A Dog's Life

by Paul Bailey

  Grigson pounced on the vainglorious observation ‘I was in Russia when Ernest Hemingway died’ and went on:

  Well, if he was, the fact doesn’t in any real way affect what little Mr Burgess goes on to tell us about the art of Hemingway. He might as well have begun that he was paying his rates at the council offices or catching crayfish at Piddletrenthide or declaiming Yeats over pints of Guinness above the waves of the Bournemouth sewage outfall, when Hemingway died. In short I can never quite believe Mr Burgess, in this book (I know nothing of his novels). ‘Old yokels in Adderbury, my former Oxfordshire home, talk of the Earl of Rochester as though he only died yesterday.’ Really? And as they talk of him in their smock-frocks do they quote with an Oxfordshire – not Oxford – accent ‘Drudging in fair Aurelia’s womb’ or ‘Ancient Person of my Heart’?

  That was written in 1968. Burgess was still smarting from it fourteen years later. In his novel The End of the World News, published in 1982, Burgess has a character enter a saloon somewhere in the Midwest of America. There is a poster on the wall bearing the message beneath a mugshot: WANTED FOR MURDER: DANGEROUS GEOFF GRIGSON. I phoned Geoffrey, now a dear friend, soon after reading that scene. He laughed heartily at the ‘old bugger’s cheek’. He thought it a good joke.

  Burgess wasn’t content with that conceit. In review after review – spanning two decades – he found an excuse, often a very feeble one, to sneak in a reference to his self-appointed enemy. These gratuitous asides must have mystified the average reader, who would have been unaware of the original cause of Burgess’s spleen. They certainly bemused his widow, who regarded them as evidence of pettiness and meanness of spirit. Burgess’s last swipe at Geoffrey, to my knowledge, appeared in the Observer in March 1990, while Jane lay in a coma, dying. She would have laughed it off, had she been able to.

  Reviewing Britain Observed, I concentrated on Grigson the celebrator, the man who judged each individual work – poem or painting – on its own merit. Reputation meant nothing to him. He had seen reputations come and go. What was important to him was freshness of vision, as exemplified by those artists who capture the passing moment, in whatever form, and thus ensure that it will last for ever.

  Grigson read my article, and some weeks later I was invited to a contributors’ party at the New Statesman’s offices in Great Turnstile in the City. I declined. Then, on the day before the party, I received a call from the literary editor with the message that both the Grigsons, husband and wife, wished to meet me. So I went along, and a friendship developed on the instant. It was as warmly simple as that. Geoffrey was to live another ten years, the much-younger Jane another fifteen. Every visit to Broad Town in Wiltshire, to the old farmhouse in which they lived, was a magical occasion, particularly in summer when we sat in the garden eating the food Jane had prepared with such loving attentiveness. And ‘loving’ is the apt word to account for their marriage – his third, her first and last – for they quite simply glowed in each other’s company.

  Geoffrey called Jane his ‘Dutch interior’, and indeed she would have looked – with her generous figure and ruddy complexion – perfectly at home in a painting by Pieter de Hooch or Rembrandt, or in Vermeer’s A Maid Asleep in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. In Geoffrey she had found the ‘older man of her dreams’, as the curator and art critic Bryan Robertson, with whom she worked in a Cambridge gallery in the 1950s, shrewdly noted. Jane’s arrival in Geoffrey’s life was one of those everyday miracles that only seem to happen in the pages of sloppy romantic novels, with Mr and Miss Right meeting by chance and declaring undying love in the final chapter. Even so, those chance meetings and heartfelt declarations, for all that they come coated in linguistic glucose, do occur in the real, messy world most of us inhabit. And so it was with Jane and Geoffrey, in their fashion. Jane had admired Geoffrey’s writing from her student days – his pioneering Samuel Palmer: The Visionary Years of 1947; his remarkable autobiography The Crest on the Silver, as well as his criticism – and was determined to meet him someday, somehow. When they did meet, at an exhibition in London, it was a blessing for both of them. Jane was a natural peacemaker, exuding warmth and a disinterested understanding of other people’s problems, and she brought peace to the unhappy Grigson household, as the son and daughters of his first two marriages acknowledged at Jane’s funeral.

  Jane became Geoffrey’s happy amanuensis, typing his books and articles and poems. She had no idea, then, of becoming a writer herself, though she had already published a translation of Beccaria’s classic treatise On Crime and Punishments, for which she received the John Florio Prize. Her distinguished career, as the true successor to Elizabeth David, whom she admired and subsequently befriended, began in an unusual way. For several weeks each year the Grigsons and their daughter, Sophie, lived in a cave-house in Trôo, in the Bas-Vendômois region of France. One of their cave-dwelling neighbours was Adey Horton, whose book Child Jesus had been praised by Kenneth Clark. Horton, a notorious non-deliverer of promised typescripts, had been commissioned by the publisher Michael Joseph to write a cookbook on charcuterie and pork cookery in general. When Jane met him, he had hardly begun work on it, despite many reminders by letter and telephone from his editor in London. He invited Jane to be his researcher and secretary. Jane accepted, and worked so diligently and thoroughly and produced such a number of detailed notes for Horton to consult that he suggested she finish the book instead. She took on the challenge with some trepidation. Charcuterie and French Pork Cookery appeared in 1967 and was instantly acclaimed, not least by Elizabeth David, who saluted its originality.

