Important to Me

by Pamela Hansford Johnson

  At my excellent school – a very good grammar school – we were on the whole admirably taught, and made to work where we were not absolutely unteachable, as in all the mathematical subjects I was. When it came to trigonometry, the mistress threw me over in despair: and actually gave me permission to sit at the back of the classroom and write poetry. (After Charles and I married he, disbelieving in my incapacity, said that he would teach me trigonometry. The lessons, with me really trying hard to understand, came to an abrupt halt, when I insisted that a sine was something that just didn’t seem to exist, an invisibility you were supposed to move around anywhere between an angle. He became in total sympathy with my maths teacher.)

  English, and particularly French literature, were thoroughly taught, and I immensely enjoyed both: but I never realised how narrow the syllabus was in both cases. English: Shakespeare, Keats, Coleridge, some Milton, Wordsworth, some Blake, Byron’s lyrics, Tennyson, Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, Browning (a little) and ‘Modern’ poetry concluded with the 1914 war. French: Racine and Corneille, Lamartine, Victor Hugo, various minor poets. Much to be grateful for, of course.

  But when I started to read Texts and Pretexts, I felt like the industrious girl in the story of Mother Holle, who was rewarded by a shower of gold.

  Crashaw, Vaughan! I had never heard of them. George Herbert, my most beloved poet – I am making no value judgments, of course – hardly at all. The more esoteric Blake. Manley Hopkins, the great intoxicant. Sir Philip Sidney. Sir Thomas Wyatt.

  And French! Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Valéry, Mallarmé, Gérard de Nerval!

  In Latin, which my friends and I could all read adequately, though mine is badly rusted now, there were anonymous delights such as this:

  Spatiari dulce est

  per loca nemorosa;

  dulcimo est carpere

  lilia cum rosa;

  dulcissimum est ludere

  cum virgine formosa!

  Among Huxley’s many chapter headings were ‘Visitations’, ‘Country Ecstasies’, ‘Self Torture’, ‘Loneliness’, ‘Desire’, ‘Earthly Paradise’, ‘Conceits’, ‘Magic’, ‘Serenity’, ‘Death’.

  The chosen poetry under each was embedded in a commentary full of wit, insight, sharpness and sometimes, where appropriate, high humour and comedy. We knew that if we could never hope to vie with him in learning, he was with us in enthusiasm, that he had got as much kick out of the writing as we out of the reading. But the most important thing was this: he led us on. He pointed out to us, by mere suggestion, without the slightest touch of the pedant, where to read further – and this partly by leaving a great number of poems tantalisingly incomplete.

  I am afraid that, at first, this newly-acquired and delightful learning, led us to bluff somewhat. With Huxley behind us, we could always show off – and we did. But later we needed to bluff less, since we had continued, many of us, on the courses he had set for us.

  My copy of Texts and Pretexts, once bound in jade and lettered in gold, is now a brownish green on the spine – which is loose – and a mere memory of jade on the front and back. When I lent it to my sons, I was always terrified that I would never get it back, for the book must now be extremely rare, if not virtually unobtainable. I hope, in the names of education, delight, exhilaration and discovery, that it will one day be reprinted.

  I have written a good deal about these poetic excitements, since I have found the poetry of the past can rarely have verbal appreciative expression after one’s early twenties. One can mention a new book of poetry: one can talk of a new play and a new novel: also of classic novels. But poetry? It makes one feel a fool. Even when I meet a young poet whose work I admire, I cannot tell him so: I am awkward and tongue-tied. After all, what could I say but, ‘I liked your poems’? Impossible to quote, or to attempt any sort of verbal analysis.

  Just conceive of an ordinary literary party, among the talk of royalties, agents and general injustices, where someone broke out in praise of, say, Crashaw, and insisted on quoting from him. There would be a deathly silence. Yet some of those silent would not be incapable of continuing the conversation. They would just be too frozen to do so.

  At small gatherings with literary friends, I have found it possible to discuss Dickens, Trollope, Proust. Even Philip Larkin, Richard Eberhart, Charles Causley, Ted Hughes. But Crashaw, Vaughan, Wyatt? Not a bit of it. I have not frozen in my own enthusiasms, but have frozen within them. And I think my readers will thus have frozen inwardly, unless they are teaching academics: in which case they may release their skills in the classroom. Somehow, these enthusiasms have become socially – well – unbecoming.

