Important to Me

by Pamela Hansford Johnson

  I felt warmly towards those hospital ancillary workers, some of whom, appalled by what they saw, went back to work. This is not blacklegging. It is a feeling for human beings. Their pay is contemptible, and they must have an increase. My own daughter worked for several months as a low-paid nurse (unqualified) at a mental hospital. Her hours were long, her wages pitiful. But she said, ‘Do you think I could strike?’ I think we must treat our nurses and our ancillary workers as special cases, and not take advantage of the moral difficulties of their position.

  Clothes, food, and elegance in general.

  I have not cared much, for some years past, about clothes. So long as I had two decent suits, without cigarette burns or moth-holes, they would do. But I did love them greatly, and only became befuddled when my juniors began to array themselves in peculiar tat from antique supermarkets. In my view, they looked absolutely dreadful: because they allied themselves to nothing, and nothingness in clothes is as awful as nothingness in architecture.

  Elegance is, in the main, only a supreme form of neatness, a precision of choice in accessories, and is not essentially something one has to buy with very much money. I like to wear hats occasionally but hate gloves – however, I can always, on formal occasions, carry the latter.

  Food. The war taught the English how to cook. Materials were so scarce that it became necessary for the greatest possible inventiveness in their use. I know I could make a very creditable ‘cheese soufflé’ out of powdered egg. Now, with restrictions lifted, we can provide some of the best – and cheapest – cooking in the Western world. Of course, it would be absurd to claim that the ‘little’ Italian and French restaurants in London are really cheap, by ordinary eating standards: but they are still cheaper than they would be in France or in New York.

  All the foregoing is fribble, of course. It is simply an attempt to see how the world goes by through a certain window. Some of us are comfortably housed, or have comfortable flats: many have country residences as well (though we don’t) and nearly all have cars – which we don’t, except for my daughter’s Mini which is actually growing a lining of moss.

  Some are comfortable in the suburbs – in Betjeman land: much nicer for the residents than most people suppose. Some are living in poverty, with the final descent to the lower slopes of Notting Hill Gate, where the chimneys arising above the house where John Christie murdered so many women, still arise. The street has another name now. How can one possibly pretend to provide a panorama of living? Half of us do not know – with the best will in the world – how the other half lives: though organisations such as Shelter attempt to bridge the gap. Some of us, through the accidents of life, have a fair idea.

  But ‘the way we live now’ cannot help but be in a state of siege. Only yesterday (8 March, 1973) bombs exploded outside the Old Bailey, the Ministry of Agriculture, one in Dean Stanley Street – from Ireland, of course, though no blame has yet been apportioned to any particular element; utterly pointless violence. I do not suppose London will see much bombing, but it has seen something. (A demoniac voice echoes in my ear, ‘You do not suppose? Just wait for a while, and see.’ Well, perhaps I had better.)

  So I make my way through the quiet streets of Central London, among the harmonies of Cubitt’s buildings, and I wonder how long this will be peaceful. I walk down sometimes to the stately elegance of the Royal Hospital, Chelsea, and its surrounding gardens. ‘How long, O Lord?’ I am inclined to think, since we are doing nobody any harm, that it will be for quite a bit.

  34. Children and Parents

  ‘For better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health –’ These are the promises made by men and women in the marriage service of the Church of England. I also like to think they are made, silendy, secularly, in many a register office, with its refulgent registrar and its display of flowers to cheer the whole business up.

  But there are times when I wonder whether the same lines do not apply where children are concerned, vis-à-vis their parents.

  I have said elsewhere that we must breed children primarily for their benefit, though obviously they profoundly elevate our own happiness or, equally, bring us unhappiness and anxiety. They are not to be used as a form of therapy: we must never use them, either in this way or in any other.

  How often does the cry arise from the child, in moments of frustration – ‘I didn’t ask to be born!’ No, you didn’t, but unless you have had singularly bad luck in life – battering parents or no apparent parents at all, you have had some fun, haven’t you? Remember, your parents often have guilt-feelings towards you. A smack on the leg or bottom when you were intolerable and had to be brought out of hysteria – these parents don’t forget. They could always, they feel, have done much better than they did. Well, when it comes to your turn, just see if you can improve on what they did for, or to, you.

  It is my experience that, during the period of adolescence, the reproaches heaped upon parents – if the child is given to verbal expression – are preposterous, but never mind about that. The time is approaching when the children are fretting to leave home – far earlier than once they did. What is one to do? Take risks, and go along with the main stream? With the boys, I think one must, if their instinct is to strike out on their own. Usually, and perhaps surprisingly, they are up to no mischief: sometimes they are bent purely on travel, on seeing the world on a shoe-string. One can let them go when they leave school, with however dubious a heart. Girls are different, whatever Women’s Lib say about the matter. They are more vulnerable – if nothing else, their relative lack of physical strength would make them so. They would be ill-advised at, say seventeen or eighteen, to make the trip to Africa or to India alone. (I do not refer to the drug-trail to Katmandhu, in search of ‘mystic experience’: this seems to me self-regarding in the last degree. But the young want to get away from what is ironically described as ‘the nest’; however comfortable we, the parents, try to make it for them, we always do it wrong. This is largely because our energies have begun to flag, and we can’t keep up with them – and would look idiotic if we tried to. So the girls particularly (some of the boys at the universities like somewhere to come back to, when they are not on their travels) share flats with other girls, live untrammelled lives. They are adept at giving one another bad advice, but what can one do about that?

