On 16 January 1930, a letter appeared in The Times from Lieutenant-Commander A. C. Powell, Royal Navy:
Sir, I am interested to see that you are including a cross-word [sic] puzzle in your Weekly Edition.
Would it not be an additional attraction to your many readers – of whom I am pleased to be one – if the same cross-word puzzle were reproduced on one day of the week in your daily edition?1
The same page of the newspaper reported a service which had been organized the previous day at St Martin-in-the-Fields for the Howard League for Penal Reform, at which the Archbishop of York, Dr William Temple, had said in his sermon that ‘it seemed to him quite plain that it would be for the benefit of society if the death penalty were abolished’.
The archbishop’s suggestion fell on deaf ears among the governing classes, but the lieutenant-commander’s idea took off. There were, inevitably, some voices of dissent. ‘Let me entreat you to keep The Times from puzzles of all sorts. Space there is precious and prestige also,’1 wrote M. Miller of 69 Warwick Square, SW1. M. Miller was either so pressed for space, or so jealous of prestige, or perhaps both, as not to be able to explain what she (or he) meant. The day that she (or he) wrote, The Times carried the news that Mr Patel had resigned as the president of the legislative assembly in India because the British had ratted on their assurance that India would be granted Dominion status – that is, treated like white countries in the Empire such as Australia and Canada and New Zealand. Sir Arthur Ponsonby became Baron Ponsonby of Shulbree, and Canon Spencer Carpenter became Master of the Temple.
Nearly all the subsequent correspondents, however, as a naval arms conference got under way between five great powers – Britain, France, Italy, Japan and America – clamoured for a cross-word.
The Times was the broadsheet newspaper with the largest circulation, and it had an importance in British public life which is difficult in these days to appreciate. It was the in-house journal of the Establishment, a term first used in 1923. Whereas Northcliffe had used it, in his days as proprietor, to scare and criticize the government, under the new proprietor, Major J. J. Astor,2 who reappointed Geoffrey Dawson as editor,3 it was a small-c conservative paper, intensely cautious in foreign policy, and stuffy in its attitude to change.
Over the matter of the crossword, Dawson commissioned his assistant R. M. Barrington-Ward, later to be editor of the paper (1941–48), to find a suitable crossword-setter. Barrington-Ward asked his friend Robert Bell, of the Observer, and Bell asked his son Adrian, then a thirty-year-old writer who had gone to live in the country to do a little farming and finish a novel. Adrian Bell had neither compiled nor completed a crossword puzzle in his life. He was offered three guineas per puzzle, and agreed to set two puzzles per week. (At this time, the small ads of the paper offered housemaids £40 per annum for full-time employment.) He was to be the paper’s crossword editor and chief setter for the next forty years. He set puzzle number one, and he set puzzle number 10,000. ‘I think you must be near dotty to spend your life setting crosswords,’ he engagingly said in August 1970.4 Bell made only a few mistakes, one of which was to misspell the surname Rossetti in one of his puzzles.
Before long the crossword lost its hyphen and became a regular feature of The Times. Like so many unmistakably British institutions, the crossword began in the United States. Evolving from other acrostic puzzles, the crossword proper first appeared in the Christmas edition of the New York World in 1913, set and edited by Arthur Wynne. By the 1920s crossword mania gripped America. Late in 1924 a man did a survey of all the passengers travelling between New York and Boston by train and found no fewer than 60 per cent engrossed in the puzzle. The New York World puzzle was one of the most popular, set by Gelett Burgess, author of
I never saw a Purple Cow
I never hope to see one;
But I can tell you, anyhow,
I’d rather see than be one.
Of his fans, addicts, victims, or whatever noun would be appropriate, he wrote:
The fans they chew their pencils,
The fans they beat their wives.
They look up words for extinct birds
They lead such puzzling lives.5
At this date, The Times in London had mocked the Americans for their crossword enthusiasm. AN ENSLAVED AMERICA was their headline6 to describe the ‘menace’ which was ‘making devastating inroads on the working hours of every rank of society’.7 Once the mania had crossed the Atlantic, of course, it became as English as, well, as female members of Parliament, as Winston Churchill and Agatha Christie,* as scrambled eggs and the briefcase and the ballot box, all of which had American origins or antecedents.
