Thirty years later, when this tense period of their lives was long gone, my mother was faced with a situation that brought it all vividly back.
In 1985, my father wanted to travel to America in order to see Bryan Obst, the young ornithologist with whom he was in love. It was at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic and he was worried about Bryan’s health – justifiably, as it turned out. Dad at this point was seventy-five years old and he had a heart condition, so Mum offered to come too. My father agreed, then almost immediately regretted it. So did she. But she couldn’t back down, because of the health factor.
She foresaw that the trip would land her in endless awful predicaments. She wrote in her diary: ‘I’m in despair over the California trip – I don’t want to meet B – and to be an onlooker at the immense animation of the queer scene, although Chris & Donny will be nice. But one is bound to feel excluded.’ What was she supposed to do? Sit quietly in a corner over on one side in that exclusive male atmosphere with a supportive smile on her face? Either she would be ignored, or she would be humiliated. Perhaps both.
She recalled the previous occasion when Dad had been infatuated with Masao. ‘I remember when the feeling of barrenness and desolation first descended – walking round the garden at Bruern, when S wanted to emigrate to Japan, my pleading for the family – and saying why didn’t he consult a friend who was devoted to his creative life? Why not consult Henry?’ She meant Henry Moore. Dad must have been arguing that he had to place his creative life before anything else. ‘“Henry” – said S – almost contemptuously – yet with pity for H. “Henry has no life of his own at all.” At that moment I knew that I would always have a place only on the perimeter.’
The state of being ‘on the perimeter’ raised in my mother an emotion even worse than the feeling that she was neglected. It was a sense of inadequacy. Had Stephen held true to this side of his nature because she’d failed to provide an alternative? It wasn’t only a lack of physical attraction. She felt that nothing she said would ever amuse him. No opinion of hers on art, on books, not even on music, would distract him from his interior soliloquy. Indeed, she did not have the right to contribute to that soliloquy because if she did so, it might be interrupted.
I would always have a place only on the perimeter – ‘a life of one’s own’ being central – yet [I] would never be able to opt for any ‘life of my own’ – it’s against my temperament. (– How absurd that sounds when one remembers my piano-playing years). But my temperament was to wish for a strong, vital, central, relationship – that wish now humbled to a desire to break through – out of my continual fear of saying the wrong thing, which strikes me dumb at home – knowing all the time that I cannot evoke the animation which B, or Xstopher, or Reynolds e tutti quanti [and all of them] are always able to, because they are at the centre. I am a shadow that hovers at the edge of vision – ‘perimeter vision’. To become substantial would require some positive act of mine, and that is not possible – because it would destroy the fragile, low-key, affection to which all must be dedicated, in order to help S’s work.
Mum could have argued that she’d known about the situation ever since the Wittersham Interlude, when they’d first met. He’d always been open about his emotions. That’s what she’d found so attractive about him. If Stephen needed this part of his life to continue, needed it for his work, she should not try to stop it. This is what my father wanted her to say. In an unusually blunt moment he once said to me, ‘She knew what she was letting herself in for. She has no right to complain.’ She knew what to expect, because he’d told her; and she’d accepted.
If he felt he was being attacked, my father could be tough; and that toughness included losing all sympathy for the other person’s point of view. He challenged her: stand on your own two feet. I shall not budge. It’s not quite the same as rejection, but it assumes that her grip on Beethoven, for example, was as strong and obsessive as his grip on Wordsworth.
Put like this, my parents’ relationship turns into a kind of duel, one in which my mother was at an obvious practical disadvantage. She believed passionately in his writing, he was ambivalent about her music. She didn’t necessarily feel that his writing was of a higher value than her music, because a love of art, any art, is yours; it can’t be compared with anyone else’s. But love of music is interiorized; and, because the concert comes and goes, ephemeral. The written page lasts longer.
