The Pursuit of Laughter (66 page)

Very often a
curé
came to luncheon; there was a little chapel in the park where Mme Costa spent hours on her knees, praying. She confessed and communicated daily. The
curé
was such a friend that one day after a copious luncheon they boldly asked him: ‘What on earth does Mme Costa find to tell you in the way of sins?’ Good, kind old lady that she was, always shelling out money for church charities and praying half the day. The
curé
replied:
‘Oh, c’est toujours la même chose. J’ai été odieuse avec les invités’
[I have been odious to my guests].

Although this was untrue, there is no doubt that she sometimes joined forces with Nancy in teasing Mrs Hammersley. ‘Jeanne and Nancy flatter each other outrageously,’ she once wrote rather crossly. There may even have been moments when she regretted having brought them together. On the whole, however, the autumns at Fontaine-les-Nonnes were an idyll.

Mme Costa’s grandchildren, Jean and Marie-Zéphyre, spent most of their holidays there. One day, when M l’Abbé, headmaster of Jean’s school, came to talk to his grandmother, Jean guessed (rightly) that he would be the subject of their conversation, and he made
arrangements
accordingly. At 3.00 a.m. a lady guest who was crossing the passage to her bathroom was astonished to hear Mme Costa’s voice, and then a man’s voice, coming loud and clear from the attic. It was Jean’s tape recorder, an invention which has proved a boon to
eaves-droppers
.

Kit and I often went over to Fontaine for luncheon, and he used to say, ‘Try and make it a Friday.’ Naturally in such a pious household Friday was fish day, and the fishes and sauces Mme Costa provided were, if possible, even more delicious than the fare on the other six days when there was no fasting.

Besides the money tease, Nancy had another way of annoying Mrs Hammersley. It was connected with politics. As usual, the world was in turmoil. In the 50s, the war in
Indo-China
, then the war in Algeria, were painful for nearly every French family, and yet the
bien-pensant
denizens of Fontaine wanted at all costs to cling to this ‘French department’ as Algeria was called. Nancy made sorties to Paris from time to time, and usually saw Gaston
Palewski, or Gladwyn Jebb [the English Ambassador], or somebody who might be supposed to be in the know or at any rate to provide titbits not found in the newspapers. Mrs Hammersley waited impatiently for her return; she longed to hear what was being said in political circles. ‘What does Gaston
think
of the situation?’ (It might be war, or strikes, or a threatened devaluation; whatever it was Mrs Hammersley herself could be guaranteed to take the most pessimistic view.) Nancy’s answer was always the same: ‘Oh, he thinks
everything’s
perfect
. He screamed with laughter,’ and so forth. However familiar Mrs Hammersley became with this particular tease, however aware that of course Nancy’s account of what she had heard in Paris was very far from the truth, it never failed in its object. ‘Nancy has been her wicked little self,’ she wrote to me. They loved each other, but Nancy could never resist the temptation to plant a dart. After a groan or two, however, they settled down to their bridge, looking forward to dinner.

Sometimes Mrs Hammersley came to us for a few days at the Temple in Orsay; Kit was always pleased to see her, just as he had been at Wootton twenty five years before. She and I, as always, discussed our friends and relations at length, each in turn. The agonized
anxieties
once lavished upon her children were now transferred to her grandchildren, though she could find little to worry about in Monica’s large and thriving family. She was interested in every detail of the lives of friends, or the children of friends. She was getting deaf, and wore an ‘aid’ on a ribbon round her neck; it had a wheel which she twirled frantically if she thought something spicy might be coming up. Bad news she relished, and once when a friend of ours married a young man who was clever, rich, and handsome, she asked how they were getting on. ‘Oh, very well,’ was greeted with silence. Then she said, with great emphasis: ‘Somehow one had
hoped
they’d be
so
unhappy!’ Her hope was realized; there was a divorce soon after. The words ‘somehow one had hoped’ passed into our language, and also into hers. I found a letter in which, referring to a royal marriage, she says: ‘We mustn’t say Somehow one’d
hoped
.’ Perhaps she was mellowing with age.

