15
A STRONG INVISIBLE RELATIONSHIP
NATASHA CAME BACK from America in the second week of February 1957.
Stephen was faced with the problem of how to present Reynolds to her. He had no intention of keeping this relationship secret. Reynolds was living in Oxford in digs at Headington, not far from where Isaiah Berlin lived. Stephen wondered if he and Natasha could visit Isaiah and then just casually drop in on Reynolds afterwards. If this happened, Reynolds should put away the photograph of Stephen that he had given him, ‘because I took it out of Natasha’s frame. I have the negative in the office & will make another one for her.’
He warned Reynolds that his first meeting with Natasha might be difficult. ‘The point simply is that I want Natasha to like you so much. I am sure that if we don’t rush her that this will happen as something we share between us all. But as you & I met when she was away, our friendship is much longer & further gone than she would anticipate.’ Stephen thought that he and Reynolds could somehow form a pair. ‘I want us, besides meeting as often as we can, to have a very strong invisible relationship in which we can, as we do at present, share our thoughts.’
As I read it, in that first week after they met, Dad fell so madly in love that for a moment he contemplated dropping everything and running off with Reynolds. Where to? God knows. But as this incandescent moment took place right at home, in the study of Loudoun Road where they listened to Fidelio together in front of the hearth – where the gramophone lurked – it was compromised from the start. Reynolds sensibly decided that he was receiving two different messages. There was Stephen, the Verlaine to his Rimbaud, and there was Stephen, the happy family man with two bouncy children to whom he was genuinely attached.
I never felt that Reynolds was a threat, because it was clear to me that he had doubts about the amour fou which Stephen dangled in front of him as if it was an irresistible temptation. Dad was chasing the impossible: amour fou in a family niche.
Reynolds was very good about all this. If at lunch Dad fixed his eyes upon a serious subject and spoke only to him, to the exclusion of his wife and children, who could busy themselves changing the plates as far as he was concerned, then Reynolds would give us a short meaningful glance as if to say, ‘Here we go again.’ My poor mother’s tolerance was surely tested to its limit on these occasions. If indeed she got up and changed the plates, there would be emphatic noises from the kitchen to indicate that yes, she was changing the fucking plates. But a look from Reynolds did much to support the idea that we were one big happy family – that he posed no threat.
It was done tactfully. It’s not as if he rolled his eyes and winked.
Reynolds at this point was still a virgin, though gaining confidence in the fact that he was homosexual. At Oxford he was beginning to form a strong relationship with a young man called Michael, but it was friendship only. My father was fascinated by the idea of Reynolds and Michael living together and forming a couple – which they weren’t, but probably this wasn’t made clear to Stephen. When, a month or so after Natasha had come back from Phoenix, she decided to go away to Gstaad as the guest of Hansi Lambert, Stephen initially thought he’d go with her; and Reynolds and Michael could house-sit 15 Loudoun Road. Reynolds would sleep in the study, as usual; and Michael could have Lizzie’s room, if we were all away for Easter.
In the end he stayed behind, so this scheme fell through.
Somewhere in my father’s persona there was a wild need to create a male partnership apparent to all the world. In the same way that The Temple was a polemical book, a declaration of openness between men, he wanted his love for Reynolds to be accepted socially. That’s fine. It’s even noble. But it required the cooperation of Natasha, his wife. And he seems not to have given the slightest thought to how this would make her feel in public, at parties, at dinners, within the world.
Meanwhile she continued her secret life with Raymond Chandler.
Fresh from a stressful visit to Phoenix, my mother can’t seriously have thought of Ray as a viable alternative. Let me state my opinion clearly: there was never the slightest chance that she’d leave Stephen and run off with Ray. But as a fantasy, a counterweight to my father’s yearning for a public display of love between two men, at least it offered a distraction.
