Most people first come to be interested in Ford Madox Ford through reading his novel The Good Soldier. This must be one of the most carefully organized fictions ever written. Ford himself, however, was almost as disorganized as a human being can be. Ezra Pound told him that even if he were placed naked and alone in a room without furniture he would reduce it, in an hour’s time, to total confusion.
Ford was the grandson of a fine old Pre-Raphaelite painter, Ford Madox Brown, so there was that to be lived up to, or got away from. He was tall, blond, and vacuous-looking in his youth, and as the years passed and he drank more he became very stout. He was compared to a white whale, a behemoth, an English squire, Falstaff, Lord Plush-bottom.
His father was a German musicologist. Ford was educated partly in France and Germany, and he always thought out his novels in French. All his family lived for music, painting, and language. Whatever the disappointments, nothing else could be truly worth the doing. During his whole life Ford worked unremittingly to support himself and others by writing, but he was not a person who could ever make money. In a sense, he scarcely needed it. It was there to be lent, or borrowed, as fate decided. Ford needed luxury (good wine, food, and conversation) but not comfort. In the shabbiest lodgings he could maintain his grand manner.
Ford married in 1894, when he was only twenty years old, and it was in those early penniless days that he met Joseph Conrad, whose ideas stayed with him for the rest of his life. In 1908 he was editor of the influential English Review. In 1909 he left his wife, Elsie, and their two daughters. He was ordered to pay them a weekly maintenance, refused on principle, and spent eight days in Brixton jail. From 1911 onward he lived with the sharp-tongued literary hostess Violet Hunt. She desired to marry him, and he extricated himself with difficulty. When World War I broke out he joined the army (he was over forty), and came back from the battle of the Somme shellshocked. In 1918 he was lucky enough to meet an Australian painter, Stella Bowen, who was prepared to live with him in a remote, rat-infested cottage in Sussex and to bear him a third daughter. In the 1920s they decamped to Paris, where Ford edited The Transatlantic Review, getting contributions from Conrad, Pound, Gertrude Stein, Hemingway, Joyce, Paul Valéry, and William Carlos Williams.
Ford was less lucky in meeting the waiflike Jean Rhys, whose talent he encouraged (he was a great encourager). She described their affair, without forgiveness, in her novel Quartet. As Alan Judd shows in Ford Madox Ford, at all times he was surrounded by friends, who sometimes became enemies, and always he found ways to be hospitable. At fifty-six he found, or was found by, his last lover, the American Janice Biala. He had always been more appreciated in America than elsewhere and lived for years in the United States. But eventually he took his new wife back to Europe. He had been driven, he said, by an overwhelming nostalgia for French cooking. But time had run out. His health declined rapidly on the voyage to France, and he died on 26 June 1939, in a clinic in Deauville, at the age of sixty-five.
Ford conducted his life unwisely. To explain him is exceptionally difficult because he was a shape-shifter, giving a series of contradictory versions of himself to anyone who would listen. For mere facts, he said, he had a profound contempt. ‘What he is really,’ said H. G. Wells, ‘or if he is really, nobody knows…and he least of all.’ At heart he saw himself as the gallantly uncomplaining English gentleman of his finest novels, the victim of ruinous women or of some guileless-seeming manipulator, like the narrator of The Good Soldier. Yet Ford was overcome by little worries; he was prone to nervous collapse; he wept on the shoulders of others. Often he was not taken seriously. His devotion to literature was absolute, but he was, perhaps, a holy fool on a large scale.
The standard biography up till now—though not the only one—has been The Saddest Story, by Arthur Mizener (1971). Mr Judd acknowledges Mizener’s work and follows his chronology, but doesn’t agree with what he calls Mizener’s negative interpretation of Ford. In fact, Mr Judd’s fiercely energetic, absorbing book is in part a defence of Ford against Mizener. It starts unexpectedly with the words ‘There are also the rich in spirit.’ Although he can hardly claim that Ford was a happy man, he refuses to consider him a failure: ‘The point, surely, is that he was a writer. It doesn’t matter what else he was or pretended to be—pig farmer, country gentleman, cook, man-about-town, editor, man of letters, soldier, cricket enthusiast…If anyone was ever sent into the world to be something, Ford was; and he achieved it.’
Ford started by collaborating with Conrad, then turned to light novels and historical fiction. The Good Soldier came out in 1915. After the war came the brilliant Parade’s End tetralogy, then reminiscences, essays, criticism, A History of Our Own Times. Mr Judd covers as much of this as he can, and quotes rather too much of Ford’s tepid poetry.
He seems, in fact, prepared to defend almost everything Ford wrote but settles, as he is bound to, for the novels. Between 1906 and 1908 Ford brought out a trilogy, The Fifth Queen, based on the marriage of Catherine Howard and the ageing King Henry VIII. To Mr Judd this is one of the best historical novels in the language. But The Fifth Queen could not hope to compete with bestsellers by people like Rider Haggard or Robert Louis Stevenson, who had said that historical romance should appeal to our ‘nameless longings’ and provide the adult version of child’s play.
That was not at all the sort of thing Ford could do. Conrad and he had agreed that the general effect of fiction must be ‘the effect life has on mankind.’ This Ford believed could be achieved not by either romance or realism but by re-creating states of mind. These, of course, can be deceptive, as they are in The Good Soldier, a story of two married couples and a young girl—well-off, respectable, and supposed to be good friends. Only gradually does it show itself to be what Ford first wanted to call it, ‘The Saddest Story,’ a frightening pattern of love and death. Those who have ‘heart’ are perhaps better human beings, but they are liable to grotesque disasters. A good deal is asked of the reader, who is led through dazzling shifts of time and viewpoint, without hope of finding a final solution, since Ford believed that ‘there is in life nothing final.’
When Mr Judd tells us that ‘it is better to read and re-read Parade’s End rather than read about it,’ it is clear that he himself is something much more genial than a literary critic. He is, in fact, a novelist himself and, on the evidence of this book, a tolerant man, sympathetic to human passions and dilemmas and to commonplace human embarrassments. Accordingly, he is particularly good on the subject of ‘Ford’s women’ (they were known as that). Ford was successful with women, Mr Judd thinks (in a way that astonished James Joyce), because he liked them, and needed to talk to them. They didn’t expect him to provide, but knew he would give. Did he enjoy sex? ‘It may be that what he most sought was the emotional intensity, intimacy and dependence engendered by sexual relationships rather than sex itself.’ The keynote of Ford’s character, as Mr Judd sees him, is generosity. For this all his shortcomings, even his disregard for truth, must be forgiven.
Mr Judd provides his book with few notes and no references, telling us that Ford cared nothing for such things. This, I think, was a mistake, but in every other way he is the reader’s good friend, persuading, lecturing a little, and bringing his subject unforgettably to life. ‘Not,’ he says, ‘that complete understanding is possible; the point is to get as near to it as we can, to know all that can be known in order to stand, if only for a moment, at the edge of what cannot.’
New York Times Book Review, 1991
Rose Macaulay was born in 1881, and died in 1958. As a young woman she went bathing by moonlight with Rupert Brooke, and she lived long enough to protest, as a well-known author and critic, against the invasion of Korea. The World My Wilderness was published in 1950, when she was thought to have given up fiction, not having written a novel for nearly ten years.
The book disturbed her readers, because it was not what they expected. The most successful of her early novels had been social satires. They were delightful to read, and still are, brilliantly clear-sighted without being malicious (or at least more malicious than necessary) but they took a detached view; humanity was so misguided that one must either laugh or cry, and Rose had felt it best to laugh. The World My Wilderness showed that the power of ridicule, after all, was not the most important gift she had.
