For the Time Being (19 page)

So this shy faux-cock-teaser, this shrew, this timid child, pranced and leapt around her Bloomsbury maypole clutching the ribbons, the Gertler, the Brenan, the two Woolfs, the Partridges and, to many people's consternation, an absurd sailor who instructed her, as she put it, in ‘lust'. Beakus Penrose was thicker than three planks.

Well: there we are. She danced and capered with all her ribbons, mixing them up greatly, getting into a terrible tangle, while the centre of the maypole – one can say the pole itself which held the whole thing together – was in truth the complete love of her life, amazingly, until the day that she died: Lytton Strachey.

A tall, stooping, bearded figure, older by far than herself, with granny-glasses and the bending frailty of a folding ruler, he adored her for the rest of his life and they were joined at the hip. Strachey was homosexual, preferring pretty boys to tender doting ladies, but he settled down to live a completely contented life with Carrington, and she with him, cosseting, loving, caring for him deeply.

No one else really mattered to her. Although she flirted and was bedded, she rebuffed, and recalled, with tiresome regularity, a long series of lovers both male and female. She chucked her Augustus
John-image gipsy skirts, off-the-shoulder blouses, for breeches and hacking jackets, and cantered over the downs when she wasn't painting, falling in love, or driving someone mad or writing her wonderfully misspelled letters, brilliantly revealing of the creature, but not prominent here. For that you must turn to David Garnett's
Carrington
of 1970, the collected letters, to get the full flavour of this extraordinary hoyden-given brilliance.

A fellow student at the Slade dismissed Carrington once to me rather sweepingly: ‘Silly old Dotty Carry-on, we called her …' But there was a lot more to her than that, and those paintings which have survived prove she was unique in her time. Nearer to Nevinson and Nash than John or Laura Knight! Her work today still catches at the heart in its simplicity and its brilliant use of colour.

Eventually she and Strachey set up house with the unlikely Partridge, a returnee from the hell of Flanders, who wanted her desperately. Strachey, on the other hand, was rather keen to have Partridge. But he never made base.

This strange
ménage à trois
endured and eventually, under extreme pressure, Carrington became Mrs Partridge and survived a pretty tempestuous relationship, an on-and-off affair conducted at all times under the benign eye of Strachey, who seemed not to mind so long as he was fed and watered, loved and cosseted, allowed to get on with his writing and permitted to go abroad from time to time to indulge his sexual needs.

It all seemed set, safe and fairly serene. Carrington cooked, rode, painted and leapt in and out of beds when ‘lust' got the better of her, although she was not absolutely mad about that part. However, they could have joyfully capered on into old age except that Partridge fell for another and married her. The strings of the maypole got badly tangled, Carrington was left only with her pole, Strachey, and settled happily for that, for he adored her. But that happiness was brutally snatched away when Strachey died of cancer, leaving her alone in a hideous vacuum.

Loneliness is a killer. It killed Carrington. She wrote, one day: ‘He first deceased, she for a little tried/to live without him, liked it not and died.' Attempting to shoot a rabbit one evening from
her bedroom window, she somehow slipped and shot herself.

Can a person love another so desperately? They can. The book ends with the line: ‘Love is love and hard enough to find.' Carrington found it and could not bear to have it wrenched away. Life was unendurable without Strachey, so she left. Simple as that.

Sunday Telegraph,
18 June 1989

The New Yorker Book of War Pieces: London 1939 to
Hiroshima 1945
(Bloomsbury)

The only time I see the
New Yorker
now is in some dentist's or doctor's waiting-room. Thumbed nervously, tattered, out of date; a skimpy little booklet stuffed with leering advertising for Imported Everything: from Chanel to chandeliers, from gin to Aran sweaters, or ‘live lobsters from Maine' and lumps of'Aunt Tabitha's Original Fruit Cakes'. Or whatever.

Embedded in this unseemly riot of sales-tease you might just come across a decent piece of writing. Some prose, a poem perhaps, a cartoon or a film review from its acidic critic. But honestly, by the time you have waded through the sweaters and fruit cakes, sublime in their vulgarity, you will be called to have your blood-pressure taken. And you won't have missed a great deal, I assure you.