It was not long, however, after adopting the American pastime of doing crosswords, before readers of The Times were displaying a number of very genuinely British sophistications. It became the pastime of the Establishment classes. ‘Do you think you could find me a copy in which the crossword puzzle has not been solved?’ asked a weary bishop at the Lambeth Conference.8
To establish its élitist status, The Times included a Latin crossword on 1 March. It was not a cryptic crossword, it simply expected readers to be well-versed in those Latin authors read in public schools and at Oxford and Cambridge – especially Horace. Nearly all the poems cited are by Horace, and most of them the Odes. ‘Horace calls Tarentum this’ (ans. Lacedaemonium). ‘Care rides behind me’ was the only clue for equitem, a reference to the third book of Odes, Ode 1, line 40. ‘One of the most remarkable results of this experiment in the crossword puzzle’, crowed the editorial, ‘is the overwhelming evidence it has brought us that the best brains in the country – Ministers of the Crown, Provosts of Colleges, King’s Counsel and the rest – all engaged in the most arduous labour – find these little games the very thing to fill up odd moments’.9 But they found them more than that. They found the little games the very thing about which to be aggressively competitive with one another. While Britain lagged behind in its serious attempts to solve the unemployment crisis, or to revive British industry, and while party politics went completely into quiescence, the ‘best brains in the country’ vied with one another to demonstrate trivial nimbleness of intellect combined with effortlessly worn classical erudition.
In the middle of the summer holidays, Sir Josiah Stamp wrote from St Jean-de-Luz the rather touching boast that he was able to complete the puzzle in just under an hour. Stamp (1880–1941) had been a civil servant with particular interest in tax. After the First World War, he had left the Civil Service and joined ICI, as well as becoming a director of the London Midland and Scottish Railway. As the son-in-law of the American General Dawes – he of the committee formed to make sense of the German reparations situation in 1925 – he was quietly pro-German and pro-American. A genial man, loaded with honorary degrees and honorific titles – he became Baron Stamp in 1938 – he wrote in that pompous tone which was no doubt his natural idiom, but which seemed to be adopted by all but the best letter-writers to The Times until very recently. The letter-writers, especially when being archly facetious, adopted the orotund locutions of a butler in an Ivy Compton-Burnett novel. ‘After a week’s chequered but salutary acquaintance with the entertaining mind of your crossword puzzler, I correctly completed his effort of Wednesday last with – or in spite of – spasmodic and guerilla assistance, in 50 minutes,’ wrote Sir Josiah.10
This was the month in which General Von Hindenburg died and Hitler became Chancellor of Germany. He did not need to take Hindenburg’s place as Reichspräsident. Having been leader of his party, he was now leader of his nation. Simply, der Führer. The Times reported that Herr Hitler had flown in a monoplane to Hamburg. Thirty-eight thousand uniformed Nazis had saluted him on his way into town from Fuhlsbüttel aerodrome.
Sir Austen Chamberlain, now retired as cabinet minister, though still in the Commons, and not destined to have as much to do with Herr Hitler as his half-brother Neville,* wrote to tell Sir Josiah that he could beat his record. He himself had completed a puzzle in 41 minutes. But, ‘Ask the Provost of Eton’, i.e. M. R. James the ghost-story writer – who ‘measures the time required for boiling his breakfast egg by that needed for the solution of your daily crossword – and he hates a hard-boiled egg’.11
Opposite Chamberlain’s letter, Times readers could see that the Krupp factory on the Ruhr had started a youth training scheme and taken on 800 boys for skilled labour. After frequent visits to America, the German steel bosses had revolutionized means of production.
