by Ann Bridge
Incidentally these people, General Stirling and his wife, are of the first water. So Owen is happy too – and I am happier. Nothing makes me feel so rich as finding new people to like, unless it is remembering how much I like the old ones.
Why is this? – here Warren, poor wretch, is infinitely remote; you are quite at hand. Please explain!
I can’t follow all your letter and must answer what I can. A blut-bad, William, is a blood-bath, in which you plunge your friends’ souls for their good. I tried to plunge Warren’s with little result, so far as I could see – but as he has written since I may have done better than I thought. If he is more besotted than I think possible it is very unfortunate – if he is less so than he seems it is A.1. In any case I cleared my conscience by doing all that I could do to make him see how different I feel myself to be from him and all his words and works, and in some respects how at war with him. His only response was to point out that even if I sacked him tomorrow I could never take away what I had given, without intending it – a picture of a spirit in action which, so he said, had done him a power of good. That he asked for nothing and never would, not even to see me – but that, since seeing me and chasing the Office of Works for me was happiness, why not let him be happy?
It’s his simplicity and this generosity that’s so defeating.
I’m all for skill and patience in personal relations, William. Do we differ? Don’t I, built alive, as you truly conceive, into the wall of Owen’s tower, but with my head poking out (to his everlasting resentment!) laboriously construct a little garden of friendships for myself? I wonder if I do mock at belief in and reliance on the better sort of values.
I’ve got my job all right. A woman we stayed with on our way is going – I hope – to let me camp in her house on Grosvenor Road to be “done” for by her caretaker for the first few weeks. I can dine with Vincent and Warren alternate nights and lunch with you and Charles alternate days – I think it all sounds most restful!
The tour is succeeding, William – the car is perfect, the weather perfect; everyone wants us to stay longer and go again on the way down. Owen has added Mrs Stirling and Mrs Sitwell to his list, and likes all these rich houses where I take him – it is not as bad as feared.
He sends you his love – so “you dear thing!” do I.
Yrs.,
M.A.’
The summons from Winston came while we were at Roy Bridge – Owen went back to London, I stayed where I was.
June 11, ’28.
‘My dear William,
Owen as you probably know is drifting about in London. He is supposed to be staying at Pendell Court and supposed to be starting back on Tuesday night – but if he doesn’t and you can lay your hand on him, give him this, will you?
I am very happy here. I have got colitis (since he ran off) and am in bed eating cornflour. It doesn’t sound very cheerful, does it? – alone and ill in a small pub. But it suits me down to the ground. I sleep all night and most of the day – a native lady sends me papers, books and brandy; I have had three visitors today, one Victor Hodgson, a perfect charmer and a lover of stones and bones like myself; Lochiel has just telegraphed to ask me to dinner tomorrow. But they aren’t the reason for my contentment – it’s being alone and able to sleep. At the moment bed is still my idea of Heaven! Today I energized and shot in an article to the Daily Express, tomorrow I must grind out 1200 words for Dick Sheppard. Lovely – all this time to write. No Owen in a fever about fish – no Warren spreading love and peace over one like treacle – no nothing and no nobody! What bliss!
Goodbye, William. Write if you feel cataleptic.
Your happy,
M.A.’
I soon got well again, and moved on; Owen stayed in the South.
The Hotel,
Spean Bridge.
June 28, 1928.
‘Dear William,
Look at the Spectator this week and tell me if you like my contribution. I’m amazed that they printed it – but its topical as does it! [This was the poem about the death of Chang-T’so-Lin which is reproduced in Facts and Fictions.] For God’s sake don’t tell Nevile that it’s mine – or anyone else.
Why in the world should Owen tread on the toes of the F.O. when devilling for Winston? Tucked away in No. 11 or at Westerham? Aren’t you getting morbid about him, William? That’s very bad for him, you know. I’m getting very un-morbid up here. I came back today from a wild 36 hrs dash to a remote place where I rubbed some superb stones in a nettle-y churchyard and slept in a gardener’s cottage, and got soaked to the skin going to and fro in an open boat, swapping lies with a grocer from Barra. Took lunch off two total strangers to whom a friend had written about me – found they were wine fiends, and talked it up in the car: result, a magnum of ‘68 Lafitte for lunch! – and I’m going back on Monday to stay 3 days. This buccaneering life is rather fun.’
That last light-hearted nonsense was written before Jane got ill, and plunged us into anxiety again. But by October, after a few weeks at Chateau d’Oex, always to me a most reviving place, I had recovered my spirits, as that letter to William from the Prima Flora shows. We spent a happy Christmas there: Owen came out, bringing Patrick; and even William, who was temporarily at Geneva on some job to do with the League of Nations, came up for a few days. Owen soon had to return to Winston, but I felt perfectly safe to leave the two little girls in the care of Madame Juvet and Jane’s trained Nurse, and later brought Patrick home to return to school myself. This meant being in London, and therefore involved with Fisher all over again; and since he is the principal character in this story I propose to use one or two more letters about him.
