An Allobiography

 Having just lately reread William Maxwell's They Came Like Swallows – one of the most heartbreaking novels of the 20th century (and one of the best, I'd say, also one of the hardest to write about: I had a go, somewhere in here), I felt in need of something more cheering. When I spotted Kingsley Amis's Memoirs (1991) on the shelves of my favourite charity bookshop, I snapped it up, and have been enjoying it as my bedtime reading ever since. Amis characterises it as an 'allobiography' as much as an autobiography, as it is mostly about other people. Kingsley having divided his life between what might euphemistically be called 'affairs of the heart' – about which he wished to say nothing – and writing, about which there is nothing to be said, this narrowed the field of autobiographical possibilities, so he shifted the focus on to other people in his life. However, as they are all seen through Amis's sharply, sometimes viciously, comic eye, they all play their part in building a portrait of the writer himself. There are chapters on, for example, Philip Larkin, Bruce Montgomery (Edmund Crispin), Lord David Cecil and Robert Conquest, all of which I'm looking forward to reading. So far, only John Wain (in the chapter 'Oxford') has come in for a full-on drubbing, but Amis gives the best of it to Larkin: 
'It was Philip Larkin, looking up from as it might have been an advertisement of one of John's later books, who said: "Isn't England a marvellous free, open country? Take a fellow like old John Wain, now. No advantages of birth or position or wealth or energy or charm or looks or talent – nothing, and look where he is now. Where else but in England could a thing like that happen? You know, a few years ago I think he got to be Professor of Poetry at Oxford. Just imagine."'
Ouch.
  I had another happy find in another charity shop yesterday – an Oxford India Paper edition of Pickwick Papers, all 900-plus pages in a pocket-sized volume, but still perfectly readable, thanks to the ultra-thin (but strong and opaque) paper and clear type. I brought it home and straight away replaced my doorstop Fireside Dickens edition, thereby freeing up a little precious shelf space. The Fireside Pickwick is of course going to my favourite charity shop. 

Lacking Inexperience

 The other day I came across a quotation by Hector Berlioz, about a fellow composer he admired, though not unreservedly: 'Saint-Saëns knows everything, but he lacks inexperience.'
I don't know enough of Saint-Saëns's work to judge how fair that is, but I think I know what he's getting at – a certain facility, as if his range, versatility and all-embracing omnicompetence made it all too easy for him. Saint-Saëns's compositional mastery seems  to have came to him fully formed; it was not something he had to grope his way towards, and there is little sense of struggle, or indeed of risk, in his work. To make matters worse for the rest of us, he was also a child prodigy (who could play any of the 32 Beethoven piano sonatas from memory at the age of 10), and became an accomplished writer, critic, poet and dramatist. 
  I wonder if there are writers of whom we could also say that they know everything but lack inexperience. I guess Milton and Pope might be candidates, both seeming to arrive in this world with a perfect mastery of their art, which never faltered, and a compositional ease that enabled them to create a mighty body of work. Maybe Dryden is another case? Anyone else? 

A Literary Birthday

 Born on this day in 1785 was Thomas Love Peacock. I last wrote about him more than a decade ago, when I characterised him as that rare thing among literary men,  a 'good egg': 

'The list of classic writers who seem to have been thoroughly decent good people, and who we sense would be enjoyable company, is not long. Keats and Chekhov for sure, Charles Lamb, probably Jane Austen... One who can be added to the list was Thomas Love Peacock.
  Peacock – friend of Shelley (and defender of his maligned first wife) and, for a while, father-in-law of George Meredith – worked, like Lamb, for the East India Company. He outlined a day's work there thus:

From ten to eleven, have breakfast for seven;
From eleven to noon, think you've come too soon;
From twelve to one, think what's to be done;
From one to two, find nothing to do;
From two to three, think it will be
A very great bore to stay till four.

