by D. J. Taylor
It was at this point, friends attest, that Trevor-Roper’s reputation had reached its zenith. With his bow-ties, well-cut tweed suits, aristocratic wife, supercilious manner and faultless taste in claret, Oxford History had seen nothing like him. Publishers, who had courted him since his celebrated controversy with the Catholic novelist Evelyn Snargs – see the letter ‘Snargs: A Witty Riposte’ in the Daily Telegraph of 15 June 1957, reprinted in his wide-ranging collection Some Old Book Reviews (1963) – petitioned him by every post. In this year alone he agreed to write a comprehensive analysis of the great religious and political questions of the early modern period entitled Why I am Absolutely Right about Everything, as well as a searing apologia for the historian’s craft called Brooking no Dissent. That neither book ever appeared can only be explained by the immense administrative responsibilities and punishing workload to which he was subject at this time.
Returning to Oxford, where he was forced to sit through a number of tedious dinners at his college, Oriel (‘I suspect several of the fellows of not having gone to decent schools, and the cellar is not what it was,’ he commented to his friend Lady Mortitia Starborgling), he immediately rejoined the academic fray with a highly amusing letter to the New York Times Book Review, under the pseudonym ‘Laetitia Gusset’, ridiculing his fellow scholar Alceste Boag. Yet a much more serious opponent was at hand. Opening the pages of the Times Literary Supplement he discovered an article by the young historian Keith Drudge entitled ‘Fact has its place’, in which Trevor-Roper’s essay ‘Some Frightfully Witty Remarks about Witchcraft’ was criticised for alleging that Baron Stoat (1549–1617) lived in Norfolk rather than the Isle of Wight, had red hair, not black, three children not ten, and died not of syphilis but opium addiction. Trevor-Roper responded with his customary vigour, accusing Drudge of being ‘a silly ass’ and ‘not quite a gentleman’, and would, experts agree, probably have written a definitive defence of his position (the proposed book, entitled Why I Hate Mr Drudge, was contracted to messrs Macmillan but sadly never appeared) had he not been engaged on a series of delightful articles about Oxford mores for the Spectator – see The Snobbe Papers (1970) – in the guise of a fourteenth century archdeacon.
A lesser man might have quailed before these onslaughts. Trevor-Roper would undoubtedly have been consoled by the encomium pronounced by his young admirer Dr Hyacinth Fogey: ‘Dear Hugh, he really was a sweetie. He had flair, you see, and he was really so frightfully witty. Of course, he may have got his facts wrong from time to time, and pursued all those tedious vendettas, but oh dear me such a relief from all the frightful bores who teach history at Oxford now . . .’ [continues for hundreds of pages].
BIOGRAPHICAL PORTRAITS
SOMEWHERE TOWARDS THE END
DIANA ATHILL
RELIGION
Well really, you know, if God were to exist, I think he would be rather foolish. Naturally, there would probably be people who wished to console themselves with what he had to say, but I should not be among them. Of course, the poor sillies would be perfectly entitled to do this.
SEX
I have never been able to appreciate the tremendous fuss that is made about sexual fidelity. When a man betrays his wife, or vice-versa, why can he not follow the admirable Gallic model and commit adultery properly? I remember that when my boyfriend Barry succumbed to the attractions of a much younger woman – darling Sally, who has since become one of my dearest friends – I at once invited her into our house, made sure that a space was available for her toothbrush at the bathroom sink, and went so far as to design the two of them matching embroidered ‘his’ and ‘hers’ pillow cases using a crochet stitch taught to me by my mother. At the time it seemed the only civilised thing to do.
THE YOUNG
To meet young people, as I am lucky enough to do from time to time, is always a very illuminating experience. Given how busy they are, with their Greek dancing lessons and their interest in Mr Lonnie Donegan’s ‘Skiffle’ music, it is extremely kind of them to take the trouble with us old fogies, and I am grateful. But we must not expect this attention as a right. I once sat at dinner next to a lively man in his late sixties or seventies who announced that he got on very well with young people and seemed to feel that he was the same age as them. What a silly man he was!
ON LATE-FLOWERING SUCCESS
I was, of course, extremely flattered that the memoir of my early years, Tea with Mrs Fothergill, and the account of my time in publishing, Dinner at André’s, should have found so many enthusiastic readers. Equally I was highly flattered to be asked to appear on the radiogram with Miss Sue Lawley. But really, you know, enjoyable as all this was, I can’t think why I wrote the books at all, and would prefer them not to be mentioned . . . [continues].
