Basil Street Blues (18 page)

To other people I know that I appear reticent. This surprises me, since I do not always
feel
reticent or keep my opinions to myself. Have I not been in tears while writing parts of this book – tears of laughter sometimes? Doubtless I have a self-protective manner, the reasons for which are scattered through this narrative. Nevertheless, despite my appearance of reticence, I have gained something of a reputation as the biographer of Lytton Strachey and Augustus John for beating back the frontiers of reticence in other people’s lives. So what can I do in this near-autobiographical story? To some extent I am obliged to reflect the silence and repression within my family – a code of privacy shared by most ordinary people of those times – because they do not hand me the codebreaking clues of any correspondence. So what I can reveal emerges more between the lines of my writing.

My father and mother kept no letters from me or anyone else, and my aunt has not kept these few letters for publication. It is merely bad luck that her nephew turns out to be what James Joyce called a ‘biografiend’. In a sense she has not deliberately kept this correspondence at all – its incompleteness and the haphazard way in which it is scattered through miscellaneous bits and pieces of paper indicate that these letters are merely ‘undestroyed’. For the act of destruction is like a sentence of death, a second death, which we cannot easily bring ourselves to commit on those we have loved. But can others do it for us? Is that an act of mercy or an act of vandalism? And does the passing of time alter the purgatorial state of these papers, raise or lower them from a heartbeat to a text? Then, if I keep them and they are never used what of that? Does their interest gradually leak away? Have I been cowardly? Why should my aunt be any different from the band of semi-public characters who have been dragged in to play parts in my biographies? If there is a principle that entitles me to do this to them, what principle permits me to act differently with her? Remember that, though the contents of these letters may not shock a reader at the end of the twentieth century, their publication would have been considered highly indiscreet only fifty years ago, quite unacceptable to my family, and absolutely unthinkable to my aunt herself. For here, in its muted form, lie moments, private moments, from what is perhaps the most vital part of her life. And if I feel a need for self-protection, so may she.

‘No serious biographer working in the twentieth century will have failed to lay down some ethical foundations to his craft,’ I wrote in a lecture on biography.

Far from adding a new terror to death, the good biographer gives an opportunity to the dead to contribute to the living world. It is understandable and right that people should seek to protect themselves and others close to them during their lives. We all need our prevarications, evasions, our sentimentalities and silences. We have a need, too, for the privacy out of which our work comes. But I make a distinction between the living and our friends the dead. I believe we pay a compliment to the dead by keeping them in employment to assist the living. For if we have all these necessary prevarications, evasions, sentimentalities and silences as our guide to conduct… we will make ourselves unnaturally miserable by imposing impossible standards on ourselves.

The general pattern of my aunt’s story is not uncommon. But whenever the chorus of conventional family sentiment bursts forth, she should be able to step forward with others, including perhaps her own aunt Norah Palmer Holroyd and her grandmother Anna Eliza Holroyd, to remind us of what families may inflict on themselves. What happened to Norah and Anna is largely irrecoverable, but an outline of my aunt’s predicament may be traced. Now that she can no longer be hurt by me, by her family, by those who knew her, by any of us, surely I may open her letters and use them to help tell her story? But I hear my father’s warning: ‘Please remember that one day someone may have to write your biography.’ I devoutly hope not. Like many others, I do not want a biography of myself written. I have all the familiar objections. Whoever tried would get it wrong. I would prefer to do it myself – and perhaps this is what I am indirectly doing. But then of course I am merely alive, and when dead may think differently. Or I may think and feel nothing. Besides, as the examples of T. S. Eliot, Somerset Maugham, Jean Rhys and many others testify, the dead have never been able to control the living, nor the living the dead. What matters is the spirit in which they communicate, the imaginative link made between us and those who ‘though dead, yet speaketh’. At any rate, I feel I must go on and do the best I can.

