Ada Leverson (1862—1933) said she had learned about human nature in the nursery. A little brother got her to help him make a carriage out of two chairs, but when he was taken out in a real carriage he was not in the least interested. Certainly she never underestimated the human capacity for imagination or for disappointment.
The nursery was in lavish 21 Hyde Park Square, and her father was a successful property investor. Her mother, descended from a distinguished Jewish family, was beautiful, talented, and leisurely, with moments of intuition, called ‘Mamma’s flashlights.’ They did not warn her that Ada was going to escape, as she did at the age of eighteen, into a luckless marriage. Ernest Leverson, a diamond merchant’s son, was unfaithful, a gambler, and couldn’t manage the money, although it is true that Ada was extravagant, and notably more so after she met Oscar Wilde. She became Wilde’s fast friend, and for a few golden years was surrounded by London’s artists, actors, and first-nighters. (Max Beerbohm, of course, was a second-nighter; he advised on the decoration of her new house.) Ada Leverson was not worried by Wilde’s train de vie. To another friend, who said he was on a strict regimen ‘in the hope of keeping my youth,’ she replied: ‘I didn’t know you were keeping a youth’—this, like other unpredictable things, in a low voice, almost thrown away. To use her circle’s favourite word, she was impayable. She had the gift, too, of amiability (Henry James felt that in her at last he had found the Gentle Reader) and of pure high spirits: all the family had them—one of her brothers was the original of Charley’s Aunt. After Wilde’s disgrace and death she may have lost heart a little. But just as she had stood by her ruined friend, so she put a brave face on her marriage until Ernest, on the verge of bankruptcy, was sent away to Canada in the company of his illegitimate daughter, at the diamond merchant’s expense. Then Ada retreated to Bayswater with her children.
Wilde had told her that she had all the equipment of a writer except pen, ink, and paper, and in fact she had already contributed, on and off, to Punch and the Yellow Book. Now Grant Richards, who says in his Memories of a Misspent Youth that ‘an introduction to Mrs Ernest Leverson was one of the most important things that could happen to a young man,’ persuaded her to turn novelist. Her grandson, Francis Wyndham, has told us that she hated writing, though it seems almost perverse of her not to enjoy something she did so well. Six novels came out between 1907 and 1917. After that, Grant Richards—although she was in love with him—could only persuade her to write the introduction to a fortune-telling book, Whom You Should Marry, which amused her. Three of the novels, Love’s Shadow, Tenterhooks, and Love at Second Sight, make up a trilogy, and these have now been reissued by Virago.
It was indeed confusing of Oscar Wilde to call Ada Leverson ‘Sphinx.’ (‘Seraph’ would have been better—that is, if seraphs laugh.) Still, Sally Beauman worries unduly about this. There were many Sphinxes about in the Nineties. One of them appeared to Richard Le Gallienne as he sat in a restaurant eating whitebait, others to Gustave Moreau and to Khnopff. Nor would I agree with Sally Beauman that the tone of the Sphinx’s novels is ‘unmistakably descended from Jane Austen.’ It seems to me much more nearly related to her own contemporaries, Paul Bourget and ‘Gyp.’ The passing remarks of Bourget’s characters (‘tout est pour le mieux dans le meilleur des demi-mondes,’ ‘avec les femmes tout est possible, même le bien’) are in the Leversonian mode, so is the worldly entanglement of Mensonges (which Edith, in Tenterhooks, is reading for the first time). But Ada Leverson never indulged in the clinical analysis of the psychology of love, for which Bourget pauses between almost every speech. She has her own lucid shorthand for the emotions. ‘Gyp,’ on the other hand, wrote almost entirely in dialogue, whereas we couldn’t do without the Sphinx’s droll commentary.
I don’t mean that Ada Leverson was an imitator: rather, that she was enchanted by the times she lived in. The three novels that make up The Little Ottleys change subtly with the passing years, not only in reference but in atmosphere. In Love’s Shadow (1908) there are ageing poets surviving from the Nineties, nouveau art, amateur theatricals. In Tenterhooks (1912) you can choose whether to take a hansom or a taxicab, Debussy and Wagner are ‘out,’ and at dinner parties ‘one ran an equal risk of being taken to dinner by Charlie Chaplin or Winston Churchill.’ The Turkey Trot is discussed along with Nijinsky and Post-Impressionism: ‘Please don’t take an intelligent interest in the subjects of the day,’ the hero begs. In Love at Second Sight (1916) he is in khaki, and wounded. At the same time the viewpoint grows, not less intelligent, but more sympathetic to the absurdity of human beings in a trap of their own making.
Unashamedly her friends are pictured in her novels, and her own unhappiness, and, for that matter, the courage with which she faced it. Perhaps because of this, they show a great advance on her Yellow Book stories, ‘Suggestion’ and ‘The Quest for Sorrow.’ Love’s Shadow is a set of variations on the theme of jealousy. Ada herself felt that jealousy was allowable, but envy, never. Hyacinth Verney’s guardian is in love with her, Hyacinth is in pursuit of the fashionable Cyril, Cyril has a hopeless tendresse for Mrs Raymond, who is neither young nor beautiful but seems merely ‘very unaffected, and rather ill.’ For counterpoint, there is Edith Ottley, who is beginning to be tired of her own patience with her husband, Bruce, but who is not yet the victim of human emotion. Critics, and even the Sphinx’s own family, found the book frivolous, but I don’t know that any book that proclaims so clearly the painful value of honesty can be frivolous. Its real heroine is the uncompromisingly plain Anne Yeo, hideously dressed in a mackintosh and golf-cap, and ‘well aware that there were not many people in London at three o’clock on a sunny afternoon who would care to be found dead with her.’ Sharp-tongued Anne is in love with Hyacinth, the only genuine passion in the novel. When she has done all she can to help Hyacinth to capture Cyril in marriage, she is seen for the last time on her way to Cook’s. She has decided to emigrate.
Whether Ada Leverson originally intended it or not, the Ottleys become central to the next two novels. Grandly careless in small details, she changes Edith’s age and the colour of her hair, and makes her far more witty and admired. Bruce is, if possible, more monstrously selfish and witless. (When Ernest Leverson came back on one of his infrequent visits from Canada, it was said that ‘he talked just like Bruce.’) Possibly the Sphinx is too hard, at times, on her creation. Faultless is Edith’s clarity, ruthless are the sharp-eyed inhabitants of the nursery. But, after all, Bruce is well able to protect himself. ‘With the curious blindness common to all married people, and indeed to any people who live together,’ Edith has not noticed that Bruce is making sly advances to the governess. Meanwhile, she herself has fallen in love with the impulsive Aylmer Ross, but ‘how can life be like a play?’ she asks sadly, and to Bruce’s relief (for he can now feel injured) she simply gets rid of the governess. In contrast to her self-restraint, there is the interlocking story of her devoted friend Vincy. A dandyish observer of life, Vincy has a mistress, Mavis, an impoverished young art student whose red hair is ‘generally untidy at the back.’ Her poverty, which brings her close to starvation, is disquieting, but Vincy discards her without pity: ‘Shall you marry her?’ ‘I’m afraid not,’ he said. ‘I don’t think I quite can.’ For all their humour and good humour, these novels can sometimes seem unrelenting. At length, the easily persuaded Bruce runs off with Mavis. Edith, however, for the sake of her children, rescues him once again.
But Ada Leverson is writing in terms of comedy, and Edith Ottley must be left happier than she was herself. To bring this about, she introduces, in Love at Second Sight, a grotesque creation, powerful enough to dominate the situation. Eglantine Frabelle, perfectly well-off and perfectly self-satisfied, is a guest in the Ottleys’ small London house and shows no signs of ever going away. She is, wrote Siegfried Sassoon, like ‘a really great impressionist picture by Whistler or Manet,’ who, ‘to tell you the truth, rather dumps the others, dear Sphinx.’ Sassoon was right. Edith and Aylmer are less interesting than this stately, tedious widow of a French wine-merchant, whose name has undertones of frappant and poubelle. Always knowledgeable, and invariably wrong, she is detestable, and admired by everybody: even Edith is devoted to her. When Bruce (it is 1916) finds that listening to the war news is affecting his health, and he must leave for America, he elopes—and we know he will never escape again—with Madame Frabelle. Once she has left the book, even though Aylmer and the delightful Edith are free to marry, the interest fades. We seem to be waiting for her to come back.