INSTEAD OF A BOOK
DIANA ATHILL
These letters belong to my dear friend Edward Field, to whom they were written. He decided that he wanted them to be published. I have no idea why – D. A.
Darling Edward,
What an old silly you are to think that Gentlemen’s Relish is a traditional American condiment! Why, my nanny used to spread it on toast for me when I was a girl. It came in the most elegant circular pots, whose top half fitted neatly into the lower, and one could have the greatest fun prising them apart with the end of a knife. My mother, I seem to remember, had her own variation on the receipt which involved substituting grilled sardines for anchovies and adding rather too much pepper . . . [continues]. It is fascinating to learn how much you are enjoying Hector Baugh’s Darkness at the Tunnel’s End. We published it when I was at André Deutsch, in a wonderful series that also included fine work by Quentin Teigh-Diem and Lorenzo D’Ulle, and I had high hopes for it – the scene in which Yaughn, the hero, stands skimming stones into the wild ocean is particularly engrossing – but the reviewers were such sillies and said it was incomprehensible and in the end it only sold seven copies.
We are having a splendid time here getting ready for Christmas. Barry is, I believe, going to Sally’s to take advantage of her Sky television satellite apparatus, and has cooked a wonderful Jamaican chicken dish for us to eat. Meanwhile, I have a discovered a very useful thing now stocked by Safeway’s. This is a loaf of bread, to all intents and purposes normally constituted, yet already cut into slices – perfect for popping into a toaster, or when one doesn’t wish to eat a great deal. Do they have them in New York, I wonder?
It was terribly kind of you to offer advice about our gas-fire. Fortunately we have found an absolutely dreamy man called Eric who has promised to put in a nice little new heater whose fumes won’t blow back in the annoying way that they usually do . . . [continues for several pages]. I am making good progress with my memoir, and the publishers seem pleased, though I can’t imagine why anyone should be interested in such a forgetful old personage as myself. I have just reached the part where Vidia throws one of his tantrums and hides behind the sofa. Wasn’t he a silly?
UNDER THE SUN: THE LETTERS OF BRUCE CHATWIN
ELIZABETH CHATWIN AND NICHOLAS SHAKESPEARE
TO BOFFLES STARBORGLING
Eremites Cell, Monastery of St Basil the Incurable, Ankara, August 1978
Dearest Bo,
I simply can’t think what I’m doing confined here amid all this hideous statuary. On the other hand, I have swum the Bosphorus twice, on the second occasion attended by three Turkish princesses in a very nice caique, which was most refreshing. And of course, le tout Ankara comes to visit: Bunty and Perdita are at their castle – he is the Akond of Swat’s dentist, I believe, and she a great expert on the Dahomey fruitbat – not to mention those two contessas that Willie Maugham introduced me to when we were staying with Noel that time at Cap Ferrat. But you are right, of course – the answer is to live alone.
Much love, Bruce
Forced to leave Benin as a result of the military coup, and what he described as the ‘rather too marked attentions’ of its despot, General Fang, Chatwin immediately departed by jet-ski an
d hang-glider to New York to spend the winter with Robert Mapplethorpe, Jackie Onassis and Henry Kissinger, with whom he planned to collaborate in a book about the little known bogusi tribe of Upper Volta. His friend Robin Kent-Cumberland remembered this period in his life: ‘Dear Jackie, it was quite a relationship. She loved him almost as much as he loved himself.’
TO MRS CECILY PIGEON
Booth of the Kif-smokers, Khan-El-Khallili Bazaar, Cairo, March 1979
Dear Mrs Pigeon,
I was extremely sorry to receive your letter accusing of me of secretly copying out large parts of your father’s journal What I Did In Patagonia when I stayed at your house and then putting them in my book, Journey to Nowhere, without your permission. I can only state in my defence that art sometimes moves in mysterious ways.
