Several Strangers

by Claire Tomalin

  When I began the book I thought of it as a little bridge of sympathy between East and West, but this conception has had to go, my sense of truth forbids anything so comfortable. I think that most Indians, like most English people, are shits, and I am not interested whether they sympathize with one another or not. Not interested as an artist; of course the journalistic side of me still gets roused over these questions.

  From this account it is Forster the journalist, not Forster the artist, who has been most acclaimed. Forty years later, when the book was dramatized, he again denied that he had written about the incompatibility of East and West, saying he was really concerned with the ‘difficulty of living in the universe’, as Furbank noted in his diary.

  The implied verdict is that Forster himself managed it better than most. His lapses have rather the air of a spoilt only child’s lapses, and did little damage. He was generous and loyal; he lived with what seemed a dangerous secret handicap in his generation, albeit an exciting one. Even though he stopped writing novels – nervous of his own success, suggests Furbank – his fame grew. And he never lost his descriptive powers. Nine years before his death he nearly died of a blood deficiency and wrote an account of the occasion:

  Only weakness, and too weak to be aware of anything but weakness. ‘I shan’t be here if I get any weaker than this’ was the nearest approach to a thought… Bob’s little finger pressed mine and pursued it when it shifted. This I shall never forget.

  How well he observed the sensations; and when the real time came it was marked by the same calm and affection.

  New Statesman, 1978

  Winter Words

  The View in Winter: Reflections on Old Age by Ronald Blythe

  Old age: are we lucky if we get there? Perhaps not, now that so many of us do. Ronald Blythe’s panorama of the south coast of England lined with lightly tanned, well-dressed octogenarians gazing out to sea is distinctly eerie. What are they looking for? ‘It is as though one needs a special strength to die,’ he says; and the risk, if one lingers too long, is the loss of that most precious possession, the sense of individuality.

  In the old days the Workhouse lay in wait. Now it is the geriatric ward or the Home (curiously named: the point about a Home is that it is not home). ‘My friend went to one and she was bitterly lost. They just dumped her there… They lost my friend in a home,’ comments one lady of ninety-one, aptly enough. For where a single Lear makes a tragedy, a large roomful must be an inferno.

  One of the darkest themes of this remarkable book is the hatred that the middle aged can develop for their helpless, devouring parents, for the mother who has abdicated into childishness, the father grown mumbling and apologetic. Visiting time at the Home, according to an observant matron, brings guilt-ridden, middle-aged children who speak in hushed voices. Perhaps what they hate most is the view of their own futures.

  But The View in Winter is not all gloom. Here is an extraordinary gallery of self-portraits, beings who expected never to be noticed again, who believed all their skills and pride and memories were about to disappear without trace; and Blythe saved them. Travelling about England over a period of several years, his gift was to hear them out, to perform the loving service of the listener. For him they were glad to spread their wings one last time; and he, like a man who has visited a beehive at the end of summer, came away with riches.

  They speak of their childhoods, of the wars in which they fought, of babies lost, of mine disasters, of the Empire – source of much pride – and of their work which once seemed so important. One lady of eighty-six, newly bereaved of the friend who had shared her life, describes the grief which has swamped everything else: ‘You must have memories… or it would not be the wonderful past which would be inside you but the dreadful now.’ As one feared, age does not diminish this sort of pain.

  A railway crossing-keeper’s son starts to describe his wooing and soon his memory gives something more:

  I was a-courting her thirteen year. Thir… teen… year. I used to pull all the water up for her out o’ that ol’ well behind the pub where she lived with her aunty. I saw her brew and bake and do it all. She’s the one, I thowt. Lovely, that well was but they condemned it. Ol’ people thereabouts lived to be eighty and ninety a-side o’ that well and niver took no harm from it. Soo that’s the beginnin’ o’ the matter. I don’t know where the end will be, do yew? I reckon we’re comin’ to it fast, but there it is.