Rose Macaulay herself was most characteristically English, tall, angular, and given to wearing flat tweed caps, or hats like tea cosies—English, too, in her gaiety and wit which, at heart, was melancholic. But almost any conclusion you came to about her would be wrong. From the ages of six to thirteen she had grown up with her brothers and sisters in a small fishing town on the Genoese coast, and this interlude of scrambling about the Mediterranean hills and foreshore was as important to her as all her English education. Again, Rose was often thought to be sexless, or, as Rosamond Lehmann put it, ‘sexless though not unfeminine.’ But in fact she had, at the age of thirty-six, fallen irretrievably in love with a married man, Gerald O’Donovan, and in spite of much heart-searching she never broke with her lover till the day of his death. Both these episodes have a good deal to do with the writing of The World My Wilderness.
The book’s seventeen-year-old heroine Rose herself described as ‘rather lost and strayed and derelict.’ Barbary Deniston has grown up in wartime Occupied France, only half attended to by her worldly, sensual charmer of an English mother. This mother, Helen, has been divorced from Deniston, and her second husband, ‘an amiable, thriving French collaborator,’ is dead. Meanwhile Barbary and her stepbrother have lived in and out of the house as children of the Maquis, trained by the Resistance in sabotage and petty thieving. Like Auden’s boy with a stone, Barbary has never heard of any world where promises were kept. When she is sent from her fishing village to the respectable Deniston relatives in London, she is doubly lost. Like seeking like, she escapes from pallid WC2 to join the drifters and scroungers in the bombed area round St Paul’s, where ‘shrubs and green creeping things ran about a broken city.’ ‘Here, its cliffs and chasms seemed to say, is your home; here you belong; you cannot get away, you do not wish to get away, for this is the maquis that lies about the margins of the wrecked world.’ Ironically enough she begins housekeeping at once, tidying and cleaning the gaping ruins of a church. She is not a wanderer by nature, it is only that she needs a home that she can trust.
In Rose Macaulay’s earlier novels, notably Crewe Train (1926) and They Were Defeated (1932), there are young girls of Barbary’s sort, precociously adult, and yet clinging for reassurance to childhood. Many have names that could be either masculine or feminine (Denham, Julian, Evelyn), as though rejecting all society’s definitions. All of them are unwilling exiles from some lost paradise. They remember sunshine and freedom, as Rose remembered her Italy. But in this story of the 1940s, the world that Barbary longs for and looks back to is a black-marketing France. The paradise itself is corrupt. And the civilization to which she is packed off is an equally shabby affair. Deniston, the honourable man, is an odd man out in post-war London. His son Richie describes himself as a ‘gentle, civilised, swindling crook’ who by bending the law a little—as all his friends do—hopes to make himself a comfortable life. Barbary is no doubt right, on the beach at Collioure, to examine the word civilization ‘and to reject it, as if it were mentioned too late.’ In any society, she will remain a barbarian. The novel’s painful question is: what have we done to our children?
The war years had brought deep personal trouble to Rose. In 1939 she was responsible for a serious car crash in which her lover was injured. In 1941 her flat was bombed and she lost nearly everything she possessed. In 1942 Gerald O’Donovan died, and Rose entered her own wasteland of remorse. How much could be forgotten, and how much could she forgive herself? In spite of this, or more probably because of it, she is more compassionate in this novel than in any other. To be self-satisfied, to be stupid, to be cruel (Rose had always said) is undesirable, if we are to consider ourselves civilized, but at the same time she was not at all easily shocked. Asked on one occasion by a question-master whether she would prefer death or dishonour she replied: ‘Dishonour, every time.’ And The World My Wilderness is remarkable for the pleas in mitigation she makes for all her characters. Helen has no conscience, it seems to have been left out of her, but she creates pleasure for others. Deniston is stiff, bland and resentful, but his integrity must count for something. Richie is a young aesthete who prefers to withdraw rather than to be too much involved, but then he has been fighting through three years of ‘messy, noisy and barbaric war.’ Mrs Cox, the housekeeper, can’t distinguish—which of us can?—between interference and what, to her, are good intentions. Even Pamela, Deniston’s second wife, wholesome tweedy Pamela (‘all Pamela’s clothes were good, of the kind known as cheaper in the end’), Pamela the young committeewoman, not at all Rose’s favourite kind of person, redeems herself by suffering with dignity. If there is a responsibility to judge these people the author is asking us to share it.
In the same way, every turn of the story brings a different confrontation, genial against sceptical, honourable against amoral, will against emotion, rough against smooth, wild against tamed. And these encounters, too, are left unresolved. In the closing chapters, for instance, Helen comes back to London. At the Denistons’ house she takes command, a supremely inconvenient guest. Her motives, as we have to admit, are generous. But poor Pamela has to hold her own against the sumptuous intruder. The contest of possessiveness, jealousy, and genuine love is so finely balanced that most readers would be hard put to it to say exactly where their sympathies lie. Rose has written the novel in terms of comedy, but all the satirist’s air of knowing what’s best for everybody has gone. Indeed there is, perhaps, no ‘best’ for any of them.
Rose Macaulay liked to insist that ideas for novels came to her as places—‘backgrounds’ would hardly be a strong enough word for them. In The World My Wilderness (if we take the ‘respectable, smoke-dark houses’ of London as a kind of negation of place) we have three of them—Collioure in the South of France, Arshaig in the Western Highlands, and the wilderness itself. Each corresponds to its own moral climate. Collioure is described in the most seductive terms. ‘The cool evening wind rustled in the cork forest, crept about the thymey maquis; the sea, drained of light, was a wash of blue shadow, sparked by the lights of fishing boats putting out for the night’s catch.’ By day, the Villa Fraises offers serene warmth and relaxation for all comers, but always with a hint of excess. The garden is ‘crowded,’ Helen ‘lounged her days away,’ the most striking of her pictures is ‘a large nude who was a French mayor, reclining on a green sofa with a blue plate of strawberries in his hand; the flesh tones were superb.’ Arshaig is equally beautiful, but austere, with misty dawns and steel-pale water, and at the shooting lodge are a whole family of Barbary’s relations, ‘formidably efficient at catching and killing Highland animals.’ But in saying this Rose reminds us that there has also been killing and hunting—of men as well as animals—in the forests of Collioure, ‘savageries without number,’ from the days of the Saracens to the Gestapo and the Resistance.
And on the beach there Barbary and Raoul had stood watching the fish in the nets as they struggled, leaped and died.
Barbary herself becomes a creature of the wilderness, the ruins of the city of London. In 1950 the rubble was still lying where it had fallen, carpeted with weeds and inhabited by rats and nesting birds. The whole area fascinated Rose—how much, can be felt in the lyrical opening to Chapter Eighteen. To her they were the new catacombs. ‘I spent much of today in the ruins round St Paul’s, which I like…part of my new novel is laid in this wrecked scene,’ she wrote to Gilbert Murray.1 Many people must still remember, as I do, the alarming experience of scrambling after her that summer (she made no distinction of age on her expeditions) and keeping her spare form just in view as she shinned undaunted down a crater, or leaned, waving, through the smashed glass of some perilous window. Foxgloves, golden charlock, and loosestrife were flourishing everywhere they could take root in the stones, but Rose did not sentimentalize over the wild flowers. It was not man’s business, in her view, to abandon what he has won from nature. She was studying obliteration.
Descended from historians, trained as a historian herself, she makes the ruins into something more than a metaphor for Barbary’s desolate state; they give the novel a dimension in time. They are still alive with the indignation of all the generations who have lived and done business in the city, or worshipped in its fallen churches. ‘The ghosts of churches burnt in an earlier fire, St Olave’s and St John Zachary’s, the ghosts of taverns where merchants and clerks had drunk’ all haunt their old precincts, even under the midday sun, so do the long-dead clerics and shopkeepers themselves. When Barbary is on the run, the phantoms of five centuries of London crowd together to watch, from their vanished buildings, the pitiful end of the chase. They are not sympathetic, they want her caught. History, as might be expected, is on the side of authority.