Unable to balance my father’s obsession with a corresponding obsession of her own, she provided herself with an alternative self-image: that of a self-sacrificing nun. She would dedicate herself to contemplation and good works.
I suppose that ‘to thine own self be true’ isn’t possible because my temperament was never suited to the life I’ve had to lead. Over and above the natural dislike of the invasion of privacy, is the fact that I have never come to terms with the situation – it’s not in tune with my beliefs about the way one should live one’s life … In my heart, (whilst it is possible to try and accept that one is a bystander) I don’t believe that human relationships should be like that. So the prospect of standing up for it, when it goes on public show, is the prospect of not being true to oneself.
In spite of her misgivings, the visit to Bryan came and went without mishap. My father, realizing the risks, warned Bryan (and Christopher and Don), and they behaved towards her with great consideration. She as usual did well, though it required an effort on her part to present herself in such circumstances. Deep down, she was a nun in retreat living on a rugged peak in the middle of nowhere.
Returning to the late summer of 1957: how did Reynolds cope with the new Stephen after he’d come back from Japan?
Stephen argued that he desperately needed to create ‘a kind of space around myself’. The things he was writing – a book of lectures, a libretto for Nicky Nabokov, editorials for Encounter, book reviews – they were nothing but distractions. ‘I’m sure I can only really start writing poetry again if I get away for an interval.’ The phrase is clear, almost objective. And probably true.
A photo of Reynolds Price taken by my father in May 1959.
Reynolds was interested and supportive, but at the same time he was anxious how Masao was going to affect their friendship. Stephen tried to reassure him. ‘If you ask about our relationship, I think the answer is that we love one another but we are not lovers – and that is as it should be, surely. I should hope there is something in the love that is generous and forgiving, as well as believing and exciting.’
Reynolds insisted on knowing more. After all, if Stephen went off to live in Japan, Reynolds would be left behind along with everyone else. Stephen remained firm. ‘That we won’t be able to see so much of one another, has to do with my home, my finances, my work etc, and not at all to do with my having gone or my going to Japan.’
But meanwhile Stephen was being as helpful as possible to Reynolds’ career.
‘You have no idea how powerful your father was,’ Reynolds told me when I saw him for the last time. ‘All he had to do was pick up the phone to a publisher and a contract appeared in the post the next day.’ In return, Stephen needed Reynolds as someone to whom he could show any piece of writing and receive back a comment that was both honest and supportive. For instance, my father at this time wrote an article on the sonnets of Shakespeare – a tremendously mined quarry, from the academic point of view. He sent it to Reynolds, who gave a detailed criticism, ending with a hint that he should abandon the piece. Stephen did so, and without hurt feelings. No one else subsequently earned such a degree of trust.
According to Reynolds’ autobiography, his first sexual experience took place when he was twenty-five years old, on the island of Tresco off the coast of Cornwall, with a young man of his own age, during the Easter vacation of 1958. Thanks to Stephen, he had just published his first short story ‘A Chain of Love’ in the March number of Encounter. He was beginning to realize that he possessed the qualities of a novelist and his academic ambitions were recedin
g.
Reynolds discovered that sex had an effect on his creative work, at the same time that non-sex was having an effect on Stephen’s.
What I knew by the spring of my third year in England was the vital relevance for me of intimate union, not only for its powers of simple invigoration through the heights of physical pleasure … but also for my own adult self-respect and the ongoing growth of my work. That pleasure affected deeply the rhythmic vigour of sentences on a page as they attended closely to the precise moral implications of my subject at any given moment in my story.
As soon as Reynolds began to have lovers of his own, his relationship with Stephen became fixed. The touching thing is that it never faded. Throughout the remaining forty years of their friendship, my father would turn up at Reynolds’ house in North Carolina, not far from Duke University, where Reynolds taught for many years. What he liked best was to sit outside on a deckchair and make drawings of the pond, or work on a long poem about his family which was never finished. Reynolds told me that it was puzzling how little Stephen wanted. He seemed perfectly happy just to be there.