I see from her letters that Nancy was not the only one who teased Mrs Hammersley. After the war, when the English ‘intellectuals’ hurried over to Paris in droves, they seem to have bored their French counterparts with excessive adulation. There was a story at the time that Jean Cocteau had turned on Raymond Mortimer, saying: ‘
Allez-vous-en, affreuse bergère
.’ [On your way, horrible shepherdess.] Raymond, a good critic and agreeable man, had a rather absurd side, one could very well imagine his unfortunate curls under the bonnet of a
shepherdess
. He was a friend of Mrs Ham’s and I must have passed on this tale; at least I can think of no other reason for the letter I received. She wrote:

* Mrs Aspinall Oglander, a great friend and neighbour of Mrs Hammersley in the Isle of Wight.

She goes on:

Sometimes she referred to us as ‘the horror sisters’, and once she wrote:

She heartily disliked and disapproved of de Gaulle, a cause of friction with Nancy, and wrote triumphantly of a bishop she met at Mme Costa’s who told her he was the devil incarnate.

Much as I loved her, I sometimes dodged Mrs Hammersley. Unless one had plenty of time to spare, it was worse than useless to get in touch with her. She wrote at the end of 1961:

We were in London during the winter of 1961; Mrs Hammersley was now 84. She wrote:

Another time she wrote: ‘Please come here in the New Year, or will the bomb have fallen?’

It was not easy for me to get away, although I very much wanted to see her, and no doubt wrote saying: ‘I
die
for you.’ A postcard came: ‘If you really died for me, or w’d my b, you’d come.’ Elizabeth Winn, a great friend of Debo’s and much loved by Mrs Ham, was once heard addressing her dog with the words: ‘I worship your body.’ This expression was taken on by Debo, and applied to people, animals and inanimate objects she happened to like. I once heard her say, ‘Oh! that
chintz!
I worship its body.’ Probably now that the liturgy has been changed and everything with the savour of the seventeenth century removed, young people will not recognize body-worshipping as having been part of the marriage service. In any case, Mrs Hammersley said if I really died for her and w’d her b, I would go down to the Isle of Wight. I went, and very delightful it was. Delicious food, pretty house, windy walks along what she insisted was the crumbling coast—rather unexpectedly, even in old age she was a great walker. And then the joys of the ‘chat’.

My poor mother had Parkinson’s disease, and Mrs Hammersley, though genuinely sorry, could not resist saying: ‘What about the good body now?’ Muv had been used to dismiss doctors in a rather airy way, saying the good body would cure itself.
She
would never have written: ‘My health is precarious nowadays, despite Nancy’s gibes, and I have to take care and not get tired. Fond love always, Mrs Ham.’

In one of her last letters, in January 1963, she says: ‘lf you love me at all, let alone W my B you will write to me again. Letters alone sustain me…’

There is no cure for old age, and my mother and Mrs Hammersley, friends for sixty five years, died within a few months of one another. Hers was the charm of sharp intelligence, wonderful elegance, and a real and deep interest in every aspect of the lives of her friends. This interest was also lavished upon small children, who loved her accordingly as she loved them. When Debo’s son was three, Mrs Hammersley said: I suppose you realize he’s at the very
zenith
of his sweetness.’ There was a song she had composed for her own children when they were little; she played and sang in her rather husky voice. The last line was: ‘How I shall miss you, when you are grown!’ She sang it to us, and then a generation later to my little boys. The poignancy and truth of the words only struck me, painfully, when I was myself old, and my children ‘grown’.

Towards the end, Rosamond Lehmann had built a house near Mrs Hammersley at Totland Bay; having her, whom she had known as a child, nearby was a great comfort. Christopher says that for his mother Rosamond was, in every sense of the word, her closest friend during those last months. She died in her eighty seventh year.

I was 18 when I first met Lytton Strachey in 1929, and 21 when he died at the age of 51. To my present aged self 51 sounds quite young, and yet I always thought of him during our friendship as an old man. In the early days he complained in a letter to Roger Senhouse [his passion of the moment] that I was ‘probably too young to provide any real sustenance’. However youth’s a stuff will not endure, and partly because of him I grew up quickly.