At the end of the book Richie is seen alone on the brink of the ‘wrecked scene,’ and the squalor in front of him makes him feel sick. He reflects that ‘we are in rats’ alley where the dead men lost their bones’, quoting The Waste Land, from which Rose took one of the novel’s epigraphs (she wrote the first one herself).2 But The Waste Land is also a fitful quest for spiritual healing, and Richie, in the end, takes the track from Moorgate Station ‘across the wilderness towards St Paul’s.’ This is one of several hints in the book of a religious solution, or, at least, of curiosity about one, even though Barbary and Raoul perceive that ‘if there is anything, there must be hell. But one supposes there is nothing.’
The World My Wilderness is, in fact, not a pessimist’s book—heartfelt, yes, but pessimistic, no. However faulty the main characters may be, there is one striking fact about them; their mistakes are not the result of caring nothing about each other, but of caring too much. It is because he still loves Helen that Deniston fails to forgive her, and Helen herself learns in the end not only how much she loves her daughter, but a way to help her. ‘She must have sunshine, geniality, laughter, love; and if she goes to the devil she shall at least go happily, my little savage.’ This is probably the best that Helen can do. And if the inhabitants of this earth, in spite of the mess, the slaughter and the desolation they cause, can give up so much for each other, they must be redeemable. In the last resort, Rose Macaulay thought so. And she was, as her novel shows, too much interested in human beings to lose faith in them.
from the Virago edition, 1983
By the time he was twenty Henri Fournier wasn’t able to say whether it was the country itself that he missed—Epineuil-le-Fleuriel, in the heart of the old Berry province—or the time that he spent there. He shared his country schoolhouse childhood with his young sister Isabelle and their most intense memory was the arrival, at the end of the year, of the livres de prix. They hid themselves, and read every book. But though the dreaming reader persisted in Henri, he became tough and intransigent. He was sent to the Lycée Voltaire and didn’t like it, started to train for the Navy and didn’t like it, prepared for the entrance exam for the Ecole Normale Supérieure and didn’t pass it. In June 1905, however, while he was still a lycéen in Paris, he saw (almost as if he had been expecting her), and spoke to, and walked a few hundred metres with, a tall, blonde jeune fille. Her name was Yvonne de Quièvrecourt, and she was of good family, staying with her aunt. He told her, in the words of Pelléas: ‘Vous êtes belle.’ She dismissed him, saying they were both no more than children, and for the next eight years, during which he never saw her, she was his Mélisande, and (transferred to the deep country) the Yvonne de Galais of Le Grand Meaulnes, which was published in 1913. Meanwhile, Fournier—he used the pen-name Alain-Fournier from 1905, partly to avoid confusion with a racing driver—had become a journalist and had a succession of mistresses, the last being the strong-minded actress Simone Benda, who pulled every string, in vain, to get him the Prix Goncourt. He took to racing cars and flying—‘like Peter Pan,’ he told Francis Jammes. Le Grand Meaulnes was written, for the most part, in Rue Cassini. If he had survived the war, what would he have written? Not, probably, Colo mbe Blanchet, which he had begun, but, as he put it himself, about ‘the countries behind the painted doors of the Paris café-concerts; a world as terrible and mysterious in its own way as the world of my other book.’
The oddness and the great beauty of the ‘other book’ come partly from the dissonance of its elements. James Barrie noted in 1922 that ‘long after writing P. Pan its true meaning came back to me—desperate attempt to grow up but can’t.’ Le Grand Meaulnes is about adolescents who want to want not to grow up, but fail. Alain-Fournier, as has been pointed out more than once, divides himself between his three main characters: Seurel, the ambiguous onlooker, Meaulnes the romantic, and Frantz, the spoilt son of the Domain. Meaulnes disturbs for ever the quiet existence of the school at Ste Agathe, that strange school where the pupils range from the petite classe to eighteen-year-olds studying for a teacher’s certificate. (One of them, Jasmin Delouche, goes bird-nesting at the age of twenty.) This school, set in its reassuringly familiar French village—the blacksmith’s, the washhouse, the smell of the boys crowding round the stove—is the only place of security in the book. Any venture into the world means loss: Meaulnes can’t find his way back to the Domain, Frantz loses his child-fiancée, his parents can’t find Frantz, Meaulnes can’t find Frantz, Seurel in the end loses everything, even the child he had hoped to bring up as his own, while Meaulnes loses the purity of vision which gives him the right to search at all. Gradually, however, it appears that the mysterious Domain is within easy distance of Nançay, where Seurel’s uncle keeps a large grocery store. It could always have been found (as in the end it is) without difficulty.
Alain-Fournier was, of course, literary, if the word is anything like strong enough. Le Grand Meaulnes, with its forests and midnight fête and pale, dubious pierrot, is a conte bleu of the 1900s, a paradise for source-hunters. But Alain-Fournier had arrived at his own idea of the relation between actuality and dream. The fantastic, he thought, must be contained within the real, and by ‘the real’ he meant ‘a really quite simple story which could very well be my own.’ He made no secret at all of the way be used his own experience. The school is his parents’ school at Epineuil, the store is his uncle’s shop at Nançay. When Meaulnes first meets Yvonne de Galais, he tells her: ‘Vous êtes belle.’ When his sister Isabelle married his best friend, Jacques Rivière, Fournier seems to have felt a tormenting mixture of affection and jealousy. So, too, in the closing chapters of the book, does Seurel.
In September 1914, just before his twenty-eighth birthday, Henri Fournier was reported missing after a reconnaissance patrol in the woods between Metz and Verdun. His body was never recovered. Over the next fifty years, the evidence of the story he had left open to the world was published bit by bit: his correspondence with Jacques Rivière in 1926 (enlarged in 1948), his family letters in 1930 (enlarged in 1949), Simone Benda’s Sous de nouveaux soleils in 1964, Isabelle Rivière’s Vie et passion d’Alain-Fournier (which, among many other things, put Simone in her place) in 1964. Jean Loize, for his 1968 biography, turned up a letter from the stationmaster’s daughter who was Fournier’s first girlfriend in Paris. Now we are promised the text of a (dullish) letter from T. S. Eliot, who took French lessons for a while from Fournier. The quest continues.
For 1986, the centenary of Henri’s birth, Carcanet have brought out Alain-Fournier: A Brief Life, by David Arkell, describing him as ‘the noted literary sleuth.’ This, I think, does Arkell an injustice. As a sleuth, he hasn’t been able to solve the long-standing problems: what was the surname of the stationmaster’s daughter? What was Yvonne de Quièvre-court’s address off the Boulevard St Germain? Did Simone abort Henri’s child in April 1914? On the other hand, he is an excellent biographer, giving a balanced view of the ‘brief life’ whose tragedy doesn’t need underlining, and he is particularly careful with the difficult relationship of Henri, Simone, Isabelle, and Jacques Rivière. Although this is a short, no-nonsense book, he manages to show that Alain-Fournier was, as he puts it, ‘the most French of French writers,’ the boy who repeated, as an incantation for difficult moments, the names of the railway stations between Bourges and La Chapelle. The illustrations are outstanding. When he went to the Lycée Voltaire in 1898 Henri was given his first 9 × 12 cm camera, and he produced a fine set of photographs, which are reproduced here from the collection of Alain Rivière. Henri’s father, his mother, the village postman, the juge de paix, all sat or stood and kept still for him, and there is a view from the schoolhouse of the Grande Place, Epineuil, almost empty in the midday sun, and looking as though nothing could ever disturb it.
During the summer of 1905 Henri was sent to London to improve his English. He had been found a clerical job with Sanderson’s, the wallpaper manufacturers, and he lodged with the family of Mr Nightingale, the firm’s secretary. Most of his letters home have been printed, but it seems that a few passages were omitted, and some postcards escaped publication. Towards the Lost Domain is the complete London series, translated by W. J. Strachan, although unfortunately without any indication of what has been published before, or where. Some of Jacques Rivière’s replies are included, so are Fournier’s notes on his meeting with Yvonne—though not the final draft of 1913. The book gives an appealing picture of Fournier, not only as an energetic young romantic, haunting the Queen’s Hall to hear Wagner, and the Tate Gallery to see the Pre-Raphaelites, but also as a hungry French schoolboy. He even had to ask Isabelle to send him bread from Paris. All the more credit to him that by the time he left for the rentrée he had come to love England. Indeed, he was a connoisseur. His descriptions are as flattering in their way as Camille Pissarro’s views of Norwood. Writing from 5 Brandenburgh Road, Gunnersbury, he is moved by ‘windows of exquisitely coloured glass, differently coloured stones, lace curtains, absolutely everywhere, pianos and flutes sounding on every side.’ Even a burglary was welcome, reminding him of Sherlock Holmes. In life and art, he told Jacques Rivière, ‘I’ve always wanted something which touches, in the sense of putting a hand on your shoulder,’ and West London did touch him.