  The point at issue is not whether one lets them go (unless one is Mr Moulton Barrett one has no option, and even he had one conspicuous failure) but how one feels when they do it. At adolescence, or earlier, one tends to find that the overt expression of affection becomes impossible, apart from the hail or farewell brushing of a cheek, one becomes acclimatised, and when the break comes, is ready for it. It is different, of course, for the widower or the widow, who have lost all they had. But if both parents survive, and remain fond of each other, there is no particular problem. Deep interest in their children remains: they feel it is not too much to ask for one occasional visit, the telephone call, the postcard. But how damned humble they have become!

  I say, I hope bracingly, that our children do owe us something, unless we have given them a wretched deal. All those nights, sitting up, watching with dread the course of infantile diseases. The effort to give pleasure. The business of clothing and educating, so far as our inclinations – or our necessities – move us. Those patches of adolescence, in which we may observe that our children are feeling pain, but are able to do little about it. Anyway, no adolescent is going to listen to us.

  None of us wishes to become a burden upon our children: indeed, the whole idea is peculiarly abhorrent. (We have no tradition of ancestor-worship in this country, which might help things along.) Yet a part of the burden of our age, unless we are as fit as fighting-cocks, will probably have to be accepted. We shall die, all in good time, and if we are fortunate, our children will mourn for us for a while: but soon, they will know a perceptible lightening of the spirits. They will breathe new air. They will really know the full meaning of liberty.

 
; There is no doubt that as some of us grow old, so we become more crotchety, more demanding. We try consciously to plan against this, to take a strong line against bedevilling our children’s lives in any way. But by then of course, we shall not be so strong, and resolutions may be hard to put into effect. Very fortunate are the married couples who take joy in each other – by which I mean the avid sharing of common interests – when their children have left them. Alas, there are too many grumbling and helpless widowers, too many creaking and wappend widows.

  One of the bad things about growing old – there are many, and Wordsworth’s ‘Old age, serene and bright, and lovely as a Lapland night’ seems to me the most abysmal slop – is that we become suddenly afraid, before our children, of saying the wrong thing. For, in reasonably good health, we do not feel old: we feel as intellectually alive as we felt at twenty or thirty – but any attempt to behave as though we did gets an embarrassed stare. So, to an extent, we are always acting. Acting our real age.

  To any woman, there comes an awful moment when she realises that the dress she is trying on is too young for her. Her looks are more important to her than any man’s (the narcissist excepted) to himself, and so, when she perceives herself in her mirror very, very slowly rotting (because that is what she is doing), she feels it keenly.

  Oddly enough, I have longed on occasion, for great wealth for one purpose only: so that I could buy a dressmaker who could keep me in self-confidence and cover up the ravages of time. How petty it seems! But there is no good pretending you are not capable of pettiness when, in the teeth of world chaos, famine, misery, you know you can be.

  I have been speaking of parents and children in general, not wishing to violate my own privacies. But in this I have been lucky: my own children do not snub me. I have heard other parents brutally and publicly snubbed by their offspring: which is quite as painful as hearing a married couple squabble in public; in fact, worse. Making fun of me is a different thing, and quite acceptable.

  There is no hope for it. For richer, for poorer: for better, for worse: in sickness and in health. These are the responsibilities our children may have, in some part, to undertake for us. Pray they don’t. Pray God we don’t put a foot neatly across their threshold. We never mean to.

  Families with shared interests – literature, music, theatre, cinema, painting, even television – what have you – are likely to come off luckiest. Does this smell of élitism? It may smell of what it please: it is a hard fact. For it takes social intercourse, at all age levels, out of the purely personal. Nothing is more boring than endless personalia. A family devoted entirely to soccer, may, for instance, have the same advantages, so we are not being so élite as all that. Just so long as a family recognises that there is a world elsewhere, there is every hope for its solidarity.

  There are vast, umbrageous shadows thrown across the whole question of parents and children. To begin with, the young child cannot give love: but he can accept it. Little by little, genuine affection creeps in – not merely as a reward for parental endeavour – and may in time become powerful. Then there is likely to come a period of distrust. The child’s will is strong. How far are his parents proposing to fight it? I suggest that more parents than do, should be prepared to fight damned nonsense when they see it: but if what is proposed is thoughtfully considered and not nonsense at all, then they should give the child all reasonable support.

  Then comes the period when the child reaches full adulthood, and must live his life with as few claims from his parents as life allows. For it is a somewhat painful fact that the passionate interest in the child bestowed by his parents is not reciprocated. It can’t be. He is a creature unbudding, with infinite potentiality: how exciting! His parents aren’t exciting, unless they go in for political or other public activities, liable to keep them in the path of the storm. But they have budded and flowered, and now their leaves have fallen.