He was a hero to our generation as author of the wittiest books. After his death he was scolded by his less brilliant successors in the art of biography for having made fun of great figures of the past. He was said to have ‘de-bunked’ them, and even to have twisted the truth in order to further his devilish denigrations. In fact, his eminent Victorians (for it is his essays about them which are the principal target of the anti-Strachey school) leave the reader with profound admiration for Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, and General ‘Chinese’ Gordon. Dr Arnold is another matter. Had they met, he and Strachey would have loathed one another, and perhaps it is a mistake to write about someone so thoroughly disliked. As to Queen Victoria herself, she is an authentic heroine to Lytton Strachey, though (like Disraeli) he could not help seeing the comic side.

When Bertrand Russell read
Eminent Victorians
he was a prisoner in Brixton Gaol; it was during the First World War. His screams of laughter were so loud that, he says, one of the turnkeys came to remonstrate with him and to remind him that prison was a place of
punishment
. Similarly, when Queen Victoria’s great-grandson the Prince of Wales (Edward VIII) found, lying on a table at Philip Sassoon’s, Lytton’s book about his ancestress, he was convulsed with laughter the whole time he was reading it.

The oddities of the characters who make history are just as true and often as important as battles or Acts of Parliament or the ending of one reign and the beginning of the next. It is seldom, indeed, that even fairly solemn newspapers like
The Times
or the
Guardian
fail to provide subjects for laughter every day of the week, and so it has always been. The jokes and ironies in Strachey’s books help to underline the pathos which is also part of truth. His own view of history is explicit. In his opinion it is not a science but an art. Faced with an unwieldy accumulation of facts, only an artist can convert ‘this raw mass of grape juice into a subtle, splendid wine’.

Early in 1929 Emerald Cunard introduced me to him at the opera, where he was in her box, and at a supper party that she had afterwards we sat next to each other. I had longed to meet him, and having done so I clung to him tenaciously, inviting him to dinner, to
luncheon
, or for a chat by the fire in the afternoon. He always came, and enthralled us all by being
so wonderfully, so exactly what we had imagined him to be: learned, rather intimidating, and brilliantly amusing.

By this time the Victorians and his teases were in the distant past, but the enormous
success
of the two books had changed his life because money was no longer a worry. He lived in modest comfort at Ham Spray, near Hungerford in Berkshire, and in London, and he could afford to go abroad from time to time. He reviewed when he chose to, and above all he could concentrate upon the period of history which puzzled and enthralled him: the
sixteenth
century. French literature was his passion. He was a natural teacher who liked to read aloud, which he did in the Strachey voice, but not with the shrieks and squeaks that added so much zest to his jokes in conversation.

Lytton had designed his own appearance. He was tall, lanky, delicate-looking, inclined to stoop, and he had an enormous nose. To balance the nose a moustache, which he grew as a young man, was inadequate; he decided upon a long and bushy beard, brown with reddish tints. Beards were much more uncommon in those days than they are now, or were in Victorian times. He could, therefore, never pass unnoticed in a crowd and was instantly
recognized
by nearly everyone. It is odd that such a fundamentally shy person should deliberately have drawn attention to himself in this way, but there is no doubt he transformed the curious physique bestowed upon him by nature into an artistic reconstruction of a patriarch or an early Christian saint. There is a mosaic in one of Constantinople’s Byzantine
churches
which could be a portrait of Lytton Strachey, as exactly like him as Lamb’s and Carrington’s pictures. He was almost beautiful, but it was a strange beauty wholly without sexual attraction. Since he was beguiled by a succession of seductive young men he suffered agonizing disappointments, some of which we know about—like his despair when Duncan Grant preferred Maynard Keynes to him. Ignorant of these dramas, I nevertheless
instinctively
knew his life was in this way unsatisfactory; it was quite obvious.