There remains a remote possibility that she would have gone off with Ray, if he’d been twenty years younger and irresistibly handsome instead of visibly falling to pieces. This is one reason why, when Chandler’s biographer mistook the boasts about Ray’s love for Natasha as if an affair had happened, Mum went berserk. The Bodleian archive has files a foot high documenting my mother’s struggle with this unfortunate scholar, Frank MacShane. In the end he not only gave in, he allowed her to tinker with his prose. She insisted that she’d been disinterested, compassionate, positively saintly throughout, yet the very ferocity with which she fought MacShane suggests that deep down, she must have felt guilty.
Ray, writing from California where he did not expect Natasha to return, began to have doubts about that cottage in the country. Would they be sufficiently alone? She seems to have replied to him – he quotes her – ‘we should only know the people we like and who like us’. It sounds as if Natasha was still dreaming of a secret hideaway. Then from Gstaad she wrote to him ‘the most depressed and lonely letters you have ever written to me’. She was also trying to learn Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata – and at this point I have to abandon my persona as an objective historian and say, Mum, are you out of your mind? Beaches are littered with the bones of pianists who’ve tried to master that piece, and you’ve just had an operation, you’re worried about your marriage and your future, and for peace and quiet you’ve had to abandon the family nest. The Hammerklavier?! But another characteristic of my mother was always to choose the hardest challenge, on the grounds that if she mastered that, easy pieces would become even easier.
By the middle of April she was back in London, where she’d been to ‘two frantic parties’, an expression that disgusted Ray. If she wanted to continue as an artist, he wrote, then she must give up her social life. But it wasn’t working. She didn’t want to marry him and he didn’t really want to marry her, ‘unless it was to protect you’. As for the piano, ‘the more success you have, the less I should see of you. You are a strange woman in some ways. You loathe talk of money, but at times you accept it very readily.’ And later, ‘we have very different sorts of pride. Yours is to accept a duty and to fulfil it, no matter how humiliating or painful it might be. Mine is to declare that where one’s deepest emotions are involved, there is no choice or half-way or quarter-way. Either there is fulfilment or there is nothing.’ This was all very fine, but both sides knew and perhaps had always known that the choice of all or nothing had never existed. ‘You are a noble woman. To say goodbye to you would cut my heart in half. But I may have to, and you may want me to.’
He couldn’t resist continuing to undermine Stephen as an inferior being.
I’m sorry he has to work so hard at so many different things. The truth, as it appears to my feeble brain, is that he doesn’t know how to work in any productive way, but fritters his energies on all sorts of things, none of which bring in much. English writers are very much handicapped by the poverty of their markets. One can’t say much except that if a man can’t learn the way to find how to achieve success, he is not going to have it dropped into his lap.
From Majorca, where she and Stephen were visiting Robert Graves, she wrote a letter containing the phrase, ‘why don’t you carry what you have in your heart and leave your mind open until we next meet?’ She was playing for time. It was increasingly clear that the cottage in Oxfordshire was unlikely to happen.
On 30 May, Ray wrote her the first of several severance letters. ‘There is really nothing to do but stop pretending that something exists that does not exist at all.’ And: ‘I am also too proud to say anything other than good-bye and God bless you.’ And – evidently he was beginning to enjoy this – ‘perhaps the b
est I can do is to cover you with all the lovely thoughts and memories of you which I have had, and then steal quietly out into the night’.
There followed a scene straight from a comic opera. Ray sent Natasha a long telegram of doom and gloom, followed by a special-delivery letter even more serious. Stephen happened to be alone in the house when it arrived. He signed the receipt and read it, assuming it was an engagement for a concert for Natasha. He then wrote to Ray explaining he’d sent it on to her, but he also discussed some of the points raised in the letter. Ray sent Stephen a letter of apology for having written privately to Natasha, adding some acid comments about the morality of opening other people’s mail. Meanwhile he sent yet another letter to Natasha, this time via his London lawyer Michael Gilbert, who was supposed to sneak round to Loudoun Road in the hopes of slipping it to her without Stephen noticing.