Yours with deepest regret
Bruce Chatwin
TO BEVERLEY CLEVERLEY
Somewhere in darkest Africa, June 1980
Dear Bev,
Of course you can borrow my flat in Albany. It is, however, the merest garçonnière, and my tastes, I must warn you, are deeply Spartan. In fact, apart from the Louis XVI ormolu-plated wash-hand stand, the Sheraton sofa, the Queen of Haiti’s ceremonial tea-towel (framed) and that first Sanskrit edition of the Mahabharana that Salman Rushdie was kind enough to annotate for me, there’s so very little in the way of ornament that I doubt it would be worth your while.
Love to Constancia
Bruce
In August Chatwin travelled by pony and ant-eater (‘it really is extraordinarily comfortable – you use the proboscis as a kind of steering-wheel’) to Quito, Ecuador to go snorkelling in Lake Poultice with his young friend Aloysius Vole-Trouser. ‘There was no one like him,’ Vole-Trouser recalled. ‘To have a rich wife and a series of agreeable bolt-holes in far-flung parts of the world is a devastating combination.’
TO ELIZABETH CHATWIN
Third Hut, Tensing Gorge, Nepal, September 1982
This is the highest imaginable camp before the mountains proper. A few days of wind-surfing and vulture-tagging before Pope John-Paul II (very agreeable, and a great authority on the Mongolian daktari dialect, on which I may write a monograph) flies me off to Lake Oboe. Viking paying huge sums of money for book – apparently. Please send £1,000 by return.
Might see you next year, if I’m strapped for cash
XXX
B
Early in 1985 Patrick Leigh-Fermor wrote to the Duchess of Devonshire: ‘Dearest Debo, Annoying young twit called Bruce Chatwin staying here. Knows everyone. Ever heard of him?’ The Duchess replied: ‘Darling Padders, Bruce Chatwin! He wrote that simply divine book about wherever it was he went to and whatever it was he did when he got there. I’m simply mauve with envy. But how twinch if he’s a know-all. Should we invite him to dins, do you think . . .?’ [continues for hundreds of thousands of pages].
CHARLES DICKENS: A LIFE
CLAIRE TOMALIN
. . . There is of course very little actual proof that Dickens despatched his mistress Ellen Ternan to France in the period 1862–1865, visited her on numerous occasions and had an illegitimate child by her which died, and yet the circumstantial evidence is so very strong that a biographer would be mad not to fill an entire chapter with it so the newspapers have something to serialise (surely ‘set down the known facts in an objective and responsible manner’? – Ed.). Take, for example, a letter of September 1863 in which Dickens informs Mrs Edith Brisket, his landlady at Wellington Street, that he will have ‘chops and sauce in the usual way’. In the circumstances it is hardly coincidental that ‘Sauce’ was the name of a lively cocker-spaniel owned by a neighbour of the Ternan family when they resided at Haywards Heath sometime in the 1850s. Similarly, when Dickens chose the name of ‘Hexham’ for the corpse-dredging Thames lighterman of Our Mutual Friend – then taking shape in his mind – he would have been all-too aware that Mrs Ternan and her daughters had very nearly visited Hexham in Northumberland on their summer holiday of 1857, only deciding to make their way to Whitby at the very last moment.
Dickens’s letters of the period are, if anything, even more suggestive. There is, for instance, a note to his friend Silas Minion from 1864, in which, recounting the circumstances of a stormy cross-channel voyage, he remarks, ‘We have been through hell and high water, and must turn and turn again.’ The alert reader will note the private code that this consciously or sub-consciously betrays (‘hell and . . .’ = ‘Ellen’, ‘turn and turn’ = ‘Ternan’). It is even possible to insinuate this sadly anonymous young woman into the narrative of Dickens’s death. Although the scene of his passing is always assumed to be his house at Gadshill near Rochester in Kent, it is perfectly possible that he may have suffered his fatal stroke at his paramour’s Peckham lodgings, and been conveyed by her – Ellen was a strong girl and quite capable of this feat – by cab, locomotive (Bradshaw reveals that a 3.17 ran from Holborn Viaduct to nearby Chatham) and penny-farthing bicycle to the family home. Alternatively, it is by no means stretching credulity to wonder whether Miss Ternan could have hired an air balloon for the purpose. As for her proposed co-authorship of Great Expectations, Our Mutual Friend and The Mystery of Edwin Drood, well . . . [continues].
JOURNALS VOLUME I
JOHN FOWLES
3 October 1949
Life: an irregular conjunction of particularities.