Oxford University Press, for their part, have reissued The Lost Domain, Frank Davison’s tried and true translation of Le Grand Meaulnes. It is a handsome edition in bold type, rather like a child’s book, although Le Grand Meaulnes, whatever it is, is not a book for children. In 1959, in the World’s Classics, it had an introduction by Alan Pryce-Jones, who saw the book as ‘the last novel of idyllic love which is likely to have universal appeal.’ He considered that nothing in it came up to the opening scenes, which established the ‘magic dependence’ of Seurel. (So did many others. Gide said that one should be loyal only to the first hundred pages, Denis Saurat to the first fifty.) The Pryce-Jones introduction has now been replaced by an afterword by John Fowles, less sensitive but more enthusiastic. Fowles, who follows Robert Gibson in taking Seurel as the central character, tells us that he was once under the influence of Alain-Fournier, and is still ‘a besotted fan.’ He deserts the text, however, when he says that Frantz de Galais, like Meaulnes, ‘strives to maintain a constant state of yearning.’ Frantz settles down happily in the end with his wife and his house. Again, the illustrator, Ian Beck, is true to one side of the book, its delicate nostalgia, but not to Fournier’s ‘reality.’ Meaulnes, for example, in the last illustration, ought to have a beard (un grand gaillard barbu). Does his beard matter? Fowles writes that ‘something elusive remains after all the learned analysis…some secret knowledge of how far a poetic imagination can outfly gross reality.’ And yet this ‘outflying’ was precisely what Alain-Fournier had hoped to avoid.
London Review of Books, 1987
There were giant-killers in those days. Storm Jameson, rallying English writers in defence of peace and collective security, had to toss up to decide between Rebecca West and Rose Macaulay for the place of honour. Between these three women enough power should have been generated even for an impossible cause. They were tireless collectors of facts—Rose used to take her newspaper-cuttings everywhere—and what courage they showed, what endurance, what determination to call the world sharply to order, what unanswerable wit, what impatience for justice. They were all prepared to outface the mighty, but they also judged themselves, on occasion, more strictly than anyone else would have dared. ‘When I come to stand,’ wrote Storm Jameson, ‘as they say—used to say—before my Maker, the judgement on me will run: she did not love enough…For such a fault, no forgiveness.’ ‘As we grow older,’ said Rebecca West, ‘and like ourselves less and less, we apply our critical experience as a basis for criticising our own consciences.’ It isn’t surprising that her son grew up with the ‘idea that a woman was the thing to be, and that I had somehow done wrong by being a male.’
But Rebecca also wrote in her old age: ‘I was never able to lead the life of a writer because of these two overriding factors, my sexual life, or rather death, and my politics.’ Here she is both attacking and defending herself, for she felt that the world, on the whole, had treated her basely. From the age of eighteen she made her own life, but she was not altogether satisfied with the results. She would have liked to subsume, perhaps, the lives of both her sisters, Lettie, the correct benevolent professional woman, Winnie, the contented housewife, ‘living decently in a house with children.’ She would have liked to live in Rosmersholm without drowning herself, and in the doll’s house without letting it defeat her. Her voice, which she found so early, is that of an elder sister, not the youngest. Samuel Hynes has even called it ‘episcopal’—‘praising the righteous, condemning heretics, explaining doctrine.’ She found it easy to attract, almost as easy to dominate, and ‘if people do not have the face of the age set clear before them, they begin to imagine it.’ Authority, then, became a duty, and yet ‘I could have done it,’ she believed at times, ‘if anybody had let me, simply by being a human being.’
Some of her first pieces, for the Freewoman, the socialist Clarion, and the New Statesman, were reprinted by Virago in 1982. They were written in her teens, or just out of them, when she first arrived in London, a phenomenon, a marvellous girl, reckless, restless, brilliant, and indignant. All her life she remained pre-eminently a journalist. To the very end, in illness, in fury, in distress, and when almost spent, she continued to react, as a plant does to the light, to new information or even to gossip. She was always on the alert, as Our Correspondent from the moral strongholds of the twentieth century. Her first novel, however, the beautiful Return of the Soldier (1918), seemed to class her as what was then called a ‘psychopathological writer’—with her older friend May Sinclair, who had organized London’s first medico-psychological clinic. The Return is the case history of an officer invalided home from the trenches. He is an amnesiac who cannot react either to his wife or to the memory of his dead child. His only surviving emotion is for a girl he once loved, who by now is a dreary little straw-hatted woman, ‘repulsively’ faded and poor. This woman courageously shows him the dead son’s clothes and toys, which have been locked away. He is cured, but this, of course, means that he will have to return to the Front.
When Rebecca called this novel ‘rather Conradesque,’ she was thinking of the unvoiced struggle between good and evil, woman’s attempt to heal, man’s invention of war. In 1922, when Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle appeared in translation, she related his theory to her own view of the life-and-death struggle: it became, for her, part of the fierce self-justification of a natural fighter. She did not hold with Freud’s majestic hypothesis that human beings unconsciously recognized the ‘sublime necessity’ of the return to the inorganic state. Like many passionately committed writers, she created a God and then took Him to task for falling short of her standards. Her case against Him was that He made sacrifice and suffering a condition of redemption: ‘pain is the proper price for any good thing.’ This was also the basis of her complaint against Tolstoy and against St Augustine, whose life she was commissioned to write in 1933: he ‘intellectualised with all the force of his genius’ the idea of atonement through suffering. Rebecca set herself to wipe out not guilt but cruelty, by the exercise of reason. The Harsh Voice and the much later The Birds Fall Down, the monumental Black Lamb and Grey Falcon and The Meaning of Treason, are essentially variations of the same battle. Blake, she believed, was on her side, so was Lawrence—though this disconcertingly meant claiming both of them as champions of the mind. ‘The mind must walk proudly and always armed,’ she wrote, ‘that it shall not be robbed of its power.’ What was her mind like, though—‘her splendid disturbed brain,’ as Wells called it—and how far did she ever free it, if that was what she wanted to do, from her emotions? It has been called androgynous, but May Sinclair came closer to it when she said: ‘Genius is giving you another sex inside yourself, and a stronger one, to plague you with.’
This plague took the form of an extreme temperament. All her life Rebecca West was betrayed by the physical, collapsing under stress into illness and even hallucination. She was a romantic in the highest sense of demanding universal solutions. ‘I believe in the Christian conception of man and the French Revolution’s interpretation of his political necessities.’ But she was also romantic in a much simpler sense. The Return of the Soldier takes place in ancestral Baldry Court, perfect in its ‘green pleasantness,’ except that the post arrives too late to be brought up with the morning tea. Parthenope is set in Currivel Lodge, with its haunted croquet lawn. The character of Nikolai in The Birds Fall Down was based on a Russian tutor—though he has become a Russian count. Isabelle, the heroine of The Thinking Reed, is young, exceedingly beautiful, ‘nearly exceedingly rich,’ tragically widowed. She hunts the wild boar, her underwear is made to measure, her first lover ‘was not less beautiful as a man than she was as a woman.’ As a novelist, Rebecca West liked to write about people who were rich or good-looking or high-born or all three, and her public liked to read about them. There was a converse: she found it difficult to forgive ugliness or coarseness—the crowds outside the court in the Stephen Ward case were worse because they had ‘cheap dentures.’ All this was part of the great impatient shake with which she left the narrowness and just-respectability of her early life. As her son was to put it, ‘shabby-genteel life in Edinburgh marked those who had to endure it to the bone.’ The Thinking Reed was said to be about ‘the effect of riches on people, and the effect of men on women, both forms of slavery,’ but, like The Great Gatsby, it shows that although money produces corruption, it also produces an enviable and civilized way of living, and there is nothing we can do about it. Good writers are seldom honest enough to admit this, but Rebecca West did admit it. With her limitless energy and enthusiasm, she called for harmony, but not for moderation. All that the reader can do, very often, is to trust the driver as her arguments bowl along in splendid sentences or collect themselves for a pause. ‘Men and women see totally different aspects of reality.’ ‘A great deal of what Kafka wrote is not worth studying.’ ‘Authentic art never has an explicit religious and moral content.’ These are sweeping statements—though sweeping, of course, can be a worthwhile activity.
