Writing Home (63 page)

We were a small (but distinguished) party that climbed out of Florence that summer morning to call upon Berenson at I Tatti. Logan was there, who was of course Mary Berenson’s brother, Bertrand Russell, the mathematical philosopher and brother-in-law of Mary Berenson, Alys, his first wife, her sister, together with Karin Costello, who had married Adrian Stephen and was, of course, the stepdaughter of Berenson. Queen Helen of Romania excepted, we were just another family party.

News of our arrival had preceded us and Berenson was immediately on the defensive and had to be coaxed out from under a large (Renaissance) bed, whither he had retired at our onset. It was twenty years since I had last been at I Tatti, and B.B. looked much older than when I had last seen him. But perhaps that was only to be expected. He must have been eighty at the time of our visit, yet in many not uncharacteristic ways his habits were those of a much younger man. As my wife sat beside him on the couch his hand brushed lightly against her thighs. ‘Tactile values,’ I heard him murmur. ‘How very life-enhancing.’ But then, he had such beautiful hands.

We talked for a while about Art, a subject in which he had evinced some interest. But he was not an easy conversationalist as his mind dwelt very much in the past. ‘Just fancy,’ he said, ‘Goethe would have been 190 today, had he lived.’ I asked him about people he had known. Did he remember Proust? Or
Wilde? Of Proust he retained a vivid memory, for he had once seen him running down the Boulevard Haussmann, cramming cake into his mouth and shouting at the top of his voice Thomas Hood’s poem ‘I remember, I remember the house where I was born’.

I wanted to know more. Had he known Queen Victoria? Or Prince Albert? Not well, he said shortly. Or Pitt the Younger, or even Fox? But alas, he could not remember, and seemed weary of such questions. By now the room was beginning to fill up. Hemingway had come in with a trophy of his visit, a tortoise he had shot in the grounds. The Windsors were there, the Duff-Coopers, Kenneth Clark as he then was, and the Berlins, Irving and Isaiah. And there, right at the back, was Toscanini, perched like an organ-grinder’s monkey upon the shoulders of the King of Sweden (an eminent archaeologist).

I saw B.B. get hold of C.C. (Cyril Connolly) together with M.M. (Marianne Moore) and M.M. (Margaret Mead) and begin to conduct them upstairs in order to show them his little P.P. (Pablo Picasso). I realized it was time to go. I kissed B.B.’s shaking hand as it reached unerringly into my wife’s blouse. ‘Ah, B.B.,’ I murmured, ‘
où sont les amitiés amoureuses de ta jeunesse
dorée
?’ But he was already fumbling with Nancy Cunard.

I remember pausing that sultry summer evening in 1939 as the storm clouds gathered, to look back to the white villa on the hillside. ‘Ta ta, I Tatti,’ I called, ‘Last Bastion of a Vanished World.’

Ten years ago, I had some thoughts, first aired on television, about a fairly well-ventilated topic − the writer and his roots.

I wrote that parody of a television arts documentary ten years ago, and, in the naivety of what I now realize was my youth (a season that eluded me while it was actually going on), I imagined that, at one stroke, I had disposed of the form. Nobody would dare do it quite like
that
any more. But, of course, they would. And they have. And what is more, they do.

Can there be a slag-heap north of the Trent up which ardent young directors from
Omnibus, Aquarius
or
2nd House
have not flogged their disgruntled camera-crews, in pursuit of that forward-retreating figure, the artist? One half expects to see Ivy Compton-Burnett herself stumbling up the slurry with her reticule between her teeth, on the strength of having spent a fortnight in Halifax when she was five. They would have filmed Proust down a cork-lined coalmine, had he lived. And always, of course, it is art as struggle, art as pain, art as redemption and transcendence. Not art as a relatively easy way of keeping the wolf from the door. Or art as actually quite a nice thing to be doing. Always it must be torture: ‘Can you zoom in on the eyes, Brian love? I want to get the pain behind the eyes, if I possibly can.’

