The Pursuit of Laughter (53 page)

Mr Bernard's book is the best and most complete biography of Talleyrand in English. There is little to complain about. When he makes James II a contemporary of George III it is obviously a slip of the pen: he means the Stuart pretender, the Cardinal of York. The organiser of the ill-fated flight to Varennes was Axel Fersen, not Fernsen, and the Prince de Ligne has become, rather absurdly, the Prince de Linge [Linen]. (Both these mistakes appear in the index as well as in the text.) To an English eye the American spelling is unpleasing, and Lady Elizabeth Holland and Lord Charles Grey will hardly do for Lady Holland and Lord Grey. Apart from these relatively trivial errors, the publisher is to be congratulated on an excellent production at a very modest price.

What made Talleyrand so greatly loved and appreciated by his many friends of both sexes and of all ages? Above all, it was his brilliant conversation. Mme de Rémusat speaks of his ‘method of approaching serious subjects in the most frivolous possible manner',
and she says: ‘Although more artificial than anyone I had ever known, he was able, out of a thousand affectations, to construct a perfectly natural manner.' There was not a trace of pomposity or hypocrisy in him, and Mme de La Tour du Pin, who disapproved of him, says: ‘in spite of everything, he had more charm than any other man I have ever known', while an observer at the Congress of Vienna declares: ‘He seemed to dominate that illustrious assembly by the charm of his mind and the ascendancy of his genius.'

Talleyrand: A Biography
, Bernard, J.F.
Books and Bookmen
(1973)

Mme du Deffand had the good fortune to live in eighteenth-century Paris, where her
surroundings
were of perfect beauty. She was pretty, and rich enough to be comfortable, as were her many friends. Versailles, with its jealousies and stifling etiquette, was no longer the magnet it had been the century before; and Mme du Deffand, after a fling in her youth with the dissolute Regent, settled down to what must seem an ideal life. Wit and beauty assembled in her yellow silk drawing room and amused themselves with chat and cards, only interrupted by delicious food.

If an interesting foreigner came to Paris he soon found his way to Mme du Deffand. There was even a spice of danger; free-thinking men and the encyclopedia they were writing were sometimes confined in the Bastille. Mme du Deffand was a comfortable reactionary, but Voltaire, a great friend of hers, lived on the borders of Switzerland. He had been in the Bastille once, and had no desire to go back.

Mme du Deffand partook of the
douceur de vivre
, which Talleyrand said only those who had lived before the French Revolution had known. Yet long before she went blind she was discontented. She said over and over again she wished she had never been born. Cross and sharp with her servants and companions, when her sight faded she took her niece Julie de Lespinasse to live with her. After a while Julie escaped from her tyranny and set up on her own. She had no money, but all Mme du Deffand's friends combined to give her what she needed, and annoyed the marquise by making Julie's salon as brilliant as her own. They were perhaps tired of the eternal grumbling and pessimism, although Mme du Deffand could be excellent company.

When Horace Walpole appeared on the scene Mme du Deffand fell madly in love with him. She was old enough to be his mother, and Walpole fled, terrified of becoming an object of ridicule. He wrote her very cruel and repressive letters, while she tried her best not to allow her love expression in her replies. The whole episode is painful; she lived only for his occasional visits to Paris.

Her letters to Walpole, Voltaire and others, are not to be compared with those of the other marquise, Mme de Sévigné, a century earlier. They are full of complaints, and one
feels both Walpole and Voltaire were terrified she might descend upon them, at Strawberry Hill or at Ferney.

Benedetta Craveri's enjoyable book tells the story well. The footnotes are at the end instead of at the bottom of the page, where they belong, and the translation is riddled with Gallicisms. But Mme du Deffand and the appalling ennui she suffered from demonstrate that perfect surroundings, peace, plenty and wit, do not necessarily make happiness,
something
twentieth-century grumblers may find it hard to admit.

Madame du Deffand and Her World
, Craveri, B.
Evening Standard
(1994)

In theory, everybody is familiar with the letters of Mme de Sévigné. And in practice? Probably a few of those considered suitable were read in the schoolroom and have
scarcely
been glanced at since. Mrs Hammersley has changed all this; beautifully translated,
beautifully
produced, her book deserves to be a bestseller, for it is guaranteed to delight, amuse and instruct, with its excellent introduction and scholarly footnotes.

About one sixth of the letters are here; most of them addressed to Mme de Grignan. ‘It is ordained there should be a Mme de Sévigné whose love for her daughter passes the love of mothers, from whom she has constantly to be parted' wrote the Marquise. Mme de Grignan (who was also a faithful correspondent, but whose letters have not survived) has often been blamed for her coldness—this ‘dry stick of a daughter' as Irvine calls her—but there is nothing harder to put up with than the sort of possessive, enveloping, passionate love which the mother heaped upon her. And with all this exaggerated adoration, Mme de Sévigné did not scruple to marry
la plus jolie fille de France
[the most beautiful girl in France] to a forty-year-old man, twice a widower, who had the pox (though this she could not know).

‘All his wives are dead,' wrote the bride's mother, cheerfully, ‘and by extraordinary good fortune his father and son as well, so that he is richer than ever before'.

