The first volume of John Lehmann’s autobiography, published in 1955, starts:
When I try to remember where my education in poetry began, the first image that comes to mind is that of my father’s library at the old family home of Fieldhead on the Thames. It is an autumn or winter evening after tea, for James the butler has been in to draw the blinds and close the curtains, and my father is reading under a green-shaded lamp.
He has said a good deal already—the little boy who wants to be like his father, the sheltered child who doesn’t need to know the time or even the season because James, the always reliable butler, deals with that, the illusion of a dedication to poetry. Adrian Wright, in this new biography, refers several times to Lehmann’s half-commitment (in spite of his energy) to the professional life he chose. Fieldhead was the magic enclosure to which, as an adult, he looked back, wishing that it might have been possible to sit there, watching and listening, all his life.
He came of a German-Jewish family, musical, hospitable, successful in business. His grandfather ended up in Scotland, by way of Huddersfield. His father, who built Fieldhead, was called to the Bar, edited the Daily News, and was returned as Liberal MP for Market Harborough. He was a dedicated rowing coach, and wrote quantities of light verse, often about rowing, for Punch. He married Alice Davis, a strong-minded New Englander twenty years younger than himself. Their family consisted of three girls—Helen, the indulged Rosamond, Beatrix—and, at long last, the boy John. Their children’s talents must have been partly, at least, inherited, but no trace of their father Rude’s jolly German Kameradschaft seems to have been passed on.
Adrian Wright has been faced with a problem of organization. He has come into all the material collected by John Lehmann’s commissioned biographer, Martin Taylor, who died before he could write a word of it. He has seen photocopies of the extensive diaries, and he has interviewed the survivors and their descendants. Lehmann himself wrote three volumes of dignified autobiography about his work, his beliefs, his travels, his dogs, and one, in the unconvincing form of a novel (In the Purely Pagan Sense, 1976), on his strenuous life as a homosexual. Wright has the job of combining the two stories, although he gives us fair warning that ‘when there has had, through reasons of space, to be a choice between discussing the plight of writers in Czechoslovakia or detailing an affair of the heart that made Lehmann’s life a misery, the heart has invariably won.’ There might be a voice of protest from the shades. But Wright is gallant, ‘attempting’—as he tells us—‘to rescue Lehmann from the margins of the literature of which he was once at the heart.’ Can this truly be done?
John was sent to Summer Fields, and left in 1921 with an Eton scholarship and a report that he was ‘never likely to do anything dishonourable or mean,’ a golden lad, as Wright calls him. About Eton he was at best lukewarm. He had wished not to disappoint his father, but he was a rowing failure. The Master in College judged that he had set his ambitions too high, and allowed himself to get depressed. On Cambridge, too, although he went up with the expected scholarship, he came to look back as wasted time.
What next? To a great extent he was conditioned already, having moved effortlessly since birth from one favourable literary atmosphere to another. His father had heard Charles Dickens read when he was six, had helped to found Granta, and furiously defended the Liberal cause at the Punch table. John himself had been at Eton with Alan Pryce-Jones, Anthony Powell, Eric Blair, and Cyril Connolly, who, we are told, stood at the door of his room in the Sixth Form Passage asking, ‘Well, Johnny Lehmann, how are you this afternoon?’ While he was at Trinity his sister Rosamond published her first novel, Dusty Answer, which shed a little of its ambiguous glamour over him, and at the same time he became a friend of Julian Bell, who invited him to Charleston. In 1931 the Woolfs, who had printed his first tentative book of poems, took him on as a dogsbody and part-time commercial traveller at the Hogarth Press. They had already run through two assistants, but, all the same, Wright is perhaps rather too hard on them. In her biography of Virginia Woolf, Hermione Lee describes Lehmann as one of the ‘ambitious, thwarted, talented young men’ who ‘rubbed up against Leonard’s adamantine proprietariness and perfectionism…It was a well-known joke among their friends that working at the Hogarth Press drove you mad.’
After seven months at the Press, Lehmann made his first appearance as an editor when he commissioned Michael Roberts’s New Signatures (February 1932), which included contributions from Julian Bell, Richard Eberhart, William Empson, Cecil Day Lewis, Stephen Spender, William Plomer, and Lehmann himself. Through Spender he met Christopher Isherwood. The friendship with Spender from the very first seemed edgy, uncertain, and uneasy, but durable for all that. Isherwood he loved, but he was tolerated, rather than loved, in return.
Spender and Isherwood were spending much of their time in Berlin. Germany was evidently the place to be, the country to be young in, uninhibited, uncorrupted by the past, electric with political hope for the future.
We can tell you a secret, offer a tonic; only
Submit to the visiting angel, the strange new healer.
In August 1932, without giving notice, Lehmann threw up his job with the Woolfs and departed for Vienna.
Though his mother suspected that he was leading a wild revolutionary life, Lehmann, renting a succession of flats, finally in the Invalidenstrasse, was attempting something much more complex. He wanted the release of his sexuality with the adaptable boys he picked up—Rico, Gustav, Willi, Tiddlywinks (introduced by Isherwood at the Cosy Corner bar), and countless others—to identify with his new Marxist beliefs, felt as freedom and defiance rather than as escape, a mystical as well as a political union with the working class (working, but for the moment unemployed). Lehmann kept them more or less happy with money, clothes, cigarette lighters, and fountain pens.
It was, as he wrote himself, ‘a contact with earthiness that I needed very badly.’ He desired wholeness, and believed that destiny offered him the choice of being a poet or an editor. Although he produced eight collections in his lifetime, there was never any evidence that he was able to write good poetry, yet he was convinced that his poetry too gave a dynamic to his existence.
There have been moments when I have seen the whole of it irradiated by my passion for boys and young men…as if I were climbing an Alpine slope, always hoping for and always with blessed luck discovering some rare and hitherto unculled flower that seemed to glow on me with its own internal light; a climb that is not yet over, nor will perhaps be until I reach the highest snows.
This is from In the Purely Pagan Sense, which for the most part plods along sedately enough. ‘Eye signals followed for some minutes, and as the messages seemed of favourable import, I finally ventured on a discreetly beckoning gesture.’
The blessed luck was that he settled for editing and publishing, for which he had the gift. He wasn’t an intellectual, neither was he original, but he did have an editor’s instinct for the latest thing. He worked extremely hard, and although he seems to have been stingy in his daily life—German champagne was served at his parties in small glasses—he had a generous appreciation of his authors and designers.
The first edition of the periodical New Writing came out in spring 1936, but by 1938 the new series was appearing under the Hogarth imprint, Lehmann having more or less made up his dispute with the Woolfs and invested some money in the Press. He had thought of calling his magazine The Bridge—the bridge, that is, between writers and workers, but also between England and Europe. In The Whispering Gallery, the first volume of his autobiography, he describes the planning stages: ‘I may even have toyed with the idea of starting a new international literature.’ Taking an ‘optimistic and Marxist view,’ he found contributions from France, Spain, Russia, and Poland, and New Writing seemed, in its beginnings, the authentic voice of violence and resistance. The voice was to change and grow considerably more mellow with changing times, with Lehmann, as Wright very aptly says, ‘bringing himself forward bearing his statement on the health of the literary world, like the captain of a ship reporting to his passengers about what is happening in the engine room.’ But readers could trust him to find for them what was unforgettable. He was the first to print George Orwell’s ‘Shooting an Elephant,’ Isherwood’s Berlin diaries, Rosamond Lehmann’s ‘A Dream of Winter,’ Auden’s ‘Lay your sleeping head, my love.’ In 1939 he courageously met the challenge of Horizon, edited by Cyril Connolly with what seemed the treacherous help of Stephen Spender. (Connolly, Wright has to admit, ‘has been perceived as being more fun’ than Lehmann.) In 1940, at the suggestion of Allen Lane, who unlike most publishers at that time had a large paper allocation, New Writing became Penguin New Writing. Wright sympathetically conjures up the blacked-out, hemmed-in Britain where the magazine found an immediate welcom e and settled down to sell 75,000 copies a month. He quotes a footnote in issue No. 5: ‘Leave this book at a Post Office when you have read it, so that men and women in the services may enjoy it too.’
For a short time, from 1946 to November 1952, Lehmann reached a near-independence at the head of what was almost his own publishing house. Purnell found the paper for him and retained 51 percent control of the new John Lehmann Ltd. It operated from the basement of his house in Egerton Crescent, and though he began by discreetly poaching some of his old authors from the Hogarth Press, he soon found his own. Probably his favourite enterprise was the Modern European Library. He bought for it Sartre’s Diary of Antoine Roquentin, Kazantzakis’s Alexis Zorba (to which he gave the title Zorba the Greek), Malraux’s The Walnut Trees of Altenburg. Among his preferred Neo-Romantic illustrators, Keith Vaughan and John Minton excelled. Minton decorated Elizabeth David’s first book, A Book of Mediterranean Food, with tipsy Breton sailors, market girls, lobster pots, fruits de mer, as a kind of delicious ballet in and out of the dedicated text. As Wright says, when you take up a book published by Lehmann you get the sense of a precious thing, obviously cared for in its creation.
In 1952 Purnell grew tired of losing money, and in spite of a letter to The Times signed by the familiar distinguished names, John Lehmann Ltd was obliged to shut up shop. The BBC offered him a magazine ‘of the air’ and he accepted, and was understandably wounded when he was replaced in the following year by John Wain. His last editorship was the London Magazine, financed by Cecil King. Lehmann’s heart was perhaps no longer in it when he handed over, in 1961, to Alan Ross.
This distinguished career he described in a letter to David Hughes. ‘David, my dear, having been betrayed by Leonard Woolf—abandoned by Allen Lane—kicked out, ruined by Purnell, stabbed in the back and thrown out by Cecil King—I think I’ve had enough.’ Lehmann seems to have needed an atmosphere of crisis, conflict, parting, and enormous grievances to give him strength for his daily round. This was true of his professional career, even more so of his sex life. In his relationships with his numerous boys there was a schoolmasterish element. He wanted to teach them, to better them, as well as to be cruelly disappointed and to disappoint. With Rosamond, who gave him some of her best short stories for New Writing, he showed the same tendency, on the grand scale. So, indeed, did she.
