An Awful Lot of Books (13 page)

Raleigh’s achievements were so various, his aims so wide and his disappointments so bitter that to understand him in relation to his contemporaries, and Miss Irwin not only throws a clear and in some cases new light upon them, she also shows how, throughout his life, he was quite unable to take their vanities and weaknesses into account. This landed him in the Tower for the first time when he married (for love) one of Elizabeth’s Maids of Honour; it generated such jealousy in Robert Cecil and Sir Edward Coke, and above all in James - none of whom could measure up to him and knew it - that they stripped him of his estates, appointments, liberty, and finally his life. Only their attempts upon his honour and the public affection in which he was held defeated them, and with these he died in most confident serenity. This portrait, in its informed and careful excellence, is an utterly absorbing piece of work, beautifully written, shining with Miss Irwin’s good appreciation of its hero and feeding - as this kind of book should - one’s curiosity to know more.

July 1960

This book begins with a brief account of the Prince Regent’s affair and secret marriage with Maria Fitzherbert. Nine years later George III’s first bout of insanity, and the Prince’s enormous debts which it was not thought that Parliament would discharge unless he made a suitable marriage to ensure the succession, precipitated this necessity. His parents had each a niece who were possible candidates, and for reasons unknown - or for none at all - the Prince determined upon Caroline of Brunswick the elder and plainer of the two and his father’s relation.

The offer of marriage was made when Caroline was twenty-six, ‘florid, gauche, stocky and over-dressed’, but ‘vastly happy with her future expectations’, Lord Malmesbury, who was sent to fetch her, did his best to knock a little discretion into her, but when she had a tooth extracted and sent to him, he may well have despaired as he thought it ‘nasty and indelicate’. From the moment that the Prince set eyes upon her he began to hate her; he was in tears during the wedding ceremony, and according to Caroline, spent the first night dead drunk upon the floor. However, nine months all but a day from the date of the wedding. Princess Charlotte was born of this union; a few months later the Prince formally signified his desire for an immediate separation, and Caroline moved from Carlton House to Blackheath. Such was her conduct there that a Delicate Investigation was ordered by the King to inquire into the embarrassing possibility of one of Caroline’s ‘adopted children’ in fact being her own natural child. The Investigation, while it did not condemn her on this major point, uncovered so much unbecoming behaviour that she was grudgingly absolved and moved to Kensington Palace.

Here, insulted and humiliated in every direction, granted the minimum access to her own daughter and absolutely forbidden any communication with her husband, she at length decided to go abroad. She had spent twenty years in England, repressed and ridiculed, and she had neither the intelligence nor dignity to improve or to endure her horrible situation. When she returned to England six years later as Queen of England, it was to face a trial for adultery with her Italian courtier which it was intended should result in her divorce and dispossession of all her rights as Queen: the trial lasted fifty-two days, split the country and was finally abandoned, but not before her already tattered reputation had been publicly shredded. She died barely a month after the Coronation from which she was turned away, and chose for the inscription on her coffin ‘The Injured Queen of England’.

Miss Richardson, whose life of Bernhardt I very much enjoyed last year, has tackled this difficult subject with skill and exactly the right kind of detachment, portraying Caroline as pathetic and unprepossessing in equal degrees, so that one sees her as the victim of her - to put it mildly - natural irresponsibility. (Two of her brothers were imbecile, but one supposes that in view of her uncle, George III’s, condition, mental instability was not an excuse for her that the Royal Family were in a position to make: had it been, she might have been more kindly treated, and the appalling unnecessity of the squalid and wearisome trial might have been avoided.) It seems to me to be an accomplished, fair and extremely readable work, and the most remarkable illustration of
folies de rigeur
that I have encountered.

August 1960

This book is a study of the art of writing and an inquiry into the nature of the artist, and Mr. Quennell is one of the few people writing today able to expand upon these subjects without ever being boring (by which I mean irritating and incomprehensible to those of his readers who do not write). It is excellent company throughout, and one of its most striking features is the remarkable and right balance which the author has achieved between his personal and direct experience of writing and his general conclusions - based upon his recollections in life or in the work of other writers. These changes of focus are so skilfully arranged that they constantly refresh one’s attention - which might otherwise be lulled into sheer sensuous pleasure by the unobtrusive, beautiful ease of the writing.

Well - what exactly does he write about? How does one discuss the vast problems of creative art in the specific terms of literature? He begins by describing his own poetic adventures and his retreat from them as ‘the need to compose poems imperceptibly diminished in me’, pointing out that there is likely to be a revealing similarity between the methods and impulses of the poet who succeeds and the poet who fails. In this season of his life he reached the tropics of Bayswater, where on a top floor he found Edith Sitwell fatefully gilded with feathers and brocade and Ada Leverson quivering in quantities of black velvet upon a sofa: they had a lunatic to tea who was in full spate of his macabre and utilitarian anxieties. There is a fascinating chapter upon style with illustrations of its necessity as a natural growth, its parasitic or obsessional tendency (with a touching account of George Moore), it being treated as an unsightly creeper interfering with great slabs of social concrete, as in the case of Wells, and finally the oblique and dreary influence that Samuel Butler has had upon present day writing.