It was left to P. G. Wodehouse three days later to admit, along with the great majority, that he found crosswords – well, a puzzle. While the editorial piously intoned, ‘every friend of Germany will hope that she will quickly recover from her present troubles and that as a strong, free and united nation, she may become a powerful factor in the maintenance of European peace’. R. Ruggles Gates – Marie Stopes’s ‘ex’ – sent in to the letters page on the same day a contribution about the ethnicity of Jews. (‘As regards the Jewish people through the world they are probably no more homogeneous than the Nordic, Alpine or Mediterranean races, but they have retained a racial consciousness which has long since been replaced in other peoples by the spirit of nationalism.’) Wodehouse, however, was still on the crossword:
Sir, on behalf of the great race of rabbits, those humble strivers who like myself have never yet succeeded in solving an entire Times crossword puzzle, I strongly resent these Austen Chamberlains and what not flaunting their skill in your columns. Rubbing salt in the wounds is what I call it. To a man who has been beating his head against the wall for twenty minutes over a single anagram it is g. and wormwood to read a statement like that one about the Provost of Eton and the eggs. In conclusion may I commend your public spirit in putting the good old emu back into circulation again as you did a few days ago? We of the canaille know that the Sun-God Ra has apparently retired from active work – are intensely grateful for the occasional emu.12
The cryptic crossword and the whodunnit mystery story were two distinctive products of their time, expressions no doubt of the belief that if one could only worry at a problem for long enough it would have a single simple solution: Keynesian or Marxist economic theory, Roman Catholic, communist or fascist doctrine. Many of the brightest minds of the age, if not necessarily the most analytic, while enjoying the mystery stories of Ellery Queen or Agatha Christie, and priding themselves on the speed with which they solved the crossword puzzle, were drawn fatefully towards ideologies, systems. Ronald Knox (1888–1957) was an addict of puzzles of all kinds, and the author of A Book of Acrostics, The book reeks almost heart-rendingly of late Victorian innocence, of parlour games in a large, intelligent, well-meaning upper-middle-class family. (Knox’s father was a bishop.) ‘To break off her engagement if she’d the intention/What place on the Thames would the young lady mention?’ – answer Goring. ‘If the Zoo were for a joy-ride through the streets of London hauled,/After what old-fashioned weapon might the vehicle be called?’ Arquebus. You can almost hear the groans from the assembled company at the atrocious pun. He also wrote humorous articles for Punch, a magazine of which his brother E. V (know variously as Eddie and Evoe) became the editor. Another brother, Wilfrid, was a distinguished New Testament scholar and Anglican holy man. Another brother, Dilly, a religious non-believer, was librarian of King’s College, Cambridge. ‘During the Thirties,’ wrote his niece Penelope Fitzgerald, ‘finding that smoking and patience [i.e. the card game] were not sufficient as alternative tranquilliser and counter-irritant to the active mind, Dilly suddenly produced a new way of writing poetry.’13 Each line had to end with a word of the same form, but with a different vowel, the vowels ‘of course’ coming in their proper order, a, e, i, o, u or the equivalent sounds in English. On the death of A. E. Housman, Dilly wrote:
Of thee the poet dead!
But still thy poems abide –
There Death, the unsparing god
Himself dare not intrude.14
Dilly would put his crossword mind to brilliant and patriotic use deciphering Enigma (the German electro-mechanical enciphering system) in the 1940s. In the Thirties he contented himself with doodles, and with an all but impenetrable translation of Herodas’s all but impenetrable Mimiambi for the Loeb Classics. Ronald, known as Ronnie, was perhaps the most celebrated of the brothers in his lifetime, partly because he wrote detective stories. Of these, his niece wrote:
Between 1926 (The Viaduct Murder) and 1937 (Double Cross Purposes) he wrote six detective stories. All of them, even the earliest, were backward looking. To feel at home in them, you need to be familiar with Bradshaw’s Railway Timetables, canoeing on the upper reaches of the Thames, vicarages, gas taps, and country house-parties in which the first duty is consideration for one’s hostess … The solutions to the mysteries are most scrupulously set out, and page references are given, in case the reader has missed the clues. As a novelist, Ronnie was not strong on characterisation.15
His biographer and friend Evelyn Waugh tells us that ‘at the time there was a limited but eager public for these puzzles … None was more ingenious than he, more scrupulous in the provision of clues, more logically complete in his solutions.’16
Ronald Knox belonged to that Etonian generation which had seen a whole generation blighted and in many cases destroyed by the First World War. Before the war, he was a wit, a president of the Oxford Union in the days when that institution was still a nursery of statesmen, and a scholar. His life was an elegy for the never-forgotten dead. In 1917 he became a Roman Catholic, and was ordained two years later, eventually becoming the Roman Catholic chaplain to his old university, Oxford. He always refused to have a telephone installed in his chaplaincy. (‘I hate using the instrument; I hate being interrupted by bells; I hate enquiries from the editors of Sunday newspapers about the existence of a future life.’)17 The chaplaincy was only available for males, and what is more, males of a limited educational background – Eton and the larger Benedictine or Jesuit boarding schools. Roman Catholic women were directed to a convent in Cherwell Edge and grammar-school-educated Roman Catholic men were advised to worship at one of the churches in the town.18
