An Awful Lot of Books (12 page)

It is perhaps idle to speculate upon whether poets make their childhood, or whether the right kind of childhood would make a poet, but there is an extraordinary inevitability underlying this book - a feeling that all the ingredients were right: the large warm-blooded family set in the small village in isolated and beautiful country; the privations real ones, the pleasures natural, the life all on a scale in which a child could find his place and grow. At any rate, Mr. Lee has made full use of it, rather as though in this book, he has opened his memory and it is revealed like a chest of treasure - dazzling, overflowing, so stuffed with the rich ornament of his mind and the enchanting workmanship of his language that it is difficult to pick out any particular piece of it. The portrait of his mother is wonderful - true and round and unsentimental and charged with affection.

‘She was muddled and mischievous as a chimney-jackdaw … was happy in the sunlight, squawked loudly at danger, pried and was insatiably curious, forgot when to eat or ate all day, and sang when sunsets were red … With her love of finery, her unmade beds, her litter of unfinished scrapbooks, her taboos superstitions and prudishness, her remarkable dignity, her pity for the persecuted, her awe of the gentry, and her detailed knowledge of the family trees of all the Royal Houses of Europe, she was a disorganised mass of unreconciled denials, a servant girl born to silk. Yet in spite of all this, she fed our oafish wits with steady, imperceptible shocks of beauty … an interpretation of man and the natural world so unpretentious and easy that we never recognised it then, yet so true that we never forgot it.’

Then there are the Grannies who lived beside each other and the Lees, ‘rival ancients who lived on each other’s nerves and their perpetual enmity was like mice in the walls’. The old Browns who had lived together for fifty years, until they were discovered lying on the floor, both of them too weak to stand and the old lady trying to feed her husband with a spoon, when they were cruelly divided by authoritarian kindness - separate parts of the workhouse; ‘they would see each other twice a week’, but they both died of this division in the first week. Getting up in the morning with his brother: ‘we both stood at last on the bare wood floor, scratching and saying our prayers. Too stiff and manly to say them aloud, we stood back to back and muttered them, and if an audible plea should slip out by chance, one just burst into song to cover it’.

A great deal of this book makes one laugh; the author has that charming view of the ludicrous which makes one love what one is laughing at, but through all of it, the times of day, the seasons of the year are the rhythm of the book, and one sees how carefully noted and absorbed they were in his childhood, so that now they are an integral part of his poetry - of everything he has to say. But perhaps the most striking feature of this work, and the one that gives it its unique quality and flavour, is the way in which Mr. Lee uses language. After reading it one feels that the rest of us have been muddling along for years with words that have been, so to speak, bottled, canned, tarnished, frozen and knocked out with casual and repeated misuse, and that he has picked and collected them fresh, so that they taste and smell - have their natural shape and sound and life and are a blessing to all the senses. There is nothing dithering, pretentious or obscure about this writing; it is prose like fresh bread - crisp, succulent and memorable - in fact, the stuff of language in a world that today is sated with the ready-mixed cakes of slogans, clichés and jargon. This is the Book Society’s admirable choice for November, but for what it is worth on a smaller scale, it is my book of the year.

December 1959

On June 28th, 1914, seven young men took up positions on an avenue in Sarajevo, then the capital of Bosnia, with the intention of assassinating Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary. The Archduke and his wife were in an open car - both were shot and died. There must be many people now for whom the word Sarajevo tolls no sound of doom - for whom archdukes are operatic luxuries - the distance of Sarajevo a matter of hours, and assassinations are generally associated with some kind of mass gang warfare or racial prejudice. It is therefore exactly the right moment for a clear and detailed account of the events leading up to and away from the murder which touched off the first World War. Professor Remak seems to have taken a great deal of intelligent trouble about them, both from his excellent portraits of the main characters, and his exposition of the wide, rotting and frightening scene in which they are set, the assassination seems not only unsurprising, but inevitable, and one is really only astonished that it did not occur earlier. The book is an extraordinary picture of transition between King Lear and bullet-proof cars, and is worth reading.