After Reynolds left England in 1960, I did not see him again until several years after my father’s death. In fact it was our daughter Saskia who met him in New York. He was coming out of a taxi and she recognized him from his book on suffering, which she’d read. They made friends. I happened to arrive in New York three days later and we had supper together.
He was being given a prize and the occasion was full of distinguished people, but Reynolds made me sit at his right hand, and throughout the meal he talked to me intensely about Stephen. He wanted me to come down to Durham and continue the conversation, but I refused. I wrote to him a few days later to say that as long as my mother was alive, I would feel disloyal to her if I started examining the distant past. This letter is the last item in the Price Archive in Duke University. I’d forgotten I’d written it. It was clear and true, and it took for granted that Reynolds and I understood each other even though the last time I’d seen him, I’d been only fifteen years old.
I couldn’t start researching this book until after Mum died. She would have guessed, and it would have upset her. In Loudoun Road on the evening of the day that she died, I saw her body off the premises (a horrible moment; they used a sack with leather straps), and then I took up the telephone and rang Reynolds. The number was in her address book. I told him she was dead and that now I could finally respond to his frequent, generous invitations to speak to me about my father. He said succinctly: ‘I’m sorry to hear about Natasha. Come as soon as you can, and stay as long as you can.’
So I went to Durham, North Carolina. I read Stephen’s letters to Reynolds during the day and talked to him about them at night, after the library had closed. He said, ‘Matt, you’re the first person to read those things in fifty years.’ It was a good week. On Saturday, I kissed him on the forehead and said goodbye and drove my rented car back to the airport. It was about three in the afternoon. He ate an early supper with his brother Bill, said how much he’d enjoyed my visit and how much I looked like Stephen. He went to sleep, and the next morning he was found in a coma. He died four days later.
17
TOO AMBIVALENT
BRUERN ABBEY WAS undoubtedly a beautiful property, and after Dad bought Mum a 2.8-litre Jaguar that she’d set her heart on, driving down from London to this country seat almost satisfied her craving for security. It was a ‘cheap Jag’ with constant health problems, but she loved it.
We’d drive out on Friday nights, through thinning lights as we left the outside parishes of London, and on, past Newbury and Hungerford. The last big towns would be left behind, with no more than a single dot now, of light from a house in the darkness, but with the silhouette of a hillside felt as a crest, a wave. Myself with my nose on the leather seats of the Jag looking at the back of my mother’s neck as she concentrated on the driving. The sudden gush of air as we took our cramped limbs from the cocoon of leathery space and stepped from the car into the overwhelming breathiness of the countryside, with crackly sounds in the emptiness, the movement of some living thing against the background of utter silence that London never has.
Michael Astor, the owner of Bruern Abbey, was David Astor’s younger brother. David was the owner of the Observer, so he belonged to Stephen’s world of serious journalism. Michael however was a restless personality. He’d tried painting. He’d tried serving as a Member of Parliament. At the time when we first borrowed the Red Brick Cottage, he was still married to Barbara McNeill, but the marriage was foundering.
The first thing Barbara asked me when I went to introduce myself was, ‘Do you hunt?’ I said politely that I was afraid I didn’t. ‘Oh. So can you ride?’ No – but I would very much like to try. She said with an easy laugh, ‘Well, we can’t have any of that.’ Meaning that she wasn’t in the business of teaching stray juveniles how to ride. And that was as far as I ever got with Barbara Astor.
My sister Lizzie’s passion for horses pulled her through this test. It brought her the friendship of Barbara’s two daughters, Jane and Georgina. (I had no luck with their sons.) Barbara smoked and rode and drank gin-and-whatsits before lunch and avoided for the most part the new inhabitants of the Red Brick Cottage. But Lizzie was able to join in.