  35. Literary Style

  ‘Le style est l’homme même.’ (Buffon)

  ‘The style is the man.’ This has been quoted often enough. It means that what a man is determines his style: so that true literary style can never be a deliberate act of will.

  The style of the later works of Henry James became more convoluted as his mind became so. Proust’s is intricate, though in quite a different way, because of the intricate workings of his fine intellect. The style of Robert Louis Stevenson, in the formal sense one of the most beautiful of all English, or Scotch, writing stylists, arose out of his own perfect and natural clarity. It is, in its simplicity, almost impossible to imitate, though a gallant attempt has been made recently, in a television version to conclude Weir of Hermiston. On the screen, it looks well: but to read it in paperback shows the impossibility of matching up the new with the old.

  To have ‘style’ does not inevitably mean possessing grammatical perfection enough to satisfy Fowler. I have often grinned a little wryly when I have seen a young writer grappling with Fowler’s precisions. After all, unless he is really illiterate, he does not need to try. It is we who make the language. I believe we are now officially permitted to indulge in split infinitives: though I dislike them myself, and usually go a long way round to avoid them.

  Style can take quite a different form from purely literary perfection. I am told by Russians that Dostoevsky wrote a sort of journalese: his style lies in his power, as did Dreiser’s, a lesser but still very formidable writer. Dreiser can, and does, often write quite horribly from a technical point of view: but with what force! It stamped itself over his entire work, so that I think, if one found a page of his manuscript drifting along a windy pavement, one would know that it was his. This would be true of all the most powerful of writers. Tolstoy? A page bearing no mention of Anna, of Pierre or Natasha, might have been harder to identify. His writing is pure, but it is in his infinite truth that his style resides.

  Flaubert, I think (I am swimming against the tide) fussed too much. I always get from his novels a sense of strain, which for me usually prevents a full emotional response. So it is with the later Henry James.

  Dickens, one of the most natural writers who ever lived, poured out his manic and depressive moods all over the paper, with the ease of someone emptying a bucket. If ever the man was the style, he was. Of course, he made heavy corrections: most writers do. But the first instinctual setting down of what he wanted to say was the best part of himself.

  ‘I remember the players have often mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare that in his writing … he never blotted out a line. My answer hath been “would he had blotted a thousand.”’ This could only have come from Ben Jonson who, except when he was writing lyrics or letting his dramatic vein run freely, was something of a classical pedant.

  No one can deny James Joyce style, especially in the fine early books, like Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, but in Ulysses and above all in Finnegan’s Wake, he has gone all out for the deliberate creation of a ‘style’ like a greyhound after an electric hare. The results of this immense struggle (the hare was caught in Ulysses, anyway) are often exciting and beautiful: but they make rather for music, or poetry, or sometimes grand opera, than they do for the creation of a novel. Joyce, like Jonson, was a pedant and there all resemblance ceases.

  Trollope is a far better stylist than is generally thought. His human understanding and compassion, his splendid dialogue, all make for a style of his own: though he wrote sloppily at times, and I personally would he had blotted a thousand sub-plots. But then, poor chap, he gave the game away when, in his Autobiography, he admitted the speed and the discipline with which he wrote. Many writers are given to both speed and discipline, but they tend to conceal the fact. In Trollope’s day, more than perhaps in ours, the stereotype of the romantic writer, with exophthalmic eyes wildly rolling in search of something called ‘inspiration’; working in sudden bursts and pardonably drunk (or tubercular) between times, was dear to the heart of the public. Trollope actually worked most industriously in the Post Of
fice and took his pleasure in the hunting-field: and had the lack of tact to say so. His finest work lies, perhaps, in his great set-scenes: Mr Crawley confronting Mrs Proudie at the Bishop’s Palace: the Duke of Omnium rebuking Lady Glencora for her electoral indiscretions: the same Duke, delighted to find that his two wild sons had, for once, joined him at breakfast just to give him pleasure, trying to repay them by kind little jokes and well-meant homilies. Many others. Here is the true ‘style’, if it is looked for.

  We are still living in an age of ‘experiment’ in art, though this has all too often meant pure stylistic experiment, and no experiment at all in the extension of human understanding. That is why so many ‘experimental’ novelists in this narrow sense, find that very few people read them, and the ordinary cultivated reader has been driven back to history, biography, or the memoirs of soldiers and politicians. As I remarked many years ago, criticism (which tends to admire and to concentrate solely upon ‘experiment’ in style, as style is commonly understood), has been driving art steadily underground. Only a handful of English and American novelists can make a living out of this work alone (without the additions of broadcasting, journalism, or ‘sitting’ on campuses engaged in the hopeful but impossible task of teaching creative writing): and when they do, it is almost always because they care about those outmoded things – as some see it – character, narrative, atmosphere.

  Style should only be complex in strict relation to the complexity of the subject: and deliberate obscurity should be checked. The Brothers Karamazov is, in parts, a very difficult book indeed, because it has great intellectual complexities: but Dostoevsky has done nothing to make this worse. In The Devils (usually called The Possessed) I do think he has raised some unnecessary barriers. I once calculated that it was only when I got to p. 247 of my copy that the whole pattern began, enthrallingly, to emerge: but his method in this book is to bemuse for far too long.