There were two people who remained, through all the storms, ready to serve. One was the immigrant Russian ballet dancer Alexis Lissine, who became Lehmann’s lover at the beginning of the war. As his career faded, the ‘beloved Alyosha’ survived as a neglected but tenacious lodger at the lakeside cottage that Lehmann had bought at Three Bridges in West Sussex. He had contributed something to the purchase, but he was not allowed into the drawing room, and did not go into it even after Lehmann’s death. The other most faithful follower, who could have been a novelist in her own right, was Barbara Cooper. Arriving in London from the North of England in 1939, she became Lehmann’s secretary and the only person apart from him who was allowed to read the contributions and even reject them. She was also ‘allowed’ to do the postage and packing, to pay the office milkman, and to be laughed at by a series of young men for twenty years. ‘You have been very good to me, dear John,’ she wrote to him after he resigned from the London Magazine.
He ended up, as he said himself, as a ‘minor cultural monument,’ a lecturer at American universities, a recipient of the CBE and many European honours. In January 1947 there had been a lunch—to the end of his days he called it a ‘luncheon’—held in his honour at the Trocadero. T. S. Eliot proposed the toast, but Wright says ‘the guests seem to have reacted…in the way those who knew Lehmann tended to react: with respect, but a feeling, too, of slight absurdity.’ It had always been so. John Heath-Stubbs, in his Hindsights, describes a visit by some young Oxford poets when Lehmann was staying in Cambridge. ‘At the end of the evening it appeared that an error had been made in booking the guest rooms at King’s, and that there was one too few.’ Lehmann offered his windowseat. ‘In view of [his] reputation, none of the Oxford party was particularly anxious to avail himself of this kind offer.’ Dadie Rylands, who had known him since he was an undergraduate, called him ‘a romantic old ninny.’ Isherwood, after a lifetime’s friendship, thought of him ‘basically as a silly old fart.’
‘Ultimately…this is a triumphant life,’ says Wright, but, as he tells it, it seems (in the noble sense of the word) pathetic, meaning ‘the moving of the passions in the mournful way, the engaging of them in behalf of merit or worth’—merit, that is, for which recognition falls short. But when have editors, however successful, however perceptive, ever received much recognition?
London Review of Books, 1999
Harold Monro, the gloomy proprietor of the Poetry Bookshop, said that the only thing people really liked to hear about a poet is that he was dead. There is a preference there too—fallen in battle, suicide in a garret. Then his reputation is left to face the future.
Jon Stallworthy must have had a more difficult job on his hands with Louis MacNeice than he had with Wilfred Owen. But he has created the same confidence in the reader by his elegance, tact, and scholarly patience, explaining unobtrusively as he goes along, and only very occasionally—it is all the more impressive for that—allowing himself a judgement. He was asked to write this book, in the first place, by Professor E. R. Dodds, MacNeice’s lifelong friend and literary executor, then by his successor, Dan Davin, and finally by the family. It was to be the first full-length biography, and Dodds wanted it to be a revaluation, feeling that the poet’s reputation ‘still bobbed in the wake of Auden’s,’ calling out for critical rescue.
Louis MacNeice (1907—1963) was Anglo-Irish, giving him, as he said, ‘a hold on the sentimental English,’ but starting him off in life as a ‘jumble of opposites.’ These seem never to have been political so much as a long-drawn-out difficulty in reconciling himself to his father. The grandfather had been a schoolteacher with the Irish Church Missions, whose aim was conversion and who were felt to be bribing Catholics in hard times by offering meal tickets and a better education. In 1879, the MacNeices had to be rescued by the police from stone-throwers. The eldest son, John, Louis’s father, took orders, married another mission teacher, and devoted himself fiercely to non-retaliation and peace. They brought up their family in Belfast and later at Carrickfergus Rectory, with fifteen rooms, some with great windows, and an acre of garden and apple trees enclosed by a hawthorn hedge. The railway ran past it and they could listen out for the Larne-Stranraer boat train. They were taken on seaside holidays where the Atlantic ‘exploded in white and in gulls.’ They were taken to Belfast Lough to see the Titanic on her way to the sea, the ‘one shining glimpse’ Louis remembered forty-five years later, in his elegy for his stepmother. The images, as Stallworthy shows, had already taken up their appointed places. Quite often, in fact, Louis felt the drunkenness of things being various. The garden, the sea, and the house would be there to meet him at every turn.
His mother died when he was just seven. His father, who ‘made the walls resound,’ alarmed him. He had an elder sister, Elisabeth, who was of great importance to him and invented with him, in the garden’s hiding-places, a game called ‘the Cult of the Old.’ His brother, William, suffered from Down’s syndrome and was sent for a time to a mental home in Scotland. But is Stallworthy right in saying that the loss of Louis’s mother to the grave, his brother to an institution, and, later, his wife to another man, ‘gave him a fellow-feeling for the deprived and suffering’? Certainly, though not a trouble-taker, Louis was compassionate. But were these the reasons? When the Rector remarried in 1917, he was quickly won over by ‘the comfort and benevolence’ his stepmother brought to the house, whereas Willie seemed to him uglier and more monstrous on every visit. His marriage is an altogether different matter.
At the age of nine, he was sent to school—first Sherborne, then Marlborough—and considered himself to be well out of Ireland,
Though yet her name keeps ringing like a bell
In an under-water belfry…
At Marlborough, he fell in with Anthony Blunt and with John Betjeman, who were lending a hand with a new school magazine, The Heretick. Under Blunt’s tuition, as Stallworthy puts it, ‘the dutiful son of the rectory was fast becoming a sceptical rebel, who wanted cornfields to look like landscapes by van Gogh.’ A closer friend, the closest of all, was Graham Shepard, the son of E. H. Shepard. He is described here as having ‘a more conventional Home Counties background’ than Louis, but in fact in 1923 his father had not yet done the illustrations for When We Were Very Young and the Shepards were living in rustic Shamley Green with a handpump over the sink. Louis saw Graham as a ‘stray from some other place or era,’ but if so he was a practical stray, liked messing about in boats, and was a good draughtsman. Of Louis himself at this time Stallworthy quotes yet another friend’s description; he was a kind of magician. ‘As on a dark clear night, there was a sense of depth without boundaries,’ and Louis was conscious of this, a showman in control, as most bright sixth-formers are.
He was obsessed with Latin metres, classical and medieval, and recited the Pervigilium Veneris ‘with harsh resonance and a percussive menace in the refrain that was almost a threat,’ but behind that there were the nursery rhymes and incantations of Carrickfergus, not to speak of ‘Father O’Flynn’ and ‘Paddy, I Hardly Knew You.’ He grew up listening to jazz, blues, and ragtime, the Sitwells, Eliot’s early poems, and to Yeats, who had declared in 1918 that he was discarding magnificence because there was more enterprise in walking naked. Once he could hear his own music, Louis never really let it go:
The same tunes hang on pegs in the cloakrooms of the mind
That fitted us ten or twenty or thirty years ago
On occasions of love or grief.
Auden, too, cast a long shadow. Louis, having gone up to Merton in 1926, found him already at Oxford. Stallworthy, attentive to what he has been asked to do, points out that, although Louis was impressed by Auden and published in the same magazines, he was never under his spell, and neither of them at this point was interested in politics. It was not until 1932 that Geoffrey Grigson approached both together for the first number of New Verse.
Graham (now at Lincoln) and Louis were interested in rugby, long-haired dogs, drink, and women, but both of them liked the idea of marriage and children. Even before he had lurched through his Finals, getting a brilliant First, Louis fell fathoms deep in love with a tiny exotic girl, a don’s daughter, Mary, white-skinned but so dark that she was said to have a fine line of hair down the length of her spine. Mary’s mother belonged to the Ezra family, and was dissatisfied, while Louis’s father, soon to be Bishop of Belfast, wrote that ‘the thought of an engagement to a Jewess is dreadful.’ And so, with neither side in favour, the young couple set up house:
I loved my love with the wings of angels
Dipped in henna, unearthly red,
With my office hours, with my flowers and sirens,
With my budget, my latchkey, and my daily bread.
This was in Birmingham, where Louis had got a job as a university lecturer in classics under Professor Dodds. After writing his bitter and nostalgic ‘Valediction’ to Ireland, which has infuriated three generations of Irish readers but which Stallworthy gently describes as ‘an exorcism,’ he settled down as a married man in Selly Park. In May 1934, their son Dan was born, and Louis would sit in one of his habitual long silences, contemplating the baby. In September, after several prudent hesitations, T. S. Eliot accepted a volume of poems for Faber. That autumn, they had a long-term guest at Selly Park, a Russian—American, Charles Katzman. In November, Mary ran off with Katzman to London.
‘Louis was devastated’—these are strong words from Stallworthy, whose clear narrative always keeps its head. Some of his friends expected a nervous breakdown. Little Dan was looked after by relations and hired help, and before long his father saw him only at intervals. There is no evidence that Louis compared Dan’s childhood with his own.
He moved back to London to lecture at Bedford College, and with unexpected common sense kept very busy all the time, travelling with Blunt to Spain, with Auden to Iceland, and with Nancy Coldstream to the Western Isles. Being lonely, and since ‘the lady was gone who stood in the way so long,’ he had begun a series of good-natured entanglements with the women whose bright determined faces look out of the book’s many illustrations. Some of his lyrics during the late 1930s, ‘Bagpipe Music’ in particular, give glimpses of chaos, while others—‘Taken for Granted,’ ‘The Brandy Glass,’ ‘Sunday Morning,’ ‘August’—try to fix through recall some golden minute in the past that can never be caged. In ‘The Sunlight on the Garden,’ written, we are told, within weeks of his divorce, he is grateful even for the moments of storm with Mary. This is what he comes back to in the moving Section XIX of Autumn Journal: ‘Thank you, my dear—dear against my judgement.’ The Journal, the best of all his long poems, was, he explained, to be entirely honest. In Spain, he had only noticed what was inefficient, magnificent, smelly, and picturesque; he wouldn’t pretend to have predicted the civil war. In Birmingham, he hadn’t bothered about the unemployed. Now he was not so much opening his poetry up to the world’s concerns as letting them pace beside him, while the ruined idyll is never quite out of earshot.