In Ronald Knox’s own case, Roman Catholicism, like crossword puzzles and acrostics and detective stories, seems to have worked for him like a systematic exclusion of experience as much as one which sought to explore its complexities. To read his works of apologetics, such as a correspondence with the then agnostic, eventually Catholic, Arnold Lunn, Difficulties, is to be amazed by the breezy way in which Knox sees Roman Catholicism as a perfect solution. Subjects which must by definition be insoluble mysteries, such as a reason for supposing the Almighty to be omniscient, are rapped out on the typewriter, no doubt with pipe in mouth, in about as much time as it took to compose an acrostic. He is prepared to defend anything, even his Church’s condemnation of Galileo – ‘the congregations condemned his teaching while it was, in their view, still unproved’. Burning witches was not so much cruel as ‘in accordance with the notions of the time’.19 These strange letters were exchanged in 1932. In the Soviet Union, the five-year plan was resulting in widespread starvation and ‘purges’ of tens of thousands of people from the party. Japan had invaded Manchuria. In Germany, the Weimar Republic was teetering to its collapse, and in Britain, with no sign of the government knowing how to cope with the unemployment crisis, debts to the United States grew and grew. Every Western power lived with the perpetual fear that its currency would cease to have any value. As Roman Catholic chaplain at Oxford during the 1930s Ronald Knox not unnaturally found the conversations of the undergraduates about the European situation dismaying. ‘Let me see: what country are you boring about now?’20 Evoe, in the editorial chair at Punch in 1933, ran a drawing by Bernard Partridge of Hitler treading Jews underfoot. Punch in those days carried serious drawings each week illustrative of what was happening in the world, but even so, the proprietors thought the message of the drawing needed reinforcement with the words ANTI-JEWISH CAMPAIGN written across the sky. Sitting with his friend Beachcomber, J. B. Morton, in the Fleet Street Bar, El Vino, Evoe wondered whether humour had had its day, and the two men would agree that the state of the world had become such that nothing was too absurd or unpleasant to come true.21
No wonder the murder mystery was the most popular literary form of its age. Inevitably, when made, or more accurately remade, into successful films or TV serials in our times, the classics from the Golden Age of mystery-writing are made to seem like period pieces, and the directors and designers take pride in the whole visual background to their stories, in the authentic Art Deco furniture, wide-lapelled suits, trilby hats and fedoras, low-backed limousines, in the cloche hats of the ladies and the black dresses with white aprons of the housemaids, as actual or pastiche jazz or big band music plays in the credits. The popularity of such series on TV demonstrates that the 1930s have a glamorous appeal in themselves, but nearly always what gets lost in the adaptation is the actual nature of the stories.
If the revenge tragedy and the simplistic history play were the staple of the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre audiences it was surely because they and their parents had just lived through a period of bloody civil war, and were holding at bay the thought that England might once again resemble the battlefield of Bosworth or the last scene of Hamlet with King, Queen, Prince and friends all corpses. The corpses in the Golden Age mystery stories play a similarly powerful but different role.
Murder on the Orient Express is one of the most perfect of Agatha Christie’s stories. It is a very simple revenge story. The train leaves Stamboul for Europe. One of the passengers is murdered during the night, and the train is stuck in a snowdrift in the Balkans. Poirot, the Belgian detective, is conveniently on hand to solve the mystery. An American passenger is the victim, repeatedly stabbed during the night the train is unable to move. Known as Mr Ratchett, it turns out that he was really a gangster named Cassetti, who had kidnapped a baby, little Daisy Armstrong, the child of an English war hero and a famous American tragic actress. When the kidnapped child was delivered back to its parents dead, the mother had given birth to a stillborn child and her worthy husband had shot himself. Cassetti had escaped justice on some legal technicality. Now, twelve suspects are assembled on the train. Could it be, as Poirot eventually realizes, that this villainous figure has been dispatched by a self-appointed ‘jury’ of odd-balls – the nanny, the valet, the ex-actress, the soldier, the Russian princess, and so forth? Or could it be simply that he was killed by a stranger who has mysteriously escaped into the snows? Poirot, having established the truth of the story, which is indeed that they have all stabbed the villain, allows the second explanation to be offered to the Yugoslavian police when, eventually, the snow clears and the luxury train glides smoothly on its way towards Paris.