*

Hazlehurst’s letters are mostly undated but a number of the envelopes exist which have postmarks, so it is possible to arrange the others chronologically by matching writing paper and addresses. The correspondence opens with a dramatic argument. From a letter sent to Brocket on 1 June 1933 from Yacht Frothblower in Cubitts Yacht Basin at Chiswick, it appears that Yolande had recently accused Hazel of ‘making use’ of her while ‘looking for someone else’. It emerges that he has had two previous love affairs about which she knows, and that both women have ‘moved on’. But he is convinced that Yolande now has grown tired of him and is herself about to ‘move on’. For she too has had romantic attachments. What about her near-marriage in 1926? And that was not all.

In one of her photograph albums there is a picture of an upright gentleman in hunting regalia seated on a white horse, its ears pointed. He looks about thirty and the caption unusually identifies him and not the horse. He is ‘Major Ogilvie’. The date is in the late nineteen-twenties, probably 1929. Also in my aunt’s box of papers are three letters she has kept from ‘Og’ written from the Whittington Barracks in Lichfield. It appears that they had known each other only a few weeks, but that he has fallen in love with her and wants to marry her. However, she is already engaged or committed to someone else. He apologises for worrying her with his declarations and attentions: they were, he tells her,

the result of day dreaming, of sitting in the sun & thinking of the impossible & making it seem possible, and impossible though it was I hadn’t really, in my heart of hearts, given up hope… I have had enough experience of the world to know how intensely unwelcome unwanted love letters are, so when I write it will be just as a pal. This time, though, I am going to transgress & tell you I miss you & want you & love you.

Perhaps because he is to have an operation, Yolande writes affectionately back, sends him at his urgent request three photographs of herself and altogether, as he gratefully acknowledges, ‘makes a fuss of me’ by going up to London to see him at the King Edward VII Hospital for Officers. ‘It’s funny dear,’ he writes, ‘that though I didn’t know your name six weeks ago, it will be your hand I shall be holding when, in a few minutes, they wheel me out to a great adventure, & it will be your photographs I shall find by the side of my bed when I wake up again… I am so happy that I love you.’ After the operation he writes once more: ‘I often look at your photographs & wish you belonged to me.’

But it was to Hazlehurst, apparently, that she belonged. By 1933, however, they both have doubts about the other’s commitment. Hazel has the idealistic notion that women are naturally of finer clay than men. In any event he felt ‘damned inferior’, he admits, to his previous loves, and Yolande is ‘very much more superior’ to both of them – which means of course that he is ‘worse off’. Is he trying to ‘move on’ himself and giving her the most flattering grounds for doing so? He blows a lot of froth as he sails round his predicament.

Suffering as I do from stupid shyness, I must imagine a lot of things that are not meant and yet, although I know this, I haven’t the sense to coordinate this feeling. In the almost impossible hope that you won’t discover too quickly my gross inferiority, you had better keep this as evidence against me, and in the likely event of my backsliding produce it to stimulate me up again.

This convoluted Victorian sentiment leads on to a simple nineteen-twenties conclusion. ‘I suppose the only way to look at things is to live for the present. The past gone, tomorrow unborn – to-day is sweet.’

But can Yolande be part of this sweetness? ‘I was quite the proudest man in London to be even seen with you,’ Hazel writes. ‘You must know how awfully attractive you are, & how any person would give anything for the privilege of your presence… You are too adorable. I cannot think of even one tiny flaw in the whole of you. I cannot say more… Do believe me. You are too sweet to me.’

The two of them spent much of that summer together. It was easier for Yolande to get away now that her father had returned to Brocket, and Hazel could come and stay there too. Their affaire was full of ‘naughty things’, but Yolande was generally careful to ‘restrain’ herself, and seems to have made no final commitment to her lover. Though he would frequently profess his love for her, she could never quite bring herself to say ‘I love you’ however passionately he invited her (‘I live for the day’). Did she find such exchanges silly? Was she, like her father, having difficulties in showing her feelings? Or did she shrink from what must inevitably follow such a declaration? For he had spoken of marriage, or at least it was implied in much he said. Of course there would be obstacles. He was not rich (‘I must make haste and make enough money for you’), and Adeline would certainly oppose the match, wouldn’t she? So they must be careful, very careful, and meanwhile he would cultivate the rest of her family. All this lies in the second surviving letter of the series which he writes from his home in Teddington in the second week of September 1933.

