Important to Me Read online

  The answer came. Did I realise that I had libelled one of their most distinguished authors?

  Let me make this point quite clear. When accused of this sort of thing, one is almost invariably guilty. But on this occasion I was not. I was as innocent as a Blakeian cherub riding the blast, and totally bewildered. I asked, who on earth did they mean?

  The answer came. Dame Edith Sitwell.

  Now I had, in my novel, a female poet, given entirely to the subject of maternity (she had seven children, and wanted more) whose literary output was slender. Her name was Dorothy Merlin. It seemed to me that she was as unlike Dame Edith as anyone could possibly be: in any case I had never had any contact with the latter whatsoever. Letters were exchanged. I urged my publisher to take legal advice: he did, and the cards fell against me. I fought against this. I agreed to make certain trivial alterations: Dorothy was tall and fair, so I made her small and dark. I even made her Australian. Still it would not do. After six weeks’ deadlock, Charles said he could stand no more.

  He wrote to Dame Edith, saying first that he was sorry neither he nor I had had a chance to meet her: but that his wife was in great trouble, and he could see nothing for it but to go to the fountain-head. He explained the position precisely, offered to send her the manuscript and to let her see for herself whether it had any offence in it.

  The response was swift. It came at breakfast next morning, on the telephone. Edith herself, roaring with laughter. The gist of it was that I was to go ahead and publish. She took my word for it that I had meant no offence to her. She would like to see the typescript for the pleasure of it, but no more than that. There was no need to show it to her at all. She added, ‘I am writing a book about Catherine de Medici. Since your wife is not a Roman Catholic, and does not massacre Protestants, surely I am libelling her? Do come and see me.’

  A gentleman, as I have said.

  I need hardly say that I did, immediately, send her a typescript, which only made her laugh more. This was the beginning of a friendship cherished both by Charles and me.

  We met her for the first time, at luncheon, at the Sesame Club, where she was supposed to hold court. I say ‘supposed’, because I think this a psychological misconception. She just sat in her corner, looking spectacular, and courts formed around her. I have seen people, whom I shall not name, bow so low before her that their buttocks shot up at an angle of forty-five degrees.

  She was not a ‘room-talker’, a type I detest. Like to talk, she did: but she was also a good listener. She could be a savage foe (though this was really another dressing-up part, consisting largely of schoolboy japes) but I, personally, have never known her to be the first to attack. And attacked she was, cruelly and vulgarly, during the thirties, by persons without a moiety of her talent. If a friend of hers came under attack, she would fight for him quite as vigorously as for herself. To one’s misfortunes, she was very kind: but to say she suffered fools gladly would be a misstatement. She didn’t.

  The miseries of her youth are well known, and I shall not dwell upon them. But she is the only person I have ever known who made a work of art out of herself, and with complete success.

  She was an exceedingly plain child, and Sir George Sitwell’s enforcement of a steel contraption to straighten her nose, did not improve matters. But it was characteristic of Edith that she would not let even nature defeat her. She must have planned, with great deliberation, that it should not. She contrived for herself a unique style of dressing – sometimes reminiscent of Elizabeth I, sometimes of the Pope, more often of the paintings of Van Eyck – which she wore so splendidly as to acquire something that could be called (and often was called) beauty. She usually chose majestic, hieratic hats, not at all like the late Queen Mary’s, and robes of the richest embossed materials. Round her neck were exotic ornaments of heavy gold. On her exquisite hands were loadings of aquamarines. One wondered how she could even lift them from her lap.

  I only once saw her without a hat, and this when she dined at our flat. Her hair was fair and sparse. But she was magnificently robed in a gown presented to her by the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York) for her poetry recital there. She told me at once that she had worn it to give me and my guests pleasure. She did, we were all delighted. But, so robed, she did not overawe us. It was not part of her plan. Her plan was simply to please.