The author remarks early in his book that ‘between the writers who have helped to change the world and writers who have set out to change it, there exists a very sharp distinction’, and that ‘the artist is essentially a secret agent, who wears numerous disguises and whose influence remains clandestine’. Later, he gives an illuminating derivation of a much misused word. In the Etruscans’ brilliant pictures that decorated their tombs two demonic presences were often depicted; one, a hideous spirit known as Phersu, who wore a mask, and was an ‘enemy of pride and strength and grace’. When the Romans overwhelmed Etruria, they adapted the ominous demon’s name which in Latin became ‘persona’ - the word used to designate the mask worn by their actors. Jung, as we know, considered and explored the persona and a contemporary has found that ‘it is not … the same as character…’ … ‘insofar as the individual regards himself as identical with the persona his understanding of himself must be considered minimal’. Mr. Quennell continues: ‘Self-expression is something assumed to be one of the creative writer’s chief objects; but, when he exhibits personality, he should bear in mind the antique origin of the word and remember its former association with the idea of deliberate deception and disguise … Yet, so extraordinary is the effect of literary genius - the mask with which a writer hides his fate often represents an aspect of his nature that the face beneath it is endeavouring to conceal.’ This seems to have some connection with the author’s epilogue in which he says that in his early youth he would have agreed with Cyril Connolly’s stern dictum ‘that the true function of the writer’ is simply ‘ to produce a masterpiece’, but that he has begun ‘to think of art as a quality that may illumine the most trivial objects …’ Earlier in this book he has described the Jamaican long-tailed Humming Bird with a kind of attention which reminded me of the part in a D. H. Lawrence essay about the red of an anemone: ‘trivial objects’ so illumined lose their triviality as they become irradiated with their essential truth. If one adapted Norman Douglas’s remark to ‘everything is worth writing about’, then surely the masterpiece depends upon that kind of writing. Finally, as Mr. Quennell says, the great artist never loses his capacity for astonishment and the feelings of awe that accompany it. If one takes awe to mean ‘reverential fear or wonder’, it does seem as though this author suffers unduly and unprofitably from the first: fear is not a dynamic emotion - it would not even get one to the truth about humming birds.

September 1960

Mr. Maxwell remarks casually somewhere in this very good book that he can neither fly nor swim, and the fact that his West Highland household contains one expert swimmer and five first-rate flyers - an otter and five greylag geese - all of whom learned their respective arts from him, is but one indication of his generous sense of responsibility as a host.

The story begins ten years ago when the author was offered a roadless cottage on the West Highland seaboard - an isolated place to live, but set in country so beautiful and remote that even to read about it creates a longing: white sands and green islands, rowan trees and small rocky bays and a burn with a roaring waterfall. Here, he and his springer spaniel, Jonnie, settled, furnishing the cottage by degrees from useful things washed up on neighbouring shores. Jonnie died, and afterwards the author, who was travelling in southern Iraq, was offered a young male otter. From the moment that it emerged from its sack, its fur stiff and spiky with mud, the author belonged to it, and the chapters about Mijbil (who turned out to be a hitherto unknown species of otter and was formally identified with the author’s name) are the most engaging in a book which is extremely enjoyable throughout.

Otters are perhaps the most captivating of all creatures that can be kept in domestic circumstances, and although they will ruthlessly adapt the circumstances to their idea of domesticity, their tremendous gaiety, intelligence, affection and general zest for life with you seems amply to repay their innate dislike of order, their genius for dismantling stuffy domestic fitments such as telephones, beds, books, china, paper, clothes, etc. After a frightful journey back to England by air - the fact that Mr. Maxwell is very funny about it does not detract from its frightfulness - Mijbil settled in a flat with his friend near Olympia before going North for an idyllic summer where he was utterly free to swim and fish and play, returning each night to sleep in the cottage,

A year later - it never occurring to him that anyone he met might be a treacherous lunatic - he was brutally killed by a road mender with a pick-head.

The sequel to this tragedy was a piece of marvellous good fortune, but there was an alarming interim. Mr. Maxwell tried keeping a ring-tailed lemur, who was gentle and charming most of the time, but after her third and nearly successful attempt to murder him - she severed his tibial artery - he sent her to a zoo. (I knew that lemur: it lunched lightly off lilac buds with me and was left by its owner for the night. I cannot help feeling now a little like somebody who invited Charlotte Corday to see me in my bath.)

In Scotland again Mr. Maxwell, by astonishing chance, encountered what must have been the only two people with a tame (Nigerian) otter whom they had to dispose of before returning to Nigeria and, ten days later, Edal took possession of the cottage and the burn. Here are admirable descriptions of man to otter relationships, and apart from many photographs there are drawings by Peter Scott, the author, Robin McEwen and Michael Ayrton.

September 1960

This book was first published in 1958 as
The Sudden View
, when it was much acclaimed but sold hardly at all. Since then, its author has published
A Legacy
, a novel which deservedly made her such a reputation as would provide the excuse for re-issuing this earlier book - if one were needed.

It is an account of her journey from New York to Mexico City by train, her travels in the country and her long idyllic sojourn in Don Otavio’s hacienda on the shores of Lake Chapala. What chiefly strikes one about Mrs. Bedford - apart from her impressive literary powers - is that she is a most formidably civilised lady, widely read and travelled, cultivated to a pitch of intelligent curiosity which has become very rare in these days of housewife and organised travel: someone who has neither had her tastes imposed upon her by commerce, nor stumbled upon them in the single dark flight of reaction to which most of us resort once in our lives. She is therefore most excellent company, and this book has that ageless quality which is what most people mean when they describe a work as classical. From the moment that the train leaves New York at the height of its tormenting metallic summer with the author and her companion settling to an iced aperitif and a mutual exchange of irresponsibility, it is certain that this journey will be rewarding.

The choice of Mexico was something of an accident, but proved an admirable idea, since, apart from its exotic, remote and ungovernable quantities, Mexico seems also to possess this ageless quality where changes of any kind merely add to its variety of contrast - paradox piled upon paradox as it were - without making any appreciable difference to the country or its inhabitants. Mrs. Bedford seems naturally to understand this situation; as a traveller she both makes and takes opportunities, and she is also able to slip from the personal present - her observant eye upon the adventures of the day - into the volcanic violence of the general past, from the first great clash of Spanish and Indian religions until the present day.