Even L. S. Lowry must needs be described as a sad and embittered man because he happened to say, at eighty, that he was not sure there was much point in doing paintings any more. A fairly mild and understandable doubt to creep in at the end of a lifetime of intense production, but wolfishly seized on and brought up at the time of his death to indicate how, such is the tyranny of art, this mild, lovable and industrious man should think his life-work without point. No matter, of course, that a similar doubt might occasionally creep into the mind of someone working for the Leeds Permanent Building Society.
Or that an employee of the Midlands Water Board might occasionally ask himself whether he was doing anybody any good. Or that even the traveller in Skefko ball-bearings goes through an occasional dark night of the soul. No. It is this demon art, demanding so much from its practitioners that they are destroyed. And if one says it is like many another job, that it helps to pass the time and brings home the bacon, you are being shy and self-effacing. Art is pain. It must be. Otherwise it is not fair.

‘Look, we have come through’ is the stock version of the northern artist’s life, though why a childhood in the industrial North or any other outlandish place should be thought to handicap anyone writing novels, poems or plays seems to me to be odd. Rather see it as a stroke of luck. True, if you find yourself born in Barnsley and then set your sights on being Virginia Woolf it is not going to be roses all the way. Or think of Dame Ivy, wrestling with a novel called
A Pit and Its Pitfalls
. But what if one was born in Hendon? How do you wrench life in Basingstoke into the stuff of art? Or Canberra?

The fact is, northern writers like to have it both ways. They set their achievements against the squalor of their origins and gain points for transcendence, while at the same time asserting that northern life is richer and, in some undefined way, truer and more honest than a life of southern comfort.

I suppose, though, I should declare an interest, or maybe confess a lack of one. I was born and brought up in Leeds, in what I suppose must have been a working-class family. When I say ‘I suppose’, I do not mean that I did not actually notice, but simply that it all seemed perfectly satisfactory to me at the time. I had, after all, nothing to compare it with. My friends lived similar lives in similar houses and talked in a similar way. I was educated at elementary school, then secondary school and, eventually, university, but never with any great sacrifice on
anyone’s part. If I was deprived, it was only in point of deprivation. Nor did it ever seem that great hopes were set upon me.

What I do recall of my childhood was that it was boring. I have no nostalgia for it. I do not long for the world as it was when I was a child. I do not long for the person I was in that world. I do not want to be the person I am now in that world then. None of the forms nostalgia can take fits. I found childhood boring. I was glad it was over.

There are fashions in childhood as in anything else. A nice, middle-class background was no longer in vogue by the time I started to write. No longer in
Vogue
, either. Early in 1960, when my colleagues and I were writing the revue that was to end up as
Beyond the Fringe
, we were photographed for that magazine. We sped in a large Daimler to North Acton, where the photographer spent some time finding a setting appropriately stark and gritty for the enterprise on which we were to embark. We ended up gloomy and purposeful against a background of cooling-towers and derelict factories.

I have never done one of those filmed portraits I started off by parodying, though the urge is strong. It is always gratifying to be asked to explain yourself, if only because it makes you feel there is, perhaps, something to explain. I admit, too, that from time to time I catch myself slightly overstating my working-class origins, taking my background down the social scale a peg or two. It is a mild form of inverted snobbery, which Richard Hoggart might dignify by calling it ‘groping for the remnants of a tradition’. As the man says in the sketch, it is a question of belonging. You would like to think you belong somewhere distinctive, whether it is a place or a class, but you know you are kidding yourself. However, I see that opens up another vast area of humbug and self-indulgence, namely, the writer as rootless man, so I think I had better stop and go home − wherever that is.

‘Dilys!’ I called to my wife, who was in an adjacent room, ‘You’ll never guess what’s just plopped through our letter-box!’

‘Oh, Duggie! ‘she cried, with a hint of annoyance, ‘I’m in the middle of the cat’s tea. What is it, precious?’

‘Only Lady Ottoline Morrell’s Photograph Album,’ I rejoindered. ‘Snapshots and photographs of her famous contemporaries photographed by Lady Ottoline herself.’ Then I played my trump card. ‘With an introduction by Lord David Cecil.’

‘Ottoline Morrell,’ cried Dilys. ‘Teamed with Lord David Cecil! Bugger the cat!’ And before you could say Saxon Sydney Turner we were leafing through these magic pages.

Dilys and I have been dedicated fans of Bloomsbury ever since Dilys’s dandruff and my appliance finally put paid to the ballroom dancing. Together we travel the length and breadth of the country, spending a fortune on fares simply for the thrill of meeting other Bloomsbury groupies.

