The Pursuit of Laughter Read online

  There is a close-up view of many a broken marriage, when she is called to help in a situation where there is never much hope. There are also happy marriages, Heywood and Anne Hill for example, and visits to the Hills and Anne’s eccentric brothers for the Aldeburgh Music Festival.

  Two snowy Christmases she stayed with the David Cecils, another happy pair. David Cecil talked himself and everyone else into a stupor, and when Frances retired to her room she heard the Cecil voices rising uninterruptedly through the floorboards.

  Very naturally, she dreads the Bloomsbury-hounds, and the cinema and television absurdities, pretending to tell the ‘truth’ about her famous friends and making a hash of it. But these talented and articulate people are not really at risk.

  Frances Partridge reveals herself, as diarists always do, from Pepys to Chips, from André Gide to Alan Clark and James Lees-Milne. She is a puritan who responds to beauty. She hates war, cruelty, stupidity. But she also hates luxury, grandeur, and even, almost, comfort. She fails to see the superb beauty of Houghton, within and without. Or if she sees it, she cannot approve. She says aristocrats are arrogant, picking on one lady, Kathleen Stanley, who was the kindest of women.

  Her Puritanism just occasionally shows the tip of its ear, as the French say. Perhaps it is one of her virtues. Be that as it may, her book deserves the success which it will surely have.

  The Diaries of Frances Partridge: 1963-66, Partridge, F. Sunday Times (1998)

  Lifelong Fit of Giggles

  Here are the scrapings of the barrel, more or less everything left behind by Henry Yorke (for that was Henry Green’s real name) when he died. Much of it is well worth preserving: interviews, unperformed television plays, chapters of unfinished novels, scenes of family life half-truth half-caricature written in the merciless and sardonic way he had. Henry Green’s grandson has edited these literary remains, putting them in chronological order. It is easy to see influences—Kafka, Henry James—but from the beginning Green’s was such a distinctive voice that only he could have written these pages.

  Greatly admired in his lifetime by other writers, Waugh, Auden, Isherwood, V.S. Pritchett for example, there will probably never be a school of Henry Green. As he himself said of Joyce, his style, his jokes, his marvellous dialogue were his alone.

  He might have echoed Gide’s cry: ‘Familles! Je vous hais!’ There is bitterness in the way he describes a boring family evening, father and mother bickering and two sulky sons leaving them to it. There is a fantasy about a giant who appears in the park at Petworth. Henry Green’s eccentric Wyndham uncles and aunts see him out of the window and are half terrified, half outraged. How to get rid of him? The butler is sent out, but is blown into the lake. Finally the giant goes, but not before bellowing that he had come there hoping to hear the family engaged in intellectual conversation.

  There is a biographical chapter by Sebastian Yorke, Henry’s son. He describes his father’s delight in minor disasters and how amused he was when things went wrong. He may have looked upon life itself as one long sick joke. Yet for his friends he was one of the most delightful men of his talented generation.

  Surviving, ed. Yorke, M. Evening Standard (1994)

  Fluttering Wings

  ‘Dearest Maud, dearest Primavera! I do not know what primavera means, or if I have spelt it sufficiently for you to recognize the word. It means Spring, doesn’t it? It means joy, the joy of green leaves with the flutter of wings among the leaves. And you, dearest, mean all these things to me, for you are not, I am convinced, a mere passing woman but an incarnation of an idea… You are at once the poet and the poem, and you create yourself not with silks and pearls, though these things are beautiful upon you, but by your intense desire of beauty and life.’

  ‘I gave you all the love I was capable of. I never cease to think of you…’

  The first passage quoted above was written by George Moore when he was 52 and had been in love with Lady [Emerald] Cunard for ten years. The second he wrote twenty five years later. His love for her lasted from their first meeting until his death forty years after. She destroyed most of his letters; all that remain are in this volume.

  Lady Cunard was a great admirer of George Moore’s books; he was a fervent admirer of her astonishing personality. ‘To Maud Cunard,’ he wrote, ‘a woman of genius. Her genius is manifest in her conversation, and like Jesus and Socrates, she has refrained from the other arts.’

