As you will see from the address, I am back in hospital. Treatment this time. Less demeaning and uncomfortable than the tests, but involving drugs which make me sleep when I do not want to and then leave me lying awake when I would give anything for oblivion.
I am apparently in for a longish stay and have a room of my own, so I have brought some work with me, to wit one of MB’s trunks. This may seem madness, an unmanageable mess from a sick-bed, but it is intellectually undemanding—about what I am up to—and I must do something. Besides, I have become obsessed with the notion that the woman is deliberately preventing me from completing my book, and I will not be so used; though I fear that the deadline is now less likely to be Steen’s centenary but (a less metaphorical use of the word) my own demise. Please do not pass this on. I am reading between the lines on my doctor’s forehead and have told no one else; but having a need to tell someone I feel that you are sufficiently a stranger not to be seriously put out.
I am doing what I can to fight back. Against MB, I mean. I have taken the minor risk of sending the first two-thirds of the MS off for final typing.
Did you see my ad in The Times for Richard Smith? I must thank you for your further fleshing-out of him at the conservatory teas, though I hope you will forgive my saying he remains as much of an enigma as ever.
A propos, one of Lord Orne’s complaints to MB was the cost of keeping the conservatory heated. Certainly by the time he wrote coke must have been hard to come by in sufficient quantities, but I suppose that if there was any of the stuff to spare anywhere in Devon it would somehow or other have found its way into MB’s stove. Of course she had the gardener on her side; Orne refers to him as having said that the conservatory plants would have died in the winter of ’41 (remember it? I was at Marlborough. We suffered) if MB had not contrived to get the fuel to keep the heating going. That was very much her style. She battened, but managed to make the relationship appear symbiotic.
That reminds me. She was never a nurse. I see you do not explicitly make her claim to have been. She worked for the same organisation as Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas, something called the American Fund for French Wounded, run at the Paris end by a Mrs Lathrop. They took supplies to hospitals, blankets and bandages I suppose, but also a certain amount of creature comforts, with which MB no doubt made free. It was war work of a fairly privileged kind. Désirée O’Connell was the other member of her team, and it was through her that MB met Steen first, in 1918. The supplies for the celebration party when your father got his medal would no doubt have come out of the fund. I wonder what he was doing in a French hospital; but the fact that he was there would be a reason for the authorities to suggest that MB, as an Englishwoman, went in and chatted with him. I very much doubt that there were ‘hundreds and hundreds’ of similar cases.
I find your account of O’Connell quite interesting. Either you have a better memory than you claim or you know more than you are letting on. I think I told you she was a poet, and rumoured to be the illegitimate child by a Frenchwoman of some Irish littérateur. She wrote exclusively in French, prose poems derived from the Imagist idiom, quite untranslatable. Rimbaud’s illuminations are the closest well-known approximation I can give you. She signed her work ‘D.D.’ Did you know this, really? It would not have been pronounced quite as you have spelt it.
She was always notoriously plain. Many accounts mention the contrast between her and MB, but having made the point the writer of course concentrates on MB. Only the crasser observers considered the relationship to have been lesbian. The general opinion was that MB did not want to live alone and kept O’Connell around for the contrast, and as an entrée into intellectual circles. Furthermore, O’Connell had a small income and MB nothing. I will come back to this.
O’Connell’s importance to me is that she was apparently in love with Steen. Steen did not reciprocate. Far from it. He disliked her in a manner I cannot parallel elsewhere in his life, though he had a good number of enemies. He acknowledged that she had a certain talent, but thought she was putting it to obnoxious ends. I think I told you that he went to great lengths to prevent her coming on the yachting trip with MB (or did I? These drugs make me hazy about such things). Some of her later poems appear to be about her love for Steen, but they are too hermetic to be any use to a biographer.
You imply but do not directly state that by the time you knew her she was a thoroughgoing alcoholic. Do I also detect an implication that for the interview with the odd-shaped naval gentleman she had deliberately sobered up enough to be able to converse at an intelligent level? There is a casual reference in a letter from Apollinaire to Braque about seeing her very drunk and throwing bottles at people ‘as usual’. Her drinking was Steen’s overt reason for refusing to have her on the yacht; he said he didn’t want to keep fishing her out of the sea; but as I say he disliked her anyway, and no doubt felt he would have more chance with MB if she were not around. She must have had the constitution of an ox if she was still drinking on that scale seventeen years later. Where, incidentally, did she get the stuff in wartime?
On the other hand it throws a new light on MB that she was prepared to take on such a liability over so long a period. I doubt that O’Connell’s small private income would by now have been a sufficient incentive, even with MB’s preference for what she called ‘living off the land’ (really no more than the shameless exaction of hospitality from anyone who could offer it).
All this is academic, for my purposes. My professional interest in the pair stops abruptly in the early Twenties, when Steen seems to have come to the conclusion that he was never going to make it with MB, and simply left Paris. He must have had the first indications of his illness about then; he was seeing specialists by the end of ’23. And whatever it was that happened between him and Smith came at this time. Then he shut himself up and wrote his last two books.