How can Bruce manage to think that he must ‘throw in his lot’ with her? Through wilful misunderstanding. Their day out on the river is tedious. The only boat left for hire is The Belle of the River, as battered as an old tea-chest, and they find that they have very little to say to one another. But both of them have the impression that it has been a great success. With such non-events, or anti-events, Ada Leverson is marvellously skilful. Oscar Wilde had wanted The Importance of Being Earnest to be not paradoxical, but nonsensical—pure nonsense, he said. The second act ends not with an epigram, but a wail: ‘But I haven’t quite finished my tea!’ This is the art of inconsequence, possible only in a society where consequences can still be grave. The Sphinx, also, had a most distinctive ear for nonsense. ‘With a tall, thin figure and no expression,’ she writes, ‘Anne might have been any age, but she was not.’
London Review of Books, 1983
Rebecca West said that Olive Schreiner was a ‘geographical fact.’ Others were reminded of a natural force, admired and dreaded, unchecked by illness, war, or poverty, something new coming out of Africa. To fit her into the history of South Africa, of literature, or of women’s movements is an exhausting business. ‘The day will never come when I am in the stream,’ she said. ‘Something in my nature prevents it I suppose.’
Olive Emilie Albertina Schreiner (named for three brothers who died before her) was one of nine children born to a German missionary and his wife, Rebecca, a member of Moorfields Tabernacle. The family was reared in the strictest possible Bible Christianity. Gottlob Schreiner was an unfortunate man, difficult to place in the Lord’s vineyard, arriving finally at a mission station in Wittebergen on the edge of Basutoland. Here he was forced to leave the ministry, having broken the strict regulations against trading. As a trader he was even less successful, but Olive never ceased to love the ruined father. Left homeless, she was taken in by her eldest brother, Theo, who first ran a school, then went to try his luck in the diamond fields.
When Olive was five she sat among the tall weeds behind the house and understood, without having the words for it, that they were alive and that she was part of them. At six, she was whipped for speaking Cape Dutch, and felt ‘a bitter wild fierce agony against God and man.’ At nine her little sister died and Olive, who had slept with the body until it was buried, lost her Christian faith. At sixteen she was possibly engaged to, possibly seduced by, an insurance salesman who let her down: ‘the waking in the morning is hell,’ she wrote in her diary. At about the same time she was lent a copy of First Principles, by Herbert Spencer. She had three days to read it, and Spencer’s vision of human evolution towards the Absolute remained with her for a lifetime. At eighteen she had a long conversation, which was profoundly important to her, with an African woman. This woman said to her: God cannot be good, otherwise why did he make women? At nineteen she was close to suicide, but found strength to go on from reading Emerson and John Stuart Mill. These are her own landmarks, ‘disconnected but indelibly printed in the mind.’ At twenty, she began to write The Story of an African Farm.
If she had been the child of an English Evangelical parsonage, she would have been conforming, in her struggle from faith to freethinking, to a recognizable pattern. But Olive was self-created. It’s true that African Farm is, in some ways, much what might be expected from a young woman in the 1870s, jilted, working as a governess, writing in a leaky farmstead by candlelight. The heroine, Lyndall, is very small, with beautiful eyes (Olive is small, with beautiful eyes), a penniless orphan, ‘different.’ Her lover rides a hundred miles to see her, and her dull cousin’s fiancé, Gregory Rose, leaves everything to follow her. ‘What makes you all love me so?’ she asks. But Olive, by her own account, had read, at this stage, no other fiction at all. And the African Farm, as it goes on, is a very strange book. Lyndall, in the end, is nursed on her deathbed by Gregory Rose, disguised as a woman in long skirts. He has shaved off his beard and watched the ants carry off the hair to their nests—an example of the book’s perilous balance between fantasy and observation. More than anything else it is a book of dreams, and specifically the dreams of children. Lyndall has a vision of independence and free choice for women. She refuses to marry the man who has made her pregnant, because she doesn’t love him enough. Waldo, the son of the farm overseer, represents another side of Olive. He dreams, in his ‘seasons of the soul,’ of studying the earth and rocks around him as a scientist. A stranger who rides in from the Karoo tells him a story—‘The Search for the Bird of Truth.’ But Waldo, though he understands the allegory, dies without getting his opportunity. ‘In after years,’ Olive wrote, ‘we cry to Fate, “Now, deal us your hardest blow, give us what you will, but let us never again suffer as we suffered when we were children.”’
She sent the manuscript to a friend in England, who recognized as she opened the parcel ‘the strange, pungent smell of the smoke of woodfires, familiar to those who know a Karoo farm.’ It was published in 1883, partly on the recommendation of George Meredith, and with its great success Olive Schreiner entered on her passionate dialogue with the world at large. Of all Lyndall’s confused perceptions, the clearest is: ‘When I’m strong, I’ll hate everything that has power, and help everything that is weak.’ Olive was not a leader, or even an organizer, but she was a great advocate, and the evangelist her father had failed to be. The only necessary claim on her attention was weakness. She needed, as she freely admitted, to be needed. For women’s right to financial and sexual independence, for the Boers against the British, the small farmer against the capitalist, the blacks (always ‘Kaffirs’ or ‘niggers’ to Olive) against the whites, she spent herself recklessly. All this was in the face of a chronic illness, apparently asthma, which is often said to be psychosomatic (though never by any one who has had asthma), and an inability to settle for long in one place. Her restlessness meant, as her biographers Ruth First and Ann Scott point out, that she ‘lacked a constituency.’ In spite of her record of friendships, she felt the pain of isolation, both personal and political. ‘Indeed the two were joined, for her sense of politics included the necessity for the individual to define her independence and make it an inviolable part of herself.’
First and Scott’s Olive Schreiner was written in the context of the women’s movements of the Seventies. The earliest biography, by her husband Cron Cronwright, has been under fire ever since it appeared in 1924, and indeed even before that, since several of Olive’s women friends refused to lend him their letters. Cronwright, as a practical man, a farmer and lawyer, probably felt he had done a fairly good job and put the best face on things, but he allowed himself omissions and even alterations. Now the Clarendon Press has published the first of two authoritative selections of the Olive Schreiner letters.