But in fact Peacock worked hard and well, succeeding James Mill as Chief Examiner of Indian Correspondence (and being succeeded by John Stuart Mill). He appeared often before parliamentary committees, and is even credited with designing the first armoured steamboats used by the Royal Navy.
  His novels – from Headlong Hall to Gryll Grange – are like nothing else in English literature. Hardly bothering with plot or character, he simply gathers together a group of people – often representative of particular ways of thinking – and lets them talk, with occasional interludes of often farcical action, and frequent songs and lyrics, mostly celebrating the pleasures of food and drink. One of his novels (Melincourt) features an orang-utan, Sir Auron Haut-Ton, who stands for Parliament; another (Nightmare Abbey) contains a humorous portrait of Shelley as Scythrop Glowry, author of Philosophical Gas; or, A Project for a General Illumination of the Human Mind. Written by a less deft hand, with the satire laid on more heavily, these novels would surely have sunk without trace, but they survive and are still – once you get used to Peacock's way of doing things – great fun to read. 
  The genial comic spirit that suffuses the novels seems to have come naturally to the man. His granddaughter remembered Peacock in old age as 'ever a welcome guest, his genial manner, hearty appreciation of wit and humour in others, and the amusing way in which he told stories made him a very delightful acquaintance; he was always so agreeable and so very witty that he was called by his most intimate friends the "Laughing Philosopher", and it seems to me that the term "Epicurean Philosopher", which I have often heard applied to him, describes him accurately and briefly. In public business my grandfather was upright and honourable; but as he advanced in years his detestation of anything disagreeable made him simply avoid whatever fretted him, laughing off all sorts of ordinary calls upon his leisure time.' [A sound policy for later life.]
  He's described elsewhere as 'a rare instance of a man improved by prosperity' and 'a kind-hearted, genial, friendly man, who loved to share his enjoyment of life with all around him, and self-indulgent without being selfish.' It would surely have been pleasant indeed to know Mr Peacock.'

Kingley Amis, in an essay collected in What Became of Jane Austen? (19700, casts a discriminating eye over Peacock's novels, concluding that 'a line must be drawn somewhere between the living and the faded parts of his work, but merely to draw the line between living and faded targets of ridicule ... would not be quite adequate. To throw in a reflection on Peacock's inordinate capacity for simple diffuseness and repetition would have the advantage of helping to get Melincourt and Gryll Grange out of the way (where they belong) [a harsh judgment: nothing Peacock wrote is particularly long, and Gryll Grange at least is very readable], but would be little use on the harder question. What can we turn to next, then? To plot versus no plot? No: the answer that appeals to me is that Peacock was only at his best in farcical-sentimental comedy with a satiric background. The moment the satirist holds the stage he makes a dive for the lectern, and the reader, unfortified with cold fowl and Madeira, spreads a handkerchief over his face.' [That's Amis the comic novelist breaking through in the last sentence.]
  'Almost the whole of Headlong Hall and Nightmare Abbey' survive Amis's critical scrutiny (along with parts of several other novels), and that would seem a very fair judgment. He characterises Peacock as 'far more energetically original' than even his admirers have often realised, and ends with a perfect summing-up: 'That enchanting urbanity, which gave him command of a whole range between witty seriousness and demented knockabout, was something which disappeared  from the English novel almost before it had properly arrived.' Yes, and more's the pity.

Thomas Hennell

 

I found this image on a picture-sharing platform this morning, and liked it on sight for its light touch and lively, easy style. It's a watercolour of 'Hampden Row' (Hampton Row in Bath?) by Thomas Hennell, a name that meant almost nothing to me. An artist, illustrator and writer with a particular interest in rural subjects, Hennell was born in Kent in 1903, and his career was interrupted by a schizophrenic breakdown that led to his spending more than three years in mental hospitals. When he returned to his life's work in 1935, he collaborated frequently with the prolific ruralist writer H.J. Massingham, and was encouraged by Edward Bawden (whom he had met, along with Eric Ravilious, in 1931) to write an account of his mental illness, The Witnesses. In 1936 a volume of Hennell's poems was published, with wood engravings by Ravilious. 
  Hennell's life, like so many others, changed dramatically with the coming of war in 1939. He immediately offered his services to the War Artists' Advisory Committee (headed by Kenneth Clark), who initially commissioned him to paint records of farming life, but in 1943 he became a salaried official war artist – and was sent to Iceland to replace Eric Ravilious, missing presumed dead after his plane had come down at sea while searching for a missing aircraft.  Hennell painted for some months in Iceland before returning to England. After that, he seems to have spent most of his time on the move, still working as a war artist, recording preparations for D-Day, following the First Canadian Army through northern France, then joining a Royal Navy unit to record the advance into Belgium and Holland. After this he worked for the Air Ministry in the Far East, painting in Burma, travelling across India to Colombo, then to Penang and Singapore. His final assignment was in Java, where he was captured by Indonesian nationalist fighters in November 1945 and never seen again. Born in the same year as Ravilious, he lived only three years longer. Two sad losses for English art. 
  Rather surprisingly, Hennell doesn't feature in Christopher Neve's classic Unquiet Landscape. There is, however, an excellent website devoted to him and his work, which is well worth a look... 