But there was a time – oh! indeed there was – when the
New Yorker
stood supreme. (Only the very best need apply. Only the very best did.) And here is a collection of some of the war pieces published between September 1939 and that appalling August day when innocence and charity were dispersed for ever in the dust of Hiroshima. I suppose the book will appeal most to those of us who are comfortably over forty. You won't know what the hell it is all about if you are in your thirties: still less if you have just hit twenty.

But for the sheer splendour of the writing and the reporting of a time lost for ever, it is almost essential reading. No matter that you were ‘not there at the time' or ‘can't identify', you will be amazed that we were so damned innocent: so simple, so pleasant, so
unbelievable
in comparison with today's grab-all, ugly, streetwise, utter-fall-from-grace-people who now surround us.

We were really pretty nice idiots who went to war and badly burned our fingers. Then, in 1939, Princess Paul Sapieha toured her estates in Poland in her chauffeur-driven car plus children and nanny never to return. That's how it
was.
Her account is written with calm good sense, the ease of ‘position', the knowledge that there would be no looking back. Worse, no going back. Ever!

It is a good way to start the book. John Hersey finishes it with his cool, calm, dreadful account of the murder of Hiroshima. Not one word too much here; no excess. It haunts by its simplicity.

This is glorious, clean journalism which today almost no longer exists because it is not
permitted
to exist. Everything must now be written in colour-supplement language which knows that the reader has only a thirty-second attention span and must be clobbered over the head with all the subtlety of a crack with a cricket bat.

One of the most famous of the contributors to this magazine was Janet Flanner, with her ‘Letter from Paris'. Her brisk, startling account of Mrs Jeffrey's escape from Paris over the border to Spain should be a compulsory piece in every anthology of the greatest short stories. It is riveting. So, too, is Mollie Panter Downs with her ‘Letter from London'. Beautiful, simple reporting which reads quite unbelievably today like Mrs Miniver's work. Until you suddenly realize that it is about real Mrs Minivers, of all classes, who
did
exist.

One almost disbelieves, and then recalls that we
were
like that. There
were
Cockneys, there
were
stiff-upper-lips, people
did
celebrate death and birth and wounds and loss with ‘a nice cup of tea', and V-2s did thud down at rose shows and Wapping was a real place – not a centre for office blocks, newspapers, rubber plants and Porsches, but a vibrant part of a living city where some people lived in rows of little cottages, with outdoor privies and sometimes a bit of raggedy garden with cabbage and dahlias – and a tin bath for Friday hanging on a nail in the brick wall.

All were awaiting obliteration, which arrived on a still September evening. Now everyone is in tower blocks; they don't know their neighbours; they aren't even Cockneys.

The Americans arrived, a little late as usual, but when they did
they inspired awe with their simplicity, respect for their firepower, affection for their generosity, and gratitude. And they fought with us to the death.

You must not miss A. J. Liebling's account of the D-day landing and after; or John Lardner, to whose memory this book is dedicated (he was killed at Aachen), and his account, funny and desperately sad, of the landing at Anzio. And there are many others too: Iwo Jima; Phillip Hamburger's letters from Rome (8 May 1945) and Berchtesgaden (1 June); and the empty echoing of Berlin raped, are shattering.

You will not read of concentration camps here, of the Holocaust, of Dresden, of the evil things that happened to the victims of infamous Yalta, or of the officers at Katyn, because these terrible things were only just emerging with the discovery, one cool April morning, of the monstrosity that was Belsen. There had been rumours. We were aware that there were worms beneath the stones. There were whispered stories, murmured hints of dreadfulness ahead, but just at that time we had not entirely kicked the stones over.

The
New Yorker
did not cover Stalingrad. There are no reports from China, of Wingate and his Chindits. But this is not a history book. There is no serious academic lesson or lecture in its pages. All it might do is remind you what really brilliant and brave reporting, and glorious writing, was like, and just how much our generation, and indeed yours, lost along with it all. I doubt you'll see its like again.
You
lost splendid writing;
we
lost that and all our innocence.

A hell of a lot.