Simple as it is, and indeed transparently devoid of any symbolic intention on the author’s part, the tale nevertheless shimmers with import. When Poirot meets the villainous Ratchett/Cassetti, ‘I had a curious impression. It was as though a wild animal – an animal savage, but savage, you understand – had passed me by.’ ‘And yet he looked altogether of the most respectable.’ ‘Précisément! The body – the cage – is everything of the most respectable – but through the bars, the wild animal looks out …’22
Christie wrote stories which are a little like unpretentious versions of Greek tragedy. Their elemental simplicities explain why they have survived when so much contemporary literature, more obviously ambitious and ‘literary’, has failed the test of time. A great wrong was done, and twelve people have conspired to avenge it. There will always be something satisfying at a profound level about that story. Yet it appeals to more than an archetypical moral response. We do not need to posit intention on the author’s part when with the eyes of hindsight in the twenty-first century we find political echoes and meanings in this story, first published in 1934. The wrong which has been accomplished by the American, and which has to be avenged as they all pass through the Balkans by a multicultural and multinational group of individuals – what does it suggest? Not an allegory, of course, but can we quite dismiss the thought that this league of nationalities wishes to put its multifarious stab-wounds into the heart of the man who has brought disaster on them all? Are they the League of Nations taking revenge, in the very area of the world where their troubles began – the Balkans – upon the old gentleman, President Wilson, who … No, that is too neat an ‘explanation’. But these stories, which have such a totally compulsive appeal, must be appealing to more than the human desire to solve a puzzle; or, to put it another way, the need to solve a puzzle, by the very fact of its being so obsessively important to so many crossword and mystery addicts, would appear to be something which goes deeper than its surface attractions.
One reason why it would be a mistake to offer any one simple explanation for the appeal of the mystery genre in the Golden Age is that the stories fall into many different categories. John Dickson Carr (1905–77, sometimes writing as Carter Dickson) and the two cousins Frederic Dannay (1905–82) and Manfred Bennington Lee (1905–71), who wrote as Ellery Queen, were masters of the brilliant puzzle. Julian Symons, in his definitive study of the genre, Bloody Murder, listing Queen’s The French Powder Mystery (1930), The Dutch Shoe Mystery (1931), The Greek Coffin Mystery (1932) and The Chinese Orange Mystery (1934), opines that ‘Judged as exercises in rational deduction, these are certainly among the best detective stories ever written.’23 The ingenuity of Dickson Carr is nearly always exercised upon variations of the locked-room mystery, the kind of puzzle which would appeal to Freudians. The Queen books abound in deductive reasoning, which feels reasonable while you are reading it. They are among the best stories which derive from the ratiocinative side of Sherlock Holmes. Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe stories, with the portly Wolfe never leaving the old brownstone house on West Thirty-Fifth Street while Archie Goodwin paces the streets of New York in search of clues, are in their way a child of the Holmes–Watson relationship. There will always be those who cherish mystery stories more for their settings than their plots, and for such readers Wolfe’s house, with his sophisticated tastes (orchids, the Times crossword) and unvarying routines, will be as comforting a place as the English villages and country houses of Dorothy L. Sayers in The Nine Tailors or Agatha Christie’s St Mary Mead in her Miss Marple stories.
For W. H. Auden, whose poetry was first published in 1930, the mystery story was essentially a religious myth. ‘The fantasy which the detective story addict indulges is the fantasy of being restored to the Garden of Eden, to a state of innocence, where he may know love as love and not as the law.’24 The enclosed worlds of country-house parties or institutions which his favourite authors depicted were disturbed by the murder, but order and redemption were restored by the detective, who, like God, brought order and justice back into the tarnished garden.
The great critic W. Northrop Frye, another mystery-addict, believed that the amateur detectives – Poirot, Archie Goodwin, Miss Silver, and the rest – were recording angels. It is a striking fact that among the most successful practitioners of the genre, so many should have been Christians. Agatha Christie’s only bedtime reading was Thomas à Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ. Dorothy L. Sayers abandoned crime stories altogether to concentrate upon Dante and theology. Ngaio Marsh from New Zealand, one of the best of the Golden Age writers, was ‘a High Church Anglican … never quite able to recover the faith she had as a child. It was one of her great regrets.’25 Margery Allingham was religious. Much of this is reflected in her work, as it is in Christie’s. Very many classics of detective fiction do actually involve vicarages, or clergy-detectives – from Chesterton’s Father Brown to the parsonage in Sayers’s best novel The Nine Tailors and to Agatha Christie’s Murder at the Vicarage. But at a much deeper, more elemental level, these writers appear to be asserting, in the midst of a world which has come morally adrift, that the moral order can still be reclaimed by the angel/detective. Amy Leatheran, the common-sense English nurse who narrates Murder in Mesopotamia, concludes: ‘Sometimes, I declare, I don’t know what’s become of the good strict principles my aunt brought me up with. A very religious woman she was …’ She wonders whether she could end her story with ‘a really good telling phrase. I must ask Dr Reilly for some Arab one. Like the one M. Poirot used. In the name of Allah, the Merciful, the Compassionate … Something like that.’26
The 1930s turn into a murder story on a grand scale. Old scores will be settled, old injustices avenged, new resentments expressed in murder. Of the dominant figures who cross the pages in the early years – Hitler, Laval, Mussolini, Ribbentrop – very many, like characters in Cluedo, were heading for violent ends.