In 1930 I invited him to stay with my husband Bryan Guinness and me in Ireland, which was bold to the point of rashness, because the long and disagreeable journey it was in those days entailed a sea crossing, nearly always rough, in a boat with few comforts, and had to be followed by a rather lengthy visit if it was going to be considered worthwhile. The whole outing started disastrously because, owing to a muddle, ‘owing to the incompetence of the idle rich’ was Lytton’s description in a letter to a friend), he was not met, and was obliged to get into an uncomfortable train and then take a taxi which got lost, ‘the rain all the time
pouring
cats and dogs’.

It is dreadful to contemplate what Lytton’s feelings must have been when no welcoming chauffeur appeared on the quayside at Dublin. I am sure I was contrite, but until I read his letter about it almost forty years later I had entirely forgotten that his visit began in this inauspicious way. His journey back was perfect. He took a cabin with no porthole so that he could not see the rocking of the ship and arrived at Holyhead ‘without a qualm’, he wrote.

Lytton had bought a new suit for Ireland, a tweed of a rich marmalade colour which set off his beard to perfection. He had discussed his packing with Carrington and decided to
take full evening dress as well as his dinner jacket; rather lucky, as I am sorry to say we dragged him to an evening party at Government House, as the Viceregal Lodge was then called. Carrington wrote to him: ‘What wizards we are to have guessed there would be a Vice Regal Ball with white shirts!’ I expect he hoped to get out of it, but this I refused to allow. He was worth his weight in gold on such occasions, his presence keeping boredom at bay in even the most unpromising surroundings.

The only time during the visit that he resolutely refused to do what I asked was when he was expected to go to a play at the Abbey Theatre. We had already been to one play there, and it had been very dull. As I could see that Lytton was suffering we all left after the first act. When the programme changed (the Abbey was a repertory theatre, but there was a dread sameness about the plays) he simply refused to go. He hid behind his beard and spectacles, but his thoughts were easy to guess.

Henry Lamb, the painter, with whom he had been in love twenty years before and
subsequently
had a rather uneasy, quarrelsome relationship, was also staying in the house. I think they were quite glad to find each other, old friends, even old enemies, of the same vintage in a crowd of the very young. Among the guests was the clever, saturnine Henry Yorke [Henry Green, the novelist, then aged 24], who never forgot sitting next to Lytton at the deadly play, and how Lytton had whispered to him about one of the dreary characters: ‘I’m feeling rather
low
about
Ignatius
.’ When Strachey’s biographer, Michael Holroyd, asked many years later what Henry Yorke’s impression of him had been, he stressed his unfailing
courtesy
to us all. Naturally in his letters to friends a more critical, fiercer Lytton emerges, but he rather enjoyed the company of young people and basked in our admiration and our
laughter
at his jokes. He did not write, as he once did from Garsington, that he had been on the point of screaming from sheer despair. When one considers Lady Ottoline Morrell’s
hospitality
had saved him from the boredom and discomfort of his life as a young man among the crowd of Stracheys at home in Lancaster Gate, this fact alone—of the relative mildness of his complaints—shows the enormous change in Lytton and the extent to which success had mellowed him.

Society made a lion of him, and although he laughed at his hostesses, he also enjoyed himself. There is a theory that he felt a little guilty about his excursions into the
beau monde
. I am sure this is not so. The outside world could never influence him—he was incorruptible and irreverent. But he was not a puritan; he liked good food and wine and comfort and
beauty
. He dreaded boredom, but he fled at the merest hint of that. It is hard to imagine a French writer who would refuse a delicious dinner because the host was one of the idle rich; on the contrary, if not invited he would censure the rich man for lacking the wit to realize that clever conversation is as essential to a good dinner as old wines and perfect cooking. Lytton’s
sorties
into the fashionable world were severely rationed by his need for quiet to write, but he would regret that it is now an almost vanished world, into which writers and other artists can but seldom escape. In those days, for them, it was like a free journey into another, rather delightful, country.