The book is divided into three parts, beginning in 1871, when Olive was sixteen. One of the troubles about collecting letters is that before the writer becomes famous no one is likely to keep them: there is only a handful of family letters here, but they are touching in their awkwardness and affection. Hard work, scarcity, the death of nieces and nephews, all in a careful copybook style. In 1880, with the help of her brothers, she scraped together £60 and sailed to England, meaning to study medicine. She never completed her training, either as doctor or nurse, and this was one of the personal failures—as opposed to her great public successes—which made her call herself, at the end of her life, ‘broken and untried.’ At last, however, except for persecuting landladies, she was free, and, after a day spent ‘worrying an idea to its hiding-place,’ she had people to talk to, and was understood. A celebrity after the publication of African Farm, she launched herself into socialist circles of the Eighties, and joined the Fellowship of the New Life. ‘It’s dreary work eating one’s own fire’—but now she no longer had to, and her relief can be felt like a kind of intoxication. The most important letters are to three new friends, Havelock Ellis, Edward Carpenter, whose Towards Democracy came out in 1881, and the mathematician Karl Pearson. With Carpenter she was always on easy terms, he was ‘my dear old Ed’ard.’ She does not discuss in her letters, and perhaps never recognized, his homosexuality, nor does she criticize his version of the Simple Life, although she tells him that he has been overfed with education whereas she is ‘dying of hunger.’ Havelock Ellis, still when she first knew him a medical student, offered her a long and tender friendship that was perhaps intellectual only, although in My Life he recalls her dashing naked out o f the bathroom to explain an idea that had suddenly come to her. Rive himself, in his introduction to the 1975 edition of African Farm, mentions Olive’s ‘inability to exercise restraint over the number of themes which interested her.’ In the Letters, Havelock Ellis is asked, as her ‘other self,’ to respond to them all. Karl Pearson, on the other hand, set definite limits on their friendship that Olive seems not to have been able to keep. He was the moving spirit of the Men and Women’s Club, which met for free discussion of all matters concerned with relations between the sexes. And Olive does discuss them freely, leaving herself without defences. ‘I would like to think you could make any use of me as a scientific specimen, it would be some compensation to me.’ The break with Pearson was a dark night of her existence. She wrote, but could get nothing finished, and dosed herself with dangerous medicines. Her influence over most people she met was as strong as ever—‘I sometimes am filled almost with terror at the sense of the power I have over them,’ she tells Havelock Ellis—but she had begun to long for South Africa. Her last letter in this selection is to Edward Carpenter (October 1889). ‘Goodbye, dear old Brother. You will have to come out after me some day, when you hear about the stars and the black people and all the nice things. I’m going to be quite well.’
By this time her younger brother Will was legal adviser to the Governor of Cape Colony, and she made a forceful entry into Cape politics. ‘There is one man I’ve heard of,’ she tells Havelock Ellis (April 1890): ‘Cecil Rhodes, the head of the Chartered Company, whom I think I should like if I could meet him; he’s very fond of An African Farm.’ She did meet him, four months after he became prime minister of the Cape, and began what Rive calls ‘a complex relationship,’ although it might perhaps be seen as grandly simple. At first she felt a ‘curious and almost painful interest’ in Rhodes as ‘the only big man we have here.’ She had the highest hopes of him politically and perhaps in other ways, walking away from him at Government House where ‘it had been said that I wished to make him marry me.’ But after he voted in favour of the Strop Bill (making it legal to flog farm servants for certain offences) she never forgave him. He came to stand, in her eyes, for the greatest of all political evils, capitalism. ‘It’s his damnable and damning gold which has first ruined himself and is now, through him, ruining South Africa.’ As to the Jameson Raid, she saw his complicity at once, although her old friend, the journalist W. T. Stead, did not. A point was reached when Olive and Rhodes were passengers on the same ship and, as she told Will Schreiner in 1897, ‘he was so afraid of me that he dared not come and wash his hands in his own cabin, because he had to pass my cabin and might meet me.’ But when there were rumours that the ‘almighty might-have-been’ had suffered a breakdown, she felt ‘intense personal pity.’
Olive believed, or thought she believed, that women must take responsibility for their own future—this is the subject of one of her allegorical Dreams—but she had to combine this with her evolutionism, with the eugenics learned from Karl Pearson, and with Lyndall’s declaration in African Farm: ‘I will do nothing good for myself, nothing for the world, till someone wakes me.’ In 1894 she married Cron Cronwright, seeing him as he at first saw himself, as ‘something like Waldo, but fiercer and stronger.’ Cron, eight years younger than Olive, deeply respected her genius and sacrificed a good deal for her: he changed his name to Cron-wright-Schreiner and gave up farming, which he loved, for the sake of her health. Olive calls her marriage ‘ideally happy,’ and indeed continued to do so in the years to come when they found it impossible to live under the same roof or even in the same country. Only five of her letters to Cron are given here, showing their early years together as ‘tenderness itself,’ though deeply shadowed by the death of their child, who lived for only sixteen hours. ‘Morally and spiritually’—which for Olive was the same thing as politically—they were, at first, completely in tune. They campaigned together against Rhodes and the Chartered Company. The ‘Native Question’ was not Olive’s main concern as yet, although she saw, as perhaps no one else in South Africa did, that it was another aspect of the world’s confrontation of capital and labour. In the Nineties her pressing duty was to champion Boers, the small upcountry farmers, the patriarchs of her childhood. Olive’s vision of Africa was pastoral and republican. On the other side were principalities and powers, the ‘wild dogs of gold.’ ‘All my friends (liberals) from home write saying there cannot be war,’ sh e tells her brother in July 1899. ‘But for us there is a worse possibility than war, that of slowly falling into the hands of speculators.’ On 9 October 1899, the Transvaal presented its ultimatum. Two days later, war began.
Olive, too ill to go to the Front as a war correspondent, as she had been asked to do, braced herself to do all she could in ‘my poor little handful of life,’ confident that her time of work would come when the war was over. Her letters show her courage, her integrity, and her intuition, and, with them, the alarming neurotic force of the Victorian ‘wonderful woman.’ It was this, probably, that made the liberal politician J. X. Merriman call her ‘one of those persons one admires more at a distance.’
London Review of Books, 1988
Sylvia Townsend Warner expected her correspondence to be published; indeed, she sensibly provided for it. ‘I love reading Letters myself,’ she told William Maxwell, her New Yorker editor and literary executor, ‘and I can imagine enjoying my own.’ She was born in 1893, an only child. Her father was a Harrow master, who, in a way not very complimentary to his profession (but quite right for STW), never sent her to school. She was allowed to study what she liked, and was devoted to him, emerging from the ‘benignly eccentric household’ as a musician: she was about to go to Vienna, to study under Schoenberg, when the First World War broke out. When her father died, leaving her, as she put it, ‘mutilated,’ she saw that it would be better to earn her own living than stay in the country and quarrel with her mother. She came to London, and worked as an editor on the monumental Tudor Church Music. Plain, frail, shortsighted, not quite young any more, and, for the first time in her life, rather poor, she set out to enjoy herself. ‘I am sure that to be fearless is the first requisite for a woman: everything else that is good will grow naturally out of that.’
In her first novel, Lolly Willowes (1926), she puts the situation in terms of fable. The decorous Lolly sees that she must escape her family. This intimation comes to her in the greengrocer’s, when she looks at the plum jam and feels herself in a darkening orchard, where the birds are silent. To find where the jam comes from, she gets an ordnance survey map—as STW did when she set off in search of T. F. Powys, the writer she most admired. When a well-meaning relative pursues Lolly even to her country cottage, she asserts her will by transforming herself into a witch. Admittedly, she has now been captured by Satan, ‘the loving huntsman,’ but she has proved that she ‘prefers her own thoughts above all others,’ and, in any case, she feels that she knows more than Satan—more about death, for example, ‘because, being immortal, it was unlikely he would know as much.’ This is reassuring, and typical of the writer. What STW herself wanted to do, and did, was to write (though sometimes she thought she was better at sawing and digging), to hear music, and to live in the country with the human being she loved best, Valentine Ackland. The two women settled in one cottage after another, and finally at Frome Vauchurch, in Dorset.
What happened to them? That was left in their letters, journals, and poems for the world to understand. In 1935 they became 1935-ish members of the Communist Party. In 1936 they went to Spain together for three weeks to help in the British Red Cross bureau. By 1950 Valentine had joined the Catholic Church, and STW, while remaining fiercely anti-clerical and ready to fight to the death against privilege or bullying, allowed a little irony to modify her left-wing views. ‘It takes reckless resolution now,’ she wrote, ‘to admit that one has known a more civilised age than the present. It is painful to admit it to oneself, and apparently shameful to mention it to others. Everyone is busy pretending that even if they once or twice went out to tea they always drank the tea from a mug.’ In 1949 Valentine (described as a ‘sea-nymph who can split logs with an axe and manage a most capricious petrol-pump’) fell in love with another woman, a young American, and STW courageously faced solitude, preferring ‘the sting of going to the muffle of remaining.’ The crisis passed, because, STW thought, ‘I was better at loving and being loved,’ and they returned to a life that she could only call blessed. She meant travel, many friendships, gardening, jam-making, perilous motoring, cats, books, and music. Guests might find the cottage exceedingly cold (Maxwell says that the temperature was the same indoors and outdoors and the front door stood wide open), but the welcome could hardly have been warmer. These years brought STW, not prosperity, but recognition, both here and in America, as a deeply imaginative writer whose novels and poems were most distinctively hers. More than this she didn’t expect: when, in 1967, she was invited to become a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature she mildly pointed out that it was her first public acknowledgement since she was expelled from kinderga rten for upsetting the class.