In the detective story, as in its mirror image, the Quest for the Grail, maps (the ritual of space) and timetables (the ritual of time) are desirable. Nature should reflect its human inhabitants, ie it should be the Great Good Place; for the more Eden-like it is, the greater the contradiction of murder. The country is preferable to the town, a well-to-do neighbourhood (but not too well-to-do – or there will be a suspicion of ill-gotten gains) better than a slum. The corpse must shock not only because it is a corpse but also because, even for a corpse, it is shockingly out of place, as when a dog makes a mess on a drawing-room carpet.27
It is noticeable that the idyllic Eden is often the English village or the English countryside, even when the author is far from England. John Dickson Carr was American but set his mysteries, most of them, in England. ‘Michael Innes’ (the pseudonym of J. I. M. Stewart) began his nostalgic evocations of an England of very old-fashioned Oxford colleges and country houses miles from the nearest remote railway halt while he was a lecturer in Australia. England, even for those who lived there, but perhaps even more acutely for those who did not, came to stand for something recognizable, if difficult without absurd sentimentality to define.
Exile intensified, for writers, a sense of ‘Englishness’. One discerns this in the perfectly crafted short stories and novels of Somerset Maugham, whose characters never feel more English than when they are on liners crossing from Tahiti to San Francisco, or pursuing their expatriate lines of business in Rangoon, Singapore or Molucca. One feels it too in the four magnificent Wessex novels of John Cowper Powys (1872–1963) – Wolf Solent (1929), A Glastonbury Romance (1933), Maiden Castle (1936), and perhaps the greatest, Weymouth Sands (1934). These incomparable explorations of the hidden human psyche, of relations between the sexes, of the mysterious and occult quality of the landscape and archaeological history of England itself, have things in common with Hardy and with Lawrence but are much more ambitious achievements. They are the only novels in English to rival the great Russians, especially Dostoyevsky – one of Powys’s great heroes. They were all composed in America where the need to earn his living forced him into the unstoppable and exhausting routines of the itinerant lecturer. Bard, show-off, mystic genius that this craggily built Celt was, these lectures were triumphant. His Autobiography, also a masterpiece, reveals the extent to which he is embedded in the Victorian traditions of a clerical family. Through the interstices of his family tree, he was related to the great mainstream of intellectual and literary life – from the eighteenth-century poet William Cowper to the Macaulays. His parsonage upbringing and boarding-school education were those of so many of the best minds of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Strangely enough, the books which he wrote after he had come home lack the deeply felt and extraordinary quality of the novels he wrote in the period 1929–36. The reader opening one of these stories for the first time might suppose he was entering a purely idiosyncratic version of England. When the addiction grows, however, you realize that with his finely attuned intuitive antennae, Powys understood better than many political and religious analysts what was happening to his native country during his exile. He is infinitely old-fashioned, and yet more shockingly modern, not least in his portrayal of sexual feeling, than his younger contemporaries. Like many of the greatest English artists in any medium, Powys is hard to define against the backdrop of modernism which shapes the American or European scenes.
Modernism in poetry, painting, theology, had been attempted in Britain but with no notable native-born exponents. The poetry of Eliot knew many English imitators, but that is what they were. An English Joyce was unimaginable. After the war, Britain retreated into itself. Stanley Spencer’s return to his childhood village of Cookham was emblematic, as the life-choices of great artists often are. So, in a very different way, was Ivy Compton-Burnett’s decision to set all her novels in a period before the First World War. British Elegy, and most specifically English Elegy, is the overriding note of serious art and literature for the next twenty years. So much had been lost and destroyed in the war that it is as though the creative intelligences in Britain wanted to recover Eden, not to chart new lands. The most successful productions in music, painting and literature in the period all have a kindred völkisch feeling for a lost England, to be heralded in the strains of Britten’s folk songs, in Betjeman’s evocations of a Victorian world, in John Piper’s switch from very weak imitations of continental Cubism and abstract collage to a quite distinctive representational style elegizing such apparently threatened phenomena as Welsh chapels or country houses. Whence came the threat? From industrial pollution, from the expansion of towns, from foreign enemies? No doubt some of these thoughts explain the appeal of English elegy. But is there not here a simple metaphysical perception, on the part of the elegists and of their admirers, that Britain had reached, if not the very end, a penultimate chapter?