Was seventeenth-century France a different world from our world? Mme de Sévigné's letters from Les Rochers could almost have been written yesterday. She walked in the woods, received her grand neighbours, chatted with the abbé, read a great many books, and never stopped assuring her correspondents that she was not in the least bored, but on the contrary occupied and amused. Those who love the country will sympathise; they are amused and happy, but Paris could believe it that they feel obliged to mention it each time they write.

Illness, the weather and money troubles were other stock subjects, whether she wrote from country or town. The doctors were very rough; yet to this day any French doctor will put his liverish patient on the diet of rice which M de Grignan found so
adoucissant
[
soothing
].

Politics, and church politics, were an unending source of gossip, and in those days everyone, however intelligent, was an amateur Crawfie. Certainly the doings of the royal family were spicy enough; births, deaths and the marriage nights of princes and princesses and of the King's large family of bastards were attended by the curious courtiers and every detail passed on to friends. Mme de Sévigné, staying at Grignan for her grandson's wedding, notes with surprise that the young couple were left to themselves all night and that nobody made a bawdy joke when they came down to breakfast.

It was to celebrate this wedding that local ladies, we read, ‘though they knew we wish to dispense with their presence, break the windows or crawl under the doors to come and pay their compliments at the peril of their lives.' [‘
qu'on avait priées de ne point venir, ont rompu des glaces, ont pensé tomber dessous, ont été en péril de leur vie, pour venir faire un compliment…
'] It was bitterly cold weather that February in Provence just as it has been this year; even the
rushing
Rhone was frozen, she writes. Surely it was ice, not windows, they broke in their polite efforts to reach the château?

Not the least of the book's great virtues is the elegance of Mrs Hammersley's English, which never jars by being too modern, and yet never irritates by being self-consciously antique.

The illustrations show what we want to see, the charm of Les Rochers, the grandeur of Grignan, the prettiness of Mme de Grignan and the exuberance of the letter writer.

Can one imagine a Mme de Sévigné of today going to watch a woman burned at the stake? I do not feel as certain, in saying no, as I should once have done.

Letters from Madame de Sévigné
, ed. and trans. Hammersley, V. (1956)

U and Non-U

BRITAIN

If I were a novelist I should think twice before allowing pre-publication extracts of my books to appear in newspapers. In some shiny journal a chapter from
Anglo-Saxon
Attitudes
, accompanied by huge caricature illustrations in full colour, nearly put me off reading the book. The editor had picked out a plum, one of Mr Wilson’s plummiest and most exaggerated baroque inventions: Mrs Salad, charwoman and former lavatory
attendant
.

Angus Wilson’s fans know well that he excels at oddities, dotty old women, criminal spivs and guilt-ridden intellectuals; the danger is, perhaps, that he might allow the richness and strangeness of his imagination to over-decorate his writing so that it became like a dinner of marrow bones and chocolate truffles.

In fact, however, Mrs Salad’s place in this novel is a minor one, no greater than Mrs Gummidge’s in
David Copperfield
. (If Angus Wilson reminds us of Dickens, and he does, it is of a Dickens who has read Freud and lost interest in reform.)

Among the crowd of personages my favourite monster is the Danish woman, Inge Middleton. Here she is with the village children whom she has taught to sing German, French and English carols at Christmas:

No wonder her clever, rich, attractive husband (a professor of medieval history) left her; he comes back each year to join the family, children and grandchildren, for a frightful Christmas to which the foregoing scene is prelude. He dislikes most his son John, Inge’s favourite child, a homosexual Labour ex-MP who earns large sums on TV fighting the battles of the little man.

Anglo-Saxon Attitudes
is the best novel I have read for a very long time. Among its many merits, it has a plot of extreme fascination; was the indecent fertility idol found by
archeologists
in the Anglo-Saxon bishop’s coffin buried with him or was it planted there by a
cynical practical joker? But the title has another meaning besides, for the book is a portrait of some of the less agreeable attitudes of present-day Anglo-Saxons.

Anglo-Saxon Attitudes
, Wilson, A. (1956)

The omniscient Bamber Gascoigne has long since taken all general knowledge to be his province, and he says he wrote this enormous book because he needed it on his shelves. As his métier is asking questions on television he probably does need it, though for most people, like the game Trivial Pursuits, it may be more entertaining than useful.

The dust jacket, with its incredible muddle of people and places, gives a fair idea of what is inside. The Cheshire Cat and Laurence Olivier, a pop star in full cry and Shakespeare, Kitchener and London buses, Queen Elizabeth smothered in jewels and the Jarrow hunger marchers in their painful misery, bracing Skegness and Winston Churchill, W.G. Grace and Winnie the Pooh are jammed together higgledy piggledy, and there’ll be a thumbnail sketch of everyone. Do they add up to ‘Britain’? Rather a grim thought. They are displayed against a sunset. Symbolic? Or just a bit more technicolour?

The book is heavy, all art paper with coloured illustrations, excellently done. Probably ‘history’ suffers most from thumbnail treatment, though biography runs it close. The brevity makes them tendentious, how could it not? The reader is constantly reminded of how much Britain loved interfering in the affairs of Europe and indeed the world, and how completely it has now lost the will or the power to interfere. The decline, and the speed of the decline, are surprising.

