Important to Me Read online

  Bello:

  hidden talent rediscovered!

  Bello is a digital only imprint of Pan Macmillan, established to breathe life into previously published classic books.

  At Bello we believe in the timeless power of the imagination, of good story, narrative and entertainment and we want to use digital technology to ensure that many more readers can enjoy these books into the future.

  We publish in ebook and Print on Demand formats to bring these wonderful books to new audiences.

  About Bello:

  www.panmacmillan.com/imprints/bello

  About the author:

  www.panmacmillan.com/author/pamelahansfordjohnson

  Contents

  Pamela Hansford Johnson

  Dedication

  1. St Mark’s and Mr Russell’s

  2. Auschwitz

  3. R.K.

  4. A Vision of the Marvellous

  5. Instructions on the History of Art

  6. Fever Hospital: 1922

  7. Travels I

  8. Women

  9. A Sharp Decline in Income

  10. Edith Sitwell

  11. Being in Love

  12. A Higher Education

  13. When Daffodils Begin to Peer

  14. Crime and Punishment

  15. Sitting on Campuses

  16. Amy

  17. Politics and War

  18. Kipling’s ‘Natural Theology’

  19. Dylan

  20. The Liberal Package-Deal

  21. Travels II: U.S.S.R., and a Note on the ‘Generation Gap’

  22. Migraine

  23. A Reluctant Note on Music

  24. Education

  25. The Pursuit of Happiness

  26. I. Compton-Burnett

  27. Family Cricket

  28. Marcel Proust

  29. Depressions

  30. A Happening in Los Angeles

  31. Two Eye Operations

  32. Detective Stories

  33. ‘The Way We Live Now’

  34. Children and Parents

  35. Literary Style

  36. Endings. (1) A Partial Conclusion

  37. Endings. (2) The Sea

  Pamela Hansford Johnson

  Important to Me

  Pamela Hansford Johnson

  Pamela Hansford Johnson was born in 1912 and gained recognition with her first novel, This Bed Thy Centre, published in 1935. She wrote 27 novels. Her themes centred on the moral responsibility of the individual in their personal and social relations. The fictional genres she used ranged from romantic comedy (Night and Silence, Who Is Here?) and high comedy (The Unspeakable Skipton) to tragedy (The Holiday Friend) and the psychological study of cruelty (An Error of Judgement). Her last novel, A Bonfire, was published in the year of her death, 1981.

  She was a critic as well as a novelist and wrote books on Thomas Wolfe and Ivy Compton-Burnett; Six Proust Reconstructions (1958) confirmed her reputation as a leading Proustian scholar. She also wrote a play, Corinth House (1954), a work of social criticism arising out of the Moors Trial, On Iniquity (1967), and a book of essays, Important to Me (1974). She received honorary degrees from six universities and was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She was awarded the C.B. E. in 1975.

  Pamela Hansford Johnson, who had two children by her first marriage with journalist Gordan Neil Stewart, later married C. P. Snow. Their son Philip was born in 1952.

  Dedication

  TO THE YOUNG SOFAERS –

  Clive, David Jr and Moira

  1. St Mark’s and Mr Russell’s

  St Mark’s Church stands almost at the peak of the Other Battersea Rise. We called it that because we lived on the opposite one. The Rise sweeps down from Clapham Common (our side) down to the junction of St John’s and Northcote Roads, and up again to Wandsworth Common, to the West. We lived in a large brick terrace house bought by my grandfather some time in the eighties, when it looked out on fields where sheep might safely graze. But by the time I was born, the railway had come, and the houses had been built up right over the hills between it and us. Not pretty, I suppose. But in my childhood I could create an Arabian Nights fantasy about anything, and found the smoky sunset between the spires of St Mark’s and the Masonic School magical to contemplate. (Just as I found beauty in the 1911 turrets of my red-brick school, also between the two Commons, in Broomwood Road.)