In 1968 Valentine died of lung cancer. ‘I have always prayed that I might not die first,’ STW wrote, ‘though my age made it probable that I should.’ As she went through her dead friend’s possessions, she found in the coat-pockets notes from herself, ‘on the lines of Keep warm, Come Back Soon.’ They had agreed that STW should live on at Frome Vauchurch, and this, until May 1978, she did. ‘With a heart as normal as a stone’ but quite undaunted, she was still writing and reading voraciously—and giving dinner parties and denouncing Mrs Thatcher—to the very end. Misfortune and egoism, she thought, turned women into vampires—very different from witches—and this she was determined to avoid.
Her letters, from which I have been quoting, are formal, in the sense that STW hardly knew how to write carelessly. It isn’t that she is considering the effect: she produces one, from a long habit of elegance. She knew that herself. ‘I can’t say it yet,’ she wrote to Leonard Woolf after Beginning Again came out. ‘Already I am writing like a printed book, and falsifying my heart.’ Often, however, her formality couldn’t be improved upon—for example, to David Garnett: ‘I was grateful to you for your letter after Valentine’s death, for you were the sole person who said that for pain and loneliness there is no cure.’ It enabled her to deal with publishers, and, most difficult of all, to give away money gracefully: ‘I can well afford it; I have always made it a rule in life to afford pleasures.’ Every now and then a short story that she never had time to write rises quietly to the surface:
Now I will sit down to tell you about two very old and distant cousins of mine, brother &2009-11-8 11:01:54 sister, who live together. She is in her nineties, he is a trifle younger. They were sitting together, he reading, she knitting. Presently she wanted something, and crossed the room to get it. She tripped & fell on her back. So she presently said: Charlie, I’ve fallen & I can’t get up. He put down his book, turned his head, looked at her, and fell asleep.
Just as careful, and just as brilliant, are the descriptions of day-by-day life in the cottage and the village, often to correspondents who had never seen either. All records of passing time were precious to STW, from Proust to Gilbert White’s notes on his tortoise. ‘Continuity,’ she said, ‘it is that which we cannot write down, it is that which we cannot compass, record or control…An old teapot, used daily, can tell me more of my past than anything I recorded of it.’ Few people can ever have described a teapot as well as STW.
Editing this volume was clearly a labour of love, and not an easy one, for William Maxwell. Unfortunately, he has cut and edited the letters on a system peculiar to himself (‘I have used three dots, unbracketed, to indicate an omission at the beginning of a letter…I have not used three dots to indicate that there is more than the last sentence’), and, disappointingly, there is only a sketchy index. Addicts of collected letters will tell him that this is a serious mistake. STW’s index would have read, in part:
celibacy, STW recommends
clearing up, STW’s passion for
coalshed, T.H. White’s diaries lost in
cold baths, STW advises, if piano kept in bathroom
Contre Sainte-Beuve, STW translates
As to the selection, the correspondence with Valentine Ackland is being published separately, while some other series have disappeared or been withdrawn: still, there is plenty here. It is only a pity (though no fault of William Maxwell’s) that he has found nothing from America for 1927, when STW was guest critic of the New York Tribune, and that there is so little reference to her poetry.
It is sad that she should have died such a short time before the publication of her Collected Poems. Claire Harman begins with the unpublished and uncollected work, arranged as far as possible in chronological order. STW is shown as an endless reviser, hard to satisfy. The Espalier (1925) and Time Importuned (1928), with their demurely ironic titles, are the only two collections she brought out in her lifetime. Opus 7, a satirical narrative in the style of Crabbe, based on the story of a ‘drinking old lady…a neighbour for many years, and I had the greatest esteem for her because she knew what she wanted,’ came out in 1931. The late poems were privately printed, except for Boxwood, which STW thought of simply as verses for Reynolds Stone’s wood engravings (although it includes the haunting ‘People I never knew’). The rambling joint collection with Valentine Ackland, Whether a Dove or a Seagull, has not been reprinted here, for the tactfully put reason that ‘it exists on its own terms.’
STW was a Georgian poet, and my only complaint against Claire Harman’s excellent introduction is that it takes the word ‘Georgian’ as an insult, and I had hoped that it no longer was. She was Georgian in her subject matter and also in her professional skill, composing, as she said, ‘with piteous human care.’ Here she can bear comparison with Walter de la Mare, the master of the two-stress line:
Winter is fallen early
On the house of Stare…
STW almost always succeeds with this precarious metre, which sounds nostalgic in ‘The Repose,’ mysterious in ‘Nelly Trim,’ and in ‘Blue Eyes’ exactly suggests Betsy’s disappointment:
Down the green lane
She watched him come,
But all he did
Was to pinch her bum.
With half-rhymes and unstressed rhyme she made a number of delicate experiments, letting the meaning control them, so that in ‘Anne Donne Undone’ the rhyme gradually disintegrates as Anne struggles with weakness and fever, while in the triplets of ‘Journey by Night’ it almost disappears. In one of her New Yorker pieces, ‘Interval for Metaphysics,’ STW remembers what it was like, as a small child, to relate the world of words to the world of things, and stand looking at a wooden paling ‘which had suddenly developed its attaching gravity, and had gathered to itself the pale primrose that forsaken dies, and a certain expression that the sky puts on at dusk, and that I had rarely seen, since I was supposed to be in bed by then.’ Yet she was surprised, twenty years later, to find she was a poet. ‘I haven’t yet got over my surprise that I should be doing it at all.’
Her sharp-wittedness had always made her more, rather than less, sympathetic to other lives, past or present, birds and animals as well. In a tiny lyric, Winter is an old beggar standing motionless in the fields:
All day he will linger
Watching with mild blue eyes
The birds die of hunger.
Loneliness, I think, she considered, after mature reflection, the worst suffering of all. It is at the heart of her finest poem, ‘Ballad Story,’ and her novel set in a medieval convent, and dedicated to Valentine Ackland, has the epigraph: ‘For neither might the corner that held them keep them from fear.’ But, in the end, what is most striking about this civilized poet is her affinity with whatever it is that defies control. By this I don’t mean either sin or magic, for she regarded both of these as perfectly amenable, but what she liked to call ‘the undesigned.’ Against Nature we oppose human order—the lawn must be mowed and appointments must be kept, even though ‘the clock with its rat’s tooth gnaws away delight.’ But, conversely, we can accept the threat of disorder, even if it is never let loose, as the most precious thing we have. ‘I have tamed two birds,’ she wrote in ‘The Decoy,’ ‘called Metre and Rhyme’
At whose sweet calling
All thoughts may be beguiled
To my prepared place;
And yet by blood they are wild.
London Review of Books, 1982
When The Well of Loneliness came out in July 1928 the reviewers were not astonished. Both Leonard Woolf and L. P. Hartley thought the book sincere, but overemphatic. The Times Literary Supplement also called it sincere, and Vera Brittain said it was ‘admirably restrained.’ It sold quite well, going into a second impression, and Radclyffe Hall, with her lover Una Troubridge, thought of taking a cottage in Rye. She may have felt some disappointment, having planned her novel in a crusader’s spirit. She claimed to have written the first full-length treatment in English of women who loved women. In Rosamond Lehmann’s Dusty Answer, she said, ‘the subject was only introduced as an episode.’ (She seems not to have known Dickens’s Tattycoram and Miss Wade.) She wanted to ‘smash the conspiracy of silence,’ but found herself instead mildly successful at W. H. Smith and the Times Bookshop.