Yolande has gone the previous month to Monte Carlo. She is probably staying with her girlfriend Cathie who has an apartment in the boulevard d’Italie. Hazel, anxiously waiting for news, imagines ‘all sorts of things such as you finding someone else’. When a letter from her does come he is elated. ‘To me you are just too wonderful, & it is still incomprehensible that you should deign to look at me even much less like me. Darling one… I never missed anyone so much and never felt so completely dependent upon one person… I never hope to be fonder of anyone for it really hurts, & I’m afraid so very afraid.’

Hazel has been staying again at Brocket and has invited Yolande’s family to visit him that weekend at Teddington, some twenty miles east of Maidenhead. It is ‘sweet’ of him, Yolande writes. But there is more to it than this, he explains. He likes her father and brothers and ‘some day it might stand me in good stead if your mother ever commenced to go off the deep end’. Kenneth and Basil arrive while he is writing this letter – it is twelve pages long and occupies him intermittently all weekend. Adeline does not turn up. Instead she telephones regularly and when she learns that Kenneth has a temperature and is in bed, she creates tremendous scenes, ‘crying copiously all day’ and telling her friends of the calamity. It is essential that Adeline’s nervestorms do not break over Yolande and Hazlehurst themselves, at least not yet. Because of his work, ‘I shall not be able to come to France,’ he tells her. But he suggests ‘sneaking a night’ by meeting her at Dover on her way home. ‘What do you think?’ he asks. ‘Even if I met you in London and we went away somewhere. As I am back on the boat I can go anywhere… But, darling Yolande, if there is the very tiniest chance of upsetting things then like you [I think] such a move would not be worth considering… I am waiting for the marvellous time you promise me when you return...’

What happened when she returned, what developed between them secretly, cannot be traced through any subsequent correspondence. They went on seeing each other, but the next letter among my aunt’s papers was written from Yacht Llanthony on 16 May 1939 and sent to Norhurst. Yolande is still ‘Darling’ and he is still ‘H’. But inevitably the tone has changed in the intervening six years. The passion has disappeared, though they are emotionally at ease with each other. They are almost like a married couple – only for some reason they aren’t married. Since Yolande is in her thirty-eighth year, the possibility of them having children has probably been eliminated. She writes to him about her ‘canine troubles’ and of Nan’s health; he is full of sailing adventures and tells her of an enthralling trip up the Rhine (‘we only just made it… I wouldn’t have missed it for anything. The whole river is full of wrecks & broken ships so you can guess the thrill… will go into detail and places visited when I see you’).

The remaining nine letters are all written during the war. In August and September 1939 he writes from Yacht Goddess which is moored at Tilbury Landing Stage as part of the River Emergency Services, and describes the ‘complete chaos’ of the first air-raid warning during which he is trying to buy milk (‘really the war is most inconsiderate’). He tells her he has been ordered to report to Liverpool. ‘Here am I the head man perfectly comfortable in possibly the safest place in the land & have to go and leave my comfy bed & home and go to some perishing outlandish heathen hole to do God knows what.’ He signs his letter ‘As ever, H’. But this is a world away from the man who half a dozen years ago had felt so emotionally dependent on Yolande, and cried out when she was away in France: ‘I miss you hellishly & long like the devil to have you back again, Darling, darling, so much.’ Yet there is the habit of an attachment, the assumption of an understanding, between them still. He telephones her, is careful to let her know where he is going, hopes ‘I can come to you or you to me depending on petrol’, and exhorts her to ‘Cheer up, be good, & happy.’

The next letter in the series comes in mid-October from the General Hospital at Ormskirk, some fifteen miles north of Liverpool. Hazlehurst is not adjusting well to the war. ‘In the black out after an Air Raid Practice I fell into a concrete shelter 10 feet deep on my head,’ he explains. Some ‘damned fool’ had left the door open ‘against all orders’ and there would have to be a Court of Inquiry. Meanwhile he lies bandaged in bed like a hero, with concussion, cuts to his face, an amazing black-and-red eye, sprained shoulder and thumb and broken tooth. ‘I am as beautiful as ever,’ and of course he is ‘as ever Hazel,’ he assures Yolande. He hopes to be coming down to London in a week – to see his dentist.