When war was declared, Louis was lecturing in America, and came back not very willingly to Britain. Auden had already decided what course to take. Graham, married by now, with a small daughter, was in the RNVR and was called up at once. He joined the corvette Polyanthus, on the Atlantic run. In bad weather, he said, it was like living in a cottage swinging from the end of a piece of string. Louis might well have ended up, like many other classical scholars, at Bletchley, but the BBC, worried that all the available poets were being filched by the Ministry of Information, asked him to write something for them ‘that would contribute to the national morale.’ He accepted, and worked for them for the next twenty-odd years.
In his preface, Stallworthy acknowledges the help he has had from Barbara Coulton’s admirable study Louis Mac-Neice in the BBC (1980), but he finds it impossible to sum up how far a poet is affected by writing to order. The work seemed like that, and sometimes was like that, in 1941, for example, when after the German invasion of Russia it was thought necessary to salute our new ally with an epic feature on Alexander Nevsky. The radio feature itself was an awkward form, comparable to the silent film. But there were visionaries in the Corporation, brave spirits, who trusted in it absolutely. In the end, Louis’s verdict on his new appointment was that ‘in spite of the unhealth which goes with a machine that is largely propaganda…it has its excitements and (what was less to be expected) its value.’
In September 1943, HMS Polyanthus was sunk with all hands on the run from Derry to Newfoundland. There were no survivors, and Louis had lost Graham,
Than whom I do not expect ever again
To find a more accordant friend, with whom
I could be silent knowledgeably.
Stallworthy is unexpectedly hard on this elegy, ‘The Casualty.’ What is the use of comparing it with Lycidas or ‘In Memory of Major Robert Gregory’? Milton and Yeats had reason for their superb detachment, while Louis had a nightmare (the drowned friend who can’t understand that he is too late for the party) to confine into a metre that rocks like the tide with the changing places of the rhymes. In Autumn Sequel, he tried again, with even more control, but less effect. But Stallworthy adds that Graham’s death was a tragic waste of his potential, ‘and it may have seemed to MacNeice that he himself had sold his birthright for a mess of propaganda.’
‘But, on the other hand, there is another hand.’ By the time Graham was killed, Louis had made a second marriage, with the singer Hedli Anderson. She understood him very well (or perhaps he had grown easier to understand) and was Bohemian in the right way, breast-feeding their baby daughter in the saloon bar, which was very unusual in the 1940s, and cooking lavishly for unspecified numbers of people. It was perhaps a mistake for the two of them to appear, as they did, on the same concert and cabaret platforms, Louis reading, Hedli singing (often his lyrics) as she had been trained to do in Berlin. In the end, he refused to go on with it, but Stallworthy emphasizes her warmth and animal vitality and must have regretted reaching the (recurrent) entry in his index: ‘relationship deteriorates.’ The marriage lasted, showing increasing signs of wear, until 1960. During these years, the unpractical Louis, who had not even remembered to bring a tent with him to Iceland, became a traveller. The BBC sent him to India, Greece, Egypt, and South Africa, and gave him generous leave of absence to run (though he did not exactly run anything) the British Institute in Athens. It was thought that these new horizons would relieve the poet’s black spells of depression.
But Louis drank. The advice given at that time in the Staff Training School was to put a discreet ‘d’ by the name of any employee who might give trouble in this way. (There had to be some allowance for genius.) When Dylan Thomas came to London and spent an evening with Louis at the George, their colleagues had to stand by in dismay as one became deafening and the other sank into a sardonic stupor. Drunk or sober, however, the two of them understood each other very well. Thomas had complete trust, as well he might, in Louis’s ear for the sound of words. When he read his ‘Author’s Prologue’ aloud to him and found that Louis couldn’t follow the rhyme scheme (who could?) at first hearing, he was bowed down in dejection.
In the ‘middle stretch,’ which is hard for poets, and often for biographers, Louis felt that he had lost, not his skill with words but his sense of his own worth. Like wartime London, he had been ‘reborn into an anticlimax.’ Trusting in the power of change, he resigned his full-time job with the BBC, to the relief of those who considered him a dangerous radical, although he had never gone further politically than the visionary ending of Autumn Journal. He moved in with the last of his lovers, Mary Wimbush, and at the age of fifty-three returned to what Robin Skelton called ‘the borderlands between game and ritual, vision and fantasy, fable and history, which are the territory of the poets of the Thirties,’ and which, more than any other discovery, he had shared with Auden. By this time he had weathered the Apocalyptics of the 1940s, the anti-romantics of the 1950s, and the arrival of Ted Hughes. He knew that his enormous production for radio had lost him the attention of serious critics. But his last poems were not intended to be his last.
He had, as Stallworthy never forgets, unfinished business with his father, who died in 1942, just as he was due for retirement. Frightened of him as a child, at odds with him as he grew up, Louis had come to see him as a great man. ‘Poems would plot the progress of his grieving and reconciliations,’ and this, surely, implies a reconciliation with Ireland, his father’s house.
He has gone prodigally astray
Till through disbeliefs he arrived at a house
He could not remember seeing before,
And he walked straight in; it was where he had come from
And something told him the way to behave.
He raised his hand and blessed his home.
This, of course, was only something Louis still felt he might do; he knew the way to do it. He went back to Ireland pretty frequently—three times, for example, in 1957—without giving any sign of wanting to live there. But in returning to his childhood’s country, his ‘erstwhile,’ he could conjure up his father even in the old seaside ritual of emptying the sand out of his shoes at the end of a summer’s day on the beach. ‘The further off people are sometimes the larger.’ In these memories of Carrickfergus he felt safe, for if he had changed, and even if Ireland had changed, they had not. But there were other experiences that also refused to die. Among these late poems, ‘The Taxis’ has all his old gaiety and his old desolation in an image of total loneliness. The bus passengers in ‘Charon,’ unable to hear the rumours of war through the glass, are all put down in a fog on the Thames Embankment to cross the river as best they can. In his ‘Memoranda,’ Louis reminds the shade of Horace that they are both of them horrible old fellows, but they are at least poets, to whom the commonplace, even the passing traffic, is always being made new.
In 1963, Louis caught a chill on the Yorkshire moors and developed viral pneumonia, not the worst kind, but it seems that the antibiotics wouldn’t take because of the drinking. He asked the doctors, possibly with surprise, ‘Am I supposed to be dying?’ The ferryman in ‘Charon’ might have given him an answer: ‘If you want to die, you will have to pay for it.’ Louis might well feel that he had already done so.
Times Literary Supplement, 1995
My copy of The Poetical Works of Spenser once belonged to my mother, who took it with her to Oxford as a student in 1904. On the flyleaf are my own Oxford notes in faded pencil: ‘CSL says forget courtly Spenser dreamy Spenser—think of rustic Spenser English Spenser homely Spenser, kindled lust, worldly muck, bagpipes, goat-milking.’
It calls up the sight and sound of the lecture room with C. S. Lewis (1898—1963), darkly red-faced and black-gowned, advancing towards the platform—talking already, for he saved time by beginning just inside the door. The place was always crowded, often with a row of nuns at the back. His eye was on all of us: ‘I shall adapt myself to the slowest note-taker among you.’
Although Lewis, opening his stores of classical and medieval learning, said that he was only telling us what we could very well find out for ourselves, we were truly thankful for what we received. Connoisseurs may have preferred the scarcely audible lectures of the poet Edmund Blunden, given in a much smaller room. But Lewis was the indispensable teacher, about whom all we personally knew was that he was pipe—and beer-loving, lived outside Oxford, and made a ‘thing’ of disliking the twentieth century. When T. S. Eliot came to read ‘The Waste Land’ to the Poetry Society, Lewis was not there.
As A. N. Wilson says in C. S. Lewis: A Biography, Lewis’s life was never eventful, ‘and yet books about him continue to pour from the presses on both sides of the Atlantic.’ None of them, however, has been as brilliant or as edgily sympathetic as this one.
Jack (christened Clive Staples) Lewis was the son of an Ulster police court solicitor. He was brought up in a villa in the suburbs of Belfast, where he and his elder brother Warnie escaped from the adults into games of high imagination in the attic. For this Little End Room, as they called it, both of them had a profound nostalgia, characteristic of the period, although it suggests not so much Peter Pan, who wanted to grow up and could not, as Alain-Fournier’s Meaulnes, who did grow up but could not bear to admit it. Neither the house nor the attic would ordinarily be thought of as romantic, but myth is not answerable to reality.
In 1908 his mother died of cancer; Jack was no more able to accept this than most boys of nine years old. He turned out to be a brilliant scholar, for whom books were not an alternative but an additional life, and in 1921 he was appointed a tutor in English at Magdalen College. (His experiences in the First World War, when he was wounded at the battle of Arras, were, he said, something quite cut off from the rest of his existence.) At Oxford he shared a house with a Mrs Moore, a woman old enough to be his mother—thought indeed by some people to be his mother—who relied on him to help with the housework.
A ‘mysterious self-imposed slavery’ Warnie called it, for he too had joined the household. Among Jack’s friends at the university (not introduced to Mrs Moore) were the group known as the Inklings, among them the Professor of Anglo-Saxon, J. R. R. Tolkien. Among them they exerted a certain amount of power, and in 1938 they as good as fixed the election for the Professorship of Poetry. A campaign like this showed Lewis in the loud and dominating character that he had adopted for public use. But the Inklings’ favourite subjects of discussion were poetry, metaphor, and the transcendent. It was with their help that Lewis ‘passed on,’ in his own words, ‘from believing in God to definitely believing in Christ.’