  His impression that the world is on the point of becoming not worth living in is shared by many of his contemporaries, whatever the hardships of their youth. Even the men who survived the horrors of the trenches in the Great War now speak lyrically of it as a supreme experience of comradeship; one darkly foretells that now, ‘something awful must happen soon’.

  The pace of change in this century contributes to this apocalyptic notion. Many learnt their skills from parents who had them in turn from a long line of ancestors, but have lived to see them become obsolete. The Montessori teacher, a brave New Woman who liberated herself and several generations of small children, sees today’s little ones run out of her parties to watch Dr Who. The neurosurgeon and the engineer can hardly follow new developments in their fields, the farrier shut his father’s and grandfather’s forge one day and said flatly: ‘It was the time to give up.’

  The effect of these ancient voices, all between the covers of a single volume, is overpowering. Maybe this is why Ronald Blythe has diluted them with his own essays. They are well informed and wide-ranging in their literary allusions. But at the risk of sounding ungrateful about a book which has shaken me and which I intend to keep to hand, I’ll say that even the most intelligent general commentary seems lacklustre when set against the truth in acute and particular shape. A last example: Lady Thelma, ninety, is now settled on a housing estate. She describes the mist of death coming towards her,

  Dear death, how I look forward to it… So weary, you know. This tiredness just falls on top of me like a dead weight. Such utter, utter weariness – you have no idea.

  The next minute, with peals of laughter,

  Talking of the dead, I’d like some of the people I used to know to see me in my new bungalow. See their faces, you know. They’d look around and say, ‘Thelma – dear!’

  And how she lives, in Blythe’s fine reporting, with her approaching death and her precious, individual laughter.

  Sunday Times, 1979

  Rosa Mundi

  Burger’s Daughter by Nadine Gordimer

  This is a big, unwieldy, even elephantine book, making little or no attempt to woo the reader, very difficult to get into, roughly and boldly constructed, with an ugly title: but I don’t intend to be rude about Nadine Gordimer’s new novel. To follow a writer as neat and crisp as she can be into a deliberately and monumentally awkward piece of fiction is more absorbing than to read most novelists going through well-oiled routines.

  She has always been able to show us Africa, its flesh, earth and leaf, and this book even more than her earlier ones tells us how things look and feel, nails detail so that it speaks its own moral. The houses, gardens and pools of the South African bourgeoisie, the cityscapes, dreadful featureless townships, hot squares where typists eat their lunchtime sandwiches; the queue outside a prison, an empty flat, a leafy cottage doomed by a coming motorway. The visual record is the emotion here. A little boy drowned in his parents’ swimming pool is remembered ever after by his sister for the pink flecks of his breakfast bacon vomited with the blue water as their mother tried in vain to revive him. Again, a character named Marisa Kgosana, whose husband is imprisoned on Robben Island, wears her splendid sexual beauty and her clear laughter throughout the book as though they were themselves banners for the cause of freedom: as indeed they become. Even more than in her earlier books, Gordimer has chosen here to describe so amply that comment is needless. It’s an apt way of delineating a society in which everyone is officially prejudged on the basis of their skin colour.

  This same intolerable c
ondition made Lionel Burger, a successful doctor and father of the heroine, into a lifelong communist fighter against apartheid. He dies, still in his middle years, in prison. His daughter, named for Rosa Luxemburg, grows up to think of her parents’ refusal to give up fighting apartheid as normal; prison visits, imprisonment and surveillance are her staples. Sometimes she even thinks of herself through the eyes of her surveillants. This may make her sound more accessible than she actually appears in the course of her story. For Rosa is drawn opaquely; and she is so distant from the norms we are accustomed to, so unresponsive to the usual promptings of the reader’s imagination as it circles around the writer’s, that I was often baffled.