10 October 1949
Oxford imponderable under her grey stones and skies. My first tutorial with Professor Dull: dry, exact, meticulous, without humour. He fails to appreciate that beneath my insouciant manner and pitiless disinclination to do any work moves a coruscating intelligence. But I shall be revenged on this pack of vulgar fools.
2 March 1951
Eventually.
6 September 1951
At home with my parents: a day of savage tragedy. Myself, mute, absorbed in Hugh Delacourt Heigh’s Highbrow Sonatas on the Third Programme; my mother engaged in some futile domestic task. All is arid, base, unkempt; the only real element my deracination. Yet I do not repine.
12 May 1952
Death: a candle flame suddenly extinguished, the hand unseen. The moth fluttering.
14 June 1952
Greece. I find the place agrees with me, though food, work, companions seedy and mediocre. I tolerate life. A fugitive, tatterdemalion quality that soothes. Nietzsche, Kierkegaard felt this, I believe. My book returned for the 37th time: the proud scars of rejection.
3 April 1962
Finally. My agent, a devious fellow, writes to say that I am to be given a large sum of money for my novel, The Introvert. It is nothing but my due, yet in any true sense the prospect appals me. Hollywood vulgarising my words, the praise of a multitude that is not worth having. I spurn them as I savour the bread they throw.
4 June 1964
Butter: more nutritious than margarine, I conclude. Yet there are some wounds that shall not heal.
SHADES OF GREENE: ONE GENERATION OF AN ENGLISH FAMILY
JEREMY LEWIS
. . . If Graham Greene (known to his cousins as ‘Boffles’ or occasionally ‘Greeney’, to the young ladies he met in the course of his perambulations along Bond Street as ‘Dearie’, but to his chauffeur by the more formal salutation ‘Mr Greene’) was by this time well-established in his trade as a novelist, the career followed by his little-known cousin Hyacinth Greene was no less fascinating. Joining the literary agency of Ditchwater & Dulle in the June, or possibly the July of 1947, first at their offices at 17 Shoreditch High Street – convenient for the tobacconist next door where he was able to purchase the Sahib Virginia Straight Cut cigarettes favoured by all members of the Greene family – but shortly afterwards removing to 137b the Mile End Road as a result of LCC building regulations – Hyacinth was very soon able to play what by all accounts was a pivotal role in the agency’s post-war development, when they represented such well-known authors as Millicent Dinge, Sadie Blackeyes and the Hon. Cecil Fauntleroy, author of Pastel Pencillings and t
he immortal Dewdrops Do Drop.
‘I don’t know quite what Mr Greene did,’ Miss Ethel Frobisher, who acted as secretary-typist to the firm in the winter of 1947, having formerly been charwoman to Charlie Chaplin’s maternal great-aunt, remembered, ‘but I’m sure he did it very well. He once asked me to go the pictures with him but it was the night I washed my hair so I had to say no.’ Relations between the two cousins remained close: ‘Dear Hi,’ Graham wrote in the January of 1948, ‘Not another blooding sponging letter! Next time you ask me for money I shan’t even reply. Now, fuck off.’ At the reception following Hyacinth’s wedding to the mercurial Gladys Spode, daughter of the renowned variety hall comedian Norbert ‘Nobby’ Spode, remembered even now for his catch-phrase ‘If there’s a ferret up yer trousers, I’m not getting it out’, held in the upstairs bar of the Dog & Partridge, Limehouse, he was discovered to have sent the present of an ormulu-plated fish-slice, purchased at Selfridges for a princely £2.4s 7d . . .
. . . Hyacinth’s social life at this time filled numberless compartments. He and Gladys are once supposed to have arrived at a friend’s supper-party at Claridge’s only twenty-seven minutes after Winston Churchill had left it. On another occasion, A. J. P. Taylor is thought to have handed him his overcoat in a restaurant foyer, mistakenly believing him to be a waiter. Yet he seems to have had ample time to monitor the progress of his younger sister Ariadne, whose employments at this time included acting as companion to the Dowager Duchess of Moulting at her London residence, 17 Kensington High Street, and officiating as deputy caller at Monty McGruber’s celebrated Bingo Palace in the Old Kent Road. Graham was at this time in Indo-China where his guilt, sexual obsessions and deep-seated ambivalence about the Catholic church continued to . . . [continues for thousands of pages].