  My mother took me faithfully to St Mark’s on Sunday mornings, and never let me out before the sermon. On the whole, sermon apart, I enjoyed it: I revelled in Broad Church ritual. The Stanford Te Deum! There was a real male choir in those days, and I would wait breathless for the great basses to come in with ‘the holy company of the apostles praise thee’. (I think that was where they came in.) And the springlike unbudding of the Benedicite, which came far too seldom. There was never a time when all this failed to move me emotionally: and I often wonder if, today, I go to church so rarely because I am lazy, or because it comes at unreasonable hours, or because I cannot bear the often quite irrelevant flooding of emotion which it induces.

  My father, on his rare terms of leave from the Gold Coast, where he was a Civil Servant on the railways, used to assure my mother that he too would gladly accompany us to St Mark’s, if only they would let him smoke.

  He died of a coronary thrombosis when I was eleven, on his penultimate leave before retirement. But that is another story.

  I may say that from those early days, belief was with me: and I have not changed it, though aware that faith is not enough. Sometimes I feel, often now, unpopular with the Lord. I don’t wonder at it.

  But when I was fifteen, my way of worship was abruptly changed by my Aunt Kalie (a corruption of her beautiful and Stendhalian name, Clélia). She began to attend Clapham Congregational Church, under the ministry of the brilliant, histrionic George Stanley Russell, and nothing would do for her but that I must go there too.

  The Church was in Grafton Square, in Clapham Old Town, a bus ride away from us. Mr Russell was a tall, rubicund, rather portly man with a magnificent voice: and a taste for ceremonial that I failed to find later among other Nonconformist ministers. (It was, of course, eccentric and contrary to Congregationalist ethos.) Musically, the services were admirable: Stanford in A occasionally, but usually Vaughan Williams. I was not deprived of my favourite hymns – ‘O Worship the King’, ‘Immortal, Invisible’, etc. – and was really interested in the sermons, which, though overlong, often took their texts from Shakespeare and Shaw. The literary and musical societies were run on a high level: I remember the young John Barbirolli and William Primrose giving us recitals, though one of the latter’s was nearly disrupted by a fit of fou rire from the brother of my best friend, who had just discovered that I was wearing my Wellington boots on the wrong feet.

  The differences between Clapham Congregational and St Mark’s were not, at that time, very clear to me: except that I much approved of extempore prayers, and of the practice of baptising a child before the whole congregation. (I had been baptised into the Church of England myself.) I was fourteen when I was first led to sit under Mr Russell: sixteen when, after a brief course of instruction, I was received as a church member, and took my first Communion: which, as the wine came round in tiny glasses, instead of being taken from a common cup, should have pleased me for hygienic reasons but never did. My mother used scornfully to call it a ‘Nippy’ service. Nippies were then Lyons’ waitresses.

  Under the influence of Mr Russell, and Martin Attwater, his handsome, Spanish-looking choir-master, the church burgeoned and in fact became what I can only call ‘smart’. It attracted most of the intellectuals of Clapham (there were a good many, in varying degrees) and was always crowded. There was a sizeable homosexual element. I might me
ntion that Martin Attwater gave me piano-lessons, and would rap me over the knuckles in the old-fashioned way, when he felt I had done insufficient practice. This did not at all prevent me from being in love with him: I was always, in a greenstick way, in love with somebody or other, and never went through the normal period of passion for my own sex. I had all the promise of being a tolerable pianist, but gave it up because my fingers were slightly webbed and I could only just stretch an octave.

  Much later on, when Mr Russell had been transported to the big Deer Park Church in Toronto – premises extensive and car provided – I found myself increasingly drawn back towards the Church of England. For I had found – and this, I know, is a kind of frivolity, proving that my Nonconformism was not very sincere – that there weren’t very many Mr Russells about.