The case was altered only by James Douglas, the editor (also in a crusader’s spirit) of the Sunday Express. Douglas decided, a month later, to feature the book and its photogenic author, in her ‘severe’ smoking jacket, as evidence of ‘the plague stalking shamelessly through public life and corrupting the healthy youth of the nation.’ The rest of the popular press divided up for or against the Express’s stunt, The Well sold out, the Home Secretary gave his opinion against the novel and Cape was summoned to Bow Street to show cause why it should not be destroyed in the public interest. John Hall (to give her the name she preferred) was not called upon to give evidence, and was silenced, when she tried to interrupt, by the magistrate. In this way the Beaverbrook press started The Well on its career as the best-known lesbian novel in the English language.
At heart, The Well is a nice long solid Great War period romantic novel. The ethos is that of If Winter Comes, or The Forsyte Saga. Stephen, the hero/heroine, driven out of her grand ancestral home, joins an ambulance unit, is wounded and gets the Croix de Guerre, and won’t declare her compromising love until she is sure it’s returned. When Mary succumbs she supports her by writing, but has to work such long hours that Mary, left on her own, takes to drink. To save her from degradation and childlessness Stephen, in a great act of self-sacrifice, drives her into the arms of a man, who marries her. Those were the days of Boots Circulating Libraries, and The Well only needs one adjustment, though an important one, to make it a first-class Boots book. This, in fact, has always been the objection of its most serious readers. Stephen’s final plea, ‘Acknowledge us, oh God, before the whole world,’ doesn’t mean ‘I am different, let us be different in peace’ but ‘I am the same, why can’t you admit it?’ Stephen is a transsexual, but the suggestion is that she wants to conform to society and can’t, just as Peter Pan, as Barrie finally admitted to himself, wanted to grow up, but couldn’t. Women are treated in The Well without much sympathy, and almost always as empty-headed. The whole book supports the view that men are naturally superior, which is why Stephen would prefer to be one. Another drawback to its defence of lesbians (‘my people,’ as John called them) is the frightful gloom and ill-fortune attending on the minor characters, who grow consumptive or deranged, or commit suicide in garrets. Stephen’s circle of friends, it seems, is doomed. Whatever else the novel does, it doesn’t show the lesbian life as recommendable.
Michael Baker has taken on the task of relating The Well to John’s own life. ‘It is arguable,’ he writes, ‘that had John drawn more on her own personal knowledge, a better novel would have resulted.’ But she would have had, of course, to romanticize herself less. Her other novels, in particular Adam’s Breed and the touching Unlit Lamp, speak for the victimized and repressed. The life of Radclyffe Hall herself was not tragic, not sacrificial, not self-denying. Writers are not obliged to be like their books. But there is something disconcerting, which Baker evidently feels, about the discrepancy here.
John was born as Marguerite Antonia Radclyffe-Hall in a house in Bournemouth called Sunny Lawn. She was not a masculine-looking child; Sir Arthur Sullivan called her ‘Toddles.’ But Toddles suffered deeply from the division between her rarely seen father and her violent, hysterical mother. (The bewilderment of children growing up without love was what she was to do best in fiction.) In 1901, with not much in the way of education, she came of age and inherited her grandfather’s fortune. This meant freedom to travel, and in 1907, at Homburg, she met Mabel Batten, a dashing, well-connected older woman who was there to take the waters and play roulette. Mabel had a warm mezzo-soprano voice; she was the kind of woman Sargent painted, and he did paint her. She was thought to have been one of Edward VII’s mistresses.
By 1907 Mabel was fifty, had spread emotionally and physically, and was known as ‘Ladye.’ Ladye’s hot-water bottles were called Jones and Charlie, and she petted and spoiled them. As John’s first lover, she did duty, too, for the unsatisfactory mother. Together they began to cruise to ‘dear abroad,’ leaving Ladye’s complaisant husband to spend his time at his clubs. There was no scandal, Ladye having a truly Edwardian adroitness in managing the pleasures of the flesh. She was a Catholic convert, and John, too, was received by the Jesuits at Farm Street. Both of them were convinced that they must have met in some previous existence. But in a few years’ time Ladye’s forces had begun to wane. John became first impatient, then unfaithful. In 1915 she met Una Troubridge, who wrote in her Day Book that ‘our friendship, which was to last through life and after it, dated from that meeting.’
Baker’s title (unlike, for instance, I. A. R. Wylie’s Life with George) doesn’t refer to the homosexual’s divided nature. ‘Our Three Selves’ were Ladye, John, and Una. During the war there was a tormenting ménage à trois at the Vernon Court Hotel, which made Ladye (she too kept a diary) ‘sick at heart. Atmosphere sad beyond words.’ In 1916 she died of a heart attack. She had been at a tea party, singing one of her own patriotic compositions, and came back, tired out, to find that John was not there. The resultant guilt and self-reproach, John found, could only be absolved by communication with the spirit world. With the help of Mrs Leonard, who was undoubtedly a powerful medium but sometimes, perhaps, resorted to likely guesses, Ladye was heard to forgive. ‘She says…“I understand you and know you never hurt me intentionally…I say most emphatically nothing could or shall prevent our meeting or my coming to you as long as God permits.”’ Subsequently Ladye gave John permission to cut her hair short. The son/daughter was recognized as Una’s husband. Admiral Trou-bridge returned from action to find himself unwanted and his little daughter neglected. He was obliged, under protest, to apply for a legal separation. ‘A great peace and relief upon me,’ Una noted. ‘Deo Gratias.’
The Twenties were John and Una’s heyday, a period of what Baker calls ‘hectic socializing.’ The two of them were instantly recognizable figures at first nights and private views, and were, of course, well-heeled travellers. ‘We stopped where we felt inclined,’ Una wrote, ‘and allowed the ex-chefs of royalty to feed us.’ Life was kept at fever pitch by quarrels and reconciliations, illnesses real or imaginary, and the false exhilaration of moving house. If all else failed, they could call in doctors and solicitors, or buy more and more pet dogs, or sack the servants. In politics they supported ‘our class’ and Mussolini’s Italy. Through all this Una remained John’s faithful wife, providing the reassurance that writers need. ‘After a day and a night spent like Jacob, wrestling with the angel of her own uninspired obstinacy, [John] would hand me the resulting manuscript…and command me to read aloud…having been asked if I was tired and told I was reading abominably and sometimes informed that I was ruining the beauty of what I read, the manuscript would be snatched from my hands and torn to shreds.’ But no price was too high to pay. If the marriage was necessarily sterile, at least the books had been born. All Una’s emotional capital was invested in John’s genius.
Michael Baker doesn’t claim to be a critic and therefore makes no attempt to decide whether her faith was justified. In any case, to Una, as to Ladye, John was unfaithful. During the hot summer of 1934, when they were in France, they had to call in a nurse from the American hospital in Paris. She was a White Russian, Mongolian or ‘Chinky-looking,’ and, Una thought, ‘quite unmistakably of our own class.’ John, at fifty-four, fell insanely in love with Evgenia Souline. She was restrained, but only for a short time, by the thought of the example of infidelity that she would give to ‘my people’ (Havelock Ellis had claimed that lesbian relationships were by their nature unstable). But Souline, who treated John as a source of easy money, was unpredictable and hard to get, and John, perhaps because of this, couldn’t exist without her. In her many hundreds of letters to her ‘sweet torment’ she began to refer to Una as a ‘terrible obligation’ and a load that might be beyond bearing. Only the Second World War separated these later Three Selves.
At intervals throughout the long story a curious heart-lessness appears. Ladye stands deserted in the darkening hotel room. Admiral Troubridge is left astounded and embittered when Una hints to her friends that he has infected her with syphilis. Una’s small daughter is found wandering in the street with no one to care for her. As an adolescent, she is asked to call John ‘Uncle.’ Una, after twenty years of loyalty, is left hanging about, recovering from a hysterectomy, while out at Passy John is in bed with Souline. In the words of The Well of Loneliness, ‘God alone knows who shall judge of such matters.’