Victoria Glendinning says in the introduction to her new biography of Rebecca West that it is ‘the story of twentieth-century woman,’ but that it is a sadder story than she had expected. She has divided her book into episodes: ‘Cissie,’ the unstoppable young new arrival in London; ‘Panther’ (this was Wells’s name for her), fearlessly launching into questions of history, politics, and morality, and into bed with Wells; ‘Sunflower,’ the fiery successful international author and unsuccessful mistress of Beaverbrook; ‘Mrs Henry Andrews,’ the awkwardly married famous writer; ‘Dame Rebecca.’ The divisions are helpful, though rather like breakwaters trying to hold back a high tide. It is a fine biography, which for several reasons can’t have been easy to write. To start with, Stanley Olson, who became a friend of Dame Rebecca’s in 1974, was entrusted with the full-length Life. To conform with this, Victoria Glendinning decided to cut down on the later years. Rebecca lived to be ninety, and the elision somewhat weakens the sense of endurance and of seeing the century through, also of that indestructibility—surely an active rather than a passive quality—which is dear to the British public. Another difficulty must have been the richness of the literary and political background, or battleground, and the sheer number of subsidiary characters. For all of them there was ‘an overwhelming mass’ of material. The only evidence missing seems to have been some diaries and papers which are restricted during the lifetime of Anthony West, and the correspondence with Beaverbrook, which Rebecca and Max burned together at her flat in 1930. With great skill Victoria Glendinning concentrates attention on the story she has been asked to tell. Rebecca was to the end, as one of her housekeepers put it, ‘black and white and crimson and pu rple and wild.’ Victoria Glendinning treats each episode, black or white, with calming, professional good sense. She makes very few direct judgements, only once or twice risking a sad question—‘How could she behave so unwisely or so badly?’ Some of the story has been paraded almost too often, some not at all. The book is equally successful with the well-known and the unfamiliar aspects, particularly with Rebecca’s marriage to Henry Andrews, who is usually thought of, if he is thought of at all, as the wealthy, totally faithful, slightly deaf, typically English banker with whom she found security and a country life. Slightly deaf he certainly was, but he soon ceased, it turns out, to be a banker, was partly Lithuanian, and was unable to resist a long series of tepid affairs with younger women. In Buckinghamshire, where they bought a house and farm, he was quite at a loss. ‘Rebecca wanted to do everything, having a flair for everything. She took over the management of the greenhouses and the kitchen and flower gardens from Henry…complaining that he could not even take the dog for a walk.’ Henry pottered, and was considered in the village to be a comical old bugger. When he died, in 1968, he left thirty almost identical dark suits from Savile Row, each with money in the waistcoat pocket, ready for giving tips. Yet he lived with Rebecca and travelled with her and drove her about, often losing the way; and he was a man about the house. Victoria Glendinning re-creates him with something like tenderness, and points out that ‘it was not so different from many marriages.’ It is only strange as the choice of the brilliant and stormy woman who wrote that ‘the difference between men and women is the rock on which civilisation will split.’
But perhaps ‘strange’ is not the right word, because consistency was never Rebecca West’s main concern. In The Meaning of Treason (revised in 1962 to include studies of Philby, Burgess and Maclean), she sometimes confuses treachery with treason and examination with cross-examination, but this doesn’t affect the dazzling intelligence of her case histories. As to why she wrote, she gave a number of explanations. She began ‘without choosing to do so—at home we all wrote and thought nothing of it.’ ‘My work,’ she said, ‘expresses an infatuation with human beings. I don’t believe that to understand is to pardon, but I feel that to understand makes one forget that one cannot pardon.’ She also said that she wrote her novels to find out how she felt. Victoria Glendinning believes that ‘she most revealed herself when describing somebody else.’ She has, therefore, to look even more attentively than most biographers at the correspondence of what Browning called House and Shop. This is a complex matter when it comes to the later work, in particular Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. In 1936 Rebecca was sent to Yugoslavia by the British Council (who might have guessed what would happen) as a lecturer, and she went there again in 1937 and 1938. Her book was a testament to the country with which she had fallen in love on a majestic scale. It was not finished until 1942, when the Yugoslav resistance to the German invasion had given it a new intention. The travel book was still there, with Rebecca as the passionate explorer and interpreter and Henry supplying—not always convincingly—the statistics, but it had deepened into a vast meditation on the history, politics, geography, and ethnology of Eastern Europe, following, as she said, ‘the dark waters’ of the Second World War back to their distant source. To do it justice, Victor ia Glendinning has had to summarize the troubled history of the southern Slavs (Rebecca was heart and soul with the Serbs), the shifts of British policy, and the devices of the SOE and the Foreign Office. At one extreme, there is the ‘emotional, curly-haired, Serbian Jew’ who acted as Rebecca’s official guide and fell in love with her; at the other is her vision of Europe’s history as a crime committed by man against himself. The exposition here could not be clearer. When Rebecca declared that she had never made a continuous revelation of herself, she was admitting that she made a discontinuous one. The novels are probably the best place to look for her. ‘Nonfiction,’ she said, ‘always tends to become fiction; only the dream compels honesty.’ So the biographer arrives, with admiration and caution, at her own view of Rebecca West’s view of herself.
London Review of Books, 1987
A novel has to have a shape, Jean Rhys thought, and life doesn’t have any. Hers, however, had a pattern, which disastrously recurred: a cycle of effort, excitement, happiness, collapse, unexpected help, resentment at being helped, black rage, violent scenes, catastrophe.
She spent her life with lovers or husbands, but wrote about loneliness. In choosing these men—or letting herself be chosen, for there was an oddly passive side to her nature—she wanted protection (otherwise she was frightened) and also risk (otherwise she was bored). The contradictions were never resolved.
This charming, sun-loving creature, brought up in the West Indies and entitled (as she saw it) to affection, warmth, and spending money, ended up as an abusive, drunken old woman trapped in what for her was a place of terror, a damp Devonshire village. By then she has almost stopped writing. In 1957, when she was nearing seventy, two saviours appeared: the publisher Diana Athill and the most understanding of critics, Francis Wyndham. They cajoled her into finishing what is perhaps the finest of her novels, The Wide Sargasso Sea. Her earlier work was republished, she was awarded a CBE. For the first time since the 1920s there was money, and she had at least a short time to spend it in the 1920s style.
Carole Angier is a warm-hearted narrator who allows us to feel for Jean’s bewildered victims, especially, perhaps, for the gentle Leslie Tilden Smith, her second husband—she gave him a black eye more than once. This book, however, is, by and large, the life of writer as martyr. In the search for perfection, Jean Rhys drove herself to the edge of madness.
The horrifying ending of Good Morning, Midnight was so hard to get right that she tore up both her contract and her manuscript. It took her nine years to finish The Wide Sargasso Sea and to release it reluctantly for publication. If she had written in any other way she would not, she explained, have ‘earned her death.’
She also said: ‘All of a writer that matters is the book or books. It is idiotic to be curious about the person. I have never made that mistake.’ But she would have to forgive Carole Angier for this truly sympathetic study in depth.
