with you about the complete awfulness of Graham Greene; never liked him, never felt any desire to try to like him and never understood why people go weak at the knee over him: nausea?”

Stanley’s second book, John Singer Sargent: His Portrait, was published in 1986, receiving a cloudburst of critical approval. He wrote to me, “I can never quite grasp why people had it in for Sargent because he paints Jews. Jealousy; they couldn’t get a commission? The Wertheimers were delightful people – even if the next generation has gone to seed rather.… But then I cannot understand anti-Semitism. It is a tiresome prejudice and worse, downright evil. But I could go on for pages. Thank God Sargent was a cut above those morons who looked at his subjects and sneered.”

The next project, a biography of Rebecca West, was making heavy weather. Stanley was becoming more than usually histrionic about the business of writing and more than usually spendthrift about the business of living. In July 1986 he had a stroke. I visited him in hospital and found that he could understand conversation but could only express himself involuntarily and exclusively in four-letter words. Three years later a second stroke was fatal.

His cousin and literary executor and now biographer as well, Phyllis Hatfield, was writing to me in 1991 with questions. In the opening pages of Pencil Me In, her book about Stanley, she describes dancing with him at his bar mitzvah. This came with the force of a secret suddenly exploding. His Russian-Jewish grandfather, an immigrant who could hardly speak English, had changed the family name of Olshanitsky to Olson because it sounded American. His father had made a huge fortune providing spare parts for electronics. Living in Akron, Ohio, the parents had thought it in Stanley’s interest to send him to a military academy on the East Coast. They could never have understood their son but they always paid his allowance and more besides, so they must have been proud of him. Phyllis Hatfield does her heroic best to present Stanley as a gifted young writer who had “an uncanny sense of how to be amusing” and viewed the ups and downs of life with “ironic detachment.” But that can’t be all there is to it. Instinct gives me the feeling that something very different, some element of fear too deep to bring into the open – the comic masking the tragic – must have driven him into exile and impersonation of an English dilettante.