Michael Baker has written this biography with a calm, flat-footed perseverance that contrasts effectively with the agonies of his subject. He has turned up a considerable amount of new material. In addition to Una’s Day Book, which was also used by Richard Ormrod in his Una Troubridge (1984), he has had access to Mabel Batten’s diaries and to the letters to Souline. But while Ormrod declared ‘a measure of personal empathy’ with Una, Baker doesn’t precisely explain what led him to write such a long book about Radclyffe Hall. Perhaps what attracted him, in the end, was her courage. Courage is not the same thing for the well-off as for the poor. John thought of herself as a martyr, but it was a martyrdom de luxe. I’m not thinking, however, of her defiance of the law or even of her fortitude in her last illness, but of her experience, through so many years, of being treated as somewhat ridiculous. Rupert Hart-Davis’s remark ‘It was always said that at a dinner-party, when the women left the table, Johnny Hall found it hard to make up her mind whether to go with the women or remain with the men’ says it all. But Radclyffe Hall was never deflected, either by friends or by enemies. She never wavered in her immense seriousness. She continued to hold her head high, even in the face of English jokiness.
London Review of Books, 1985
‘Thank Heaven, fasting, for a good man’s love’ is Rosalind’s sharp rejoinder, in As You Like It, to the proud shepherdess. As advice it is ambiguous, because Rosalind can only give it while she is passing herself off as a man. And E. M. Delafield’s book, delightful (like everything she wrote) to read, is not as straightforward as it looks at first.
Most recollections of E. M. Delafield are of the handsome countrywoman and J.P., organizing and well organized, the competent mother, the successful public speaker, a director of Time and Tide. ‘A witty, extremely soignée person’ an American interviewer found her in 1942. One might not have guessed that her sympathies were with the Labour Party, and there are other unexpected glimpses of her, for example on her visits to Russia where she had arranged to meet the young journalist Peter Stucley. ‘With a hat,’ he wrote, ‘from Marshall & Snelgrove on her head, and in her hand a bag which always contained, at moments of exhaustion, a supply of ginger biscuits’ they toured Moscow together, although their last outing, to a reformatory for prostitutes, was cancelled. In her own account she describes how she washed his handkerchiefs and saw him off ‘in deepest dejection’, feeling like l’orpheline de Moscou. The total impression—and this, I believe, accounts for the comic and pathetic tension of her books—is of a woman who would like to free herself and understands how it is to be done but can never quite bring herself to the point of doing it. ‘Realize, not for the first time,’ writes the Provincial Lady, ‘that intelligent women can perhaps best perform their duty towards their own sex by devastating process of telling them the truth about themselves. At the same time, cannot feel that I shall really enjoy hearing it.’ What held her back—and she knew this, of course, better than anyone—was partly inborn, partly imposed. At convent school, she said, she had been taught for life that ‘a good reason for doing something was that I knew I should hate it.’ An even stronger influence was her mother.
This mother was also a novelist. Mrs Henry de la Pasture had a great popular following, and when Elizabeth began to publish she called herself Delafield (a translation of sorts), apparently to keep clear of her mother’s success. Why not, however, a different name altogether? Mrs de la Pasture’s books went into many editions, including Newnes’ Sixpenny Novels and Hodder & Stoughton’s Sevenpenny Library. Among her titles are The Grey Knight: An Autumn Love Story (1908) and The Lonely Lady of Grosvenor Square (1907). Her advice to her daughter was to write about something of which she had personal experience, but in her own novels this experience is certainly heightened. You get dash and spirit from Mrs de la Pasture, and generous wish-fulfilment. Her heroines are the middle-aged enchantresses dear to middle-aged women authors. Take Lady Mary in Peter’s Mother (1905). She is a widow, pale, sad, but still beautiful, and free at last to marry her first love. But her son comes back wounded from the Boer War and expects her to make a home for him. When she asks, in a sudden outburst, whether she doesn’t deserve a life of her own, she meets total incomprehension. What is disconcerting is to find that in E. M. Delafield’s last novel, Late and Soon (1943), the same situation appears, though in more painful terms. The Provincial Lady notes ‘Mem: a mother’s influence, if any, almost always entirely disastrous.’ The struggle to escape from it, however, greatly strengthens the critical faculty.
Thank Heaven Fasting was published in 1932, when E. M. Delafield had been writing for twelve years. The period of the story is not precisely given (the First World War is never mentioned), but in Eaton Square the power of money, parental authority, and social status is still absolute. Power needs force to support it, and it is the overwhelming force of received opinion which divides the All Right from the Not Quite and makes the unmarried woman something worse than odd—a failure, a disgrace to herself and to what in racing would be called her ‘connections.’ The term is the right one, because the young women are bred and trained entirely with the object of getting them successfully married within three years, after which they are regarded, and regard themselves, as leftovers. Grotesquely artificial as the system is, it is biologically predictable. The All Right—even if some of them are Only Just—must reproduce themselves with the All Right to maintain the species. In itself this is a bizarre spectacle, one of nature’s processes gone hopelessly astray, which must lead eventually to extinction.
The story opens on a note of keen irony. ‘Much was said in the days of Monica’s early youth about being good.’ (Monica was one of E. M. Delafield’s own names and one may guess that she would rather not have been given it.) Goodness, in this context, means what is convenient to those in authority. Certainly, it has nothing to do with truth. Monica has been carefully trained to behave to men—beginning with her own father—exactly as they expect, and to say to them only what they want to hear.
‘Have you been to play whist at the Club, father?’
The question dated from Monica’s nursery days. She asked it several times weekly, and never realized that it was a matter of complete indifference to her.
At her first dance she catches sight of herself in one of the great ballroom mirrors and ‘saw that she was wearing too serious an expression. Both her mother and the dancing-mistress had warned her about this, and she immediately assumed an air of fresh, sparkling enjoyment.’ At home, after dinner, she sometimes plays the piano.
‘That will do now, darling,’ said Mrs Ingram. ‘I can hear father coming, and he may want to talk. Ring for coffee.’
Monica obeyed.
She was not really particularly interested in either the Adieux or Sobre les Olas, although she vaguely liked the idea of herself, in a simple white frock, dreamily playing under the lamplight and it always rather annoyed her that her conception of her own appearance had to be spoilt by the fact that, having no faculty for playing by ear, she was obliged always to keep her eyes fixed upon her music.
Monica, then, is not a protester. She is conscious of the duties of her station as a young girl and accepts them without question. All time is wasted—so too is all friendship and all music—unless it can be shown to ‘lead to something,’ that is, a proposal of marriage, although it is assumed that the man is likely to try and get out of it if he can. If the offer is not made within the first three seasons, the daughter will have to share with her mother the cruel burden of guilt. Fathers can distance themselves; mothers, if they have failed, must live with failure.
A possible exception to this rule is the handsome, formidable Lady Marlowe (her first husband had been a German Jew, but her second had been English, ‘so that was all right’). If her two daughters, Frederica and Cicely, prove unattractive to men, Lady Marlowe intends, so she frankly says, to banish them to a separate house and disown them. But such strength, and indeed such cruelty, can hardly be expected of all mothers, nor is it surprising that Frederica and Cicely droop, with dark shadows under their eyes and ‘pale, inefficient hands.’
Monica does not have to suffer from this kind of brutal contempt. The novel would be very much weakened if she did, since another irony of the opening chapters is that her prospects seem so hopeful. She starts out with the goodwill of the entire household, although she knows very little about some of them—‘she had a dim idea that the kitchenmaid did actually sleep in the boxroom.’ She is crimped and squeezed into the desirable shape and launched into the drawing-room world. Once there, her first conversation on her own is a success. She has been able, for several minutes, to think of something to say to a man. It looks, then, as if she will be able to justify her existence and the fact that she was not born a boy. Her parents, who remind her so frequently of all they are doing for her, will not have to be disappointed.