Ray wrote a covering letter to Gilbert blaming Natasha for having married ‘a handsome nothing’. If one touches something corrupt, he wrote, one risks becoming corrupted. ‘I cannot any longer respect her acceptance of something which to me is detestable and obscene.’ He meant a homosexual husband. Gilbert wrote a very English reply, handwritten to show he hadn’t dictated it to his secretary. ‘With regard to what you say about pansies I’m not so sure,’ he wrote. ‘I know dozens of them, of course, and they are of a type – sui generis, to use another piece of law latin – artistic, artistically creative in fact, self-centred, emotionally hard, easy to get on with at surface level, ultimately untrustworthy. But to dislike them as a class seems as illogical as disliking Jews, diabetics, or somatotonics.’
If Stephen had quickly abandoned the idea of pursuing a physical relationship with Reynolds, what alternative did he have in mind?
‘I want what Rimbaud called “the new love” – which perhaps isn’t what he knew even. Did he succumb to the expected, do you think, or was he getting something quite different from their relationship than that which Verlaine got?’ This was close to asking Reynolds for his opinion, but it was up to Stephen to define what he wanted. ‘Every relationship with a man in which I felt intense love has broken down: and I think it did so because it failed by the standard which makes each of us afraid in a letter to the other to write slovenly things, or a bad sentence.’ He expected a great deal from Reynolds, but the world in which this would blossom was that of words on paper. ‘Do let us keep going this miraculous communication between us. It has quite changed me.’
‘Perhaps we are both to some extent people who look into others to discover an image of ourselves … If the image that each holds of the other is that which he wishes himself most to be, this means that we live in our relationship what we potentially are in our work. We are each other’s poems for one another.’
This is extremely intense, but luckily Reynolds knew how to cut things down to size. One of their private jokes derived from an article by Leslie Fiedler published in Partisan Review in June 1948, ‘Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey!’ This argued that Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn is full of disguised homosexual messages, and that the famous raft on which Huck and Jim floated down the Mississippi in flight from the real world seethed with homoerotic implications. It was one of those ideas that were initially laughed at but wouldn’t go away. So, whenever Stephen and Reynolds wanted to lighten the mood, they threw ‘honey’ or ‘raft’ into the context.
I feel I’d sell everything I have and never go abroad again and mortgage myself for life and let the children just run wild in the hedges, if I could move to Westwell and stay there the next 30 years. Maybe at the end I’d have one of those real rocky impressive-looking faces like R. Frost blown up 20 times on the American embassy stairs … I might be persuaded to go to Oxford now and then and drawl out my poems in a voice natural and meandering as a river with rafts on it.
Westwell was a village not far from Oxford where my parents rented a house for six months. Natasha’s search for a house in the country had not ceased, though she’d abandoned the idea of a secret cottage bought by Chandler. She was certain that a country haven would provide a solution to her anxiety.
Unfortunately, Westwell lay less than an hour from Headington, where Reynolds lived. Shortly before they’d travelled to Majorca in June to see Graves, Natasha had found out that Stephen had been quietly driving up to Oxford to see Reynolds. Stephen wrote to him that she was ‘deeply disturbed and upset … I think therefore I had better not make any special effort for us to meet this weekend, as I don’t want to give the impression (which would be false anyway) that Westwell is for me just a diving board to Headington.’
The house in Westwell used to belong to the scholar and poet Rex Warner and his wife Barbara Hutchinson, who was Peggy Ashcroft’s sister-in-law. It had a handsome eighteenth-century front and a big central room with good acoustics. Rex and Barbara had separated, and my parents took over the lease. The front windows looked out on to the village pond and the woods behind the house were beautifully untidy. The Bechstein had come down from London and Mum was working. She thought the move away from the city had solved some of her problems, so the idea that Stephen was sneaking off to join Reynolds was a bitter blow.
In writing to Reynolds that they’d be seeing each other less often in the future, Stephen tried to explain that Natasha knew their relationship was only one of words, but this didn’t make it any better. ‘What also counts is that for Natasha there is a history in which in the past I have been bad – and inevitably she feels this is the same pattern.’