A new readiness to write seemed to be released, and during the Second World War Lewis became, through his books and through radio, one of the most popular and reassuring of apologists for the Christian faith. In the 1950s he began to publish his children’s stories, which themselves were Christian allegories. Letters reached him from all over the world, and to all of them he gave a written reply. In 1952 one of his correspondents arrived in England—Joy Davidman from Chicago, separated from her husband and with two growing boys. She and Jack fell in love, and, somewhat to the dismay of his friends, they married. But she had already developed cancer, and in 1960 it killed her. (These closing months have been mythologized in Bill Nicholson’s play Shadowlands, which is running at the moment in London.) Mr Wilson’s business, however, is with reality, which, as he boldly says in his preface, is ‘more interesting than fantasy.’ No one, surely, could be better qualified for the job. Mr Wilson, whose previous books include a biography of Tolstoy, knows Oxford very well indeed, and has not been daunted by the huge quantity of material—letters, papers, diaries, an eleven-volume history of the family by Warnie. He can give a proper estimate, and does give a very high one, of Lewis’s work on medieval and Renaissance literature. Curious domestic situations and bizarre characters call out his keen sense of comedy, which he keeps just under control.
On the other hand, he has a very real understanding of the difficulties of the spiritual life. What does he make of CSL? A biographer has chosen to be one of God’s spies, even if his subject makes it difficult for him. Although Tolkien truly said that, at heart, Lewis was always writing about himself, he was shy of his emotions and adept at self-concealment, particularly perhaps in his autobiography, Surprised by Joy. He argued, too, in ‘The Personal Heresy,’ that a writer’s character should not be deduced from his books. But Mr Wilson (who never met Lewis) has, with great skill, conjured up a true image. The heavy, red-faced reactionary is there, but Lewis is also shown as a private man of exceptional generosity and humility. Perhaps, indeed, he was a great man. But, in spite of his energy, Mr Wilson sees him as curiously passive, as if waiting for his life’s turning points to arrive.
Lewis was by temperament and belief a Romantic and, like Wordsworth, he seems to have had his decisions made for him by particular significant moments. Among these were the morning when he was told his mother was dead; the night when, walking and talking with his friends in the starlit college garden, it came to him that the Gospels were not different in kind from other storytelling, except that they were told by God as truth, with human history as material; the debate in 1948 at Oxford’s Socratic Club, when his theological arguments were demolished by the philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe. (After that he wrote no more apologetics for ten years. The defeat, Mr Wilson thinks, ‘stung’ Lewis back into ‘the world which with the deepest part of himself he never left, that of childhood reading.’ He pushed open the door of the wardrobe and began to tell the story of Narnia, the world on the other side of the wardrobe, which is redeemed by ‘a great lion called Aslan.’) Lastly, there was the death of Joy. ‘No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear’ is the first sentence of A Grief Observed, the most touching and immediate of all Lewis’s books, the record of his own bereavement. His own death came three years later.
At the end of his strange and deeply interesting story, A. N. Wilson’s attitude is still, I think, a kind of civilized bewilderment. This is especially so when he considers the countless readers and disciples of CSL. Lewis has another life, far apart from his biography, in the minds of three generations of children and in the religious experience of millions. ‘This phenomenon can only be explained,’ Mr Wilson suggests, ‘by the fact that his writings, while being self-consciously and deliberately at variance with the twentieth century, are paradoxically in tune with the needs and concerns of our times. Everything on earth is not rational, and attempts to live by reason have all failed…It is the Lewis who plumbed the irrational depths of childhood and religion who speaks to the present generation.’ And Mr Wilson, who has evidently set himself strict rules, feels that a biographer is not qualified to try out those depths. This in no way weakens his detailed portrait of Lewis.
New York Times Book Review, 1990
Stevie Smith (1902—1971) said that she was straightforward but not simple, which is a version of not waving but drowning. She presented to the world the face that is invented when reticence goes over to the attack and becomes mystification. If you visited Blake and were told not to sit on a certain chair because it was for the spirit of Michelangelo, or if Emily Dickinson handed you a single flower, you needed time to find out how far the mystification was meant to keep you at a distance and to give you something to talk about when you got home. Eccentricity can go very well with sincerity, and, in Stevie’s case, with shrewdness. She calculated the effect of her collection of queer hats and sticks, her face ‘pale as sand,’ pale as her white stockings, and also, I think, of her apparent obsession with death. She was interested in death, and particularly in its willingness to oblige. She had survived a suicide attempt in 1953, she was touched by the silence of the ‘countless, countless dead,’ but when in her sixties she felt the current running faster and ‘all you want to do is to get to the waterfall and over the edge,’ she still remained Florence Margaret Smith, who enjoyed her life, and, for that matter, her success. Her poetry, she told Anna Kallin, was ‘not at all whimsical, as some asses seem to think I am, but serious, yet not aggressive, and fairly cheerful though with melancholy patches.’ The melancholy was real, of course. For that reason she gave herself, in her novels, the name of Casmilus, a god who is permitted to come and go freely from hell.
Stevie was good company and (what is not the same thing) a good friend. She could be ‘Comfort Smith.’ Deep intimacy she drew back from, because she respected it so much. ‘That troubled stirring world of two’ was always strange to her, though love was not.
In the serious process of trying out friendships, Stevie liked to say exactly the same things to a number of different people. There was even a kind of guided tour of Palmer’s Green, to Grovelands Park, round the lake, and back to Avondale Road. But if, for her own purposes, Stevie was sometimes repetitive, she was never predictable. Patric Dickinson, in his introduction to Scorpion and Other Poems, says that she loathed cruelty, and so she did, but although (for instance) she was fond of children she was not deceived by them, and knew that it could be satisfactory to put them sharply in their place. Again, she was encouraging to beginners, but when she was pressed (probably quite mistakenly) to support Yevtushenko for the Oxford Professorship of Poetry, and was told he would encourage the students to meet and read their poems aloud, she paused for a moment and said: ‘How terrible!’ After her aunt’s death she took to plain cookery, and wrote that she loved to feel a slim young parsnip under her knife.
One Avondale Road, the ‘house of mercy,’ was certainly necessary to Stevie. She tired easily and had never liked going to the office.
Dark was the day for Child Rolandine the artist
When she went to work as a secretary-typist.
It was the privilege of employers, the rich, to waste the time of the poor, and in particular the forty-five minutes or so it took for her to travel back to Palmer’s Green. The problem of getting her home as soon as she wanted to go became, in fact, one of the first considerations of her friends. ‘Riding home one night on a late bus, I saw the reflected world in the dark windows of the top deck and thought I was lost for ever in the swirling streets of that reflected world, with its panic corners and distances that end too soon.’ Everyone wanted to spare her this. But once she was safely back, the beloved suburb where she had been brought up became a refuge. She was not known as a writer there, and could keep the observer’s stance that was precious to her. ‘Through the laburnums and the net curtains,’ she said, ‘you may snuff the quick-witted high-lying life of a suburban community.’ Her heart went out to all she saw and overheard of the lonely, the peculiar, the poisonously nice, the fatally well-intentioned, and to those misplaced in life who, respectable to all appearance, would prefer to give up and ‘storm back through the gates of birth.’ She also liked to sense the warmth of ‘father’s chair, uproar, dogs, babies, and radio,’ and ‘yet she would point out that she was really on the edge of the open country,’ only six stations to the middle of Hertfordshire. The sky was clearer in N13 and she could come to terms with herself there. At the same time she insisted she was driven to write because there was absolutely no company for her in Palmer’s Green.
When Kay Dick interviewed her in 1970, Stevie complained about her photographs. ‘They make me look dead, and as if I’d been dead for a long time. I haven’t got a thing about age but I do rather have a thing about looking dead and buried.’ She made no particular objection, however, to being written about, though her three novels and twelve volumes of poetry seemed to have taken her self-portrait as far as it need go. It might be thought, too, that after the death of her sister in 1975 the truth about Stevie, if hidden, would be hard to find. However, her biography has now been undertaken by two American scholars—a matter of satisfaction in itself, since during her lifetime she was not much appreciated in the States. One can only admire the courage of the joint venture. Not only are they collaborating at long distance (Barbera at the University of Mississippi, McBrien at Hofstra), so that they can only meet to compare notes twice a year, but, as neither of them ever met Stevie, they are getting to know her by running the documentary film about her life over and over again. No investigators can have worked harder. And although she has proved elusive (there is no evidence, for example, that George Orwell was her lover), and has turned out to be a somewhat offcentre eccentric, they have remained sweet-tempered and continued to gather, research, and file their discoveries together. The first result of all this is Me Again, a handsome selection of uncollected stories, essays, reviews, and poems, and sixty-odd letters, only two of which have been printed before.
For some reason that the two editors don’t reveal, nothing, except for the letters, is arranged in chronological order. James MacGibbon, Stevie’s literary editor, does not comment on this, but says in his rather cautious preface that their choice is ‘tantamount to an autobiographical profile.’ This is not quite so, but he is surely right in saying that the book will give most readers their first authentic idea of her religious convictions. These were self-convictions. She had almost made up her mind that God was one of man’s most unfortunate inventions. What needed explanation was not man’s failings but his continued demand to love and be loved, even when
Beaten, corrupted, dying,
In his own blood lying.
But that was not enough, and the frail poet hurled herself against Von Hügel, Father D’Arcy, Ronald Knox, and all the propositions of the Catholic and Anglo-Catholic Churches. ‘Some Impediments to Christian Commitment,’ which is a talk she gave at St Cuthbert’s, Philbeach Gardens, just over two years before her death, is an account of her own spiritual history, a touching one, with her own particular sense of the sad and the ridiculous. It has never been printed before. ‘Torn about,’ as one might expect, by the loss of her childhood faith, she was driven year by year to conclude that ‘the Redemption seems a Bargain dishonourable to both proposer and accepter.’ Uncertainty, however, which she finally settled for, proved treacherous, and she had to admit finally that she was a backslider as a non-believer.