  The critical success of that first book, which might never have been written if Adey Horton had been more conscientious, encouraged Jane to think ahead and start a new life as a food writer. In 1968, she was offered a job on the Observer Colour Magazine, to which she contributed regular articles until within weeks of her death twenty-two years later. Her column was notable for its insistence that good cooking is impossible without the right, fresh ingredients. She wasn’t prudish on the subject, but she did regret the vanishing of the seasons. She travelled throughout Britain and Europe in pursuit of excellence – talking to farmers, suppliers, fruit growers, butchers, fishmongers and her fellow writers. If she chanced on an interesting, and workable, recipe she always named its source, an act of literary politeness not often displayed by others. But then, Jane wasn’t in competition with anyone. ‘I think food, its quality, its origins, its preparation, is something to be studied and thought about in the same way as any other aspect of human existence,’ she declares in the Introduction to Good Things, which was published in 1971 and consolidated her ever-rising reputation. The notion is so sensible, so basic, one might say, that it seems amazing now that she felt the need to express it. Were she alive today, she would be insisting that it cannot be repeated often enough.

  ‘Oh, sod it all’: I first heard Jane utter that mild obscenity not long after Geoffrey’s death in November 1985. She was desolate with grief, and only kept on working out of a sense of duty and responsibility. In his last weeks, Geoffrey was attended to by a professional nurse, whom he shouted at one day in his frustration. He hated being old and hated the idea of dying even more. The nurse answered him back, telling him what a rude and ungrateful so-and-so he was. He was won over instantly, to such an extent that Jane accused him of falling in love with her. Jane and the nurse accompanied him on his final outing to a local church, to listen to a recital of Haydn piano sonatas. Geoffrey wasn’t especially musical, but he adored Haydn’s warm-heartedness and mischief.

  There were generous tributes to Geoffrey in the press, the most touching by the poet Peter Reading in The Times Literary Supplement:

  I read him on Ben Nicholson and a painter I’d hitherto regarded as a clumsy eccentric – Samuel Palmer (whose pictures have seemed magical to me ever since). I was first and permanently attracted to the poems of William Barnes by Grigson’s enthusiastic commentary on them. His topographical and historical guides h
ad the same quality of pointing out something good one had somehow missed. His accounts of flora and fauna were knowledgeable and not poetically twee. His reviews amused me greatly; exposing humbuggery, spotting talent, valuing sense, zapping bunkum. They were healthy, good fun to read (though the dissected probably didn’t relish them), and the attendant whines of ‘cruelty’ from the anti-vivisection lot were entertaining. In this desultory way many of us learned from Grigson.

  The cries of ‘cruelty’ can still be heard, albeit faintly. He merits a couple of snotty references from Ian Hamilton in the posthumously published Against Oblivion, and is glibly and brusquely dismissed as ‘that notorious scourge’ by Selina Hastings in her biography of Rosamond Lehmann. The ‘scourge’ had the temerity to question the poetic talent of Cecil Day-Lewis, and to find it severely wanting. Hastings is content to record that the other critics – none of them named – disagreed.

  I shall always regard my friend Geoffrey Grigson as a rescuer and discoverer. You only have to look at his anthologies to be made aware of the depth and range of his reading. He loved to grub in the Bodleian Library or the British Museum in the hope of rescuing some deserving poet (frequently the author of a solitary, deserving poem) from an ill-deserved obscurity.

  In his grubbing days, he chanced on William Diaper, George Darley, and Samuel Daniel, who wrote:

  O blessed letters that combine in one

  All ages past, and make one live with all,

  By you do we confer with who are gone,

  And the dead living unto councell call:

  By you th’unborne shall have communion

  Of what we feele, and what doth us befall…

  (Geoffrey shared Coleridge’s admiration for those lines, which he loved to quote.)

  For me, Grigson the enthusiast is at his most beguiling in the collection of essays Poems and Poets, in which he celebrates such wonders as Whitman’s ‘Memories of President Lincoln’ and Christopher Smart’s ‘A Song to David’ in language that is finely sensitive to what makes each poem peculiar and wonderful. An observation like the following is a world away from the criticism that is practised by his despised professors of literature. He quotes these lines from the fifty-second stanza of Smart’s masterpiece:

  The grass the polyanthus cheques;

  And polished porphyry reflects,

  By the descending rill…

  and then observes: ‘Anyone who knows, by good luck, the limestone country of Raby, and of Staindrop Moor alongside, and Teesdale, will at once see the flower and the rock and the waterfall in a characteristic conjunction which Smart must have known in his County Durham days, the limestone so finely polished by centuries of the descending rill, protruding from grass chequered with the lilac umbrels, by the thousand, of the Birdseye Primrose.’

