For the Time Being (30 page)

There is a common fault with novelists: they cannot write speakable dialogue. Dialogue written to be spoken aloud reads gloriously on the page. But there is an idiotic legend that it does not; that you have to ‘write' dialogue for the eye only, and this Mrs Lessing does. And how! There seems to be very little prose here. This is the opening paragraph of'The Pit':

A final sprig of flowering cherry among white lilac and yellow jonquils, in a fat white jug … she stuck this in judiciously, filling in a pattern that neededjust so much attention. Shouting ‘Spring!' the jug sat on a small table in the middle of the room.

Well, there you go. A noisy, not to say energetic, fat white jug. I cannot help feeling, with the greatest humility, that perhaps an editor would have been useful here. I mean, jugs do not ‘shout'. The word ‘in' is scattered about like rice at a wedding.

I only hope Mrs Lessing never sets foot in her kitchen to take kindly notes for, say, ‘Observing the Settings of a Strawberry Jelly'. That would indeed be worrying.

Daily Telegraph,
23 May 1992

Vita and Harold: The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and
Harold Nicolson,
edited by Nigel Nicolson (Weidenfeld)

It is rather like being under shell-fire. To begin with, a sudden thundering roar, explosions, flashes; then a rattling and clattering. Sudden silence. A calm. A distant rumble. Stillness.

Just when you think it is safe to stick your head above the parapet to get a gulp of air, bang! crash! wallop! and once more one is cowed by salvoes of the dreaded V-3S. Vita, Violet and Virginia. We have been shrapnelled with their infidelities, passionate excesses, intellectual indulgences. Now these wanton, and frankly rather tedious, creatures are upon us again.

I had hoped that all had been said about them and about the strange marriage at Sissinghurst. Nigel Nicolson thinks otherwise. He has already published his father's diaries and letters, as well as a plump volume of Virginia Woolf's diaries. His moving, if contentious,
Portrait of a Marriage
was the basis of a fairly dreadful television dramatization. Newspapers have chattered about the union for years. Now we have the letters between his parents from 1910 until 1962.

Less knowledgeable writers than Mr Nicolson have had a hand in turning the hay of this harvest and filled their barns. But, alas!, here we have another 400 pages and at first sight there is nothing much that we do not already know: accounts (Harold's) of Churchill, the Royals, writers, politicians, nuggets of scandal. And
yet:
reading slowly, carefully, it appears that this amazing marriage was a bit out of kilter. The play was ill cast. Vita should have been ‘Papa' and Harold should have played ‘Mama'. Why does an elderly gentleman – he writes the
Spectator's
‘Long Life' column – see fit to rake through the cold ashes of his parents' love and expose their
very private thoughts to all and sundry for, as Vita would have said, ‘the delectation of the common herd'?

A cloud of despair descends as one starts to read. It is all familiar. Meeting in 1910. Innocence and sweetness. Love gradually dawning. Families considering. A fairly vain girl. A very vain, curly-haired ‘cherub' with a pipe. The wedding. The sumptuous background of the Sackville Family and Knole. Her money. Not his. Soon the slow canter towards Violet Trefusis. Forbidden love and lesbian passion. The escape and the chase. The Road to Arras, husbands, poor, damp Harold; helpless, useless Denys. The final capture. Racked with jealousy and rage, Harold wrote in 1919:

… Damn! Damn! Damn! Violet. How I
loathe
her … if you arrive with her I shan't meet you … I feel I should lose my head and spit in her face.

Nothing a little stronger? More forceful? One can only be grateful there was no tabloid press in that time. They would all have been done for; but the ‘scandal' was suppressed, until another stole upon the scene.

Enter the heron-elegant, fastidious, sexually repressed, sad Virginia Woolf. More hopeless passion; the carousel spins again. Tough on Harold, but he, it appears, was much to blame. That fact emerges clearly from this collection. Harold was, frankly, the villain of the piece. He was undoubtedly a brilliant diplomat, a clever politician, a quite dedicated gardener, but as sure as hell-fire he was a selfish, spineless husband.