Among the ten stories retrieved for us is perhaps the most lyrical of all, ‘Beside the Seaside,’ a languorous fin-de-saison holiday impression, the pebbles of the beach still warm to the touch but deeply cold underneath, and her friends’ tempers just beginning to fray. There is a variable delicate friction between the interests of wives, husbands, and children, and between human beings and nature—one might say between the seaside and the sea. Helena (the Stevie of this story) detaches herself, unable to help doing so, and wanders away inland across the marshes, returning ‘full of agreeable fancies and spattered with smelly mud’ to confront the edginess of the party with her artist’s sense of deep interior peace. In ‘The Story of a Story’ she again defends herself as an artist. This wiry situation comedy shows why Stevie sometimes longed, in her character as Lot’s wife, to be turned into a pillar of asphalt, since she seemed to give offence so often. Her friends did not want to become her material, as they had in ‘Sunday at Home’ (also reprinted here), and her publisher hesitated, afraid of libel. ‘The morning, which had been so smiling when her employer first spoke, now showed its teeth.’ Sitting alone in the rainswept park, the unhappy authoress regrets the loss of friends, but much more the death of her story. She had worked on it with love to make it shining and remote, but also with ‘cunning and furtiveness and care and ferocity.’ These were the qualities that went into Stevie’s seemingly ingenuous fiction.
About the poems, also industriously tracked down, I am not so sure, since she herself presumably didn’t want them included in the collected edition of 1975. Stevie Smith had a remarkable ear (‘it’s the hymns coming up, I expect’), and when she was manipulated by whatever force poetry is, she knew that all she had to do was listen. She produced then a kind of counterpoint between the ‘missed-shot tunes’ that haunted her and the phrasing and pauses of her own speaking voice. Not all the verses in Me Again seem quite to reach this, although you can hear her distinctive note of loneliness which as she pointed out ‘runs with tiredness,’ in ‘None of the Other Birds’ and ‘Childhood and Interruption.’
In the end, one of Stevie’s greatest achievements was to be not only a connoisseur of myths, but the creator of one. Out of an unpromisingly respectable suburb at the end of the apparently endless Green Lanes she created a strange Jerusalem.
London Review of Books, 1981
J. G. Farrell was half English, half Anglo-Irish. At the beginning of the 1950s, he was a tough young man, fond of cricket but concentrating on rugby. He was at Rossall, and at the end of his last term spent seven months in the Canadian Arctic as a general labourer on the Distant Early Warning System. He was selected because of his evident strength and health. His father, Bill Farrell, had gone out to Bengal as a boxwallah, but had been driven back to Dublin by increasing deafness. In 1956, Jim was able to go up to Oxford, to Brasenose. He was supposed to be studying law, but turned out twice a week for rugby as a centre three-quarter. At the end of his first term, he collapsed quite suddenly, and was taken by ambulance to the Slade Isolation Hospital. It was polio, and when he was discharged in the spring of 1957 he was told not to ask too much of himself, as it would take time to learn to live again. His balance was affected, and there would always be pain in his right side. Sexually, there would be no impairment, but he must make allowance for lack of upper body strength. His old friends in Dublin were taken aback. He looked shrivelled and lessened. His hair had turned grey, almost white.
He came to London, perched in holes and corners—at one time in a conservatory in Kensington—and concentrated all the frail remainder of his strength into establishing himself as a writer. What was the competition? William Golding had published Lord of the Flies in 1954, The Inheritors in 1955, and Pincher Martin in 1956. Andrew Sinclair, deeply disliked by Farrell, had brought out My Friend Judas in 1960. Iris Murdoch’s The Bell came out in 1958 and A Severed Head in 1961, Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook in 1962. Farrell, meanwhile, wanted to write a book that would not only sell, but be remembered in the same way as Camus’s La Peste. In 1963 he would be thirty. He was facing, Lavinia Greacen says in J. G. Farrell: The Making of a Writer, ‘the descent from dreams.’ How did people handle that? He felt he had earned the right to guess.
Most people who have lived alone and tried to write, even without physical disabilities, will feel sympathy with Farrell. He made his bed every morning without a wrinkle and left a sheet of clean A4 on top of the pile, to begin the next day’s work. What about women? While he was writing a book, he was entirely absorbed, but this made him lonely, in a state of ‘Sarahlessness’ (Major Brendan Archer’s expression for it in Troubles), or (for they came and went) Sandylessness, Dianalessness, Carol Driskolessness, Bridget O’Toolelessness. He was aware of ‘a curious anarchy inside me that requires me to smash to pieces every promising relationship.’ But he showed great managerial skill, parting from them without enmity.
He had twice gone across to teach in France, and his first novel, The Man From Elsewhere, showed that he was still under the spell of the French cinema. In July 1963, he was asked to tea at Chatto & Windus, the first time he had ever set foot in a publishing house. But they didn’t accept his book, which made an almost unnoticed appearance in Hutchinson’s New Authors list—£50 on signing the contract, £100 on publication. Next, he made use of his most precious and personal material in The Lung. This got a good notice from the Guardian, but the reviewer added that it showed ‘the developing powers of a considerable talent.’ ‘Considerable’ was a drop of poison, to be brooded over while all the words of praise went for nothing. ‘I seem to have become quite sickeningly ambitious,’ he wrote, almost in dismay, about his third novel, A Girl in the Head, which, as Greacen acutely points out, is not about love so much as the inability to love.
At this point, he was awarded a Harkness Fellowship for two years’ study in the United States, from which he came back with only one image that would be of real service to him—the sight of the ruins of a vast clapboard hotel on Block Island. Within a day or so it had become in his imagination the setting of his Irish novel, Troubles. For Troubles he was awarded the Faber Prize, which consisted of £250 and lunch at the Etoile. ‘At a stroke, in the world where he most wanted to succeed, his reputation was now made.’ This, however, was not really so until 1973, when he won the Booker Prize with The Siege of Krishnapur.
Farrell hadn’t been to India when he began The Siege. He had collected a mass of detail from the V&A, the Science Museum, Brompton Cemetery, diaries and letters in the British Museum. He was in that half-hypnotized state of writing a book when material seems to lie in wait for you at every turn. But he saw that both a limitation and an increased depth were necessary. His subject was the Indian Mutiny, concentrating on the siege of Lucknow, which became Krishnapur, then on a handful of characters in the Collector’s Residence, each of whom—even the dogs—would find the siege a crucial test of belief. This proved the hardest part.
Farrell felt ‘tempted to strip it of all ideas and just leave the action.’ But he persevered, and his book appeared at the end of August 1973. As Private Eye put it, ‘novels about India always win the Booker,’ and none has deserved it more than The Siege of Krishnapur. He was already researching his next Imperial novel, The Singapore Grip.
Why, in 1979, did Farrell make the move to Ireland? His accountant had warned him that if his health deteriorated further, he might find it hard to manage, and advised taking advantage of the Irish Authors’ Tax Exemption scheme. Farrell himself felt a great anger ‘that it was the first time he was likely to earn a large amount and it could be taken by the taxman,’ as do we all. Eventually he bought, at first sight, an old farm cottage in West Cork, at the end of the peninsula between Dunmanus Bay and Bantry Bay. The local handyman who sold it to him was of the opinion that Mr Farrell ‘wanted to replace his childhood.’
Farrell threw himself into country life. Never having done any sea fishing, he got someone to show him how to do it and went down every possible evening to try for pollack from the rocks. It was the first sport he had been able to enjoy since he played rugby at Oxford. With his weak shoulder, he was doing an unsafe thing, but this simply meant that he welcomed the element of risk, which is an entirely different matter from feeling suicidal. On 11 August 1979, he chose the wrong evening. It had looked calm enough, but a freak storm got up and washed him off the rock. His body was not recovered until a month later, on the far side of Bantry Bay. Lavinia Greacen begins and ends her book with Farrell’s drowning, to emphasize the sea imagery which, she thinks, runs through his whole life. This is probably a mistake. He was a restless spirit, and there is no reason to think he would have gone on living in West Cork, or anywhere near the coast. He had been thinking of Paris. But this, all the same, is an admirable biography. Greacen had been given access to family letters and diaries as a key to ‘the private life of an exceptionally private person’ and she remains calmly sympathetic, calling in exactly the right way on the reader’s admiration and pity.
Times Literary Supplement, 1999
‘You’ve better things to do with your time, dear girl,’ Angus Wilson told Margaret Drabble when, after twenty-four years’ friendship, she suggested writing something about him. No, he would do that himself—Angus Wilson on Angus Wilson. He never managed it, and by 1991, when he died, his standing as a novelist had suffered and he had begun to feel like an old trouper or an old queen whose show was no longer wanted. This skilful and sympathetic book, then, is in the first place a matter of rehabilitation, or picking up the pieces, which may not be the very best basis for a biography, but is still an extremely good one.
Throughout she calls him, affectionately, ‘Angus.’ She is ‘Drabble.’ Angus came from a confusing, shabby-genteel family and a half-world of expatriates and private hotels where he was the precocious, blue-eyed youngest, an eavesdropper on the world. The child’s eye view, he came to believe, was crucial to the writer (although one of his school-friends thought Angus had never had a real childhood at all). When at the age of thirty-six he published his first volume of short stories, The Wrong Set, it included the very earliest, ‘Raspberry Jam’: a small boy looks on while two odd village ladies, who don’t wish to be spied upon, put out their pet bullfinch’s eyes with a pin. Angus liked to say that he had thought of this story, almost that it had thought of him, on a single afternoon. Drabble, however, has found four earlier drafts in the notebooks. You almost regret her thoroughness.