For some reason the Westwell phase did not last long, but luckily my parents were offered the loan of a Queen Anne cottage in the grounds of Bruern Abbey, an eighteenth-century Palladian house built on the site of a religious building destroyed in the Reformation. The house belonged to Michael Astor, whom they’d met recently. The Bechstein was carried across from Westwell to Bruern towards the end of August.
That summer Engaged in Writing, the novel about the Venice symposium on which he’d been working for months, with frequent advice from Reynolds, was rejected by his American publisher, Harcourt Brace. This unexpected humiliation ‘seemed like a final God-inspired kick in the pants saying: “honey, you just have to chose between being a writer, and a writer who turns up at Congresses”.’
He decided to cancel an engagement to travel to Japan for a PEN Club meeting. But as the tensions about Reynolds rose to unbearable heights, he changed his mind. He flew off on 23 August.
16
BARRENNESS AND DESOLATION
THE JAPANESE PEN Club had existed since before the war, and several Japanese writers, among them the great novelist Kawabata, wanted to improve contacts between Western and Japanese writers. The theme of the meeting was a discussion of the effects of one culture upon the other. Though there may have been some political implications in the background, the main point was that Japanese writers felt they were cut off from the rest of the world.
Almost two hundred speakers from abroad had been invited, and there were as many delegates from Japan, so the meeting was anything but intimate. Unfortunately, even though it turned out to be so poignant, Stephen kept no record at the time. There’s just a later reference to an occasion when he, Alberto Moravia and Angus Wilson, hiding behind the pines in one of the Zen gardens at Kyoto, tried to escape from the clutches of the Duchesse de la Rochefoucauld. Eventually the three writers abandoned the meeting and slipped away for a few days’ tour of the country by train, accompanied by Shozo Tokunaga, Stephen’s translator.
My father told me a story about this episode, which he described later in his diary after Moravia died. It illustrates his idea that Italians, though outwardly cheerful, are by nature depressed. The scene is a railway carriage. Perhaps in pain because of his bad leg, Moravia ‘always seemed poised over some abyss of boredom’. For hours, they’d been travelling in silence through the most wonderful scenery. Then Moravia gave a weary sigh and said, ‘After all, it is a beautiful world.’ For some reason Dad thought this was killingly f
unny.
During this trip, Stephen fell in love with another man whose surname also was Tokunaga, though he wasn’t a relative of Stephen’s translator. In a later diary he calls him Masao. This affair was instantaneous and passionate. The emotions of Masao, his beauty, his incapacity to take any practical decision about his life, were expanded by Stephen into a mood which gave to the whole of Japan a kind of irresponsible dreamy freedom that reminded him of his youth in Weimar Germany. Stephen would resign from Encounter, discard his family – which surely could get on without him – and resume the life he’d had in Hamburg when he was young. Masao and the ‘floating world’ he inhabited were the perfect embodiment of that state of living ‘without guilt’ which, to Stephen, represented a calling, a vocation, a quest.
When he came back, he wrote to Reynolds:
for a week I seemed to have in Japan something I had always been looking for and never found before, with the consequence that I know now what it is I was looking for. This sounds awfully sinister, but really it was a matter of feeling – far more than I realised at the time. This has the effect that I feel I couldn’t possibly expect to find it again, and that all my previous attempts, as I say, seem in retrospect, humiliating or foolish or disgusting or importunate.
I clearly remember my father’s return from Japan. In the front hall of Loudoun Road, he gave Lizzie and me our presents. Mine was a set of woodcutting tools and three perfect blocks of fine-grained balsa wood. Lizzie received a large Japanese doll; or perhaps it was a samurai. Then we were sent up to our rooms. This was odd, but as we had presents, we obeyed.
Through the floorboards I could hear our parents passionately discussing something in Dad’s study. It seemed more of a fight than a reunion. Though I couldn’t hear what they were saying, Stephen was telling Natasha about Masao and his plan to leave us and live in Japan. The atmosphere was tense but it was hard to tell what was happening. My father seldom shouted, and as far as I can remember my parents never quarrelled about their relationship in front of us children.
A House in St John's Wood Page 19