Consider this. At no time did he, apparently, ever try to help his wife to come to terms with her homosexuality which, as she makes perfectly clear, distressed her every bit as much as it obsessed her. The cries for help, in her early letters, were ignored by her husband, or – and this seems hardly possible, but must be considered – were blithely misunderstood. At any rate they made no impression. He was quietly, happily, pursuing his sexual adventures: not always with ‘members of his Club' either. Rough trade was fun. But, in 194::, when her affairs with Violet and Virginia, and one or two others along the line, had cooled a little, Vita wrote:

… I was thinking. ‘How queer. I suppose Hadji [her private name for him] and I have been about as unfaithful to one another as one well could be from the conventional point of view, even worse than unfaithful if you add in homosexuality, and yet I swear that no two people could love one another more than we do after all these years.' It
is
queer, isn't it? It does destroy all orthodox ideas of marriage?

It does, I suppose, and the fact is that they did adore each other passionately. Intense love, without carnality, was something they both understood very well. That love was probably kept intact by constant separation: he on diplomatic missions for years at a time, she with friends in ‘lovely places' or, more important, Sissinghurst. Of course it is possible to enjoy a full and long-lasting love without sex, and it is often far more profound than the orthodox kind. This they knew, and explored and stretched it to the limits, and beyond. One is impressed and moved.

However, there is a fearful coyness in many of his letters, a sort of'What a naughty boy I am', a thumb-sucking cuteness, a heavy use of baby-talk, which I find unattractive. (I keep in mind that these are private letters.) When she needed a masculine toughness to match her own, his softness, his cool detachment were what she actually got; and it jars.

He considered the hideous bombing of Guernica to have been merely ‘really horrible', and even his reporting of Churchill's greatest speeches to the House in the 1940s sound, here, as interesting and rousing as bead-stringing. However, he loved his wife. He was eager, boyish, sharing her love and passion for the houses and gardens which they created together, and he behaved with circumspection in his affairs; but he was, as he confesses, at all times woefully in need of care and protection. As far as she was capable, Vita afforded him that. Contentment, you may think, was finally assured. However, in a 1960 letter, just two years before she died, she wrote:

I think it [the Trefusis affair] was partly your fault, Hadji. You were older than me, and far better informed. I was very young, and very innocent. I knew nothing about homosexuality …
You should have … told me about yourself, and have warned me that the same sort of thing was likely to happen to myself. It would have saved us a lot of trouble and misunderstanding. But I simply didn't know.

There it is. A cry, which jogs the heart, which came too late and which went unanswered. Help was never forthcoming; never even considered. A sign of what? Monumental selfishness? Helplessness? Ignorance? Perhaps all these things. However; the love, amazingly, stood firm for this mismatched couple. They invented, as it were, a private love together until the day they died. Their letters are a glorious example of'Civilized Behaviour'.

Daily Telegraph,
6 June 1992

A House in Flanders
by Michael Jenkins (Souvenir)
Memories
by Lucy M. Boston (Colt Books)

Nostalgia, they say, is not what it used to be. Perhaps rightly so: who can possibly look back on the past thirty years with any true degree of longing or nostalgia? In a country which is now
paddling
into moral decline rather than merely being apprehensive of such a thing; when elegance, truth, dignity, kindness and discretion have become words to deride rather than to cherish, and when the whole sorry fabric of what we believed was safe, secure and perfectly sound now tilts as sickeningly as the tower of Pisa, how then can we possibly look back with nostalgia over the years which have brought us to this lamentable state?

But there was a time, just a little before the hectic, hysterical, ‘Swinging Sixties' (which started the tilt in our once upright status), when all those sneered-at and reviled words still applied and we were leaner, kinder and better fitted for life. Have you, I wonder, ever cupped an evening moth, released it into the dusk and discovered to your delight that you had trapped a hummingbird? Well, if that fortunate error has not yet been yours to rectify you may do so now by reading Michael Jenkins's
A House in Flanders.

Here, in slender format and under a not very enticing cover, you will find a whole spectrum of colours and lights, of delights and elegances, of wistfulness and love. You will even come across glory, in a sense, as well as sweet grief. This is a
radiant
book and one I beg you not to overlook. You will pick it up again and again for sheer delight.