  I came to know her famous brothers, Osbert, now dead, then suffering with the utmost gameness from Parkinson’s Disease, and the handsome Sacheverell (the present baronet) whose prose works, The Quick and the Dead, Splendours and Miseries, are absurdly underrated. As a trio, they were – at least, in their earlier years – so united, so bizarre – a sort of six-legged race – that they not unnaturally became targets for parody. (One must parody someone.) Sir Noel Coward was the first, and most effective offender. (Young men usually are: remember the days of TW3, and Beyond the Fringe.) But I am glad to say they made it up before Edith died. Because, had things been different, they would have enjoyed each other’s company so much.

  Edith’s last days were not particularly sad ones. She was confined to her room, where she occupied her chair as if it were a throne, and then to her bed. This had a green velvet coverlet, and her lovely hands were always displayed above it. She was cared for by her devoted secretary, Elizabeth Salter, and by the equally devoted Nurse Farquharson. There was a Siamese cat called Shadow.

  Her parties continued, but no longer at the Sesame Club. We were invited for drinks to her flat – not ‘summoned’, as I have heard someone say: a parade of that sort was not in her nature. She was enormous fun, even when old age had made some of her ‘practical joke’ stories repetitive. They were so good that one didn’t mind hearing them again; even as no one has ever minded hearing again the most famous songs of a great music-hall star.

  When she died, how we missed her! She had that capacity to linger in the memory fully-blown. For we are pitifully short these days of people who have ‘style’, that mysterious and immediately recognisable attribute. Edith had it. So has Harold Macmillan (in excelsis), Sir John Betjeman. But we are fast becoming a grey lot.

  Of Edith Sitwell’s poetry I shall only speak briefly. She was in love from the first with metrical intricacies, and the golden Hesperides of words.

  Some clown has announced this week, in some periodical, that poetry should only be reviewed by poets. For whom, then, is it written? Should plays only be reviewed by playwrights? or novels by novelists?

  This demand means that poetry should only be reviewed by technicians. The rise of the hair along the spine, as Housman put it, has no place in this new aspect of criticism. It is a mere engineer’s conception.

  Edith, until her later years, did not approximate to the status of more than a minor poet. Few hairs rose along the spine. Yet she was gay, delightful, and absolutely original.

  I think her main early weakness was her passion for Swinburne. A magnificent manipulator of words, he had no sense at all: I do not know anything sillier than his record of Sinister Queens.

  ‘I am the Queen Aholibah’, etc.

  Poets need to have something to say: see Shakespeare, Dante, Milton, Donne, Herbert, Pope, Dryden and so forth. Edith found it during the war, when her religious feeling and her social conscience grew side by side. ‘Gold Coast Customs’ and ‘Still Falls the Rain’ are very considerable poems.

  Who should blame her that in her younger days, she chose to employ her very great gift in giving fun? She had had little fun herself.

  11. Being in Love

  It is not an entire advantage to be fluent in reading, as I was, and my children after me, at the age of four, nor to understand what is so laboriously spelled out in front of you. ‘N-O-T B-E-F-O-R-E T-H-E C-H-I-L-D.’ Of course, this pricked up one’s ears. And sometimes one’s ears could be sources of grief.

  I was amusing myself with a playmate of about my own age – say, four and a half – one afternoon. I think we were dressing up: doubtless she was the princess and I the handmai
d. She was extraordinarily pretty: indeed, she grew up to be the prettiest woman I have ever seen in my life. She was killed in a bombing raid during the Second World War.

  Watching us indulgently was her mother, and a friend of her mother’s, Mrs T. Suddenly I heard the latter say, as part of a conversation, but with her eyes on me, ‘She seems a clever little girl. What a pity she’s so U-G-L-Y.’

  When my mother came to call for me, I could hardly wait to get outside the door.

  Me: ‘Mamma, am I ugly?’

  My Mother (indignant): ‘Certainly not! Whatever put that idea into your head?’

  Me: ‘Mrs T. said so. She spelled it.’