  Gordimer denies us any psychological analysis of Rosa. There is no dwelling on her intimate sense of herself, her feelings, her possibilities. It is important that she does not get on with men who might view her in that light; this is not the Portrait of a Lady; the traditional male approach to a young woman – what couldn’t she do, what couldn’t I rouse her to? – is nothing to her. She is already set on her own course; she knows what she can do, although we don’t. She is without ambition and especially without erotic ambition. She is also quiet. Without the gestures of self-sacrifice and heroism she accepts that her path must lie through the prisons of South Africa. There is no mention of duty towards her parents’ memory; she is curious about their past but not pious. Still, it was they who set off the little engine that works inside her. One would like to know more of its workings, although Gordimer implies that simple humanity is enough to explain it. But then what makes so many others deny the simple humanity of the Burgers? Is communism the only effective weapon against apartheid?

  The climax of the book is brought about when Rosa visits Europe, having first worked skilfully and patiently to be allowed a passport. She goes to her father’s first wife in a village on the Côte d’Azur among kindly, gossiping, sun-worshipping friends who live as though nothing had happened in the twentieth century. A meal on a terrace, flowers, wine, sun, love or the memory of love, these are their staples; and they cherish their own comforts carefully. Here Rosa for the first time becomes the mistress of a man she loves, a French schoolteacher away from his family to work on his thesis on the cultural effects of the colonial experience. The claims of private happiness, with all its romantic panoply, begin to be made. Rosa and her lover seem wholly congenial; he proposes that they should bind their lives together, adulterously but permanently, in Paris. Only, with this same lover she has looked at the paintings of Bonnard and he has remarked how they, like her Côte d’Azur friends, take no account of the experiences of the century, wars and camps and racial contempt; with him, if she accepts him, she will perhaps slide also into a way of life that is removed from public concerns. Can she do this, or even risk becoming a token expatriate South African liberal?

  Gordimer endorses Rosa’s determined rejection of the private world in favour of a return to South Africa and, inevitably, prison. She implies too that it is not really possible for the European mind to meet the South African experience, to encompass the nature of what is going on there. I accept her verdict; it seems to me that Burger’s Daughter is written out of the moral commitment which makes charm and happiness look shabby if they are bought at the price of turning your back on atrocity.

  Well, that’s right. But also: I’m glad nobody made Bonnard feel guilty about painting what made him happy, a naked woman in the bathroom, a meal on the terrace.

  Punch, 1979

  Girl with Scissors

  Christina Rossetti by Georgina Battiscombe

  Consider a girl of temper so violent that she ‘ripped up’ her own arm with a pair of scissors when rebuked by her mother. Consider the same girl at twenty-four writing this verse:

  It’s a weary life, it is, she said:

  Doubly blank is a woman’s lot:

  I wish, I wish I were a man:

  Or better than any being, were not:

  Were nothing at all in all the world,

  Not a body and not a soul:

  Not so much as a grain of dust

  Or drop of water from pole to pole.

  The girl’s father is an invalid, a scholar and exile who often expresses the wish that he were dead. In the family parlour hangs the portrait of her mother’s favourite brother, John Polidori, once Byron’s physician, later a suicide. Of the four children, two are called ‘the calms’: they are sensible like their mother; but Dante Gabriel and Christina Rossetti – she is the girl with the scissors – are ‘the storms’.

  Christina’s life began in 1830 and was passed chiefly in north London; as Georgina Battiscombe tells us in her calm and sensible biography, it was outwardly uneventful. She lived at her mother’s side until her mother died, and survived her by only eight years. Teaching, the only possible career then for a girl of her background, was unpleasant to her; she took up invalidism instead, like so many of her gifted female contemporaries (Elizabeth Barrett, Alice James). It is worth noting that her first mysterious breakdown came with adolescence, as if in protest against the unacceptable terms on which she was expected to live her life.