  The audience for this marvellous, intelligent, inconsequent conversation was formed by her luncheon and dinner guests, and although she invited clever men to her house some of the company was not as amusing as it was fashionable. ‘There are people about that are of no interest to me, as little intelligent they seem as squeaking dolls,’ complained George Moore.

  None of Lady Cunard’s letters to her faithful admirer have been found, yet her portrait is clearly seen in his to her, from her marble eyes and gold hair, to her worldliness, her love of music, her brilliance. She would descend unexpectedly upon the old writer in Ebury Street, like a bright humming-bird, then rush away leaving a purple orchid for him to treasure.

  She was everything that he could never be, and as he sat year after year writing and rewriting and revising his books, there is no doubt that she brought him something uniquely precious. He was, naturally, a little bit jealous. ‘I was glad to see you brightening as usual the lives of dull people,’ he once wrote, with a nip of sarcasm.

  Letters to Lady Cunard 1895-1933, Moore, G. (1957)

  Beauty Betrayed

  If Mary Pickford was the world’s sweetheart, Greta Garbo was the world’s goddess. She had perfect beauty and a rare acting talent, and unlike any other actress before or since she hated publicity in private life, refused to be photographed and evaded fans, autograph hunters and the Press.

  Cecil Beaton was in every way her opposite. He loved and courted publicity, made his fortune from it, and kept endless scrapbooks into which he pasted every passing reference to himself in the English or American papers. He longed to meet Garbo, and having met her he longed to marry her. It would have been the all-time publicity coup.

  Years later, he proposed. She wisely refused; both were homosexual, and in any case she would have loathed his social life, climbing (in his own opinion) ever higher, loving the lighted candle, luxury, success, people. She stayed with him in Wiltshire and told him he was hag-ridden; the hags were his mother, too fond of the bottle, and his lesbian secretary Maud Nelson. He noted in his diary every detail of their friendship and their intimacies, and finally betrayed her by publishing it in her lifetime. It was a dreadful thing to do by any standards, and strangely enough he realized this himself, but his desire to be known to the world as lover of the most beautiful woman in the world was too strong to be resisted. Diana Souhami describes how as publication drew near he suffered a sort of agony; at that very moment, absurdly enough, he was given a knighthood, and the pleasure he got from being a Sir was blighted by his apprehension about Garbo and his diary.

  Some years previously Greta Garbo’s lesbian friend Mercedes de Acosta had similarly betrayed the star. Badly needing money, she wrote memoirs and described a mountain holiday she had with Greta, six weeks when nobody knew where they were, the address a secret. It was this episode which sold the book and made Mercedes de Acosta a little money. She was never forgiven. Even when she was dying, in hospital, Greta Garbo refused to visit her.

  Cecil Beaton, on the other hand, she did visit, grown old and bald and half paralysed by a stroke. Made furious by the diary, years had passed, and she went down to Wiltshire to say goodbye to her tiresome old friend. There were probably two reasons for this somewhat uncharacteristic behaviour. First, Garbo knew Cecil Beaton so well that she cannot have been surprised by what happened. Where his narcissism was concerned, he had no sensitivity, or even good manners. But secondly (something missing in this fascinating book) Cecil’s redeeming feature was laughter. ‘Give me the bonus of laughter,’ wrote John Betjeman in a poem at the
end of his life. It was impossible to be with Cecil for half an hour, let alone half a lifetime, and not be convulsed with laughter. A look came into his face and he would say something in his drawling, braying voice which was inexpressibly funny. It is an important part of the man, who should not be remembered as the rather villainous creature depicted here. Among the illustrations in ‘Greta and Cecil’ Garbo is seen laughing with Cecil. There cannot have been many of these perfect moments in her Hollywood or her New York life. Perhaps she forgave his disgraceful behaviour because he had amused her so much. The best possible reason.

  Greta and Cecil, Souhami, D. Evening Standard (1994)

  Impotent Comforts

  Gerald Brenan lived to a great age; he was a prolific correspondent to friends and relations, who kept his letters. Very tempting to a biographer. Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy has not resisted, his book (although fascinating) is too long.

  Many of the letters are full of what Cyril Connolly called Brenan’s ‘naïve sexual boasting’, which embarrassed those who did not realize the agonies of a sensitive man to whom ‘doing what comes naturally’ was a near impossibility. He was often impotent.