Every now and then E. M. Delafield indicates briefly (she is a very economical writer) how much human material is being wasted or suppressed. Left to herself, Monica has a good heart and a healthy capacity for normal happiness. She loves dancing for its own sake, and, disastrously, she loves Captain Christopher Lane. At his appearance on the scene her eighteen years of training, social, emotional and religious, collapse at a touch. ‘God must understand her, and must not allow her mother to guess anything at all.’ Captain Lane, to be sure, is not altogether real to her—‘he was masterful, exactly like people in books’—but he is also a powerful physical presence which has nothing to do with books. At the funfair—a strong metaphor for sexual excitement—she finds that she has forgotten her mother and her friends and, as the evening goes on, even time itself. She will never be allowed the chance to do such a thing again. Almost at once time reasserts its power, and becomes a threat. Although the flashy Captain only finds the opportunity for a few kisses before he is posted back to India, Monica’s reputation for niceness has gone. She has lost her marketable freshness. She and her mother will be left to count the anxious years as they pass. They are not quite hopeless, but their hopes will be pitched sadly lower and lower.
‘The Anxious Years’ is the title of the second, and by far the longest part of the novel. Monica, Mrs Ingram, and Parsons, the faithful lady’s maid, are left in a kind of unholy alliance to keep up appearances in Eaton Square. Monica, once a devourer of fiction, now creates it, inventing, with her mother, new variations of the true story. ‘They displayed for one another’s benefit a detached brightness that ignored everything below the surface,’ conscious, day in, day out, of ‘an undercurrent of sick envy and mortification.’ E. M. Delafield calls their pretence ‘gallant’ as they go through the daily formalities of dressing, shopping, driving out and back home again, which are all they know and which it would never occur to them to give up. Without these things their life would not be endurable.
The men who are supposed to give meaning to their lives are a poor lot, almost all of them self-satisfied and self-deceiving. But the thin characterization of the men, in this particular novel, works very well. They are to be seen as a necessary condition of life rather than as human beings. Poor Monica is patronized by her father, sexually awakened and then ditched by the Captain, disillusioned by Carol Anderson, without understanding any of them. It could be said, indeed, that the true marriage, as the story works itself out, is between Monica and her mother. They have ‘the intuition peculiar to those who live together.’ From Monica’s first childish dependence she grows into the desperate conspiracy of the middle chapters, until almost imperceptibly she becomes the stronger of the two. ‘Darling, there’s no such thing as friendship between a man and a woman,’ is Mrs Ingram’s comment when Carol Anderson appears, but for the first time her voice is timid. Her last resort is the pretence that she can’t bring herself to let her daughter marry and leave her by herself. ‘Not that I’d ever grudge you your happiness, my precious one, but just for a few years more—I don’t suppose it’ll be for very long.’ And Monica, listening, feels ‘sick with pity.’
Earlier in the book she has been jealous of the affection between her parents, and when Vernon Ingram is killed in an accident she envies her mother’s hysteria, her right, so to speak, to violent grief. Jealousy, in the peculiarly English form of accepted defeat (everyone else is more fortunate and more worthy of being fortunate), was of particular interest to E. M. Delafield. Unlike lechery and greed, it can never provide satisfaction in itself, only in the thought of someone else’s failure. In creating character, she held that
to show one side only is to falsify it and therefore deprive it of all value…there are no wholly ‘nice’ people, or wholly ‘nasty’ people in real life, and they therefore have no place in the particular form of roman psychologique in which I happen to be interested.
The jealousy that bedevils the gentle and pliant Monica is a product of ‘the whole tradition of her world, daily and hourly soaking into her very being, so that it became an ineradicable part of herself.’ There is, for example, the beginning of a real friendship between Monica and Cicely Marlowe. But the news of Cicely’s engagement (even though the man is not All Right) while Monica herself is still doggedly waiting and hoping, is almost too painful to be borne. ‘It added to her misery that she was ashamed of it, and despised and reproached herself for her unworthy jealousy.’ Still more disgraceful is her relief when the whole thing, after all, comes to nothing.
Thank Heaven Fasting would be a sombre book if it were less witty, and less deceptively mild. Proceeding, as it does, in the kind of short paragraphs that were then thought suitable for the Woman’s Page, it concentrates from beginning to end, and with admirable clearness, on the main story. In this sense, it must be counted a classic. Characters and places are carefully limited. The tone is detached, or seems so. E. M. Delafield had, she said, ‘consciously striven, throughout the whole of my writing life, for ability to observe impartially, unbiased either by sentiment or by cynicism, and courage to record faithfully and without dramatic emphasis.’ She isn’t impartial, of course. What is the use of an impartial novelist? But she is accurate, calm, and lucid. She possessed what she called a phonographic memory, and could repeat, word for word, conversations which she had heard or overheard many years earlier. Dialogue, even in short snatches, is one of her great strengths as a writer. In Thank Heaven Fasting the conversations are often—as they are in real life—duels, open or disguised. Mrs Ingram has an easy victory over Monica.
‘Sit down, my pet.’
‘I’d rather stand.’
‘Mother said, Sit down, Monica.’
Monica sat.
The neurotic Frederica also challenges her mother, together with the whole system to which she has been condemned.
‘I don’t want to get married. I hate men. I wouldn’t marry anyone—whoever it was.’
Lady Marlowe gazed at her in astonishment for a moment, and then laughed again.
‘So you’ve got to that stage, have you?’ was all she said.
And Frederica, left alone, sinks her teeth into the flesh of her thin wrist to control herself. At the other end of the scale is Mr Pelham, amiably chatting on one of his punctual calls.
‘The other day’ remarked Mr Pelham, ‘I heard of a fellow who was sitting out a dance with a girl. They’d talked about all the usual things and didn’t seem to have anything more to say, and whatever he asked her she only seemed to answer Yes or No—so what do you think he suddenly did?’
‘What?’
‘He suddenly asked her: “Do you like string?” Without any preliminary, you know.’
Monica smiles, though only because she sees that she is expected to. But she understands as well as he does that between people who are obliged to talk but have nothing to say, anecdotes, even about string, are precious currency. There is something touching, however, about Mr Pelham’s admiration of the resourceful fellow, whom he doesn’t even know, but has ‘heard of.’ Mr Pelham is tedious—he is the sort of man who always calls a walk ‘a ramble’—but in his voice one can distinguish human kindness.
If E. M. Delafield had a good ear, she also had an exceptionally sharp eye for (to quote one of her own titles) The Way Things Are. The house in Eaton Square dominates Thank Heaven Fasting. In Monica’s bedroom
the furniture itself was all painted white, so was the narrow little mantelpiece on which stood the collection of china animals dating from nursery days. The pictures were framed in gilt—mostly ‘copies from the flat’ of Swiss scenery, and Italian peasantry, but there were also reproductions of one or two ‘really good’ pictures. These had been given to Monica from time to time, usually on birthdays, and she always felt that she ought to have liked them much better than she really did.
In a rebellious moment she had wanted to take down the Sistine Madonna, but had not been able to summon the courage. Her upbringing has taught her that nothing must be taken more seriously than appearances. When she goes to her mother’s room after a party ‘to tell her all about it,’ she sees the nighttime Mrs Ingram, with whom she is quite familiar—her hair in a double row of steel wavers, her face glistening with cold cream, recruiting her forces for the next day’s grand pretence. Heavy meals come up from the basement kitchen, clothes are worn which can’t be taken off without the help of a servant, fires blaze, bells are rung, hairdressers arrive by appointment—every morning and evening bring the spoils of a comfortable unearned income. It is the only home Monica has ever known, and we have to see it turn first into a refuge for the unwanted, and then into a prison.