Lytton’s bread and butter letter was no doubt as insincere as such letters generally are. ‘How, oh how, to say how much I enjoyed every moment of my visit, and how, how, oh how, to thank you for your angelic kindness? It was the greatest refreshment for me—a veritable experience too!—I dwell in memory upon every detail, every single one. [Including, I
suppose
, my reprehensible incompetence.] What fun! I only hope my occasional vagaries didn’t infuriate you. I imagine you at this moment in a nest of Sitwells.’ There is a postscript to this letter. ‘Oh! The fires of Knockmaroon. A subject for an Ode by Pindar.’ It was August, but fires, if not a necessity, are at least a comfort in a damp climate.

While Lytton was with us I continually questioned Henry and Pansy Lamb about his life. I doted upon him. I particularly wanted to hear about Carrington, who was said to love him so dearly and to ask so little in return. People told one that Carrington’s husband, Ralph Partridge, and his lover, Frances Marshall, lived with Lytton and Carrington and made a happy foursome; but the one who mattered to me was Carrington. Would she like me, or at any rate not dislike me too much? The Lambs were pessimistic: they said they couldn’t imagine Carrington and me together; no, it would never do.

A month or two later Lytton invited Bryan and me to stay at Ham Spray. Besides Carrington, Ralph Partridge and Frances Marshall there were Raymond Mortimer and Roger Senhouse, a typical Ham Spray house party. Lytton’s library, a well-proportioned room where he worked, was upstairs. Standing beside him in the window with its view of the Berkshire Downs, I saw Roger Senhouse crossing the lawn. ‘Almost too charming, don’t you think?’ asked Lytton, in such a way that I realized Roger was his beloved.

I felt shy of Carrington, probably because I so much wanted to be liked by her. On Saturday evening Lytton read us an essay on Froude he had recently finished. Perhaps it was true that the Irish visit had been a refreshment to him, at any rate when he got home he began to write again, which he had not done for months. He liked reading aloud: he said it helped him to judge the flow of words.

On Sunday evening Carrington made us a rabbit pie for dinner. I had never tasted
rabbit
before—it is forbidden to the children of Israel, and we were brought up by my mother according to the laws of Moses. Why rabbit? Not to eat the dirty pig, the accursed one as my mother always called him, was probably wise for the inhabitants of hot countries like Jews and Moslems. But surely the rabbit with its clean vegetarian diet must be harmless? However, Moses was right, as I discovered that night. Like the oyster, it occasionally
harbours
a poisonous substance which has an appalling effect upon the human digestion. Carrington’s was one of these terrible creatures. I was violently ill all night long; I thought I was going to die. The doctor had to be summoned in the small hours; he gave me something that sent me to sleep for a long time. When I woke up the house party had disappeared, except for Carrington who nursed me back to health. This accident of food poisoning was a short cut from mere acquaintance to great friendship, for henceforward I looked upon
Carrington
as a great friend.

I cannot remember what I said to Lytton in my bread and butter letter; nobody cares
much for a guest who falls sick, and he with his long history of ill health probably minded a good deal. If he did, he soon forgave me, and we saw each other quite often in London. I hoped he was going to be bowled over by Harold Acton, the one friend of our own
generation
whom we revered as well as loved. I longed for them to appreciate each other as much as I appreciated both. After dining with us, ‘a rather dreary dinner’, he tells Carrington, ‘once more Harold Acton figured. I feel myself falling under his sway little by little’.

A few months later, having acquired Biddesden, a house on the borders of Wiltshire and Hampshire, we became neighbours of Ham Spray and Carrington. She frequently came over, sometimes with Lytton and sometimes without. I imagined I knew her intimately, but this was mere illusion. Only many years later, from innumerable books about the Bloomsbury Group, did I learn that although obviously Lytton was her star, the
irreplaceable
focal point of her life without whose presence she preferred to die, yet she was
simultaneously
juggling with a number of lovers whom she kept throwing up in the air and
catching
and throwing again. Just occasionally one of them fell to earth with a crash but, though painful for him, it was of supreme unimportance to her. It was natural to her to dispose of the part of herself for which Lytton had no use in a rather cold-hearted way, and she made her lovers suffer because they all sensed her indifference, and that ultimately they meant nothing to her at all. Only Lytton counted.