Chapter II
In fact, Sir Warren Fisher is much more than a character in our private story; he is an historical figure, whose work in and influence on the Civil Service is now the subject of a good deal of research – social historians are writing about him, his activities impinge on biographies dealing with that period. Since we were so closely involved with him I feel we ought to have a contribution to make to this subject, but when I re-read both the preceding contemporary account, and the letters I wrote then, I do not feel that any very clear picture of his character emerges. Of course at that time, in 1928 and ’29, I had not begun to write formally at all; I have spent the intervening thirty-odd years in writing novels, and hence in practising the craft of delineating characters, albeit invented ones, as best I could. It interests me to see these early struggles to understand and explain a character not invented, but actual, impinging on my own life, and to observe what a poor job I made of it – I have tried to see whether, looking back, with so much professional experience behind me, I could make a better assessment, draw a more convincing picture, and perhaps a fairer one – and the answer is that I can’t. So it seems to me that the only thing to do is to give these immature scraps for what they are worth, always bearing in mind Sir Claud Schuster’s dictum, reported earlier, that ‘Fisher was a curious creature; no one understood him.’ And Sir Claud had worked with him for years, and counted himself his friend, up to a point; if he was baffled, no wonder that I was – baffled and embarrassed. The following letters show, I think, at once an endeavour to be honest, and that just because I was embarrassed, I was unfair.
Upper Jordan,
Worplesdon,
Surrey.
[This was the house of my sister Grace, married to Sir Bertram Bircham.]
Feb. 14, ’29.
‘Dear William,
Still here! I called in to see you the day before I left London, but you had a cold or something and were away. I was sorry – I wanted consolation – I’d just had tea with Warren and was desolated by his optimism. Warren won’t do, William! He really won’t. I’ve tried valiantly to be proper friends with him, to feel generous and real to him inside; and it isn’t his fault either; but reality simply withers at his touch. He’s like that. I think I must chuck it. It’s corroding somehow to have an unreal sort of friendship like that. Either he must learn
to be friends on my terms or none. And he can’t learn.
I brought John here, just over a week ago. 36 hours later he suddenly got acute inflammation of the middle ear; we got a Dr to him, and he was operated on three hours later. We seem to have averted a mastoid this time – it’s healing well and he has no pain any more. But it’s not very nice, William.
Love to Elsie.
Yrs.
M.A.’
I see that one sentence in this letter might give a false impression – ‘on my terms or none’ might be taken to indicate that Sir Warren had made a pass at me. He never did anything of the sort, at any point. Nor can I even explain just why I should have felt, and said, that reality withered at his touch. But I did feel it, strongly; I felt that he believed that by pretending that something was so, you could make it so. I thought sometimes that he behaved like a Christian Scientist about matters other than health; about his health he was not a Christian Scientist – he went to a doctor for his sinus trouble, and used an elaborate sort of douche to rinse them out. But he had been profoundly influenced in that direction by the great love of his life, Lady Ebury, who had died some time before we met him; she was a believing and a practising Christian Scientist. It seemed to me that this pretence had something to do with his not being able (or willing) to recognize the enormous difference, as Grigg and I had told him, between Sir Eyre Crowe and Sir William Tyrrell – Crowe half-Teuton, half-Irishman, equally compounded of granite and lightning, and Tyrrell, his successor as Head of the Foreign Office, the smooth, supple diplomat of partly Asiatic descent – by calling both alike ‘good fellows’ and ‘dear things’ he reduced them to a common level of unreality, totally unrelated to their actual living characters – an unreality of his own creation.
Perhaps the following letter throws a little more light on the effect Fisher produced on me – and on other people too.
Upper Jordan,
Worplesdon,
Surrey.
Feb. 21, ’29.
‘My dear William,
That’s a very good picture of him – “germ-free” is peculiarly happy. But, no – he isn’t what he is by nature entirely; he’s what he is by theory, not by experience. Remember Archie Bell and Warren’s “converted face” – that was a great truth too. But, yes – again: converted from some living muddiness into distilled water; you can run batteries on that, and perhaps the Civil Service, but it’s no good to drink. The tiresome thing is that he has a power of a sort – he’s like Aspirin, and when one has too bad a cold or headache, one takes it, and finds relief. Of course we all know the after-effects of Aspirin – it depresses the heart’s action; it constipates, you must take a purge after it. What I object to is this subsequent feeling of disloyalty to my bottle of tablets. You do see that one must either stop taking them, or else swear loyally by Aspirin?
I like your analysis of the devil. Oh yes, there’s plenty to be afraid of. And no need for fear. You are very right, William; that was a good spasm.
I’m typing the Saga (this is what we called my private record in the family) – editing it rather heavily as I go. I want it to become something that —— could read – and others too. It loses in fun and vigour, but I think that worth while. I begin – now William, don’t get frightened, and don’t talk, or fuss! – I begin to see possibilities of use in the Saga. Once one lends a thing, you see, you never quite know ... do you? If it has sufficient interest to amuse. Do you think it has?