Stanley Spencer’s extraordinary confidence as a painter, his absolute at-homeness with the medium of oil paint, is as obvious as a poster. He was born the son of a piano teacher, the grandson of a builder, in the Thames Valley village of Cookham, a place he would mythologize, immortalize in rather the way that Samuel Palmer made Shoreham in Kent seem a gateway to the beyond. He went to the Slade School of Art. A photograph of Slade students on a summer outing in 1912 shows us David Bomberg, Dora Carrington, Edward Wadsworth and C. R. W. Nevinson. Gwen Raverat well might have been there – she too was a contemporary at the Slade. And there is the diminutive figure of Spencer, whom they nicknamed ‘Cookham’. The condescension in the soubriquet hovered round Spencer for most of his life, when he must have been regarded as a primitive, an eccentric, a boy from a suburban village on the edge of Maidenhead, doing spiritually in his art what he did actually, for reasons of poverty, as a student: returning each night to Cookham and his ‘Pa’.
In subject-matter, the paintings of Spencer follow the grand traditions of European art – stylishly executed landscapes of a highly traditional kind and, his hallmark, religious pictures, in which, for example, the villagers of Cookham experience a General Resurrection upon the Last Day. His experiences serving in the Royal Army Medical Corps during the First World War were poured into the haunting murals in the Sandham Memorial Chapel. There are scenes of life – soldiers frying rashers of bacon in a billycan in the Camp at Karasuli – and scenes of death and resurrection. There is sometimes grandeur in his perception of humanity, and sometimes low ribaldry, as in his low-life pictures, chiefly executed during the 1930s, between overweight women and randy, bewildered little men like himself.
Many English viewers of these grotesque paintings – the funny little man in trousers staring imploringly, but alarmedly, at the bulbous women bulging from their flowery frocks – will be transported into the world of Donald McGill’s comic postcards. If Disraeli was – as he so inconsequentially once informed Queen Victoria – the blank leaf between the Old Testament and the New, then perhaps Stanley Spencer was the missing leaf between the art of the High Renaissance and the saucy postcard. As in the world of his contemporary John Cowper Powys, spirituality and ribaldry and self-conscious Englishness can be disconcerting until you get your eye in, learn how to overlook some of the tomfoolery. You feel ‘important’ themes are being given a lightness they can’t bear – the exact opposite of the sort of thing going on in Europe at the time, where French or German writers and artists might take themselves more seriously.
Spencer’s art was a continual stripping, self-revealing, self-lacerating. And it might be as well to mention, before exploring its overtly religious dimension, the autobiographical counterpoises to the Donald McGill–Maillol roly-poly joke-pictures. In 1950 Sir Alfred Munnings came across some of Spencer’s ‘couple’ pictures and initiated a prosecution of the artist for obscenity. One always dislikes reading accounts of artists persecuting one another by means of the law – think of A. A. Milne acting the Pharisee over P. G. Wodehouse during the Second World War. As it happens, the whirligig of time brings its revenges. The scenes which Munnings depicted – harmless equestrian canvases, race meetings and the hunt – would probably be much more shocking to many people today than Stanley Spencer’s searingly honest nudes – particularly the self-portraits with Patricia Preece.
Patricia Preece was Stanley Spencer’s reason for returning to his childhood village in the early Thirties. Spencer divorced his wife Hilda, and made over his property to Patricia Preece, whom he married at the Maidenhead registrar’s office on 29 May 1937. Patricia Preece went on loving, and wishing to live with, her lover Dorothy Hepworth, one of those pre-Second World War lesbians who look exactly like a man. Spencer wanted to have his ex-wife as a lover, not an idea which pleased either woman very much.
The Thirties were a time of sexual revolution, just as much as the 1960s – in some ways much more so.
See the advertisements of the period for new suburban housing, or drive out of any big British conurbation until you reach the mile upon mile of 1930s housing, the semi-detacheds, all aping larger houses, the stockbroker Tudorbethan of Edwardian Surrey and Middlesex and Altrincham and Edgbaston; all nagging the mortgage-slaves to aspire to something higher. An Englishman’s home is his dungeon. These houses were supposed in every way to be better than the tenements and terraces of the Georgian and Victorian cities. Each had a scrap of garden behind its privet hedge. Many had a garage. Once inside them, though, and you find that the rooms are poky, just as small in many cases as those in a rotting Georgian rented terrace, but, unlike the town house, miles from anywhere or anything which could be described as interesting. What hopes these miserable little dwellings represent, what spiritual and emotional constriction they must have offered in reality, as hubby went off to the nearest station each morning from just such a dormitory village as Cookham, and the wife, half liberated and half slave, stayed behind wondering how many of the newly invented domestic appliances they could afford to purchase, and how long the man would hold on to his job in the Slump. No wonder, when war came, that so many of these suburban prisoners felt a sense of release.