Billingham, Prestatyn, Loughborough − scarcely a town of any size but does not boast one, sometimes two, Woolf Clubs. This last Tuesday, for instance, saw us both at Garstang, a fork supper prior to Kevin Glusburn’s thought-provoking paper ‘Lytton Strachey: An Hitherto Unrecorded Incident in the Slipper Baths at Poulton-le-Fylde’. Need I add that Carrington fans were out in force?

However, to our text,
le livre des photographies
. Aficionados of Bloomsbury, that much abused postal area, will need no reminding that Ottoline Morrell was the chatelaine of Oxford’s Garsington Manor, famed rendezvous of artists, intellectuals and anybody who was anybody who happened to be passing. No Nobel Prize-winner was ever turned away.

Well-to-do and six foot two, Ottoline was never a beauty, but no one can deny she was possessed of a certain dignity. On page 52 is a picture of the painter Henry Lamb. Ottoline was very smitten with Henry, and one afternoon they were in the front room at Garsington and Ottoline was giving Henry a very French kiss when who should walk in but hubby Philip! Ottoline never turns a hair. She just wipes her mouth on her stole and says, ‘Henry has a temperature. I was just giving him an aspirin.’ As Dilys says, I think quite rightly, ‘What Bloomsbury had, Duggie, which we’ve lost subsequently, was style.’

Here, on page 53, is Katherine Mansfield. This was before she had the shoe shop. Bertrand Russell and Dora on page 60, Dora wearing a lovely frock which Dilys swears is by Adèle of Romford only the index doesn’t say; Lord David doesn’t seem to have done his homework there. Augustine Birrell, on page 59, is pictured with the economist Maynard ‘Sugar’ Keynes.

Dilys and I are so genned up on Bloomsbury that Leonard and Virginia Woolf are just like friends of the family to us.

‘I don’t think Virginia would like that,’ says Dilys − ‘sitting in front of the fire cutting your toenails.’

‘Toenails nothing,’ I retort. ‘If we had Morgan Forster coming round to his tea, you might invest in a new brassière.’

And so the battle is joined.

Of course it’s all fun. That’s the good thing about Bloomsbury − no hard feelings.

The young man on page 59 is Frank ‘Toronto’ Prewitt. Now he is not hard-core Bloomsbury. In fact neither Dilys nor I had
any gen on him at all, but we got on to the grapevine (in the person of the indefatigable Pauline Lucas of Huddersfield) and came up with a few facts. Turns out Frank was Canadian, and half Red Indian. Thanks, Pauline, for that valuable info. Aught you want to know about Maynard Keynes’s undies, just give us a tinkle.

The other gentleman in the photograph is fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson. Now I don’t think I’m treading on anybody’s corns when I tell you that what he used to like was his friends to stand on him in their highly polished boots. This used to disturb Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson’s mother, Lois Lowes Dickinson: ‘Give over, Goldsworthy’ she used to shout. ‘Don’t let your friends wipe their feet on you. Is that what they teach you at King’s College?’

And on page 65 we’ve got Ε. Μ. Forster. What a sweet person. But look at those trousers. Talk about half-mast! I said to Dilys, ‘Only connect? The person who measured his inside leg wants his head examining.’

Of course, as you might expect, Ottoline’s album is full of pictures of the uncrowned queen of Bloomsbury, our own Virginia Woolf. And you know Virginia, she always seemed to have a cig in her mouth. It’s smoke, smoke, smoke. No wonder hubby Leonard called his autobiography
Dunhill All the Way
.

I hope I’ve told you enough about this book to make you want to rush rush rush to your nearest bookseller. You may be too late. It’s already unobtainable in Barnsley, and in Huddersfield they’re fighting over copies.

Something, though, bothered me about this book. As Dilys and I scoured its pages I was tormented by a resemblance I couldn’t pin down. ‘It’s Ottoline, Dilys,’ I said. ‘Who does she take after? She’s got a look of somebody.’

And then I remembered.

‘Dilys,’ I said. ‘Cast your mind back. Batley. The Ace of
Clubs. Summer of ’67, was it?

‘Oh Duggie,’ she said. ‘Those were the locust years.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘Batley. Dusty Springfield live on the stage of the Ace of Clubs. That’s who Ottoline is. She’s the spitting image of Our Dusty!’

So if Ken Russell’s got any ideas about giving Ottoline the treatment then think on, Ken − this is Dusty to a T.

It isn’t one for Glenda.