(Re)moving Pictures

This is a curious story. It seems that our new Prime Minister, Free-Gear Keir, has removed historic portraits of Elizabeth I and Sir Walter Ralegh from a reception room in 10 Downing Street, replacing them with two studies by Paula Rego inspired by the predella of Carlo Crivelli's Madonna della Rondine altarpiece (that's the predella above).  Personally, I would find anything by Paula Rego harder to live with than Walt and Liz, but Starmer doesn't seem to have a problem: his difficulty, he has said, is with pictures looking at him. 'I don't like images and pictures of people staring down on me. I've found it all my life' (his only reason, he says, for removing portraits of Gladstone and Lady Thatcher from Downing Street). If this is true, it is almost interesting. So too is something Douglas Murray mentions in his latest Spectator piece, aptly titled 'Does Keir Starmer have a soul?': 'When asked what his favourite novel was before the election, Starmer said he doesn't have one. A favourite poem? Doesn't have one. To cap the anti-aspirational tenor of the times, he was asked about dreaming and he said he doesn't have a dream.'  So, this much, if true, we know about this strange man: he doesn't like pictures looking at him, doesn't have a dream, and probably doesn't read (in any real sense). Hmm. 
  To make things stranger still, a Downing Street spokesman has declared that the Paula Rego replacement scenario had nothing to do with the present incumbent anyway, but was part of a planned reshuffle of the government art collection. So maybe there's no story here at all. Ah well...

 

'Far known to sea and shore...'

Time for a poem, and as I'm not long back from Venice, here's one on a Venetian theme – one of A.E. Housman's less well known works, published after his death (in the collection More Poems), probably because it is a little too revealing of Housman's sexual predilections. In Venice he had had a romantic liaison (inevitably abortive) with a gondolier called Andrea, who is named in the poem, but the dominant presence, and absence, is the campanile in St Mark's square. On the morning of Monday, 14 July, 1902, the massive bell tower had collapsed vertically onto itself, leaving nothing but a huge pile of rubble and one dead cat, the custodian's. Fortunately the square had been evacuated just in time, so there were no human casualties. It was rebuilt – dov' era e com' era (where it was and as it was), as is the Venetian way – by 1912. Anyway, here is the poem...

Far known to sea and shore,

        Four square and founded well,

A thousand years it bore,

        And then the belfry fell.

The steersman of Triest

        Looked where his mark should be,

But empty was the west

        And Venice under sea.

From dusty wreck dispersed

        Its stature mounts amain;

On surer foot than first

        The belfry stands again.

At to-fall of the day

        Again its curfew tolls

And burdens far away

        The green and sanguine shoals.

It looks to north and south,

        It looks to east and west;

It guides to Lido mouth

        The steersman of Triest.

Andrea, fare you well;

        Venice, farewell to thee.

The tower that stood and fell

        Is not rebuilt in me.

Mother and Son

 Succumbing to my Ivy Compton-Burnett addiction again, and happening upon a title I had not yet read, I plunged into Mother and Son (1955), a late, immensely enjoyable, very funny and indeed almost mellow work (which deservedly won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize). 
Mother and Son is a quite straightforward affair, driven by the interactions between two households – one of spinsters and a cat (of whom more later), the other a familiar Compton-Burnett set-up: tyrannical elderly head of household (female), somewhat ineffective partner (her husband), somewhat ludicrous middle-aged son, and two young nephews and a niece who act as a sharply perceptive, truth-telling chorus. The action begins with the tyrannical Miranda Hume interviewing a potential 'companion', who retires hurt after a bruising interrogation, taking up a comparable position in the nearby household of spinsters, the younger of whom, Hester, who is something of a free spirit, duly heads for the Hume household to make herself useful there. As usual in the fictional world of Ivy Compton-Burnett, there are startling revelations – a little cluster bomb of them in this case – which turn everything upside down. As a result, rash courses of action are embarked on, but this time they are soon abandoned, and everything returns to something like normal (with the difference that everyone now knows who they are, which they didn't before). 
  The most strongly drawn character is the middle-aged, mother-devoted son, Rosebery (known to the children as 'Rosebud'). Hilary Spurling, Ivy's great biographer, describes him perfectly as 'almost an honorary woman: a repressed and virginal elderly queen whose virtually complete lack of self-knowledge enables him to make wildly indiscriminate advances to wildly unsuitable partners in a state of semi-permanent sexual agitation'. The other strongest character is not human, but a cat called Perseus, the object of the spinsters' devotion. He is, in their eyes, a creature of more than human insight and wisdom, but to anyone else Perseus is all cat. Here he is in action, after Hester fears she has upset his tender sensibilities: 
'"Poor Plautus, has he gone away to cry by himself? I must go and comfort him."
She went out with this purpose, but found it was not Plautus who needed comfort. He was sitting on the grass behind the house, with an air of doing something deeply congenial, his eyes on some birds, who were fluttering and crying under his openly sinister scrutiny. It was true that he knew things that they did not, and he was engaged with them at the moment.'