  This is why I remember some of Victor Neuburg’s garden evenings with affection. If we talked of Blake, we damned well did talk of him: we were at least uninhibited, even if we were raw. Contemporaneity was not all, though of course it entered it.

  I think it is only on my rare meetings with Edmund Wilson that I was able to talk about Proust, Dickens, Kipling, in a spontaneous way – mostly in answer to his sharp questions. He was a great critic, and I was in awe of him, but somehow or other he made things easy. If it had been poetry – that unspeakable subject, when the poetry is over a hundred years old – I think I could have done the same.

  But it is of no use repining: and my friends need not have the slightest fear that I shall suddenly break out in delirious praise of Wyatt, or anybody else. My excitements are not silenced: my tongue is. Even to my son, Philip, if I strike something in poetry that seems to me magical and may strike him in the same way, I will not read it aloud: I will simply pass him the book.

  I gave A la Recherche du temps perdu, volume by volume, to Andrew, many years ago, when we were sitting on the sands of a small Belgian resort. I was rewarded, on occasion, by bursts of laughter, when Proust’s comic scenes had struck home. It was very satisfying.

  Mais, O, ces voix d’enfants

  Qui chantent dans la coupole!

  Little by little, the great arch of our heavens shrinks, the blue fades, and the dome of the cupola is smaller than we thought.

  For all of us? I doubt if that was true of Huxley at any time. He was not a ‘Gottgetrunkener mensch’, but he was drunk with literature: and in our youth he made us so, too.

  Now, as the years go on, we are becoming retiring and mock-modest; at least, among our contemporaries. It is sometimes possible to exchange enthusiasms with the young, but only if they raise the subject. That is one of the reasons why they please, and stimulate us, so much.

  13. When Daffodils Begin to Peer

  Shakespeare. All the international millions who are devoted to the plays know him of course: as something more than an elusive shadow, just out of sight. Sometimes he seems very much in sight: and he is not Francis Bacon, or the Earl of Oxford, or some strange consortium – the last conception an impossible one for anybody of the slightest literary insight.

  I first visited Stratford in the spring of 1940. It was beautiful spring weather: I am sure that the meadow flowers were more abundant then than they are now (fewer insecticides). Ladies’ Smocks were indeed silver-white. The walk to Shottery was not so abominably built up as it is today: one could imagine the young Shakespeare making that trip, perhaps not altogether to his advantage. The doxy was just over the dale.

  I was particularly happy: I had begun to suspect that I was to have a child, which proved to be a correct suspicion. What did I see at the theatre? I don’t remember very well. But I think I saw Margaret Leighton in As You Like It: I know I heard three little boys sing: ‘It was a lover and his lass’, as though it were the first song ever sung in the world.

  Of course, I had gone regularly to the plays long before that – (though not at Stratford) whenever I could. From the ages of eleven to about fourteen, I and a few like-minded school-friends saved up for our Saturday treat. This was invariably the same. We would climb to the top of the Monument, where we would eat our sandwiches, and look out on the panorama of London. Then we would go to th
e Old Vic – Lillian Bayliss’ theatre – to sit on a hard gallery seat – price 6d – (or, I should say, two and a half ‘new pence’) – and watch Shakespeare. No scenery: just curtains, a few banners, a throne, some leafy boughs for pastoral scenes, fanfares and tuckets. Baliol Holloway, our hero, a dashing Falconbridge in King John. We were drunk with it all.

  Thou wear a lion’s hide? Doff it for shame,

  And hang a calf’s skin on those recreant limbs!

  What is there about Shakespeare that can intoxicate many children, and carry that intoxication (though it will grow an increasingly critical content, where production is concerned) into age? God knows. But, of course, there is something.

  The war interrupted my playgoing. But from 1950 onwards, Charles and I visited Stratford once every year for a week – in so far as it were possible.

  I maintain that the town in itself is altogether delightful: in shape, it is as it was in Shakespeare’s day, and the Stratford Trust has done wonders to preserve it. Of course there are some blots: some people will insist that it is ‘commercialised’. It isn’t, or only in some minor respects. But who, knowing anything of Shakespeare, that man of the theatre, businessman, builder of New Place, armiger, aspiring bourgeois, can conceivably believe it would have pleased him if it had run at a loss?