Did I tell you how good I think they are? I take it you have not read them, but if you find yourself near a reputable library read the fourth chapter of Honey from the Rock. The book is a discussion of the place of the Jews in Western civilisation, but typically Steen didn’t use the subject in order to contribute to the so-called Jewish Question, but as a sort of paradigm of all human behaviour. Chapter Four will make your hair stand on end if you read it remembering that it was written eighteen years before Buchenwald.
How did he come to look at the world with those eyes? That’s what I want to know. He might have written as good a book ten years earlier, but it would have been quite different. I feel as though I had written six hundred pages as mere preparations to answer that question, and now I can’t do it. God, let Smith see my ad and answer it. Supposing he’s still alive.
Meanwhile I amuse myself with irrelevant speculations about the household you encountered. For instance, do you know the real status of the girl you call Annette Penoyre? You make her refer to MB as ‘Aunt Molly’. This of course might mean anything in the usage of that class and period and certainly cannot be said to imply, let alone prove, an exact relationship. I think MB can have had no kin closer than second cousins. The one really worthwhile thing to come so far out of these intolerable trunks is a letter from Steen in which he makes it clear that the opening sequence of The Fanatics is closely based on MB’s own experience. You have her saying she had a very peculiar childhood, and that was certainly the case. Collating bits of Nineties gossip with Steen’s novel, I think the facts were probably these:
The parents were an appalling couple, the father a sort of gentleman horse-coper, the mother vapid, disorganised, sexually accessible to a remarkable degree but in a manner so unlikely to arouse genuine passion that she was more tolerated than you would have expected. They moved in the very outermost fringe of the circle that surrounded the Prince of Wales (E. VII-to-be), sometimes living together, sometimes apart. One silly hack has ‘proved’ that the Prince was MB’s father, but this cannot be true; she would have been better treated. Neither pa
rent had brothers or sisters but both were related by cousinage to a number of county families, and they developed a technique of blackmailing these with a threat that they themselves would come to stay unless the family in question took care of the child for a while. In the end the Gore-Phillipses took her on most of the time, on the understanding that they did not have to bring her up with their own brood. As a result MB spent most of her childhood in large Gore-Phillips houses where the family were not at the time residing; Eaton Square in August; their Scottish hunting-lodge in mid-winter; and so on. The Fanatics opens with the hero as a child wandering round a huge fake-Gothic castle on the west coast of Scotland, with the main rooms dark because the shutters stay closed all winter, but with blazing coal fires in the grates in an effort to keep the damp out, and for company two old couples who speak little but Gaelic. It is one of those passages which speak, which have an imaginative charge not accounted for by the material described. Steen’s letter says, ‘I have stolen your childhood. I must have it for the novel. It is what I have been looking for these past eight years.’ I am fairly certain that he is talking about this opening sequence.
As a matter of fact I was working on this very question when I had to come in here. The Fanatics is not, even in the eyes of devotees, a success, though Steen for a while regarded it as his major work. He had begun thinking about it before the war, but had then had his ideas drastically disrupted (I take it you have read To Live like the Jackal) and was unable to resume until something dislodged the inner log-jam. He seems to have persuaded himself that his encounter with MB had done the trick. This answers your question whether she did not mean something more to him than his other women, and I suppose I must concede that here the answer is yes. But her intrusion was, if anything, more disastrous than that of the Kaiser.
How did I get into a discussion of The Fanatics? These drugs do make one ramble. I shall have to get the medicos to put me on to something else before I tackle my final section. The maddening thing is that I have only eighty pages to go. If it weren’t for this bloody woman! Forgive me, I know she meant a lot to you. Anyway, she cannot have been anybody’s aunt. A trivial point, and irrelevant to you as you are writing fiction and could give her ninety nieces if you chose.
What else? I take it you put the remark about MB throwing all her papers into a trunk to tease me, but should I come across any of your father’s letters I will put them aside for you, having (I’m afraid) read them myself. A curse of my method (of my temperament, really) is that I have to read every word. It has rarely proved worth while, but on those few occasions how worth while! Now that I feel myself to be in a hurry I am more conscious of the actual curse than the potential blessing.
I do wish your method (temperament?) had allowed you to deal more extensively with Captain Smith. I feel that MB is, typically, edging him out, though this is scarcely your fault as she is the focal point of your book. May I suggest that when you have finished a section you jot down for my use anything you can remember about him but which you have been unable to incorporate? Do not worry if it seems unlikely to be of use to me. I need straws to clutch at.
Later. This is all very rambling, I’m afraid. I have re-read your instalments so far and must tell you that I have done so with increasing doubts about the usefulness to me of what you are doing. How do even you know what is true and what is not? How do you distinguish between real memory and invention masquerading as memory? Of course in my trade I frequently have to extract fictional impurities from the accounts of supposedly reliable witnesses, where, for instance, somebody has added a bit of shaping embroidery to a favourite anecdote and has then retold it so often that he can no longer remember not seeing what his tongue has got into the habit of saying he saw. But with you I am trying to extract factual impurities from a fictional brew. Ironically this is what Baston claims the reader has to do with Steen’s work. The locus dassicus, on which Baston expends a whole chapter, is the back-from-the-dead episode in To Live like the Jackal.