  Geoffrey, whose beloved older brothers were slaughtered in the Great War, was never ‘half in love with easeful death’. Extinction was the nastiest of his enemies. He loved a letter by William Cowper, written in 1790, ‘after madness and preliminaries of vengeance and hell’: ‘The consideration of my short continuance here, which was once grateful to me, now fills me with regret. I would like to live and live always.’

  Well, he couldn’t, and nobody can. Geoffrey wrote many poems, and I fear that many of them will be forgotten. Yet there is a single poem, set down in his last years, that ought to endure in anthologies. It is short, and elegiac, and – to my ears – beautiful:

  You are young, you two, in loving:

  Why should you wonder what endearments

  Old whisper still to old in bed,

  Or what the one left will say and say,

  Aloud, when nobody overhears, to the one

  Who irremediably is dead?

  Jane said, ‘Oh, sod it all’, and said it again and again, often with a laugh, when she was diagnosed with cervical cancer. In those final five years of our deepening friendship, we talked on the phone every evening at six, mentioning books that Geoffrey would have relished dissecting – all overpraised, most now mouldering away – and exchanging recipes. The supply of socks for Circe showed no signs of running out.

  In the spring of 1989, I went with Jane on an eating tour of the Highlands of Scotland. One day we came across something memorably daft – ‘daft’ was one of her favourite words, which she spoke with the flat ‘a’ of her native Sunderland. It was a notice outside a hotel which read:

  ROOMS

  LESS GOOD – £12

  SLIGHTLY BETTER – £16

  BEST – £30

  The sight of it inspired her to laughter. Her laugh was like a hoot, rising and rising in volume, and there were times when I thought it would never stop. It was a wonderful noise she made – warm, generous, unconstrained. It was the SLIGHTLY BETTER – £16 that inspired her now. I waited for Jane’s hooting to cease, as curious passers-by stared in amazement. In that same small town, we went in search of a cotton shirt which I wanted to buy. The assistant in the men’s clothing shop told us, ‘Ye’ll nae get a cotton shirt here. Try the tobacconist across the street.’ The tobacconist indeed sold shirts, but not cotton ones – ‘There’s no call.’ It was typical of Jane that she kept her laughter in check until we were outside. ‘There’s no call,’ she repeated, and we both had hysterics for the second time.

  I remember, too, that we stopped to have a picnic by Loch Ness. The monster was otherwise engaged, but an unidentifiable seabird compensated for his or her absence. It ate bread, cheese and salami on the bonnet of the car. Jane smiled, and said of the husband who had left her desolate, ‘Geoffrey would have recognized the bird in an instant.’ She opened a bottle of alcohol-free white wine someone had given her. ‘What do you think?’ she asked after we had taken a sip. Before I could reply, she said, ‘It’s disgusting, isn’t it? Let’s have the real thing.’ So we did.

  Later that year, I cooked lunch for Jane and Bryan Robertson, with whom she had been in love thirty years earlier in Cambridge. It was the happiest of reunions, with Bryan in unstoppable form as they exchanged memories and gossip. The pioneering curator and restorer of the Whitechapel Gallery in the 1950s and 60s – who had rescued Turner and Stubbs from disregard and neglect, and brought Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko to the attention of the British – was hooting as heartily as Jane that day. Jane said afterwards that she had loved Bryan for his rare intelligence, for his enthusiasm, and for a quality he shared with Geoffrey – a deep, deep knowledge of books, paintings and poems that fashion had overtaken and overlooked. And when Bryan died – on 18 November 2002 – at the end of a gruesome illness, borne with much good humour and concern for his friends – I thought of Jane’s high regard for him, and his glowing affection for her.

  At Jane’s memorial service, in the spring of 1990, I was privileged to read a poem by Geoffrey that had never been published. It was a love poem, addressed to his young bride, which Jane carried in her bag wherever she went. She needed no written confirmation of his love, which was demonstrated by look and touch, but it must have comforted her when her husband, mentor and lover was no more.

  That evening, Circe played with Geoffrey’s socks as usual, and for many subsequent evenings.

  Minders

  It was their unhealthy white fatness we noticed first. Their bellies preceded them into the park as they arrived with an assortment of dogs – a sprightly Alsatian; an artistically trimmed poodle, with a black pompom on each shaved leg; a fluffy Sealyham, and a docile Dobermann, whose interest in Circe – even when she wasn’t in season – was always startlingly evident. They often held hands, like young lovers, when they weren’t munching copious hamburgers.

  She was small and broad. He loomed above her, his vast gut barely contained within a grubby white T-shirt. She invariably wore a tracksuit and trainers; he a black leather jacket and baggy jeans. Her hair was dank, his sleekly greased. They doted on each other and on the pets in their charge, who obeyed their every quiet command.

  They were married, we learned, and had been unemp
loyed for a long time. But now they were doing all right, walking and looking after the dogs that belonged to the rich professional people who lived in Chiswick. They loved their work and were well paid for it, in cash. We could see that the dogs liked their minders, for whom they were naturally and immediately obedient.