Stanley Spencer, ‘Cookham’, used to the coming and going of the trains to Maidenhead and Slough and Reading, knew the soul of lower-middle-class, imprisoned British humanity during the years of the Slump and the preparation for war. His own life was deeply bizarre, but he made of it a parable of his times. His nude canvases of himself and Patricia Preece give off an overpowering atmosphere of sexual frustration. One of the most successful shows her lying on some crumpled sheets wearing the sort of black lacy ‘lingerie’ men are supposed to like to buy for their womenfolk. (She looks as if she ought to have a bubble coming out of her mouth saying to the figure leering at her from behind the easel: ‘You silly bugger!’) Spencer wrote her a poem at this time:
I will buy my God a chemise
To wear over her
I embrace her with suspenders
And worship her with drawers
My adoration dresses her
Covering her with loveclothes.
Spencer always, whether he is depicting sexual or religious themes, retained a very strong element of absurdity. The canvas now hanging in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge is a truly ghastly scene of crestfallen Spencer, naked from the front, gazing at Patricia as she leans with her hands behind her head and her legs splayed. It must be one of the most ridiculous, as well as the saddest, pictures of human non-meeting, non-love, incomprehension and depression. (When Spencer left his wife and child and married Patricia Preece, it was an unconsummated union.) The uncooked joint of mutton in the foreground with its perkily phallic leg-bone is in sad contrast with the drooping Spencer.
Companions to these terrible pictures are the self-portrait of Spencer alone, in tears, in a bedsit in Belsize Park, and the painting done two or three years earlier of his estranged wife Hilda, looking away from him with tight lips, his contemptuous daughter and her alarming death-like dolls, held like a father’s broken promise in the arms of her summer frock. So all this lies behind and alongside the Stanley Spencer we all know and love: the potboiling evocations of the sunny Thames valley, and the overtly religious stuff – Christ carrying his cross down Cookham High Street, and the General Resurrection happening in Cookham Churchyard.
In all this there was a turning of the British back upon the rest of the world, a pulling up of the shutters. The troops had come back from the war. The politicians and the businessmen had conned everyone into thinking life would be different. It wasn’t a land fit for heroes. It was still as unfair and as class-riven and as silly as before, simply less rich, and less certain of itself. The way that English art turns its back on the Continental traditions is emblematic. Piper stops being a pseudo-Braque and becomes a minor but distinctive figurative artist in his own right. A definitive article, explaining his position, is Piper’s ‘England’s Early Sculptures’, published in Architectural Review in 1936. He was struck by such wonders as the carvings of the Last Supper on the twelfth-century font at North Grimstone in Yorkshire. His work as an abstract artist had drawn him to ‘an instinctive search for the everyday symbols of geometry’. A medieval Wiltshire wit in Peter Langtoft’s Chronicle of 1307 is obliged, when studying the antiquities in Rome, to admit that he has never seen Stonehenge. He is kicked out of doors and told to go home and see the beauties of his own culture. Everyone, says Langtoft, should be treated thus ‘who scrap for barley cornes of vanity on foreigne dung hills’.28 Whether painting lighthouses or harbours, Welsh Nonconformist chapels or aristocratic houses (see his magnificent series of paintings of Renishaw), Piper appears to have been released by Langtoft’s injunction into a series of powerful elegiac visions. It is as if he has seen a Britain which is about to destroy itself, and is determined to capture it in a series of rapid, haunted, almost tear-stained visions. When George VI saw Piper’s series of Windsor Castle, he expressed commiseration with the artist for having struck such bad weather. It would be crazy to think of Piper as a great artist in the league of Picasso or Titian, but sometimes minor artists see a clear truth. His great friend John Betjeman, similarly, was never in the league of his old schoolmaster Eliot, but Betjeman’s hymn-like verses about the strapping thighs of girls in tennis clubs, or the rattling tram-ride of his boyhood back to Parliament Hill Fields through poverty-stricken North London, have similar power to Piper’s sad washes and sketches. Like Noël Coward’s songs, they stay in the head for ever, indelibly recording
Dear old, bloody old England
Of telegraph poles and tin,
Seemingly so indifferent
And with so little soul to win.29
* Both, of course, half-American.
* Austen Chamberlain died in 1937.