Hemlock and After (1951) and Anglo-Saxon Attitudes (1956), his first two novels, were generous in scope but just as deliciously, or frighteningly, acid in flavour. Their success and that of the much calmer Middle Age of Mrs Eliot (1958) led to an unpredictable result; his commitments expanded enormously and so, in spite of the nervous strain, did his happiness. For the next twenty-five years, as literature entered what Drabble calls ‘The Age of Conferences,’ Angus emerged, with only Stephen Spender as a serious rival, as the Indispensable Man. In 1963 he became first lecturer, then Professor, at the new University of East Anglia as it rose from Norfolk’s flat fields. He was on the committee of the Royal Literary Fund and the Arts Council, Chairman of the National Book League and the Society of Authors, eventually a Companion of Literature and a knight. As a distinguished visiting lecturer he patrolled Europe and America, hugely welcomed as a sort of white-haired totem by the world’s students. Ceaseless travelling is pretty sure to mean comic mishaps, and Drabble doesn’t miss these, but at the same time she skilfully keeps us in mind of the heroism with which Angus (perhaps literally) worked himself to death. He succeeded, not as a born organizer but as someone who was interested in other human beings, a brilliant, malicious man who was still, at heart, a sweet-natured busybody, prodigal with time and effort. Organization was left to his lover, secretary, driver, and cook, Tony Garrett.
All these activities mean that Drabble is faced with a cast of hundreds, but she never lets one slip. Some are famous; others, although their names are listed, are totally obscure; some have their own anecdotes: ‘Juliet Corke married a Frenchman and Angus spoke at the wedding in fluent French, recalling the little tabby cat she had once given him,’ Gerard van het Reve ‘would ask for a plate and some mustard, if conversation at table grew dull; he would then spread the plate with mustard, and lay his penis temptingly upon the plate.’ Drabble vividly describes the places Angus went to, and even, on occasion, places he might have gone to, but didn’t. Drabble assesses the reviews of each book and suggests the originals of the characters (four are given for Rose Lorimer, the sublimely ridiculous lecturer in Anglo-Saxon Attitudes). She knows the names of Angus’s roses, and makes us interested in his meals. Her sense of period, down to the very year, is, as always, matchless, and you can feel time pass inside and outside the cottage at Felsham Woodside. There is, on the other hand, not much evidence from accountants and it’s not quite clear why the money ran out just before Angus and Tony (now acting as a nurse) left England for St Remy. Readers of The Independent will remember the dignified appeal for funds in May 1990 by Rose Tremain, who had been one of his pupils. The end, as Drabble says, was not a happy one. But Dr Patrick Woodcock, who looked after Angus and many of his friends, once told me that the best provision against old age was ‘to make sure of your little treats’ and these Angus had, in the visitors who brought him his last luxury, gossip.
‘He made no secret of the fact that he was a homosexual,’ Drabble says, ‘and this volume is in part a history of what we now call gay liberation, and the decreasing need for discretion.’ Francis King suggested in his memoirs Yesterday Came Suddenly that at first Angus Wilson hated his own sexuality, but this does not appear from the biography. He seems to have been admitted to dressing-up games, and perhaps seduced, by his elder brothers. However, although in Hemlock and After he wrote, for 1952, quite openly about the subject (Rupert Hart-Davis’s Hugh Walpole, published in the same year, never mentions it), he still felt obliged in his early novels to restrict himself. Getting rid of the restraints didn’t improve him as a writer—when does it ever? Meanwhile in his official capacity as a smiling public man, he felt, although he never denied or compromised, that it was better to proceed with caution. I should add that anyone anxious to read about the details of his personal sex life has come to the wrong counter. Drabble has been guided, as she explains in her preface, by Tony Garrett, to whom the book is dedicated, and who told her that he was prepared to talk about the relationship but not about ‘actual sexual activity…firstly because I cannot ask Angus for his permission.’
The truth about his sexual adventures, Angus always insisted, was in his fiction. Everyone is at liberty to look for it there. His real subject, as he explained in his Northcliffe lectures and his self-analytical The Wild Garden, was evil, as distinct from right and wrong and their traditional playground of comedy. Margaret Drabble accepts this and says: ‘He demonstrated that it was still possible to write a great novel.’ This implies direct competition with the great Victorian classics, and Angus in fact wrote distinctive studies of Dickens and Kipling, but Drabble goes off course, I think, in trying to show that what attracted him to them was that his life-story was like theirs. It wasn’t. Their attraction for him, surely, was the lavish, unaccountable nature of their genius—Kipling’s daemon, or Dickens’s ‘I thought of Mr Pickwick.’ Faced by what seemed almost the duty of greatness, and uncertain of his own daemon, insecurity threatened, and to banish insecurity Angus took to avoiding silence. Nobody who ever knew it could forget his voice—heard from outside in the street, growing louder on the stairs, non-stop into the rooms rising into plaintive arabesques, pausing only for a painfully brilliant imitation. You can hear it, so to speak, through the chinks of this admirable biography, a solid tribute of scholarship and affection.
Independent, 1995
Truth is more important than modesty, Roald Dahl said, but glorious exaggeration seemed to suit him better than either. For example: ‘It happens to be a fact that nearly every fiction writer in the world drinks more whisky than is good for him. He does it to give himself faith, hope, and courage. A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom.’ This is the writer as hero, talking to his young readers in their millions in Boy —not an autobiography, he tells them, as that would be full of boring things, but a record only of what ‘made a tremendous impression on me.’
What had impressed him most since he was born in 1916 to Norwegian parents were the family’s rugged holidays in the fjords, spiffing practical jokes—such as frightening an ugly old sweetshop woman with a dead mouse—savage beatings at school, a confident beginning as a trainee oil salesman in East Africa. In 1939 he trained as a fighter pilot ‘and I got shot down myself, crashing in a burst of flames…but that is another story.’
Invalided out of the RAF, he was sent on intelligence work to wartime Washington. At this time he was a handsome young man, with something a little dangerous about him, who was friendly with the rich and famous, and married to the actress Patricia Neal. He also had a ferocious imagination, which he set to work for him. He was fairly well established with The New Yorker and Playboy long before he began, perhaps more successfully than anyone else in the world, to tell stories to children.
It might be felt that fate had allowed him a good deal, but Dahl knew he deserved more. He felt entitled to dispense with income-tax collectors and quarrel with publishers and, if he was bored, to be exceptionally rude. He was convinced he should have a knighthood, since that was what great writers were given. On the other hand, he was often kind and generous, and met life’s worst blows with courage. His favourite daughter, Olivia, died at the age of seven. Dahl nearly went out of his mind, but he said afterwards that he had lost all fear of dying. ‘If Olivia can do it, I can.’
Dahl was colourful, noisy, dominating, possibly a genius, certainly an expert in self-publicity. Jeremy Treglown, his biographer, is calm, judicial, accurate, quietly brilliant. The ice man cometh. Treglown is humane, but we would like to know the truth. Was Dahl really shot down, or did he make an ignominious forced landing? Can he be trusted on the subject of his flogging headmasters? How much help did he get from publishers’ editors, who patiently toned down the bloody-mindedness of his plots? Treglown never proceeds without evidence, some from documents and from the books themselves, a lot of it from firsthand witnesses. Then he gives his assessment, trying to separate ‘the detached, scientific, sometimes cruel-seeming Dahl from the kindly magician.’ This, however, as he must have noticed, means distinguishing one unreality from another.
Roald Dahl’s books for children are much less primitive than his stories for adults, which depend on shock endings, Saki-like schemes for revenge, and hateful practical jokes. The much-loved ‘juveniles’ are just as ruthless, but they are life-loving. The eight-year-old Roald was galvanized by the idea of coasting downhill on his bike, no hands. ‘It made me tremble just to think of it.’ Joy and fear are indistinguishable here, just as they are when the juice-laden Giant Peach is spiked on the Empire State Building, or the BFG endeavours to please the Queen by farting his loudest. Jeremy Treglown’s fine psychological study is the key to these fantasies, which still earn £2 million a year for the Dahl estate. Most writers would tremble just to think of it.
Evening Standard, 1994
There is no direct train from London to Hull, in Yorkshire. You have to change at Doncaster. Philip Larkin used to claim that he went on working there because literary curiosity-seekers (not to speak of ‘Jake Balokowsky, my biographer’) would be daunted when they discovered that the journey took three to four hours, and might decide on another poet instead.
Certainly Hull seemed like seclusion, almost retreat, with correspondence as a lifeline. ‘Postmen like doctors go from house to house’—although Anthony Thwaite is perhaps too optimistic in saying that Larkin thought of both of them as healers. Postmen and doctors make mistakes, and the relief they bring is often only temporary.
Larkin decided early on against marriage, risking loneliness in exchange. He valued jazz, cricket, drink, women (some women), books (some books), poetry, and friendship. ‘“Friend” can mean three things,’ he wrote somewhat sourly in 1941, ‘acquaintance, comrade, or antagonist.’ Of his three joint literary executors, all were unquestionably his comrades and two are poets—Andrew Motion, whose biography of Larkin comes out this year, and Anthony Thwaite, who edited the Collected Poems (criticized for putting in too much) in 1988 and these Selected Letters (criticized for leaving out too much) in 1992. The third executor, Monica Jones, a university lecturer, was by far the closest of Larkin’s women friends.
The correspondence will only be completely comprehensible when the biography appears. Meanwhile, faced by several thousand letters, Thwaite has had to save space and at the same time do what he could about some awkward gaps. Only a dozen or so letters to Monica Jones have been made available (although Thwaite discreetly says that ‘apparent losses may later be recovered’), and it seems that those to Bruce Montgomery (the detective writer Edmund Crispin) can’t be inspected until 2035. George Hartley, the publisher of Larkin’s first important collection, The Less Deceived (1955), reserved his letters because he wanted to sell them unexcerpted. And the important correspondence with Kingsley Amis, who first met Larkin when they were students together at Oxford, and to whom the very last letter in this book, dictated just before the final operation, is addressed—this correspondence, too, is rather ragged.