Mum did everything she could to encourage Lizzie’s friendship with Jane, which indeed lasted for the rest of Jane’s short and unlucky life. And whenever Mum looked at Lizzie playing with the Astor girls, an ecstatic look would come over her face. It was a complex expression, because confusion was mixed in there somewhere, along with the feeling of achievement. I’ve been reticent about including Lizzie in this book because I want her to tell her own version of the same events, but when Mum looked with such pride at Lizzie playing with the Astor girls, did it signify a lack of confidence? Did she remember her own adulation of the Booths when she was a child? Did she enjoy the fact that Lizzie was acquiring a similar role among the Astors?
My mother loved her children and her husband, but she did not think we had succeeded in becoming the strong, self-assured family she’d always dreamed of. I think she was wrong to believe this, but my childhood was secure and hers was not. I can see that when she remembered her own childhood, to her its finest moments had occurred when she’d been tucked away at Funtington in the tree house with the Booth children, protected from the outside world by branches and leaves. By delegating Lizzie to the families of Michael Astor and John Huston, she was retrospectively handing herself over to the Booths, which was something she’d yearned for – and it had almost happened, but not quite.
She would not have seen this choice as failing her maternal obligations. On the contrary, she was sacrificing herself. She wanted Lizzie to enjoy the best opportunities. Today, having accumulated the roles of father and grandfather, I find this hesitancy touching, but at the time that ecstatic look she gave to families she assumed were in possession of the secret – a secret dependent on money – merely suggested that none of us was quite worthy of the family she had in mind. That we’d disappointed her by failing to attain her own high standards.
Of Michael Astor, she used to say as she picked up a house-guest from the train station, pointing at a row of plane trees that he’d planted in a long avenue up to the Big House, and shrouded with barbed wire so that the teeth of nibbling deer wouldn’t damage them – waiflike as new trees are before they get a grip – ‘I think it shows great faith in the future, don’t you?’ The word ‘future’ coming out as ‘few-char’, as she’d be using her ‘grand’ voice. Then one day she said, ‘I think it shows great faith in the ffff—’ and her voice tailed off. She’d remembered at the last minute that Michael was getting divorced from Barbara the following week.
In those early years at Bruern, Dad would occasionally invite me out for a drive. I always said yes, but nothing happened on these occasions. Silence in the car, a familiar route to the village, a trivial purchase and then back. It was companionable, but my father was so
tightly locked up in his own thoughts, there didn’t seem much point in my being there. He was a bad driver, so he wasn’t showing off that particular skill. Maybe he just needed to get out of the house. Or maybe he wanted to confide something to me and never dared.
He also spent many hours drawing the heavy yews around the pond where ancestral carp floated languidly. His drawings had a soothing rhythm to them, the same line made again and again, like waves on a beach. It was hypnotic. He’d explain: that bit of the landscape echoes the other shape over there – which was a good idea, but he was unable to bring it forward in the marks he made.
From the beginning of 1958, Chandler planned to come to Europe. He wanted to interview the Mafia boss Lucky Luciano in Naples – of all the odd ideas! And he had one or two chores to do in London.
The only letters from Natasha to Raymond to survive are from this period, when Ray was due back in England. He destroyed all the others. Here, she replies to several letters from Ray filled with the usual derogatory remarks about Stephen:
I couldn’t despise Stephen as you do – you are right there. I see that he does the best he can, even with his failings – just as you do the best with yours. You simply have different outlooks & different failings, each of you. He talks sympathetically and respectingly of you – you don’t do so well about him. In fact you judge and condemn others rather too freely sometimes …
I still am in no position to condemn him, and above all whatever lack of love and harmony there may be in the family must somehow be made good by me. All other solutions would be a retreat from love – and I am certainly not going to teach my children to despise or judge their father. When they are grown, they will naturally perceive in an adult way; but I will not be the instrument of dissension, bewilderment – lack of security in my children. Where I have failed deeply – is in having brought you into it at all.
A House in St John's Wood Page 20