  Born in 1894, he hated his father and his barbarous boarding schools, and they are blamed for his complexes. At 18 his one idea was to escape, and free himself from his constricting background. With a bohemian friend, Hope Johnstone, he planned to walk to China. Telling a few lies, and with a few pounds, he ran off.

  He met Hope in Paris, and found happiness, discomfort, hunger and danger. They slept in barns, or inns where the beds were alive with bugs, stole vegetables to eat and could well have died of hunger and cold when winter came. Hope gave up at Venice, but Brenan pressed on, until ‘one dark evening in a snowstorm on a Bosnian mountain, I turned back’.

  By letter, he bargained with his father for freedom to live in his own way. The parents were by then longing to compromise; he went home. He was 20 in 1914; he became a brave soldier, and at the front made friends with Ralph Partridge. It was a stormy friendship, because the love of Brenan’s life, the painter Dora Carrington, married Partridge. But the most important thing that happened after the war was his long visit to Spain, chosen for its cheapness. All his best books are about Spain, South From Granada a classic. He suffered from jealousy over Carrington, but she, Lytton Strachey and various writers stayed with him in his primitive cottage in the sierra.

  He married an American poet, had endless unsatisfactory affairs with hippies and nymphets, and read enormously. The Spanish civil war and Second World War he spent in England, then back to Spain for the rest of his life, his writing at last beginning to sell. Fortunately his wife Gamel shared his love of discomfort; they had no bath or lavatory and on their travels stayed in flea-ridden inns.

  The Spanish Labyrinth is his great book on Spain, and Gathorne-Hardy’s chapter about it is, next to his account of the walk, the best thing in this enormous biography. There are several harrowing cancer deathbeds, that of Brenan’s wife beyond bearing. All are culled from frightful descriptions in letters to long-suffering friends.

  His own death—when, after a short spell in an English old people’s home, the Spanish claimed him as their own and took him back to Andalusia—was at the age of 92.

  When Strachey was dying, in 1932, Carrington seemed intent on suicide, and Ralph Partridge sent for two of her lovers, Gerald Brenan and Tommy Tomlin, hoping in vain they might induce her to live.

  Probably not many people now alive knew the brilliant Stephen Tomlin, a sculptor married to Julia Strachey.

  Strange that in this ‘stupendous mass of paper’ even his actual name should be omitted. True, he was known as Tommy, but Stephen Tomlin was a considerable artist and personality.

  The Interior Castle: A Life of Gerald Brenan, Gathorne-Hardy, J. Evening Standard (1992)

  A Sponge for All Seasons

  Evelyn Waugh, his chief tormentor, called Cyril Connolly ‘a droll old sponge’, and that he certainly was. This excellent biography brings him wonderfully to life. His grotesque appearance, his velvet voice, the successes as a schoolboy that won him all the prizes at Eton, making Oxford drab by comparison, the knockabout turn of his marriages, the sloth and greed which gave him permanent angst but which he lacked the will to curb. It is not a sad life nor a wasted life, even if authorship of a masterpiece eluded him; he will be remembered as a brilliant critic, editor and personality.

  The Unquiet Grave was no more than a commonplace book containing his nostalgic thoughts about Paris and the Mediterranean when war immobilized him in London; flawed by much that was rather absurd and irritating, it nevertheless echoed the feelings of his generation at that time.

  All his life he was surrounded by adoring women, and never more so than when, financed by Peter Watson, he edited Horizon during the war. Lovely and devoted girls did the hard work of producing the magazine, ministering to him they fed him with honeydew.

  He was capable of imaginative sympathy. Meeting a boy who had like him been a King’s Scholar at Eton and was doing his military service soon after the war, the description of his basic training so horrified Cyril that he told him to write it all down, and published it in Horizon. Balm for the unwilling soldier. Connolly was dogged by poverty. His first wife, Jean, had some money, but the other wives had none. He and Jean were perfectly suited, her income was enough for their bohemian way of life. Dining with them was hazardous because of their pets; ferrets cannot be house-trained. When she left him because he was ‘impossible’, he mourned her loss on and off for the rest of his life.