  The most wonderful season at Stratford was, for us, when, under the general direction of Glen Byam Shaw, the whole tetralogy of the history plays was performed: Richard II, Henry IV, Parts I and II (these two plays remind me of one magnificent novel), Henry V. The overall theory seemed to me based on the writings of E. M. Tillyard. What a cast! Harry Andrews, as Henry IV himself, bulging-eyed Hugh Griffiths as Glendower, and the delightful but obviously chilling young Richard Burton, first as Prince, then as King.

  Burton now seems lost to the theatre; it is a tragic loss. I cannot but think that despite his fame in the cinema, and the plutocratic glitter with which he has surrounded himself, he has let us down: and by ‘us’, I mean the English stage.

  I shall never forget his first entrance in Henry IV, Part 1. It was entirely consistent with the rejection of Falstaff, which was to come. Here he was, cold-eyed, pale-eyed, smiling rarely – and then only because Falstaff forced him to – among his companions in the Boar’s Head, sowing his wild oats because time was running short, and he knew he had to accept a royal destiny in which they could have no place. The scene in which he and Falstaff were fooling, pretending to be king in turn, was singularly glacial; and a clue to everything that was to come.

  Falstaff (playing the prince) was indulging in delightful false pathos: ‘Banish plump Jack, and banish all the world.’

  A dreadful pause. Then, in a voice of ice, the real Prince’s reply: ‘I do. I will.’

  He had that rare star-quality which can be expressed by absolute stillness. Lydia Sherwood, Gertrude in Burton’s Hamlet, was speaking to me of the first Court scene. ‘You remember how he stands there with nothing to say, until “a little more than kith and less than kind”? Well, he just stood. He was doing nothing naughty, not even the faintest fidget. But the rest of us could have turned handsprings before an audience would have paid us the slightest attention.’

  His Henry V was a little disappointing: perhaps he was not quite ready for the sudden switch to heroic acting. But in his scene with the soldiers by night, he was as magical as ever.

  I remember sitting next to him – he didn’t know me, and wouldn’t have cared if he had, he was lost to the world – on a bright spring morning, on the terrace of ‘the Dirty Duck’ as it is called (the Black Swan, an actors’ pub by the river). He was studying Henry V then. There he sat, not very tall, his hair still worn in his Prince Hal fringe, quite immobile, except when he had to turn a page.

  Paul Scofield, that splendid actor, and most thoughtful and modest of his kind, told me on an Atlantic crossing, that he and Laurence Olivier, and almost everyone else, were investing every hope in Burton’s future. Well, Richard Burton has had his future: he and his second wife became predominantly successful, and ‘glamour-figures’ of the highest order. But I am afraid the glory has departed.

  Between whiles during the Tetralogy – the weather was fine – I walked by the river, watching the famous ‘backward eddy’, and the weir where the swan’s feather stays motionless on the peak of the fall. This last was pointed out to me by Mr Timms, the head porter of the Shakespeare Hotel, who is a remarkable amateur Shakespearian and – I find – a very sound critic. He had been pondering the lines, from Anthony and Cleopatra ‘the swan’s down feather that stands upon the swell at full of tide, and neither way inclines’, and had gone to the weir to find out if they were accurate. I think Mr Timms has never missed a performance: he was in love with Shakespeare from his early youth, when the old theatre had been burned down, and all that was to be seen was a performance of Macbeth (live) in a local cinema. I rarely go to a play without asking his opinion beforehand. His answer is often sly. ‘Well, Madam, since I expect you are a bit of a purist …’ I suspect that I am. Sometimes I walked to Shottery, but in ten years that walk had been ruined. No daffodils. No ladies’ smock. No violets blue. And only a modicum of daisies. New houses, concrete schools, allotments, fences. But I had seen it in better days.

  I must admit to a visceral dislike of Peter Brook’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream – a world success, and dispraised by only one or two English critics. I was that year attending the international Shakespeare conference, and saw this with scholars from all over the world.