William, I must stop.
Oh by the way, it wasn’t true to say you were sorry Warren isn’t satisfying. I felt the chill of a crocodile’s tear on my hand as I read that! You aren’t sorry for him, you know, a bit – you dislike him with a peculiar intensity. And you are not sorry I don’t find him satisfying – you’d be horrified at the lapse if I did. Isn’t that true!
Yours,
M.A.’
Well, these letters are full of very harsh words about someone who, after his initial disastrous and damaging misjudgement of Owen had treated us with great generosity, kindness, and even affection – so why was I so nasty about him? I still cannot come on a clear, let alone a valid reason – if there can ever be a valid reason for being nasty about anyone. I think the nearest I can get to it is that I had a semi-conscious or subconscious feeling that there was something about Fisher that was not quite genuine – not really honest to himself about himself, and therefore not able to be honest to or about other people. Now my generation, at that time and for some years previously, had made a fetish of stringent honesty in personal relations; the Cambridge set of Darwins, Cornfords, Hugh and Steuart Wilson and so on, with whom we were in touch, had developed it to a point which I, when I first encountered it, found startling – the determination to express everything in words, without fear or shame about one’s own feelings; it startled and even shocked a far wider circle in the poems of Rupert Brooke. But by now, I and the people I lived among had been practising this way of life for years, and any other seemed to us false and unworthy. And I think that, forced into a rather close relationship with Fisher, who belonged to quite a different generation, I judged him, perhaps unreasonably, by these new standards of ours, and found him wanting.
But there was one aspect of Fisher’s curious character which, odd as it may seem, caused me no discomfort. This was a simple, earthy taste for low not to say vulgar humour. After his long strenuous days conducting public affairs at the Treasury with some of the most highly-trained intelligences in the country, his favourite recreation, back in his rather featureless little flat, was to settle down after supper in a chair by the fire with a glass of port, and play over gramophone records of the most simple-minded sort: Harry Lauder’s comic songs or, what he enjoyed still more, those of George Formby, the Lancashire comedian. One of those which he particularly delighted in was called ‘When a Man Reaches Forty’, and had a chorus which began ‘For – he’s – not old enough to be old, poor fellow, and he’s not young enough to be young’; Warren would listen, smiling, beating time with one hand on his knee, to the ‘poor fellow’s’ various disasters and humiliations – when they culminated in something particularly outrageous he would shout with laughter, enchanted.
Now, this seemed to me to be perfectly wholesome; I felt that these simple tastes of his were completely genuine, as his uncritical optimism, and perhaps some of his pietism, too, were not; those were assumed attitudes, this was the natural man. His shrewdness, too, was natural, and enjoyable – I was a great one for saying ‘Thank you’ and making appreciative remarks, by way of being polite; Warren’s word for these was ‘Mary’s little phrases.’ (And a good word, too!)
Chapter III
Let Owen, whose story after all this really is, have the last word. He has been persuaded to jot down some opinions.
‘I take a rather less critical view of Warren than my wife did, or than William Strang has been reported (p. 130) as taking.
Warren’s was an elusive and enigmatic character; but I would state quite categorically that he was a good man. His superficial attractions were obvious – good looks, extreme readiness in speech, open-mindedness, toleration, patience, and scholarship. A model civil servant – courageous and emphatically not dishonest in personal or official relationships.
Why I originally got into trouble with him was because he was not intelligently sensitive to the characters of other people who were quite unlike himself, and principally to mine. He was educated, it is true, at the Dragon School and at Winchester, but never moved as a member of it in that large upper-middle-class society of which, for instance, the Buxtons and Hoares as well as my parents on both sides and all my uncles and aunts were typical. I was related to and acquainted with many of these, and was at home in their homes. In my leisure I rode, shot, fished, skied; spent summers and autumns in Scotland, winters in Switzerland and springs in Italy; and as a schoolboy or undergraduate visited and dined with the rich and sometimes with the exalted in London. What Fisher’s background was I do not know, but th
at he did none of these things is certain, for he told me so, and outside of official life we should have been most unlikely to meet. I was and, I suppose, am an old-fashioned snob, born and brought up in the country, and consequently at ease with all classes of society, particularly the top and bottom strata. The class of society with which I was least at ease is precisely the class to which Warren appeared to belong.
This accounts in part for my having what he called “strolled in” to the Board of Enquiry without feeling or seeming in any way impressed or overawed by this bunch of civil servants who wanted to enquire into what I regarded as my private life. This was the main cause of all the trouble.
I became, and remained, very fond of Warren. He was much much cleverer than me – cleverer than almost everyone – frighteningly clever. Just a little too clever – not easy like Lindsay and Wellesley and numerous other friends of mine (mostly critical of me) in the Foreign Service; not stupid and vain like Austen Chamberlain. On the whole a good man, who worked like a tiger.’
I would go further, and say that Fisher’s work was his life.
Appendix