  Two men would have liked to marry her, but she rejected both on religious grounds – one was a Catholic, the other a free-thinker, and Christina was a strict Anglican under her mother’s influence; her sister Maria became an Anglican nun. For ten years Christina did voluntary work at the St Mary Magdalen Home for Fallen Women on Highgate Hill; she was deeply interested and horrified by their plight, and wrote several narrative poems around the theme. She was published and became well known, but remained awkwardly shy; and illness took her beauty. She made only two trips abroad. It is on record that she saw her first sunrise at the age of forty-seven. No wonder that she wrote of days

  when it seems… that our yoke is uneasy and our burden unbearable because our life is pared down and subdued and repressed to an intolerable level; and so in one moment every instinct of our whole self revolts against our lot, and we loathe this day of quietness and sitting still, and writhe under a sudden sense of all we have irrevocably forgone.

  Only religion revived hope at such times, and throughout her life she celebrated its consolations and seemed to look forward eagerly to the experience of Paradise – a Paradise of rich fulfilment, of sunshine and music, sweet fruits and blooming flowers, the love of a heavenly bridegroom, ‘heaped-up good pleasure’, as she put it.

  Battiscombe suggests that Christina, thwarted in her experience of eros, put her passion into her expression of agape: she rebukes both ‘cheap’ talk of sexual repression and any suggestion that there may have been an actual lover. Yet it is easy to see why other biographers – notably Lona Packer in her Christina Rossetti (Cambridge, 1963) – have wanted to find real sex somewhere. ‘My heart is like a singing bird’ demands something stronger than the pallid, sleepy Collinson or the tubby, absent-minded Cayley. Battiscombe is right, I think, to dismiss Lona Packer’s theory of a love affair with the Rossetti brothers’ friend William Scott; but there is a missing element in her own determinedly subdued and tasteful account of this anguished and surely enraged life that produced so much surpassingly painful and morbid as well as beautiful poetry.

  Christina Rossetti’s most famous poem is to this day ‘Goblin Market’. It has been read variously, as a straightforward fairy-story, as sexual fantasy, as a parable of temptation and redemption and, most recently (by Ellen Moers), as a memorial to the eroticism of the Victorian nursery, credited with many covert pinches and guilty tastings. This is a good point: ‘Goblin Market’ is both brilliant and embarrassing – embarrassing because it is a poem about innocence and experience by someone slightly over-insistent on the virtue of innocence, which she perhaps had deep doubts about.

  Who was it, after all, who did taste all the forbidden fruit, who enacted everything his sisters had learnt from their mother and their church to deny? Christina’s fellow ‘storm’ and favourite brother, Dante Gabriel. The more he lived his stormy life, surrounding h
imself with heaped-up pleasures, with beautiful models and mistresses, the more rigidly she retreated into the safety of absolute self-denial. No risk of hers could redeem him; she could only be Isabel to his Claudio. But she loved him to his death.

  Another poem of hers, ‘The Lowest Room’, shows a young woman regretting the freedom of the pagan past, to which her sister replies that Christian virtues are better; this meek sister is rewarded with a husband, while her discontented elder is obliged to learn patience as ‘year after tedious year’ of her life goes by. The lesson is that it is bad to want experience, excitement and action, all those things enjoyed by men and free-thinkers. Christina, who could not dare to think of living like Dante Gabriel (except perhaps in Paradise), martyred herself and chronicled her martyrdom in deeply troubling poems.

  If she was shy in life, as a poet her voice was confident:

  What are heavy? sea-sand and sorrow:

  What are brief? today and tomorrow:

  What are frail? Spring blossoms and youth:

  What are deep? the ocean and truth.

  And if she repeatedly expressed a longing for death as an escape from the frustrations and weariness of this world, no one was more responsive to the scents and flowers and brightness of summer, and to the whole notion of ecstatic enjoyment. Battiscombe sees the tension between her Italian blood and her English upbringing as a source of pain and spur to genius; I suspect some deeper sense of outrage in her along the lines of the verses quoted at the start of the article: if she couldn’t be Dante Gabriel, she would be ‘doubly blank’.