Thwaite’s job, or one of them, has been to show the ‘stages of life’ which Larkin himself so dreaded—the inescapable I-told-you-so of mortality. First there’s the adolescent, trying out romantic ideas and dirty language. Here the chief correspondent is Jim Sutton, who knew Larkin as an eight-year-old schoolboy at King Henry VIII School, Coventry. Sutton never became a celebrity. He was an unsuccessful painter, an Army driver in the war, later a chemist’s dispenser, and evidently a choice spirit. To him Larkin confided not only his early disappointments with publishers and with sex but his concept of poetry itself. ‘A poem is just a thought of the imagination—not really logical at all. In fact I should like to make it quite clear to my generation and all subsequent generations that I have no ideas about poetry at all. For me, a poem is the crossroads of my thoughts, my feelings, my imaginings, my wishes, and my verbal sense: normally these run parallel…often two or more cross…but only when all cross at one point does one get a poem.’ At this time he was ‘humanly although perhaps not excusably tired of not getting any money or reviews or any sort of reputation.’ The only ‘adventurous’ thing in his life, he told the agent Alan Pringle, was to apply and be selected for the public librarianship at Wellington, Shropshire, replacing a man of seventy-six, and ‘handing out antiquated tripe to the lower levels of the general public’ for £175 a year. And yet by the time he was twenty-five he had published two novels and a volume of poetry. The poems had only one reviewer, but that reviewer was D. J. Enright.
From the 1950s his life quite rapidly, if warily, expands. The toad, work, always keeps a precious jewel in its head of self-doubt, misanthropy, and irony. But the nervous beginner becomes what he has to admit is a well-known poet, and the young writer who signed his first book contract for £30 turns out to be an excellent businessman. To Patsy Strang (whom he met after moving from Shropshire to Belfast) there is his first series of love letters, or something very like them. ‘You are the sort of person one can’t help feeling (in a carping kind of way) ought to come one’s way once in one’s life.’ When she decamps to Paris, he tells her she is like ‘a rocket, leaving a shower of sparks to fall on the old coal shed as you whoosh upwards.’ In 1959 he was appointed to the University Library of Hull. In 1961 he was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for poetry. It was not until the end of the Seventies that he began to feel the wretched approach of dryness, although even then he ‘would sooner write no poems than bad poems.’ Thwaite believes that this drying-up or desertion was partly, at least, the result of the unsettling experience of his last move. In 1973 the University of Hull decided to sell off its ‘worst properties,’ including the one where he lived, and he became, for the first time, a homeowner, faced with endless practical difficulties, and feeling ‘like a tortoise that has been taken out of one shell and put in another.’ But even this experience never stopped him from writing letters.
Two omissions seem strange. There are no letters to Larkin’s family, not even to his mother, to whom he wrote regularly until her death at the age of ninety-one. And there are almost none to do with his official career at Hull, and yet the building of the Library Extension, of which he had been in charge since his arrival, was, as he put it, ‘the daysman of my thought, and hope, and doing’. At the same time, he was secretary of the university’s publishing committee. Very likely these letters might be considered dull, but dullness is a necessary part of most existences, and certainly of Philip Larkin’s.
What was he like, exactly? Having decided, by its usual mysterious processes, that Larkin was one of the very few living poets that anyone (apart from students and teachers) wanted to buy and read, the British public accepted his persona from the poems they knew, and grew attached to it. He was modest and humorous, lived out of tins in rented rooms, was ‘unchilded and unwifed,’ worked decently hard without becoming rich, visited churches as a wistful sightseer, had missed the sexual revolution of the Sixties by being born too early, was ‘nudged from comfort’ by the sight of ships and aircraft departing and of the old people’s ward. He refused to bother about what didn’t interest him. He was the writer who, when asked by the interviewer about the influence of Borges, said: ‘Who’s Borges?’ New music, a new generation’s language, was not what he wanted. ‘My mind has stopped at 1945, like some cheap wartime clock,’ he told Kingsley Amis. In defiance of realism’s bad reputation, he continued to write about the recognizable human condition. ‘I’m not interested in things that aren’t true.’ But with this marvellous talent for the clearest possible everydayness he combined the torment of the romantic conscience and, however embarrassing it might be, the romantic vision. In ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ he is forced to admit—though not until the train is nearly into London—that the absurd honeymoon couples, and not himself, are the source of fertility and future change. The ‘success or failure of the poem [when read aloud] depends on whether it gets off the ground on the last two lines,’ he explains to Anthony Thwaite in 1959.
To a considerable extent, the Larkin of these letters is the reader’s familiar Larkin. What you paid for is what you get. But there are passages that are not so reassuring. It isn’t so much that he sent for girlie magazines and, for long periods, drank too much and got ‘routinely pissed,’ or even that he allowed himself to resent the success of others and to hate extensively. His women colleagues in Belfast were ‘old Sowface’ and ‘old Bagface,’ Seamus Heaney is ‘the Gombeen man,’ R. S. Thomas ‘Arse Thomas,’ Ted Hughes a ‘boring old monolith’ and ‘no good at all’ but so are Pope, Shelley, Robert Lowell. Blake is an ass, Byron a bore. ‘I find old Henry James repulsive sitting there cuddling his ideas, like a butler warming up the undermaids!’ Still, these are private letters. Who would want to be answerable for everything they’ve said, in private letters, to friends they hope to amuse? More distressing by far are his general opinions, forcibly expressed, which leave the whole concept of political incorrectness gasping. If they represent what he really or even sometimes felt, immigration (LETTING THE BUGGERS IN HERE) must be made illegal before every household in the land is overrun, unemployment should be got rid of by stopping national assistance, workingmen are ‘awful shits marching or picketing,’ the Labour Party are Communists who would like to see him in a camp for dissidents. In a Hull student’s paper he was said to have ‘Judged it prudent/Never to speak to any student,’ and if they continue to demonstrate he recommends flogging.
How seriously were his correspondents supposed to take all this? I think quite seriously. When I was working in an unimportant capacity for the British Arts Council Literary Panel, Larkin was asked for advice on the funding of ethnic arts centres. He replied that anyone lucky enough to be allowed to settle here had a duty to forget their own culture and try to understand ours.
Thwaite, it has been suggested, has done his best, through his selection and omission, to sweep things under the carpet and give as favourable a picture as possible. This may be so. And perhaps he was touched by Larkin’s mild complaint to a woman friend: ‘[I am] rather depressed by the remorseless scrutiny of one’s private affairs that seems to be the fate of the newly dead. Really, one should burn everything.’
It has even been argued that Larkin, a favourite with examiners and educators, shouldn’t, after the publication of this book, be allowed any longer onto the school syllabus. But what schoolchildren learn and will continue to learn from his poems is that ‘what will survive of us is love.’ And there is some evidence of this too in the Selected Letters—in his encouragement of Barbara Pym for example, when she was struggling with unresponsive publishers, a correspondence that became what Thwaite calls ‘a delightful and moving intimacy.’ There are the pains he took for his old friend Jim Sutton, who had written an unsaleable book on his war experiences, his loyalty to long-term library colleagues, and his agonizing worry over the health of Monica Jones. His letter to Douglas Dunn, after the death of Dunn’s first wife, begins: ‘Dear Douglas—I don’t know whether it is harder to speak or write to you of these last weeks. Whichever I am doing seems the more difficult.’
Thwaite makes only the modest claim to have compiled ‘an interim account of a memorable man, much loved by many people.’ Meanwhile, I imagine, he must be scanning the horizon for the arrival of Andrew Motion, whose Life, let’s hope, will provide him with a much-needed and decisive ally.
New Criterion, 1993
I first heard of J. L. Carr through a passage in Michael Holroyd’s Unreceived Opinions. Holroyd had had, from George Ellerbeck, a family butcher in Kettering, a letter telling him he had won the Ellerbeck Literary Award, consisting of a non-transferable meat token for one pound of best steak and a copy of Carr’s novel The Harpole Report (so this must have been in 1972 or 1973). The letter went on: ‘The prize is only awarded at infrequent intervals and you are only its third recipient. The circumstances are that Mr Carr, who makes a living by writing, is one of my customers and pays me in part with unsold works known, I understand, as Remainders.’ Never before or since have I heard of anyone who managed to settle up with a butcher, even in part, with Remainders. It is a rational and beneficial idea, but it took Jim Carr to carry it out.
James Lloyd Carr was born on 20 May 1912, of a Yorkshire Methodist family. His father used to preach in the Wesleyan ‘tin tabernacle.’ Jim used occasionally to play truant, but did not and could not forget the old revivalist hymns—‘Hold the Fort,’ ‘Count Your Many Blessings,’ ‘Pull for the Shore, Sailor,’ and ‘We Are Out on the Ocean, Sailing.’ He went to the village school at Carlton Miniott in the North Riding and to Castleford Grammar School. At Castleford his headmaster was the enthusiastic and progressive ‘Toddy’ Dawes, who, during a miners’ strike, took the local brass band across to France to perform in Paris, where it won a competition. ‘Other schools had ordinary headmasters,’ said Carr. ‘We had Toddy.’ In turn he himself became a teacher and a publisher of historical maps and delightful tiny booklets, The Little Poets, a little, that is, of each poet and illustrations of all sizes. These were left by the cash-outs of bookshops to attract last-minute purchasers, and, on occasion, he gave them away like sweets. I only wish I had a complete set now.
In 1968 he retired early to make a living with the pocket books and maps, and to write. He settled not in his native Yorkshire but in Northamptonshire, where he had been a head teacher. He described it as ‘onion fields, spud and beet fields, mile and mile after mile of hedgeless flatness, dykes and ditches,’ and he loved it dearly. In 1979 he wrote his masterpiece, A Month in the Country, which was published in 1980, shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and won the Guardian fiction prize. It was made into a film. ‘Fine gentlemen from London,’ as Jim insisted on calling them, arrived at his house in Kettering, and pointed out that the title, of course, would not do, it had already been used by Turgenev. ‘Is that so?’ said Jim. ‘I don’t think I’ll change mine, though.’ He didn’t.