  My Mother (always just): ‘No, darling. You’re quaint.’

  Quaint! A horrible word. It dogged me for years, when I could not believe that any of my young passions could possibly be reciprocated.

  I was, in fact, a plain child. Photographs of the time show me as a Chinese doll, with an odd slant of eye (this runs in the family: my grandfather liked, mysteriously and ridiculously, to attribute it to a Mandarin – it would be a Mandarin – of whom we were all the descendants), a snub nose, and a bob of thick dark hair, with a low and unbecoming fringe, this topped by a big ribbon bow fashionable at the time.

  After the incident of Mrs T., the subject of my looks tended to worry me. Later, strolling with my beautiful friend on the Common, hoping to pick up boys from the Grammar School, I would automatically take second place when these hopes were realised. It was while staying with the romantic novelist Jeffery Farnol and his wife Blanche, that comfort came. I was fifteen and I remember it well: it was the first really lavish household I had ever visited, and an exciting one. Jeffery, in the spirit of his novels, would cry out, when carving the Sunday joint, ‘By Jesu, a goodly baron of beef!’ I was happy there, and their daughter Jill took me to tea-dances and presented me, diffidently, with two of the most beautiful dresses I have ever possessed – or, I suspect, ever shall. At that time my mother and I were very hard up.

  But one afternoon I heard a brief conversation between my mother and Blanche Farnol.

  My mother: ‘Yes, I think she shows promise.’ (I was then writing long poems about the Golden Fleece, Hylas and the water nymphs, and others of similar classical inspiration, all deeply influenced by Tennyson.) ‘But I’m afraid she isn’t going to be a beauty.’

  Blanche (comfortably): ‘Just give her a year. She’ll improve.’ At sixteen, in fact, there was some improvement, and my fears of a lifetime of non-reciprocation faded.

  I should like to return, however, to an experience I had at the age of eight. I was returning on the bus from a trip to Richmond Park, with my mother, my Aunt Kalie, and a man friend of hers whom I shall call Henry. Henry must at that time have been in his early thirties: and women, except platonically, were of no interest to him. This, naturally, I was not to know. I was sitting next to him in a front seat on the top of the bus. It was a blue and brilliant afternoon (wasn’t it always like that, when we were children?). I was suddenly taken with a passion for him so violent that I shall never forget it. It seemed to me that I had never met anyone who seemed so handsome (he was, in a bleak way), so adorable. So much what I wanted for myself, for ever and ever.

  The duration of this amour was, I suppose, about an hour and a half, if that. But what I want to emphasise is that it in no way differed in kind from any love I experienced later. It seems to me that our youthful loves and our mature ones differ very little, in essence, except in their duration. Proust knew this: his devoted love for Gilberte, frustrated, soon died, and he was able, without the slightest feeling of remorse, to give her precious gift of an agate marble to Albertine.

  My mother was, in some respects, a wise woman. So that I should not sneak off to meet boys round street corners, as she (fearing grandfather) had done, she kept, from the day I was fifteen, open house for the boys and girls I cared to invite. These were the dancing days: we rolled back the carpet in our pleasant semi-basement sitting-room and danced for hours. We then drank tea and ate my mother’s special and much appreciated treat, called for for many years after that – of bread pudding, full of currants and spice, hot from the oven. Afterwards we graduated to something called Reo, a red wine that seemed racy then, but which I cannot now admire.

  Babs, Teddy, Jack, ‘Take Plato’ (see An Impossible Marriage), Reg, Peter, later Ian (this was not his name, but I liked it better than his real one) and later still F., but F. was older than we were, and in a sense a disruptive influence, for by then he and I had become engaged. I think of them all with affection and gratitude.