Evening Standard, 1990
L. H. Myers (Leopold Hamilton Myers, 1881—1944) was born into a distinguished scholarly family. His father, F. W. Myers, was one of the founders of the Society for Psychical Research; their home in Cambridge was a centre of hospitality and intellectual discussion, but it was also rather an odd place to be brought up in. Frederic Myers was set upon demonstrating the immortality, or at least the survival, of human personality by acceptable scientific methods, and his children were half frightened and half fascinated by the procession of mediums and ‘sensitives’ who came to the house to give evidence. Leo’s mother was passionate and possessive; his father expected rather more of the family than they could give. When he died Leo had to cut short his time at university to take his mother abroad; F. W. Myers had made an appointment to manifest himself after death, and had named a time and place, but the meeting failed. Leo lost faith, but only in his father’s methods. He saw now that though reason must always be distinguished from intuition, it should never be separated from it. They must work together.
He was educated at Eton and Cambridge, and although he was always as popular as he would allow himself to be, he bitterly hated both of them. He rejected, in fact, every social structure to which he belonged, including the literary circles that London offered him. To Myers, all of these fell grotesquely short. ‘Just as an individual cannot live for himself,’ says the Rajah in The Near and the Far, ‘so society cannot live for itself, but must keep a self-transcendent idea before it.’ In holding this ideal, and in devoting his writing career to it, Myers was unflinchingly sincere, but his life was not consistent with it. He was neither an ascetic nor a revolutionary. Between his seduction at the age of sixteen and his marriage he had a number of affairs, some, he said, ‘very squalid.’ When in 1906 he came into a legacy he moved through society as a generous patron of the arts, but also as a detached and elegant young man, with a taste for racing at Brooklands. Even when, after running through every other political solution, he became a Communist, he still had a part-share in an expensive French restaurant, Boulestin’s. Myers, of course, noticed these discrepancies, since he possessed (in the words of his friend L. P. Hartley) ‘an exquisite wry sense of humour, of which he was half-ashamed.’ But Hartley has also described how, with the close of the 1930s and the threat of war, Myers’s self-knowledge darkened into pessimism. A slow and scrupulous writer, he had always depended greatly on the advice of his friends. Now he quarrelled fiercely with most of them. As a young man he had asked himself the question: ‘Why should anyone want to go on living once they know what the world is like?’ On 7 April 1944, he answered it for himself by taking an overdose of veronal.
Myers left his great trilogy, The Root and the Flower, to speak for him. Like his other books, it has an exotic setting, in this case sixteenth-century India under the reign of Akbar. He did not pretend to accuracy and indeed he had never been to India, though he visited Ceylon. His motive, as he said in his 1940 preface, is to give us a clearer view of our own social and ethical problems from the ‘vantage-point of an imaginary world.’
This world, though anything but safe, is a very seductive one. The slow rhythm of the palace, the desert and the river are like an audible pulsation of the Indian heat, but at any moment we may be asked to look at something as small as a mark in the dust or a dying moth, or stretch our ears for a minute sound. We do not, however, do this for nothing. The descriptive passages hardly ever stand still, they give the sense of something about to happen:
At the door he paused again; from the roof there hung down wisps of dry, grey moss; ants had built a nest against the threshold and the droppings of wood-pigeons whitened the window-sills. Contrary to his expectations the latch came up when he tried it; the door opened and a curious smell spread upon the fresh air.
The absence of the moon and stars made the night intimate and earthly; dry leaves, lifted from the ground, were swept across his hands and face. It seemed as if the earth’s secret energies were working upon him, and he yielded to a process which he felt to be beneficent. His spirit lay still in a quiet excitement; a sense of expectation gathered; it was like that of a woman who is awaiting the first pangs of her first childbed.
She showed him the place where the young man was buried. There certainly were some suspicious marks upon the ground. The soil was cracked, having swollen up in a blister, and this seemed to indicate that the work was not the work of Thugs, for Thugs always drove a stake through the body to allow the gases of decomposition to escape without a sign.
Myers wants us to look at his world of appearances and beyond it. Appearances cannot be dismissed as an illusion, for no illusion can be created except by reason. On the other hand, the life of the spirit is just as real as the pigeon dung and the bloated corpse. ‘I am’ has no meaning without ‘There is.’ How can the two be reconciled? On this problem depend the three great questions of the book. First, how can an individual be sure that he has found himself? ‘If everyone is pretending to be like others,’ says Prince Jali, ‘who is like himself?’ Second, if each individual is a solitary heart, how is he to unite with other human beings? Third, if he does so, how can he be sure that the society he lives in acknowledges ‘the supremacy of the spirit as the guiding principle of life’?
Reading a long book is like living a long life; it needs an adjustment of pace. Myers is asking us to slow down, and so to deepen the consciousness. At the beginning of the trilogy, a story of war, betrayal, torture, and political power, we have to consider what seems a very small incident. The little prince, alone on the palace balcony, sees a snake crawling along the gutter. The wind stirs a twig, and Jali, watching, ‘entered into the snake’s cold, narrow intelligence and shared its angry perplexity.’ It strikes, loses its balance, and falls to its death on the roof below. The snake shares ‘the terrible numerousness of living beings, all separate, all alone, all threatened.’ It could not tell that the twig was not an enemy. It was deceived by appearances. But a little earlier Jali had been gazing at the serene desert horizon, which had looked so different when they made the six days’ hot journey across it. ‘He clung to the truth of appearances as something equal to the truth of what underlay them. Deep in his heart he cherished the belief that some day the near and the far would meet.’
The first book of the trilogy gives a sense of the imperial war game that will decide the fate of India. Akbar is the ruinous tyrant or ‘great man’ of history. His dream of uniting India’s religions—the Din Ilahi—is folly, and he himself is at heart commonplace. His inheritance is disputed between his two sons, Selim, the brutal soldier, and Daniyal, the perverted intellectual. It is the duty of Rajah Amar, in his small kingdom, to decide where his allegiance lies before he withdraws, as he wishes to do, to a monastery. Almost perversely, he favours Daniyal, because he has always disliked him, and he wants to stand uninfluenced by the affections. Sita, the Rajah’s wife, is a Christian who prefers, for good or ill, to stay with the rest of humanity. These two, husband and wife, are far apart, and yet they are both searching for perfection. ‘The gulf is not between those who affirm and those who deny but between those who affirm and those who ignore.’ The man whom Sita eventually takes for a lover, Han, is a wild chieftain who relishes life at is comes, but all through the first book we can see him gradually driven, step by step, to concede that he cannot after all live through the senses alone. His love for Sita ‘seemed to play not upon the nerves of the flesh, not upon the machinery of the brain, but upon the substance of the very soul…and he said to himself, “What is this?”’ On the other hand, the Rajah’s adviser Gokal, the Brahman philosopher, is caught in sensuality’s trap. He is enslaved by a low-caste girl, Gunevati, who in turn is guided by sheer animal instinct.
Myers, of course, saw the danger of all this. ‘The impression may come into the reader’s mind,’ he wrote, ‘that what he has before him is a philosophical novel.’ This, he knew, would mean neither good philosophy, nor a good novel, nor, before long, any readers. But his characters are not representatives of ideas, they are an invitation to think about them, which is a different matter. And in spite of Myers’s detached and elegant manner, they are all human beings. Gunevati, for instance, has been taken, I think quite wrongly, as standing for pure evil. Certainly she resorts to poison, and passively accepts the position of fetish to an obscene and forbidden religious sect. But at other times we are asked to pity her, as Flari does, when he realizes what a low price she puts on herself, in spite of her beauty. Beauty has no particular rights in the world as it is. Jali pities her, too, when she turns pale and ill as a captive in Gokal’s house. The truth is that she has no way of knowing herself. To destroy her is not justice.