  His wit and clever conversation made Connolly a welcome guest, but he was not always asked twice by fastidious people. One host complained that he marked his place in borrowed books with bacon rind. He wrote brilliant reviews for the Observer until he quarrelled with the priggish owner, and subsequently for many years the Sunday Times, an excellent paper in those days. He promised endless books to eager publishers, but rarely wrote them.

  Towards the end of his life he was invited to Austin, Texas, for an exhibition based on his ‘100 Best Books’. Expenses paid and a large fee, it was a recognition by America of his eminence as man of letters. Austin has an unrivalled collection of modern English books and MSS. He was happy to accept and was enjoying every moment until the cataloguer of Evelyn Waugh’s library, a recent acquisition, asked him to solve some conundrums of place and identity. Connolly’s eye lit upon Waugh’s copy of The Unquiet Grave, and he could not resist looking inside to see what had been written in the margins. The brutal rudeness and dismissive jokes he found ruined his visit. ‘For the rest of my stay in Texas I remained obsessed with Evelyn’, he wrote. Waugh teased him even from the grave.

  Connolly died, as he had lived, beyond his means. He left a huge overdraft at the bank; his rich friends generously paid up.

  The photographs illustrating this delightful book are so badly reproduced that one succeeds in making the attractive Jean look uglier than Cyril himself, while Railway Club members seem to be hardly human.

  Cyril Connolly: A Nostalgic Life, Fisher, C. Evening Standard (1995)

  Enormous Huts

  In July 1928 I went accompanied by Nanny, to stay at Bailiffscourt. This was a piece of country by the sea in Sussex which the Guinnesses [future in-laws] had bought a couple of years before; they had saved it from speculators who had planned to ruin the entire coast.

  Bailiffscourt itself was a small farm-house at Climping, notorious as the home of Colonel Barker, a woman who pretended she was a man and married a Brighton girl. We loved this story which had filled the newspapers and I was considered very lucky to be going to see the place formerly hallowed by the presence of Colonel Barker. I soon discovered, however, that one must not mention Colonel Barker at Bailiffscourt; her name was taboo and Lady Evelyn preferred to forget that she had ever existed.

  Lady Evelyn Guinness, her children, their Willoughby cousins, and two nurses lived in the Huts. These really were huts, made of pitch pine and set on bric
k foundations. They smelt deliciously of raw wood and salty air. They were planted down in the middle of a cornfield, and at the bottom of the field was the sea. There was a quite exceptional glare in summer outside the Huts; the flat treeless landscape, the enormous sky, the ripe corn and the sea reflecting back the light of the sun almost blinded one.

  Lady Evelyn, like Farve, was a builder. She was going to build a very strange house; already her mind was full of her plans for it, but meantime the family put up in the Huts. Bryan and I wandered about the fields or sat on the beach. Sometimes we all went for a picnic on the Downs. When we reached the chosen spot the drivers of the cars unpacked a huge tea, a frying pan, a pat of butter, and eggs. ‘Diana’s so clever, Mummy, she can cook,’ said Bryan, bursting with pride.

  ‘I’ve never heard of such a thing, it’s too clever,’ said Lady Evelyn in her whispery little voice.

  ‘I can’t really. Only fried eggs. Anybody can do fried eggs,’ I said modestly, but Lady Evelyn and the nurses took up the refrain. To cook! It was too wonderful.

  At that time she was in her early forties; a very pretty, slight, fair-haired and blue-eyed person with a very tiny voice. Her voice was not exactly soft; it was more like a miniature hard voice, scarcely audible. She never raised it. She had a ferocious collie called Lady which bit men visitors. ‘Lady! Lady! What do I see you doing?’ Rather naturally, Lady never noticed this reproof, what with her own growls and the exclamations of her victim.

  Lady Evelyn loved wild flowers growing among the corn and did her best to encourage them. Not only in the fields near the Huts were poppy and cornflower seeds strewn in profusion; all the way down in the train from Victoria to Arundel she would lean out of her carriage window in springtime, scattering weeds and seeds as she went. ‘I’m afraid Walter doesn’t quite approve,’ she told me. Walter, Bryan’s father, was Minister of Agriculture.