There is not much of a story here, really: an English youth of fourteen, some time in the early fifties, is despatched to France to live for a long summer with ‘the French Side' of his family. A
clutch of ageing ‘Aunts', an ‘Uncle' and various relations, living in a great old house on the Franco-Belgian border, welcome this unknown English sprig and enfold him in tendrils of love and affection. The ‘Aunts' happen to own a number of small farms in the district, and the daily life, the coming-and-going in the great house, the scents and lights, the ease and gentle peace engulf both the hero and the reader.

The house has stood for centuries fair and square and solid in a part of Europe which has been the site of battle upon battle. Wars have ravaged the fields and woods repeatedly, banners have been unfurled across its plough-lands, cannons trundled down its lanes; but somehow the house, its land and its owners, battered, starved, occupied, bullet-pocked, shelled to mud and splinter, have stayed firm. The only reminder of its last brutal occupation is a swastika cut into a terrace stone.

There is, in the eloquent descriptions of the great Flanders plain, in the sharp, clear, understanding portraits of the people, in all the almost melancholy sweetness of this high summer of ripening corn and under candled chestnut trees, a sense of Colette and Alain-Fournier. Reasonable, one might suppose, since it is a book set in the heart of the French countryside. But Sir Michael is an Englishman – indeed he is our Ambassador to The Hague – and he sees all about him with the eye of a fresh and delighted witness to the intensity of beauty.

It may be a slender ‘story' with not a great deal of ‘intellectual chattering' and absolutely no pretensions. This is perfect, simple prose at its best. You will not reach for your Fowler or the
OED,
but you will be transported back to a time which, although so recent, is nevertheless lost irrevocably to us today.

If Michael Jenkins drifts gently downstream in a quiet punt to nostalgia, then Lucy M. Boston takes us down the same river in a bucketing motor-launch.
Memories
is a reprint of her two books of childhood and early life,
Perverse and Foolish
and
Memory in a House.
It reminds us that, apart from being the writer of twelve books for children, she was also a poet, a gardener, a musician; she painted, made patchwork quilts, rebuilt a derelict old house, was ‘wayward',
‘undiplomatic', ‘fearless', ‘incapable of emollience' and hurled herself about in a world where ‘glumness was a sin'. All a bit exhausting. But you may very well enjoy the early years of nursery and rather peevish parents, not to mention a fearfully tiresome husband, soon got rid of. Nostalgia in a different guise indeed. Romantic, perverse and, to be honest, slightly irritating.

Daily Telegraph,
27 June 1992

Lee Miller's War: Photographer and Correspondent with the Allies
in Europe, 1944–45,
edited by Antony Penrose (Condé Nast)

American, upper-middle-class, elegant, witty, educated, warm, tough, sexual (not just ‘pretty' or ‘beautiful'), Lee Miller was a writer, photographer and
Vogue
model. In Paris, in the twenties, she was the centre of a glittering circle led by the Surrealists: she was a ‘muse' to Man Ray, friend to Max Ernst, Picasso and Cocteau, and wife to Roland Penrose, with whom she moved to England to become part of another glowing circle. She was never at any time in her life ‘somewhere around'. She was ‘there', a fully formed ‘woman' with the sensuality, strength and subtlety of a collared cheetah. Restless when war broke out, enraged by the violence of the Blitz, desperate for an outlet to her anger and energy, she got
Vogue
to send her on a ‘job' to photograph an evacuation hospital in Normandy. She did not return until the war was over. From the siege of Saint-Malo, to the hideous finish in a rubbled Berlin and, in a final act of defiant victory, a bath in Hitler's bathtub, she was always present. When the war finished, so did she. Left in the vacuum of peace, she had no function. Like so many of us she found it impossible to adjust.

This is a deeply moving and fascinating book, compiled by her son Antony Penrose from a mass of her old articles and photographs. They were written, and taken, for British
Vogue
in the heat of battles or in their weary aftermaths. It seems only America can breed this particular kind of woman: there was certainly no equivalent in our armies. She was an extraordinary witness to a brutal and gigantic killing, yet she remained feminine always.