Book Two is a Bildungsroman, the education of Prince Jali, the Rajah’s son. This, in a sense, is the simplest part of the trilogy, and, in terms of action, the most exciting. Jali’s ordeals are of the flesh, the mind and the spirit. As a young adolescent he finds, under Gunevati’s tuition, that women are easy enough and he can get into any bedroom he likes. But he wants to understand life, or at least to see it clearly, and his passion for knowledge leads him to explore the secret cults of the Valley and to discover how they connect with the spying and counter-spying of the court. But Jali—for he is only a learner and a searcher—does not know enough, not enough, at least, to outwit his enemies by himself. And after his escape from the Valley he is in greater danger still, as he approaches the neighbourhood of the Camp.
Here, perhaps, Myers let his prejudices run away with him; the Camp, or Plesaunce, is, as he admitted, a monstrous version of the world of Cambridge and Bloomsbury by which he had once been deceived. It is the stronghold of Daniyal, the artificial paradise of the aesthetes, and to Myers the aesthetes were ‘trivial,’ a word which for him meant the denial of life. They were the sterile self-regarders and self-indulgers; sterility leads to cruelty, and self-regard to the death of the spirit. The Camp, then the travelling court of Prince Daniyal and his entourage, entices Jali with the most degrading materialism of all. If we are in any doubt as to how dangerous it is—dangerous rather than merely absurd—we have only to follow, as Jali does, the fate of Gunevati. It is at Daniyal’s orders that this girl, who can express herself only through her body and her senses, has her tongue cut out; after that she is forced to learn to write. ‘She opened her mouth wide. Jali found himself looking into a cavern—black, swollen, horrible.’ It is this that recalls Jali to himself, so that he will never again be mistaken as to the nature of the Camp.
Jali will be the ruler of the future, but for the present power still rests with Rajah Amar. Book Three returns us to the problem we set out with. Is the Rajah justified in giving up the near for the far, or is his longing for detachment only another name for the refusal of responsibility? In the face of Gokal’s misgivings, he still prepares to withdraw from earthly concerns. But on the very point of leaving he is summoned to the Camp; there the whole nature of evil is brought home to him by another of the book’s apparently unimportant moments, the horrible incident of the white cat. Now Amar has to decide, at his own risk, whether in the face of recognized evil a man can ever be absolved from action. The Rajah does not choose what happens to him, but Myers has shown that though there are strict limits to the human will, there are none to human vision: Amar sees what is to be done.
When Gokal brings his fallen body back across the lake, we do not even know whether Amar is dead, or what effect, if any, he has made on Daniyal. Like the relationships of the characters, which have been, all along, subtle and ambiguous, the story never yields a conclusion. ‘There is no illusory sense of understanding,’ Myers said, ‘only the realisation of what is.’ But the trilogy unmistakably ends with a return to life. The thought had come to Gokal that if the Rajah were to die without recovering consciousness, it might be as well. ‘But he condemned that thought,’ and as he goes up the path towards the house on the farther side of the lake, he hears Han, Sita, and Jali talking together on the verandah. With these quiet everyday sounds Myers concludes his strange masterpiece, which, it has been said, ‘brought back the aspect of eternity to the English novel.’
from the Oxford University Press edition, 1985
When I was working on a Life of L. P. Hartley I went to see Princess Clary, one of the kindest of his hostesses in Venice, who said to me, ‘My dear, how can you write the life of a writer? If he had entered into politics, if he had commanded an army in warfare, but what life can a writer have?’ I felt the force of this, but only gave up when I realized that what I was finding out would be distressing to Hartley’s surviving sister, Norah.
In Foreign Country: The Life of L. P. Hartley, Adrian Wright says very little about the staff surrounding Hartley in his later years in London ‘rough trade,’ young men who amused him more than they amused his visitors; sometimes, apparently, wheedling for fur coats and cars. There is little revealed about the unsavoury hangers-on and his unfortunate political views and behaviour: he upset his country neighbours by killing swans.
Wright’s biography is, however, well written and well constructed; it is elegant and discreet and would have suited Norah exactly. And it is the last opportunity to have written his life with access to the family papers. Norah died in 1994, after giving instructions that all surviving material was to be burned.
Norah and her elder sister, Enid, lived in the Victorian-gothic Fletton Tower, on the outskirts of Peterborough, all their lives. The house had been built from the proceeds of their father’s lucky investment in a brickfield. Leslie, the doted-on but ruthlessly ordered-about son, was the only one to leave home. His mother was obsessed with her son’s health, and he was sent to Harrow simply because she had heard it was on a hill and thought it would be good for his chest. At Oxford, he realized that it was necessary for him to be a writer, and also that he wanted to breathe a different air—different, that is, from Fletton. He became friends with Eddie Sackville-West and Anthony Asquith, and also with Lord David Cecil, with whom he fell irretrievably in love. As an expert in avoiding disagreeable facts, he perhaps believed that this golden friendship would never suffer mortal change, but in 1932 Cecil married.
Wright had to decide at an early stage in the biography whether or not to call the amiable, sociable Hartley a snob. Hartley was deeply fond of many people who weren’t distinguished at all, and he never hesitated to invite his grander friends back to the heavy atmosphere of Fletton. On the other hand, he had a passion for grandes dames. He loved to be given orders by the imperious and to do errands for people who already had everything. One of the first of his patronesses was Lady Ottoline Morrell.
By the end of the 1920s, he was a regular visitor to Venice and its Anglo-American palazzi. Wright has been able, therefore, to connect his book with a series of waterscapes: the Northamptonshire fens, the glittering Venetian lagoons, and the reaches of the river Avon. After the Second World War, Hartley bought Avondale, a large, old, inconvenient house on the riverbank at Bathford. There he intended, taking Henry James’s Lamb House as a model, to live among friends and books. That meant staff and a personal manservant. Hartley always insisted that he was unable even to fill a hot-water bottle.
Charlie Holt, the manservant who was with him from the first at Avondale, massaged him every day (comparing him to a beached whale) and staunchly protected him for twenty years. After Charlie’s death, the situation soon deteriorated. Hartley began to revel in the domestic upsets that gave him the precious sensation of having something urgent to do. One of his difficulties as a novelist was to ‘raise’ his material sufficiently for twentieth-century readers, which he managed by killing the characters off, physically or spiritually. Life at Avondale, and later in London, was ‘raised’ by a series of increasingly sinister male factotums. Wright is particularly sympathetic here to Hartley as a frustrated homosexual, knowing himself swindled and insulted but finding it half pleasurable.
Many readers will be grateful for a biography of manageable length, although something surely should have been said about Hartley as a collector. Persian rugs and carpets were his speciality. When, after agonizing indecision, a new one arrived from Bernadout’s, some authority would be invited to give gracious advice. He himself had been taught about antiques by his aunt Kathleen, who was a shrewd buyer and seller. But Wright gains a lot from seeing Hartley as a tragic rather than a comic figure. All the lamentable charade of his final years—the gin, the rough trade, the boozy shuffling about in carpet slippers, the ravings against the working class, the Inland Revenue, and the swans who impeded his boat—all these turn into the sad phantasmagoria of a man who outlived so many friends and felt that his country and his century had betrayed him.
Some of Hartley’s books are very bad, some are classics, such as The Go-Between (1953), which gained an additional large audience after the 1970 film with Alan Bates and Julie Christie. Wright, in search of the ‘running shadow’ that he thinks must have darkened Hartley’s life, turns to the fine autobiographical novels and, above all, to The Go-Between. There, Wright believes, the author ‘tells us what we should never be allowed to know about him,’ and suggests a childhood wounding that shocked him irrecoverably. However, Hamish Hamilton, his long-suffering publisher, said that ‘Leslie was impotent and that was all there was to it.’ Dr Patrick Woodcock, who looked after him untiringly, thought that ‘Leslie never gave away his emotional life to anyone, not even to himself.’
What is certain is that Hartley himself wouldn’t have welcomed any investigation that went further than this book. Although he admitted that ‘Freud was in the air the writer breathes,’ he objected strongly to the idea of Freudian analysis. This is clear enough from one of his most disturbing short stories, ‘A Tonic.’ A tonic is all that the patient, Mr Amber, wants or needs; but, while Mr Amber is unconscious, the famous specialist conducts a complete examination, ‘which in all his waking moments he had so passionately withstood.’