  The streak of emotional Calvinism in my make-up was not, so far as I can see, attributed either to Mr Russell or to St Mark’s. It is a grim streak, emergent only at times, when I think of William Cowper. The doctrine of the Damned and the Elect is one of the most dreadful ever formulated, but, though I don’t believe it, I cannot forget it. It drove Cowper mad. The trouble was that I could never be sure that I was either, but I think most Calvinists must have felt themselves Elect or life would have been intolerable. When I think of religion in the Middle Ages, and then look at medieval paintings where people are heartily enjoying themselves, I cannot think that they believed, more than sporadically, in their horrible idea of Hell.

  But there is some comfort. The Abbé Mugnier – quoted by George D. Painter in his biography of Marcel Proust – in answer to a lady’s question as to whether he believed in hell, replied – ‘Yes, because it is a dogma of the Church, but I don’t believe there is anyone in it.’

  My two elder children were baptised in the Congregational Church at Staines. My son by my second marriage was christened (for complicated reasons) at the age of three, walking to the ceremony with much pride and only regretting that he had not been given a speaking part, in a Church of England ceremony in Christ’s College Chapel, Cambridge, by Canon Ian Ramsey, later Bishop of Durham, and confirmed in his school Chapel. Andrew, my eldest son, by my first marriage, refused to be confirmed at all and I had to write the most difficult letter to his headmaster concerning his ‘doubts’. (He had no doubts.)

  All this brings me to my own problem. Years later, when I had remarried, I attended for a while the excellent Kensington Chapel. But I found it too austere. I was being steadily drawn back to the Church of England, and I should have liked to take Communion there. But it seems to me I can’t, unless, at the age of sixty, I am confirmed in that faith. For some reason, I can’t go through with this. Liberal churchmen have told me that since I was christened into the C. of E. I should go ahead and take the Sacraments where I choose. But that, it seems to me, is swindling. Churchmen not so liberal have more or less agreed with me. So I have become no churchgoer, and guilty at times because of it.

  I am always guilty about something. Guilt has been my besetting misfortune, a torment to attack me at the strangest moments.

  However in The Times text for the day, I have just read this: ‘I have swept away your transgressions like a cloud, and your sins like mist: return to me for I have redeemed you.’ Isaiah 44:22.

  Can this be so?

  2. Auschwitz

  ‘As I looked towards the east, high up to the sun, I saw a

  tower on a hill-top well and truly made: a deep dale beneath

  with a dungeon in it, With deep ditches and dark ones, dreadful

  to see. A fair field of folk I found between them, all manner

  of men, the middling and the rich, working and wandering,

  as the world asks.’

  Langland, Piers Plowman

  trans. Nevill Coghill.

  It was a magnificent, warm, golden day in the late summer of 1967 when Charles, my husband, my younger son Philip, his friend Martin, and our interpreter, set out from Cracow to Auschwitz. (Auschwitz is what the Germans called it: in Polish it is Oswiecim.) The boys were then fifteen. I had said to them, ‘This is history: but it is horrible history. Do you want to go?’ They said they did. First, we stopped at a farm where we bought flowers to lay eventually upon the monument. We rode on past fair fields of folk, ploughing with ancient implements: it was idyllic for us, but I don’t suppose it was for them. They would have preferred to have tractors. But there it was, the bright earth, the men and women in bright colours, the docile oxen before them.

  I had steeled myself for what we were going to see: perhaps too rigorously, as it turned out. It was a long drive, but at last we came to the small town of Oswiecim, which is commonplace. But it is near to the camps, which were reached by a single-track railway. What was heard? What smoke seen to ascend? I had reached my peak of political consciousness and activity in the middle thirties: the thirties have haunted me ever since. But the boys? They were both highly intelligent and well-read in modern history, but to them it must necessarily be hearsay. Was the murder of 6, ooo,ooo Jews carried out by what must have been a large and efficient Civil Service, even conceivable? I remember being awakened to the reality of Nazism in 1934 by, of all places to find it, a photograph in Time magazine, of a girl shaven and placarded, being paraded through – where? Nuremburg? I can’t recall. But I do recall the vividness of the shock, horror and rage, that human beings should behave so to each other. They were to behave a million times worse.