Do you remember, Steen was attempting to follow von Lettow-Vorbek’s retreat to Mahenge when he ran into a patrol and got laid out by a bullet across his scalp? His companions, four local tribesmen and his ‘friend’ Mshimbi, thought he was dead, dragged the body into the bush and buried him in a shallow grave before making off. But Steen came to, dug himself out and somehow or other found his way to their camp, where they all ran off, thinking he was his ghost. It’s a bravura bit of writing, maintaining the actuality of detail and the sense of his own delirium in a marvellous balance. Baston makes hay with it, and concludes that there’s hardly a word of truth in the whole thing. It is a key passage in his debunking exercise. My own view, if you are interested, is that it is true enough. Perhaps, as Baston says, Mshimbi and the others knew he wasn’t dead and only heaped branches and a few clods of earth on him to hide him till it was safe to come back and collect him; and perhaps in that case they didn’t go far away. Mshimbi told Baston as much, and that he was on his way back to the spot when he found Steen staggering along the trail. But Baston admits he paid him, and Mshimbi on that basis would have told him what he wanted to hear. Steen, I am sure, came to and found himself in what he believed to be a grave, dug himself out, followed and found his companions, somehow. By the time he came to write his book he saw himself, vivid as truth, stepping in among them where they sat mourning in the moon-shadow under the bean-tree.
It may or may not have happened like that, and how shall we know? I am reconciled to leaving the question unanswered in Steen’s case, but you are still here for me to question. When I feel stronger I may well challenge you, Baston-like, on a number of points. I hope you will bear with me.
Later. I have had a minor but extraordinary illumination which I must tell you about, because you have accidentally provoked it. It comes, I suppose, of thinking about Steen’s back-from-the-dead adventure just after writing and thinking about Désirée O’Connell. I believe her infatuation with him, and his consequent loathing of her, may be partially explained by the episode in East Africa. As far as one can make any definite sense of O’Connell’s poems of the period, she was obsessed by dead men; she seems almost to have worked herself into a state of female necrophilia (clinically a somewhat rare complaint, I should imagine). Steen, by his own account, could be considered one of the living dead, and therefore providing her with an erotic stimulus scarcely available elsewhere. Steen, of course, took a quite different view of himself, as a creature brimming with excess life, and regarded the adventure as proof of that. The notion of being anyone’s zombie would have disgusted him. I will get my secretary to bring me the D.D. poems next time she comes and see whether any of the later ones can be read in this sense. If only they weren’t so ineluctably obscure.
I must get back to work; though, quite by accident, writing this rambling hodge-podge has turned out to be just that. I fear it will have been less use to you. To make up for wasting your time I will tell you that I have collated MB’s bank statements for the late Thirties. Her finances improved considerably over the period. She spent less than half the income from Steen’s trust and seems to have invested the remainder, quite cannily. The dividends (sources listed in statements in those days) rise steadily. There is a stray statement from ’51 by which time she is living wholly on dividends. The sizeable royalties from To Live like the Jackal must by then have been going elsewhere. (Where? Why? Another tormenting little mystery.) But when you knew her MB could certainly have afforded to pay Orne some rent. Or at least her share of the coke-bill!
I am in two minds whether to send this, for fear it will sound to you maudlin. I am not in fact awash with self-pity; anger is nearer the mark. Write to me soon. Don’t forget, Smith is the one I want to know about. I have as much of MB as I can take.
Yours ever,
Simon Dobbs
Dobbs’s hope that I would not be ‘seriously put out’ by the possibility of his death was badly off the mark. I was appalled
. If anything, the slightness of our acquaintance made it worse. I have had friends die, both suddenly and predictably, and coped with my own reactions in the way one does. This was different, I think because it seemed to involve two deaths, that of Dobbs and of his book. Of course his publishers would get somebody else to finish it, but it wouldn’t be the same thing—a zombie, to use his word. I sensed that if he did manage to get it done it was going to be very much what I have called a ‘real’ book, not just a contribution to knowledge, but a source of pleasure and enlightenment for readers long after most of the books of our day are forgotten. So, in a mysterious way, I felt it to be Steen’s last chance too. It was very unlikely that another writer of Dobbs’s calibre would take him up, especially if the uncompleted zombie work existed on the shelves, providing an apparently satisfactory Life.
It seemed to me that I had a duty to do my small best to help, even if it meant taking risks with my own creative processes. I would settle down to getting all the ‘true’ bits of my own book written before I did anything more about the ‘fictional’ bits. This was a risk, partly because I had never before tried to write a book except from beginning to end, and partly because in this case the coherence of the finished product was obviously going to depend on an organic interweaving of elements. If I let the ‘truth’ set too hard, the ‘fiction’ might never cohere to it. The result would be a mess like a cracked mayonnaise. Still, I felt I had a moral duty to give it a go.
Truth is the devil. Strange that I should be finding that out so late in life. External truth is bad enough, but internal truth is gone like a lizard on a sandbank, glimpsed at best as a sort of already-vanished motion. The preceding two paragraphs contain a kind of truth, but still they are humbug. Now it would be dishonest to delete them.
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