  Now Peter Brook is brilliantly inventive: but on this occasion he invented too much. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a play shot through with moonlight and moon-imagery. A truism? All right. Why not, then, believe it? The play opened on a scene of blinding whiteness – which was to blind the spectator throughout. A kind of gymnasium, where it might have been appropriate to hang war criminals. The first part went well enough – obviously we were to have an evening of perfect verse-speaking, and so we did.

  Then – the wood near Athens. Oberon and Puck, in clown’s costumes, high on trapezes, like accomplished conjurers playing between them a sort of cup-and-ball game. My attention was wholly distracted from the text by apprehension lest they should drop the damned things. Still worse, when the lovers began to climb vertiginous ladders attached to the wings. Who would be the first to fall? Worse still, when poor Hermia, hanging by her arms to a trapeze a good way above the stage, had to make a longish speech. Could she hold out? Was she suffering? Well, she was young. Let me comfort myself by pretending that she was not suffering so much as I thought.

  Bottom and the workmen came off better. But when Bottom was carried off by the ‘fairies’, shaggy men in something resembling boiler suits, to Titania’s bower, someone thrust an arm through his legs to suggest an enormous phallus. Influence of Jan Kott, probably. But so hopelessly out of key with the poetry.

  I asked Marko Minkov, Professor of English at the University of Sofia and one of the world’s foremost Shakespearean scholars (he was soon to be honoured by Birmingham University), what he thought of it all. He was sitting next to me. He replied, ‘If I keep my eyes tight shut, all the time, it is beautiful.’

  I cannot recall all the marvellous performances I have seen at Stratford. There was Olivier’s unmatchable Malvolio, a canting, nasal-speaking Puritan who could yet arouse pity: so that on his release from the ‘dark house’, his exit line – ‘I’ll be revenged upon the whole pack of you’ – struck a second’s dead silence into the babbling gossips of Illyria. When I saw Twelfth Night recently, this line was greeted by the audience with hearty laughter. Surely that was wrong? An Elizabethan audience would have laughed, but then, I think that in four hundred years we have learned to recognise something of Shakespeare’s extraordinary ambiguities. Shylock, for example: don’t we find some pity for the isolation of the Jew? Hadn’t he eyes like other men? If pricked, did he not bleed? If poisoned, didn’t he die? I think that in our laughing and our refraining from laughter, we
may be wiser, and closer to him, than his contemporaries.

  Paul Scofield’s famous Lear was powerful and original: I just had one fleeting doubt. He looked so fit that he might have spent six weeks out on the heath without any damage to his health. But I reserve my supreme admiration for his towering Timon. Timon of Athens is scarcely a cosy play. Despite Wilson Knight, I think it is poorly composed, and suffers from being on only two notes. Yet the moment it was done, I could have instantly sat through the whole thing again, just for the moral splendour Scofield brought to it. This so impressed me and carried me away that I lost my head somewhat and actually shouted my applause, which emboldened several others to shout too. I must say I thought that, for a fleeting second, Scofield looked a little surprised.

  To a non-Shakespearian scholar, to toy with new and recent Shakespearian scholarship is always fun, provided you don’t mind being snubbed occasionally when you are wrong. I remember my son Philip, then aged about thirteen, and intimate with all the plays, going round at a party during one of the biennial Shakespeare conferences, and politely asking authorities from many nations if they knew in which play Matthew Gough appeared and what was remarkable about him. No one did.

  The answer is, Henry VI Part II. What is remarkable is, that he has a quicker entrance and departure from this life than anyone in the canon, and nothing whatsoever to say. The stage directions in the Irving edition (I admit it is not now commonly read) and the O.U.P. edition, 1964:

  ‘Alarums. Entry, on one side, CADE and his company; on the other, Citizens, and the king’s forces, headed by MATTHEW GOUGH (or “Goffe”). They fight: the Citizens are routed, and MATTHEW GOUGH is slain.’

  It was, of course, impudence on Philip’s part, at his age, to tease scholars like this: but it was not quite motiveless. He believed that poor Matthew must have had more of a part once, but that something had been lost. Or perhaps the editors had been in an inventive mood? But this I can hardly believe. I should welcome enlightenment. The oddity appears to be this: in neither The Folio of 1623 nor The Quarto of 1594, does Matthew Gough ‘enter’. He is only slain. What happened?