In Thank Heaven Fasting E. M. Delafield returned to a theme she had treated much earlier, in Consequences (1919). In this novel, which was one of her own favourites, the heroine, Alex, is as naive as Monica, but much less able to do what is expected of her. She has suffered—unlike Monica, but like E. M. Delafield herself—from years of spiritual regimentation in a strict Belgian convent. Emerging, bewildered, at the age of eighteen she finds that her parents expect her—what else has she been growing up for?—to get married. She accepts a proposal from a man she doesn’t love, and who removes his pince-nez, with deliberation, before he kisses her. (This is also true of Mr Pelham and of Cecil Vyse in A Room with a View; it seems to be an Edwardian novelist’s warning signal.) With very real courage, Alex breaks off the engagement. In consequence, her mother’s world rejects her. She is undirected, untrained, thought to be odd and difficult. Her brother and sister do not want her, and as a last solution she drowns herself. Monica’s story, then, could be seen as a revised version of Alex’s; we must accept that comedy is crueller than tragedy. It is interesting to see how E. M. Delafield has quietly removed what might be called the extenuating circumstances. Alex dies because her sincerity is unforgivable. Monica retreats to the pretences of Eaton Square. Nanda, in Henry James’s The Awkward Age (who becomes unmarriageable because she is thought to have read a daring book), is shown as finer than all the men and women around her. Monica is not. Gissing’s Odd Women lose their means of support. Monica remains comfortably off. In a conforming society, she is a conformist. Her claim to sympathy is only that.
And the reader does sympathize with Monica, all the more because she is unheroic, and finds it almost unbearable when, at the very end of the book, she wakes sweating and sobbing, afraid that after all there may be some hitch to prevent her marriage. One feels almost ashamed to be seeing her desperation at such close range. Was she capable of acting otherwise than as she did? So tightly does her world close around her that it seems, at first, that there are no choices open to her. She has heard faintly of alternatives—the New Woman, the suffrage movement—but she has been taught to regard them with horror, and is duly horrified. Lady Marlowe considers that women who demand votes are simply hysterical old maids, or wives who can’t get on with their husbands (she herself has worn out two). No New Women make an appearance (there is a hint of one in Mary Collier, who wears her hair straight and her clothes plain, but it is not developed) and there are no female salary earners—not even writers—among Monica’s acquaintance. At one point in the novel, however, when Cicely falls ill, the Marlowes call in young Dr Corderey (clever, but not All Right). Corderey has studied the unhappiness of idle women, and considers it an illness. They need treatment, he thinks, as much as any other patients. To Monica he says
‘I suppose you were never sent to school either, and you live at home, and have nothing to do…and if you were forced to earn your living tomorrow, you’d have to starve.’
Monica, for an instant, felt offended, because she knew that her mother would think she ought to be offended. But he had spoken with so much sincerity that she could not pretend to disagree.
‘It’s quite true.’
Monica is listening here to the voice of truth. She has heard it before, more than once. She heard it when she wanted to take down the print of the Sistine Madonna. She expresses it, if only for a moment, when she cries out ‘Why can’t one have a career, or even work, like a man?’ She knows that her mother’s grief has turned into self-indulgence. She has the capacity even to know herself, but what she sees dismays her. Better to look away. Here E. M. Delafield is relentless. We are not allowed to question the happiness of the happy ending. Quite against the tradition of comedy, the older generation has been proved, apparently, right. And all Monica has to wish for is that if ever she has a child, it will be a boy.
From the Virago edition, 1989
When she dined at Somerville High Table, as she quite often did in the late 1930s, we used to look up at Dorothy Sayers as she sat there in black crêpe de Chine, austere, remote, almost cubical. She told the dean that the students dressed badly and had no sense of occasion. We resented this because we felt that, although most of us had not much money, we had done the best we could. These, as it happens, are the very words of her illegitimate son, whom she supported, but never acknowledged in her lifetime: ‘She did the very best she could.’
We, of course, could never have envisaged such a situation. We couldn’t have guessed at the weight of feeling behind her story ‘The Haunted Policeman’ (in which Lord Peter Wimsey’s son is born) or at the images which appear on the cover of this new Life—a frilly child, a slender young woman with a Leonardo smile, a jolly undergraduate dressed as a man and impersonating the conductor Sir Hugh Allen.
Biographies of Dorothy Sayers—four at least, including Janet Hitchman’s Such a Strange Lady—have been published already, but this is the most authoritative by far. Dr Barbara Reynolds, who is editing Sayers’s letters, has read more of them than anyone else, and she met and corresponded with her for eleven years and collaborated with her on her Dante translations. (About this she has written already in The Passionate Intellect.)
As her subtitle suggests, she is particularly concerned with Sayers as a committed and dogmatic Christian and as a scholar—a scholar even of detective fiction, as she showed in her introduction to the well-loved Gollancz collection Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery & Horror (1928). ‘I do feel rather passionately about this business of the integrity of the mind,’ she wrote to Victor Gollancz. There she felt unassailable. Emotionally and physically, however, she had a rough ride, with some compromises to make. Like many children of the manse (her father was Rector of Bluntisham-cum-Earith in Huntingdon) she had to make the best of oddly conflicting impulses. After a wretched entanglement with an elusive poet, John Cournos, she ‘chummed up’ with a car salesman and motorbike fitter who amused her, told her dirty stories, and left her pregnant. (Fortunately she had a cousin, Ivy Shrimpton, who made a living by fostering and teaching children.)
Then, in the 1920s, when she was reviving her interest in Old French literature and preparing to translate Tristan, she married Mac, a motoring journalist, who enjoyed a few drinks and a visit to the Holborn Empire and so did she. With him she took to good food and wine and majestically increased in weight. She was able to give up her slogan-writing job at Bensons, where she had worked successfully on the campaigns for Guinness and Colman’s mustard, and become a writer only.
But, distressingly enough, in the shadow of her success Mac diminished. From then on she managed her own life admirably, supported by loyal friends and taking on publishers, the press, the BBC, even the hierarchy when there was trouble over the broadcasting of her brilliant life of Christ, The Man Born to Be King.
She was one of the intellectuals entrusted by the Ministry of Information to encourage the nation at war, and she fearlessly accepted controversy. As a matter of fact, although she was argumentative, argument was not her strong point. (In The Mind of the Maker, for example, she claims that the process of artistic creation is threefold and so an analogy of the Trinity, without any evidence at all except that that was how she felt herself when writing.) What she had, as Frank Swinnerton puts it in The Georgian World, was ‘that inconvenient readiness of comment which flows from a mind lively and in good order.’
Speaking what she believed to be the truth she regarded as a duty. ‘She was influential,’ says Barbara Reynolds, ‘and other influential people took notice of what she said.’ This, of course, is true, but there were many strong-minded women, in sensible hats, on call at that time, and it is heartening to remember that Dorothy Sayers’s influence was due to an imaginary amateur detective who had ‘walked in complete with spats’ in 1920, and who was not at first meant to be taken seriously.
Barbara Reynolds is a cautious writer, devoted to her subject and, as the founder of the Dorothy Sayers Society, scrupulous over detail. Take the question of the almost too amiable chaplain of Balliol, Roy Ridley. He did, it’s true, wear spats and a monocle and did claim, to Sayers’s vexation, to be the original of Peter Wimsey. But she was quite wrong in saying she had never met him until after she had written her books, and Reynolds shows that she was wrong.
It is always a biographer’s job to look for the relationship between the life and the work, even though Sayers, like most authors, said that there wasn’t one. ‘None of the characters that I have placed upon this public stage has any counterpart in real life.’ Reynolds can only say that this is ‘disingenuous.’ After all, it is Lord Peter himself, in The Nine Tailors (by which time he’s become pretty serious), who says that the writer’s creative imagination ‘works outwards, till finally you will be able to stand outside your own experience and see it as something you have made, existing independently of yourself.’ Writers, he adds, are lucky.
Observer, 1993