The encyclopedia is politically correct, warning that many popular hymns and nursery rhymes have become unacceptable: ‘All things bright and beautiful’, ‘eeny meeny miny mo’ and part of the National Anthem among them. Librarians in public libraries ban Noddy, but he remains a best seller; since he cannot be borrowed he is bought, which must have made a fortune for Enid Blyton.

The Bisto Kids
, 1919 version, are here, a tragic picture of ragged and undernourished children longing for what looks like typically nasty British food. It induces many questions. Why were people so poor, in the ‘richest country in the world’?

Why do the British put up with British Railways, is a question often pondered on the line between Dover and London by incoming tourists. Why so squeamish about a nursery rhyme but so tolerant of the filthy London underground? The encyclopedia tells us the underground dates from 1890, it has accumulated grime for more than a century, and nobody seems to mind. St Paul’s Cathedral being hidden by office blocks? Not enough to do something. Is British tolerance a virtue or a vice?

Yeats is excluded for being Irish. Terry Wogan is in, described as an Irish broadcaster.
This is probably just as it should be, although Britain’s greatest gift to the world is the English language, used by Yeats with such admirable virtuosity.

A final question: what would Sir Francis Bacon think of this book? Rather insular
perhaps
. But that is the object of the enterprise.

The Encyclopedia of Britain
, Gascoigne, B.
Evening Standard
(1993)

‘All the king’s horses, and all the king’s men, couldn’t put Caitlin Thomas together again.’ These words, the last in the book, are doubtless true. The only person who conceivably could pull her together would be Mrs Thomas herself, and she may very likely consider that the heavy task is not worth the trouble. That she is capable of doing it is proved by the fact that she was capable of the sustained effort and concentration required to produce the piercing, high-pitched, long-drawn-out wail which is
Leftover Life to Kill
.

A few months after she brought her husband’s body back to Wales from America Mrs Thomas went with her youngest child to a Mediterranean island, where she spent a wretched, cold winter in a cheap hotel. She describes various sad little adventures, and even managed to fall in love in a rather mild way with an Italian miner aged eighteen. The inhabitants, according to her account, were relieved when she finally left their shores, although they did not, like her Welsh neighbours, go so far as to wish to tar and feather her and put her on a bonfire. She has a good many complaints to make about them, chief of these their drinking habits. She says they never wanted to drink with her at what they considered the wrong times, and she was never able to find out when was the right time. Unlike Wales, where, of course, the right time was opening time. The island and the island loves, hates and quarrels are really padding, however; for the point of the book is that it tells once again the story of Dylan Thomas the poet, whose death has left his wife at the bottom of a pit of despair in which she attempts to kill time; until life, which has become for her a useless misery, shall finally come to an end.

Here is one of her descriptions of her husband: ‘He was never his proper self until there was something wrong with him; and, if ever there was a danger of him becoming “whole”, which was very remote, he would crack another of his chicken bones, without delay, and wander happily round in his sling, piling up plates with cucumber, pickled onions, tins of cod’s roe, boiled sweets; to push into his mouth with an unseeing hand, as they came, while he went on solidly reading his trash. His passion for lies was congenital: more a practice in invention than a lie. He would tell quite unnecessary ones, which did not in any way improve his situation: such as, when he had been to one cinema, saying it was another, and the obvious ones, that only his mother pretended not to see through, like being carted off the bus into his home, and saying he had been having coffee, in a café,
with a friend.’ He and Mrs Thomas fought and nagged and annoyed one another, but she misses him ‘and pines, as keenly as a sick cow for its calf just removed.’

Jung says that perhaps we owe everything to our neuroses. We probably owe Dylan Thomas’s saga to his neurotic desire to escape from the stifling petty-bourgeois Welsh atmosphere in which he had been brought up. ‘No blue-blooded gentleman was a quarter as gentlemanly as Dylan’s father. And, though Dylan imagined himself to be completely emancipated from his family background, there was a very strong puritanical streak in him, that his friends never suspected; but of which I got the disapproving benefit.’ (He made Mrs Thomas wear gloves to go to Carmarthen market.)

This book confirms the horrible accounts already published of the poet’s sordid life and death. To what do we owe its appearance? Did Mrs Thomas feel that if she
unburdened
herself, told all, held back no private details, she could be cured of her bitterness (which she describes as ‘solid as a Christmas cake’), put away the past, start life anew? Apparently not. ‘They say confession is a great relief, as liberating and loosening as a flood of tears, to the confessor. I don’t agree—I find it unmitigatedly painful,’ she says. Possibly she wrote the book to earn money. Thomas had an enormous success in America, and
perhaps
on the whole Mrs Thomas, who loathes such unalike places in Europe as Wales and Italy with an equal loathing, would be better off in, say, Greenwich Village, where she would presumably find plenty of hard liquor at all hours of the day and night and where the cracked Dylan Thomas gramophone record might be put on over and over again for a delighted audience of fans.

Leftover Life to Kill
, Thomas, C. (1957)