December 1959

Mr. Potter opens his autobiography with the idea that one is born grown up, but tied in a parcel, the wrappings of which are much too tight for one. He implies that in the unwrapping some maturity gets spilled and that it isn’t until the other end of one’s life that one recovers it. This volume takes the author up to the age of nineteen, when his parents suggested that he might like to go to Oxford, and these nineteen declining years are very well described: there is an aura about them, which is extremely pleasant - a general feeling of blue skies, highly polished linoleum and very good home-made food, of order, kindness and rather long Sundays. It took him all this time, he says, to realise that his home was a jerry-built brute with cardboard walls, but from the first, it seems, he was surrounded by such a wealth of affection that it would not really have mattered where he had lived. His parents seem to be of a kind no longer in existence: throughout the book there is a most endearing quality of trustful innocence in all their behaviour and dealings with life. His father was a chartered accountant who first became aware of his future wife when he heard her singing in the Messiah. She had a beautiful voice and was dressed in white, and as Mr. Potter’s father felt like Samuel Butler about Handel, it was not long before he requested a private interview in a letter accompanied by two bunches of violets. By the time the author was born his father had lost all his private income on the advice of a subsequently accredited lunatic - but there was a piano alternately endured and enjoyed by the whole family, and they all read books worth reading, much as their equivalents today would read newspapers. The author’s education begins at the Girls’ Public Day School Trust and involved a walk across Clapham Common, which was perfect ground for the kind of dreamy erratic invention with which he bolstered himself up before a possible Bad Day: it continued at Westminster, which he says was ‘financially heroic’ of his parents. But the events of this book simply provide a solid, unobtrusive frame for this sunlit picture of a quiet, happy Edwardian childhood which underlines the fact that it does not matter what parents have or do with their children as much as it matters simply what they are; and to make this truth so eminently readable and charming is not only a tribute to the author, but perhaps provides his parents with their posthumous reward.

December 1959

So much has been written about Schweitzer’s hospital at Lambaréné that it has become difficult to have a clear picture of the place or the man who made it, but Dr. Franck, who went there for some months to practise much-needed dental surgery, has managed to produce a refreshing, interesting and convincing account. He admits that he arrived there stuffed with misconceptions: he seems to have left impressed, devoted and glad of his experience. The hospital is not modern in the technical sense of that word, but no one is ever turned away, and after forty-five years Schweitzer sustains a complete personal responsibility for every one of his staff, patients and guests. The qualities of his compassion and love of all life infect everybody: the staff, whose energy and endurance is far above the general standard; the patients, whose belief in his concern for them provides the reliable factor that is so often needed for their recovery; the guests, who are allowed to be generous, silly, inquisitive or vulgar, with such courtesy that they may even see themselves as they are seen. Dr. Franck likens Schweitzer to a
Groszbauer
(great peasant): the hospital, leper village, vegetable garden, children and animals are all his farm or kingdom, and in it he functions as doctor, teacher, pastor, and musician; but he has succeeded in lifting all these capacities far beyond any parochial autocracy. ‘The crucial fact about Albert Schweitzer, and that which makes his long life into a profound message to every man, is that in the face of all obstacles a man succeeded so absolutely in developing every one of his potentialities to its utmost limit.’ This is Franck about the doctor; what strikes one even more is the way in which, by his energy and influence, Schweitzer has managed to create a climate where all kinds of people - seriously stricken lepers, people apparently incapacitated in body and mind, etc. - are enabled to live in such a way that they can develop their own uses and beauties. Dr. Franck is particularly good in his written portraits of these people for whom he had a very clear understanding, but the whole book is written by somebody who not only seems professionally well informed but has also a good heart.

March 1960

This fascinating and unusual book is an account of all that the author could discover about the Hermit of Great Canfield in Essex, who died on January 17th, 1942, at the age of eighty-four. The author was eighteen at the time that Jimmy Mason died, and his family lived in a house called Sawkins at Great Canfield that had belonged to the Mason family. Everybody knew that Jimmy lived in a hut he had built in the middle of a home-grown wilderness a mile across the fields from Sawkins, as they also knew that Jimmy was attended by a brother, Tommy, who lived in a hut nearby and bought Jimmy’s food for him. The village gossip and a few newspaper articles claimed that Jimmy has spent sixty years in this manner, seeing almost nobody excepting his brother occasionally, and an old woman whom the Rector had sent to look after the two old men, and that the reasons for this were a cruel father and/or the fact that Jimmy had been jilted at the age of twenty-four by a woman variously called Daisy, Susie or Fanny Bell.