  Of course, that basement became redolent of romantic attachments, but in those days, for boys and girls of our middle class upbringing, these were only expressed in flirtation and in surreptitious kisses in the hallway. I am speaking of a time when we were between fifteen and nineteen. No one went to bed with anyone else, nor would have thought of such a thing. (If anyone did so, he or she kept it dark.) No one suggested to us that otherwise we would be frustrated, would wither on the vine. My mother, who had had my horoscope cast and who had been informed that I should need ‘a strict moral training’, would certainly have seen to it that I did not fall into error. But then, nobody asked me.

  None of us was any the worse for all this. It was a carefree time, the only one I have ever really known. The end of the twenties: the beginning of the thirties. To my second husband, Charles, they did not seem like that at all. Seven years older than myself, they were days to him of hard work and anxiety: he was politically conscious, while we were not.

  We were, on the whole, a literary set, though only a few of us cared for serious music, and only I had a smattering of knowledge about painting. Every week there was some new discovery. Someone had found out Dostoevsky, someone Liam O’Flaherty, someone Nietzsche, I think this was ‘Take Plato’. And one day, Teddy burst in, full of excitement, to tell us of a novel called Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe. This was a profound influence upon us all – for it is a book for youth – and many years later I was to write a critical study of Wolfe’s work.

  I am not going into a recital here of my love affairs, greenstick or otherwise, except to say that my engagement to F. had been broken off. Before him there had been Ian, whom I met many years later as a middle-aged man, handsome, a combination of fun and gravitas, with a charming wife and family. A grandfather. He died before his time, and I remembered Bruges, where we first met at a band concert on the Grand Place, all gas flares and carillons.

  Of my two marriages, I wish to say little here. I married Neil, an attractive, Frenchified, twenty-four-year-old Australian (his education had been mostly in France) in 1936. We were married for fourteen years, and the marriage was broken up, I think, largely by the war and the irrational hostility of my mother, with whom we lived. It was some years after the war that we were divorced, but the strain had been increasing. But I remember the pre-war trips we were constantly making to France – mostly to Paris, but sometimes in rucksack hikes around the Seine Valley – Les Andelys, Caudebec-en-Caux. We were both extremely pressed for money, for my writing brought me in little, and I do not know how we managed it. But we did. For him, I have little but gratitude. He has remarried and has a daughter.

  In 1950, I myself remarried. This was to C. P. Snow whom I had known, from an exchange of letters on the subject of literature, and from casual meetings, for many years. He has been all I could wish. More might be said, but it isn’t going to be.

  12. A Higher Education

  I once said of Aldous Huxley, that he was loved by the young in the twenties and thirties, because he had the gift of making them feel that, if only they really tried, they could become as clever as he.

  I was fascinated by his novels, and repelled: repelled by his own loathing of ugliness wherever it was to be found – in a human countenance, in a dog falling from an aeroplane and splattering with blood two naked lovers on a flat roof. Implausible, I have always thought, but unforgettable j
ust the same. He had a certain in-built life-hatred and life-contempt: when I met him in his old age this seemed to have moderated. He was very gentle. Age had even brought him a handsomeness that he had lacked in youth. Nearly blind, happy with his wife, he found in California a way of life that appeared to satisfy him. He became a mystic and, I must add, the most gullible man I have ever met. He really did appear to believe that dolphins were cleverer than he was.

  It was not, however, the novels, or his later mystic-philosophical works, that had such a deep and life-lasting influence upon me. This was a book published in 1933, called Texts and Pretexts, which was an anthology with critical commentaries. It opened miraculous doors to me, and for a group of my friends with literary interests, who were as excited as I was. (When I spoke of it to him in the sixties, he said he intended to write a sequel: he died before this became possible.)

  He was my ‘Higher Education’, and the only one I ever had. At least, it was the only real help I ever had: the donkey-work, which a university would have helped me through, such as a long struggle with French literature, had to be done in solitude, and with no further instruction. Here I am not asking for sympathy, holding out the tin can, as it were: I believe that, to a creative writer, a university education would have been nothing but a hindrance. A course in Eng. Lit. has rotted many a promising writer. It is only as a critic that I should have welcomed it.