  At last we came to the camp itself. Over the entrance was the risible legend (had one felt like laughing) ARBEIT MACHT FREI (Work makes Free). It was a tidy settlement, the doing of an orderly people. God knows they were orderly. There were neat brick barrack blocks, divided by roads along which trees were nicely planted. We went into the visitors’ hall, which was no more ominous than the hall of a well-run hospital: an information desk, pamphlets, seats for the weary or for the overcome. Now it was hot, at the peak of the day. Next we went into the first of the exhibition rooms: behind large plate-glass windows were the huge-piled relics of the murdered: teeth, hair, rags, a few toys. I noticed two little plaits, a child’s plaits, still tied with faded blue ribbon.

  And I could not feel. The pain itself had numbed pain. Try as I would, I could not react: I might have been making a tour of an engineering works. I could not tell what Charles or Philip were feeling: their faces showed nothing.

  We went on, through room after room, till we came to the gas-ovens. Martin had, by this time, retired to the open air. The gas-ovens. We were shown over them by guides, some of them ex-prisoners here, who exhibited a kind of gusto that was almost cheerful. I stared at rusted iron: that was all it was, to me.

  At last, that part of the visit was over. We rejoined Martin, and went to see the gallows on which Hoess, Commandant of the camp, was hanged. It seemed a very small gallows.

  And at once I was flooded by all the emotions that had repressed themselves. The full horror broke over me, the dying millions. Charles, Philip and Martin, to whom the dreadfulness had been present all the time, were visibly shaken. I don’t know that I was. All this revulsion was inside me.

  We got in the car, and bumped over fields – there was no road then – to the monument to the victims of Auschwitz. It was the boys who laid the flowers upon it. Extremely hot now, and the petals shrivelling in the sun.

  It was some time later that I learned how their attitudes differed from mine. Yes, they seemed to think, this must not be forgotten nor forgiven, but it was the past, and it was their business to remake the future. We could not remain at enmity with any nation for ever. At any rate the English young – and not just the young – were deeply moved by Willy Brandt’s grave and audacious gesture when he knelt three years later on the steps of the Auschwitz monument.

  The Russians of my generation, with their twenty million dead (that may be an understatement) are only now learning a degree of compulsory forgetting. (Only just.) I think I expressed, not unfairly, the attitude of the older Russians, who had
experienced the war, in Mamonov’s speech regarding the Germans, at his own table, in my novel, The Survival of the Fittest. What the young Russians think I don’t know. I have had many opportunities to ask them, but somehow I never have.

  Standing looking out across the Polish fields, now glossed by a sun beginning to set, like a landscape by Samuel Palmer, I thought of our own war crimes. I have heard the atom bombing of Hiroshima defended often enough: I say that it was indefensible. It could have been dropped off-shore as a warning, and I dare say would have done harm enough then. I first heard the news from Frank Phillips, who had just announced it, when I happened to meet him in the B.B.C. club after some broadcast of my own. I have never felt more sick, or more ashamed. And of course, the subsequent bombing of Nagasaki was damnable, and beyond all reason. So were lesser things, like the militarily useless and wanton bombing of Dresden.

  I do not subscribe to the fashionable shibboleth that ‘we are all guilty’. It is an escapist’s excuse for not feeling guilty about anything at all. I shall revert to this subject. I did not know the atom bomb existed, and had I known, and had I been older and in any position of power, should have protested at the plan to drop it with every bit of force at my disposal, as Szilard and his colleagues did – without result. But the feeling of shame persists. It will not be forgiven those who were responsible.

  I thought of all this as the boys rose from spreading their dead flowers on the memorial. At least – and this I took for my comfort – we had not so much collective guilt for the cruelty of individual man to individual man. This seems to me the worst of all, that gleeful (or indifferent) eyes must have met eyes in terror.

  We rode back to Cracow through the sunset, and I do not think we talked much of what we had experienced that day. Indeed, as the evening wore on, I believe we ceased to think about it. ‘We forget because we must.’