The Times, 1996
During the second half of his life, Evelyn Waugh became the victim of his own game, not of Let’s Pretend, but of Let’s Pretend to Pretend. He was impatient when others didn’t understand his rules, and impatient with the game itself when it didn’t—as games should do—provide a satisfactory alternative to real life. It was played en travesti—with embarrassingly loud tweed suits, weird ear trumpets, and a house full of Victorian bric-a-brac, with the tiny Master threateningly aloof in his study, emerging with the message: I am bored, you are frightened. Sometimes he was aghast at the sight of his own bloated face in the mirror. He was asking, it seemed, to be judged severely, and he has been. No one condemns Robert Louis Stevenson for playing king in Samoa, but Evelyn Waugh, it seems, can hardly be forgiven for his nineteen years as the tyrannous squire of Piers Court, his country home.
The game continued while his religious, moral, and aesthetic convictions demanded to be taken with total seriousness. It has often been said that he created a fantasy world out of the England and the Roman Catholic Church he knew because it was useful to him as a novelist. Waugh could never have accepted this for a moment. He saw himself, from the time he wrote Brideshead Revisited onward, as a defender of the faith and of the last vestiges of a vanishing civilization.
The second volume of Martin Stannard’s biography opens after the outbreak of World War II, with Waugh as a trainee officer with the Royal Marines. There follows a sober account of the six painful years of his war service. He had courageously volunteered, at the age of thirty-six, because (as he told students of the University of Edinburgh in 1951) ‘I believe a man’s chief civic duty consists in fighting for his King when the men in public life have put the realm in danger.’ But he pictured himself as doing this alongside his aristocratic cronies—a ‘club of upper-class toughs,’ Mr Stannard calls them—who alone would understand him. But they did not want him, and in pursuit of the ideal posting he fell out with so many commanding officers that he was generally considered unemployable. Finally he was sent on a mission of support to Yugoslavia, where he ended up on a furious and lonely crusade, not on behalf of Tito and his partisans, but of his own fellow Catholics on both sides in the war and the civil strife that followed. This made him such a nuisance to the British Foreign Office that Christopher Sykes (Waugh’s official biographer) believed that there was some question of court-martialling him. Mr Stannard, however, going patiently over the records, concludes that the question was not seriously raised.
By the time Waugh was demobilized in 1945 he had a family of three daughters—Teresa, Harriet, and Margaret—and a son, Auberon. With his gentle, long-suffering, but independent-minded wife, Laura, he moved back into the house he had bought for them, Piers Court, in Gloucestershire. At first, hoping to escape the hated ‘century of the common man,’ he had thought of moving to Ireland, but he became reconciled to a country life in England, a little travel, an occasional rampage in London. ‘If this regime sounds placid,’ wrote Mark Amory, the editor of Waugh’s letters, ‘it must be remembered that it led to the crisis on which The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold is based.’ Gilbert Pinfold hears ‘voices’ that put in words his own worst fears about himself, and they drive him mad.
Meanwhile, during the disastrous, quarrelsome, and drink-sodden war years, Waugh, as always, had protected his breathing space as an author, writing a riotous satire, Put Out More Flags, and the enormously successful Brideshead Revisited. Charles Ryder, in that novel, during his long love affair with a great and ancient Catholic family, meets the power of the True Faith in action. In the later war trilogy, Sword of Honour, Guy Crouchback, like Ryder, is a reserved and decent man, but belonging to an ancient family himself: he is faced with the ruin of all his illusions. Neither of these characters is in the least like their creator, but they justify him—his romanticism, his snobbery, his crusade against the world as it is.
Most novelists, after all, take the opportunity of self-justification. It’s the compensation of their profession. Certainly it is too simple to say, as Mr Stannard does, that Waugh’s power to hurt was the mainspring of his comic power. In fact, it might be felt that the mainspring of both his tragedy and his comedy was his experience of being hurt.
The 1950s were the years when the income-tax inspectors, kept at bay until then by his agent and his accountant, closed in on Waugh, and at the same time he lost (deliberately, as it seemed) some of his old friends—though never Graham Greene or Nancy Mitford. At Piers Court, Laura farmed with a particular interest in her cows, and Waugh developed the bizarre persona that he justified by his belief in an independent world of the artist, one that he had the right to defend against all invaders. On visits to the United States he accepted hospitality grudgingly, told Igor Stravinsky that he couldn’t stand music, and pretended to believe that if he died there the undertakers would refuse him burial because of what he had said about them in The Loved One. On the other hand, he was prodigally generous to Catholic charities. And although he affected to think little of his children (except for his favourite, Meg) he in fact got to know them, as individuals, very well. The family, as so often happens in large country households, formed a conspiracy against the outside world, not feeling the necessity to explain itself.
In 1957 Waugh was working on a book of which he had very great hopes. This was the life of his friend Monsignor Ronald Knox, inadequately described by Mr Stannard, who teaches English at the University of Leicester, as ‘a country-house priest with a keen enjoyment of upper-class society.’ In fact Knox was a brilliant apologist and the translator of the Old and New Testaments. Mr Stannard seems to have taken against Waugh’s Life of the Right Reverend Ronald Knox, and speaks of ‘a certain dishonesty in its tone’ and a ‘thinly disguised rancour.’ Waugh’s aims were certainly very different from Mr Stannard’s. He was not a scrupulous collector of facts but an artist who gave to every book he wrote a strong and elegant pattern. Ronald Knox’s family—he was my uncle—knew that the Life was inaccurate in places, and that it had proved impossible (for instance) to get Waugh to grasp the deep, wordless affection between Ronald and his brothers. But they admired his courage in criticizing the Catholic hierarchy where he thought fit, and they welcomed the book, which, in its very dryness and melancholy, gave a living likeness of Knox.
When the book appeared in 1959, the Prime Minister was Harold Macmillan, who had been Knox’s pupil. Macmillan had been encouraging from the start, and Waugh felt that Knox’s biographer might well be rewarded with a knighthood. ‘That’s what one really needs,’ he told Anthony Powell. Now a letter arrived from Downing Street. It offered to make him only a Commander of the Order of the British Empire. Mr Stannard says that the creases in the letter show how Waugh crumpled it up in a fury before writing to decline.
Minute attention to detail, perseverance, diligence Mr Stannard certainly has, and his two volumes will be standard reading for students of Waugh. He has used diaries and letters, published and unpublished, memoirs, reviews, personal interviews. But his researches have not been authorized by the family, and when it comes to analysis of character and motivation he never quite seems to find his feet. Laura, for example, is compared as a mother to Dickens’s Mrs Jellyby, which would mean that she neglected her children. But soon afterwards we’re told that she ‘spent much time deflecting his anger away from her brood and on to her own head.’ Again, Mr Stannard says that ‘no one persecuted Evelyn Waugh more relentlessly than himself,’ but, a few pages later, ‘his sanity depended on his being right.’ These discrepancies don’t represent changes or new developments. They are the result of Mr Stannard’s day-by-day, pile-’em-high accumulation of details, which makes it hard for him to stand back and see exactly where he is.
At the end of 1956 Waugh left Piers Court for somewhere still more secluded, Combe Florey House, in Somerset. But for how long could the twentieth century be kept at bay? Above all, he felt threatened by the decisions of Vatican II and the changes in Catholic ritual. ‘The awful prospect is that I may have more than twenty years ahead,’ he wrote to his daughter Meg. But after he had published the first volume of his autobiography in 1964 he had only two more years left. ‘The distress caused by the Vatican Council was widespread,’ Diana Mosley said recently. ‘It killed Evelyn Waugh.’
Boredom can also kill. In fact Waugh collapsed with coronary thrombosis in the downstairs lavatory of his home, and Mr Stannard concludes that he died, as he lived, alone. How he makes this out I can’t tell. In spite of, or because of, his outrageous behaviour, Waugh was never without a sympathetic friend, and by his family he was offered more love than he was ever able to accept. I don’t call that loneliness.
New York Times Book Review, 1992