Daily Telegraph,
29 July 1989

Capote: A Biography
by Gerald Clarke (Cardinal)

Capote said of himself: ‘There's the one and only TC. There was nobody like me before, and there ain't gonna be anybody like me after I'm gone.'

He was right on all points.

Start reading this splendidly constructed, very moving, often funny book of Gerald Clarke's and you won't want to set it aside. It is compulsive reading, with all the tenacity of a good novel and the incredibly researched detail of a thorough biography. It proves, if it had to be proved, that in this singular case ‘it
is
a great help to know the person about whom you are writing.'

Clarke knew Capote in the last years of his life and had to watch the appalling decline of his subject into decay, ruin and ultimate death. Helpless to assist, he could only attend at the bier.

This is the unhappy story of a genius-gone-wrong, the destruction of a could-be glorious machine, of a brilliance tarnished and corroded far too early. A sad creature born of imbecilically hopeless parents in Alabama, who was as hopelessly lost and adrift in life as they were, he eventually managed to get away from them, adopted the name of his stepfather, Capote, and got himself to New York.

Undersized, high-voiced, effeminate, almost-pretty when young, homosexual and fairly repellent on drugs and drink when older, he wrote. And
how
he wrote! The output was modest, but it was marked with an astonishing originality, and his first major work,
Other Voices, Other Rooms,
secured his position. He coursed along on this
oeuvre
for quite a while, chucked in
Breakfast at Tiffany's
and odd bits and pieces, and became the cherished ‘collectable' of the Smart-set and the Literary-louts.

He spent most of his time flitting like a dark, silent bat from love
to lover, potion to potions, county to country, pill to needles; he was, in fact, on a downward path from the second that he wriggled free of his mother's resentful womb. He knew about words, about sex and people, and how they ticked and
why
they did.

Capable of great affection and blistering cruelty, he was often described as Puck or Merlin, or merely as a ‘bloody witch'. He began to believe his own myth, not a sensible thing to do at the best of times, and his times were mostly the worst.

His masterpiece is, however,
In Cold Blood,
the true story of the wanton, aimless slaughter of a small-town family in Kansas. The story became his obsession for almost half a decade; he lived among the witnesses, knew the killers, was marked by the experience for the rest of his life.

Gerald Clarke's massively researched account of this unhappy writer is like a police torch probing cruelly with a blinding light into the darkest recesses of a thieves' attic, revealing all the evidence needed as well as nuggets of sheer splendour, to prove the word ‘genius'.

He makes it perfectly clear that Capote was correct when he stated: ‘There ain't gonna be anybody like me after I'm gone.'

There ain't.

Sunday Telegraph,
13 August 1989

Goldwyn: A Biography
by A. Scott Berg (Hamish Hamilton)

Here is a triumphant biography. A. Scott Berg's last one was about Maxwell Perkins (the Genius Editor) but this is about a very different fellow, a rum fish indeed, but nevertheless a Titan. More or less illiterate, speaking only Yiddish and some Polish, at sixteen he walked from Warsaw, via Hamburg, London (dossing in Hyde Park) and Birmingham (where he had an aunt), and finally reached North America (£95 steerage).

There is no record of him having set foot in the United States. There is, on the other hand, a belief that he probably landed in Canada. We must assume he slipped across a wild frontier and reached his Utopia. Determination, guts and raw ruthlessness remained with him all his long, and raging, life.

I'm not going to tell you the story here, nor shall I attempt to analyse this extraordinary man. Scott Berg does that. His book is no less triumphant than his biography of Perkins: scrupulously researched, witty, moving even, amazing at all times, wry and utterly absorbing.

Schmuel Gelbfisz was the eldest of six children born to gentle Aaron and extremely ugly ‘Big Hannah' (victims of an unhappy ‘arranged' marriage). He spent his early life in two rooms on the edge of starvation and the Jewish Quarter of Warsaw. The family never
quite
starved, although they once had to survive for a week on a handful of potatoes; life was a constant battle against fear, pogroms, conscriptions for the Tsar's army, hunger and virulent anti-Semitism. Schmuel, reasonably, decided it was time to get out.