The author’s consuming interest in Jimmy began a few days before the hermit died: the pipes at Sawkins were frozen and he went up to the attics to look at the water tank. There was a large mound of debris that had accumulated from bats and sparrows, and in kicking it he came across what proved to be Jimmy’s diary - written in a long narrow account book. The diary opened by announcing that ‘
this book was bought by Fanny on the November 15th
,
1894. She hung it on the fir tree on Saturday, November 17th, 1894.
’ It went on to remark that if its author should be poisoned at last, the book would explain everything. The writing was in pencil, wild and scrawly - like copybook gone to seed; the diary stopped in 1897. At the time of writing, Jimmy was already spending most of his time in his hide, beside which there was a pond: he used to throw apples, cherries and walnuts into the water for the children who played there, although they obviously never saw or spoke to him. Fanny was often remarked upon. ‘
She came on the grass, looked across the pond and said goodbye several times. So good did did seem. Then she wispered goodbye so tendre and went off...
’ After nightfall, Jimmy crept out and left presents for her in a basket, which he either hung in a fir tree or left on a rail at the front gate. Eggs, apples, honey, shillings and pennies, walnuts, cherries, flowers, rabbits and radishes, and often letters: they were put out at nine o’clock and were usually taken by twelve.

This is the matter which started Mr. Trevelyan upon his search for understanding Jimmy, which is most brilliantly conducted and, except for reminding one a little of Symons’s
The Quest for Corvo
, is unlike any other book which I have read. One of its most fascinating aspects is that in the course of this search, a picture of nineteenth-century village like is uncovered - elaborate, but unvarnished, with a veracity which rings mysterious and true, a composition of behaviour both more natural and more eccentric than we are likely to meet with today. This is the chief charm of the book, which Mr. Trevelyan has never spoiled, and although many times in his devoted search the plot of Jimmy’s nature seems to thicken, it always dissolves before too firm a grasp of the available facts.

He was ‘religious’ but not a mystic; extremely frightened of and censorious about people, although he loved giving presents and was long-suffering about the children who racketed round his pond throwing stones to provoke his further generosity. He kept bees and prayed, and rabbits ate out of his hand. His voice was educated and his spelling freakish: ‘Gertram, Ednere and Erbete’ are three of the people in his diary, and it was Tommy, frequently described as ‘gagging deadly spite’, who so faithfully protected and guarded the hermit until he died.

Mr. Trevelyan has clearly taken an enormous amount of trouble with this book, but he had produced something so unusual and so full of interest that he should feel his pains entirely justified.

July 1960

Whenever one reads about them, one is chiefly struck by the tremendous range of the Elizabethans - that the great ones were neither specialist nor common men is more palpably evident - both their actions and their words ring with a magnificent energy, in comparison with which we seem merely to fumble and mutter. Sir Walter Raleigh, ‘the last of the Elizabethans’, and certainly one of the greatest, with a vision which seems to have been on the scale of Henry the Navigator, stands by himself in one respect: that his manifold capacities - soldier, sailor, courtier, explorer, enlightened colonist, scientific discoverer, poet and author - all seem to have radiated from a heart as pure as it was active: in his age of blood and gold and poetry, when cupidity, treachery and violence were household equipment, Raleigh always lived on a larger, more innocent scale. Even his ‘bloody pride’ seems to have had an impersonal and redeeming element. Thus he served his country steadily in the face of the ageing Elizabeth’s lonely and possessive caprices which were often wearisome and sometimes dangerous and even more remarkably through the pusillanimous James’s uttermost malevolence. This, apart from the ordering of Raleigh’s trial, which has since been acknowledged as ‘a trial marked from first to last by injustice and crime’ and having him condemned ‘for being a friend to the Spaniard’ (there were no witnesses to substantiate the Crown’s allegations, and a year later four of the Judges concerned were secretly allotted pensions for any information they could supply to Spain), degenerated to sheer treachery when, not daring to execute Raleigh in the face of public opinion and so keeping him in the Tower for thirteen years, James sent him out as English Admiral to Guiana to find a gold mine, and having procured from Raleigh all the private particulars of his ships, armaments and proposed ports of call, sold them to the Spanish. When Raleigh returned, he was again condemned, this time for ‘being an enemy to Spain’, and put to death. James signing the warrant to coincide with the Lord Mayor’s Day, in the entirely vain hope that the pageant and fine shows would take the people’s mind of Raleigh.