A Month in the Country is not quite like any of his other novels. It is 1920, and Tom Birkin is back from the trenches with a facial twitch that the doctors tell him may get better in time. He has been trained by one of the last remaining experts as a restorer of medieval murals, and he has been hired to uncover the whitewashed-over fourteenth-century painting on the wall of a Yorkshire village church. His fee will be twenty-five guineas, and he is told to make the best of what he can find.
He arrives at Oxgodby station in pouring rain and darkness, but receives an offer to come inside and have a cup of tea from the stationmaster, Mr Ellerbeck. (The name, of course, and the kindness are from Kettering. Carr liked to introduce characters from one book to another, and from real life into books.) But Birkin refuses the offer. He has an appointment to meet the vicar at the church, and in any case he is quite unused to northerners. He feels himself in enemy country.
The rain stops, and the next day brings the cloudless, golden, incomparable summer of 1920. For Tom Birkin, ‘nerves shot to pieces, wife gone, dead broke,’ it will be, almost against his will, a healing process. Like Solzhenitsyn in Matyona’s House, he has wanted to cut himself off and lose himself in the distant innermost heart of the country. ‘Only time would clean me up,’ he thinks. But he is brought back to himself first of all by the way things are made—even in the drenching rain he notices that the church masonry is ‘beautifully cut with only a hint of mortar.’
Then there’s the way things work—notably the cast-iron Bankdam-Crowther stove in the church itself—‘There seemed to be several knobs and toggles for which I could see no purpose: plainly, this damned big monster was going to provide me with several pleasurably instructive hours learning its foibles.’ Then there is the place. On his very first morning in the bell tower, a vast and magnificent landscape unfolds.
Day after day, mist rose from the meadow as the sky lightened and hedges, barns and woods took shape until, at last, the long curving back of the hills lifted away from the Plain…Day after day it was like that and each morning I leaned on the yard gate dragging at my first fag and (I’d like to think) marvelling at this splendid backcloth. But it can’t have been so; I’m not the marvelling kind. Or was I then?
Next there is the long-dead, unknown wall-painter himself, ‘a nameless painter reaching from the dark to show me what he could do, saying to me as clear as any words, “If any part of me survives from time’s corruption, let it be this.
For this was the sort of man I was.”’ (At the very end of the book, Birkin refers to him as ‘the secret sharer,’ a reminder that Carr had been given what he called his first stiff dose of Conrad at Castleford Grammar.) Lastly, among his unconscious healers are the natives of Oxgodby, who turn out to be anything but hostile. Carr always dwelt lovingly not only on turns of speech but on details of behaviour that separate one region of England from another. He used to describe, for example, a down-and-out travelling show in Yorkshire in which the compère had appealed for someone to ‘come forward’ from the audience. ‘But,’ said Jim, ‘they don’t “come forward” in the North Riding.’ Certainly they don’t need to in Oxgodby, where they are used to speaking out and staying put. Kathy Ellerbeck, yelling her mam’s invitation to Sunday dinner up Birkin’s ladder, is Carr’s heartfelt tribute to the Yorkshire school-leaver.
The epigraphs of his books were important to him. A Month in the Country has three. The first is from Johnson’s Dictionary—‘A novel: a small tale, generally of love’—a Carr-like, and indeed Dr Johnson-like, throwaway. The third, an octet from Trench’s ‘She comes not when Noon is on the roses,’ was added to the 1991 edition after the death of Carr’s wife Sally. The second is from the poems he loved best, Housman’s A Shropshire Lad (no. XXXII). I am here on earth only for a short time, Housman says. You must trust me.
Take my hand quick and tell me,
What have you in your heart.
Being Housman, he is not likely to expect an answer, and Birkin doesn’t get one either.
There are, it turns out, three strangers in Oxgodby besides Birkin himself. One of them, Moon, he meets on his first day in the bell tower. We don’t exactly know what Moon does, although he appears to be a professional archaeologist, and had ‘an RFC pal’ to fly him over the site before he began on his commission, which is to make reasonable efforts over a given period to find a lost fourteenth-century grave. We do, however, find out from a chance revelation in a Ripon teashop, the secret of Moon’s war record and what was done to him.
Birkin is working at the top of his ladder, Moon has dug himself a hole to live in beneath his belltent. Birkin has been accepted from the beginning by the inhabitants of Oxgodby, helps with the ‘dafties’ at the Wesleyan Sunday school, goes on the glorious Sunday school outing, to which Moon is not invited. Moon talks posh. Birkin doesn’t, but he and Moon like each other. Are they to be thought of as opposites, or as two marked men, marked, that is, by the war and by their bitter experience of sex, and regarded by old Mossop, the sexton, as (like all southerners) fair cautions?
The other two outsiders (or at least they haven’t managed to feel accepted in Oxgodby) are the vicar and his wife, Arthur and Alice Keach. (He is also referred to as the Reverend J. G. Keach, but Carr was a reckless proofreader. He had, he said, a ‘terrible and inexcusable vice of not reading a proof until after I have published it.’) The vicar is businesslike—this seems at first to be his only good quality—disapproving, unyielding, and chilly. He has ‘a cold, cooped-up look about him,’ and although he must have got used to the twitch, he continues to talk to someone behind Birkin’s left shoulder. Cold church, warm chapel. Birkin listens through the floor of the belfry to the congregation ‘bleating away downstairs’ and contrasts it with the thick Yorkshire pudding at the Ellerbecks’ and the blacksmith’s splendid basso profundo. The vicar’s wife, Alice, on the other hand, is like a Botticelli—the Primavera, not the Venus—a Primavera, that is, in a straw hat with a rose from the vicarage garden stuck in the ribbon. Birkin’s feelings for Alice are what might be expected, and there is a moment when he is very close to asking her Housman’s question: What have you in your heart? His attitude to the vicar is also predictable. He and Moon have decided that the marriage is an outrage. ‘Frankly, if Keach was as awful as he seemed, living with him didn’t bear thinking about.’
But Birkin runs out of money and finds himself obliged to call round at the vicarage to ask for his first instalment of pay. This leads to a passage characteristic of Jim Carr, who likes to beguile us with a story based on his own experience, or something near it, and then allow it to take off, just for a while, into a dazzling, improbable flight. ‘The house was in a clearing, but what once had been a drive-around for carriages was now blocked by a vast stricken cedar, its torn roots heaving up like a cliff-side and supporting a town-sized garden, its crevices already colonized by wild plants.’ After a heroic struggle with the bell-pull, Birkin has the door opened to him by Alice Keach herself. She begins a not quite sane story of life in the vicarage where the trees, it seems to her, are closing in on them until mercifully fended off at the last moment by the house walls. She has none of the self-assurance that she shows outside her home. The vicar, too, is different. He has evidently been playing his violin, which is lying by a rickety music stand in one of the vast, chill rooms. Fig leaves, like giant hands, press against the window. The two of them seem huddled together for the comfort of each other’s company. And Birkin feels unexpectedly sorry for the Reverend Arthur Keach.
It seems that the only people in the book we are asked thoroughly to disapprove of, even to hate, are the military authorities who sentenced Moon, and the grand new proprietor of the Baines Piano and Organ Warehouse in Ripon, who looks down on the Oxgodby deputation (Mr Ellerbeck, his daughter Kathy, Mr Dowthwaite the blacksmith, and Birkin) who have come to replace the Wesleyans’ harmonium with a pipe organ. The proprietor thinks he can afford to despise them because they have come to buy secondhand, bringing the cash they have collected with them in a bag. But he is greatly mistaken.
‘It is the death of the spirit we must fear’ is Carr’s epigraph, this time for The Harpole Report. The death of the spirit is to lose confidence in one’s own independence and to do only what we are expected to do. At the same time, it is a mistake to expect anything specific from life. Life will not conform.
‘And it’s gone. It’s gone. All the excitement and pride of that first job. Oxgodby, Kathy Ellerbeck, Alice Keach, Moon, that season of calm weather—gone as though they’d never been.’ Early in the book the perspective of time is established. Birkin is looking back, with wonder, at the very last years of a lamp-lit, horse-drawn age. Of course, he and Moon have another set of memories to haunt them, from Passchendaele. But Birkin believes that the future is opening up. ‘Well, I was young then.’
Carr is by no means a lavish writer, but he has the magic touch to re-enter the imagined past. Birkin notices, as he walks back down the road, how he first smelled, then saw, the swathes of hay lying in the dusk. At the Sunday school outing, ‘Afterwards, most of the men took off their jackets, exposing their braces and the tapes of their long woollen underpants, and astonished their children by larking around like great lads.’ Those tapes! Who would have remembered them except Jim Carr?
From the first Birkin has seen that the wall-painting is a Doom, a Christ in judgement with its saved and its sinners in a great spread of reds and blues. He finishes the restoration according to contract, just as the first breath of autumn comes to Oxgodby. But the moment when the year crosses into another season becomes indistinguishable from his passion, making itself clear as it does quite suddenly, for Alice Keach.
‘All this happened so long ago.’ The tone of A Month in the Country, however, isn’t one of straightforward remembering or (if there can be such a thing) of straightforward nostalgia, or even an acute sense of the loss of youth. More complex is his state of mind when he thinks of the people—perhaps only a few—who will visit Oxgodby church in its meadows and regret that they missed seeing the master painter himself—‘like someone coming to Malvern, bland Malvern, who is halted by the thought that Edward Elgar walked this road on his way to give music lessons.’ This is a nostalgia for something we have never had, ‘a tugging of the heart—knowing a precious moment gone and we not there.’ But even this has to be distinguished from downright pain. ‘We can ask and ask, but we can’t have again what once seemed ours for ever.’ You can only wait, Carr says, for the pain to pass, but what is it that once seemed ours for ever? Or is this, like the Shropshire Lad’s, an unanswerable question?
From the Penguin edition, 2000