Several Strangers

by Claire Tomalin

  One of the things that interests her especially is the way in which families normalize, or seek to normalize, what outsiders regard as abnormal. ‘Monsieur les Deux Chapeaux’ takes a few hours in the life of a family group: a small party is being given by the wife of Colin, a young schoolteacher. The pivot around which the story turns is Colin’s brother Ross, noticed at the start clipping grass in front of the school with two hats rather than one on his handsome head. Everyone likes Ross; his mother keeps saying he is a mechanical genius – he does indeed tinker with car engines – and his sister-in-law flirts gently with him. But by the end of the story the atmosphere has been stained with fear and we see that Ross, the good-natured mother’s boy, is a terrifying and inescapable burden on Colin’s life. Nothing has happened, nothing has changed; only we have glimpsed the bad truth that has to be lived with.

  Again, in ‘A Queer Streak’ a seriously eccentric farming family throws up one daughter clever and ambitious enough to escape to higher education in Ottawa, only to draw her back into its orbit through the unhinged behaviour of the next daughter. The eldest, trapped by her sense of responsibility, gives up her chances in order to look after her own people. But it is not a simple tale of abnegation. There are irrational forces at work in the sane sister as well as in the others, and her flight from Ottawa is a form of salvation as well as a sacrifice: she is not as tragic as she thinks she is.

  These are not stories that set out to make neat moral points, they are not fables, and there are no narrative tricks in them. They are rooted in the sheer eccentricity of human beings and the places in which they perform: draughty boarding-house rooms, a deserted swimming pool, a rural skating rink with its scratchy gramophone waltzes. They reveal comfortable old Canada to us as exotic terrain.

  Short stories still get short shrift. They are hard to review, hard to sell, not often awarded prizes. It seems absurd when you consider how firmly established the genre has been for a century, how various it is, and how much of our best modern fiction is embodied in it: think of Pritchett, Naipaul, Bellow, to name only three living masters whose short fiction equals their full-length work. For Alice Munro, it is clearly the natural medium. She is never going to write a blockbuster, thank goodness. Read not more than one of her stories a day, and allow them to work their spell slowly: they are made to last.

  Observer, 1987

  Giant Crab

  The Memoirs of Ethel Smyth abridged and introduced by Ronald Crichton

  ‘An old woman of seventy-one has fallen in love with me… It is like being caught by a giant crab,’ wrote Virginia Woolf early in 1930 when the composer Dame Ethel Smyth, who had just read A Room of One’s Own, sought her out. It was true that the objects of Ethel’s passion were sometimes in danger of being crushed, but Virginia was flattered, amused, delighted. At once she settled down to reread all the volumes of the Smyth autobiography, some of which she had reviewed earlier, praising them for their courage, candour and vitality. ‘How did you learn to write like that?’ she asked her new friend. These are the memoirs that have been abridged into the present volume. No wonder Virginia Woolf was held in thrall: Dame Ethel is Ancient Mariner and Belle Dame Sans Merci rolled into one, and her reminiscences are extraordinary. It is partly their range, from Victorian upper-middle-class nursery to the Germany of the late romantic composers; from the courts of reigning monarchs to camel-riding in the desert; from the Paris of Proust to Holloway Prison. It is also their revelation of a character in which spontaneous emotion and driving ambition cut across every accepted view of Victorian womanhood.

  She did defy – or perhaps rather ignore – all the stereotypes of her time, whether in matters of work, sex, class or even manners. From the age of twelve she insisted on her vocation for musical composition, an activity that no one in her milieu conceived possible for a woman (and scarcely for a man). Before she was twenty she had beaten her father – a general in the British army – into total submission to her will by adopting the sort of tactics subsequently used by the suffragettes. These included extracting credit from local tradesmen (‘put it down to the General’) to finance illicit expeditions to the London concert halls, where one of her amusements was to watch G. H. Lewes beating out the rhythms on George Eliot’s arm (not always correctly, she observed). Ethel’s next move was to depart for Leipzig, where she lived unchaperoned in lodgings and pursued her serious musical education. It was not an easy path. She tells the story of how Anton Rubinstein, asked to advise a beautiful young aspirant on her career, listened to her playing and then simply pointed to her fingers, her forehead and her heart in turn: ‘Hier nix, hier nix, und hier nix!’ But Ethel was not nix. She was welcomed by the musical world, and even her family came to accept that music was her way of life and Germany her second home.

  Over the next two decades she studied, composed and met most of the great figures of the day. Her love of Brahms’s music did not prevent her from noting how he stared at pretty women ‘as a greedy boy stares at jam tartlets’. She considered Mahler the finest conductor she ever knew, but found his personality resembled ‘a bomb cased in razor-edges’.

  Ethel’s work did not stand in the way of her social activities, or her many passionate friendships. Throughout her life, she loved intensely, without regard to age or gender. She is quite candid about this, although there are some unexplained areas in the memoirs – a couple of nervous breakdowns, and a somewhat evasive handling of her love affair with Henry Brewster, an expatriate American aesthete with a wife. Even when the wife died, Ethel refused to marry him, although they worked together – he wrote librettos for her operas – and she nursed him when he was dying.

  One’s sympathy rather goes out to Brewster: on one occasion, having travelled across Europe to be with her for a few precious days in Scotland, he found her too absorbed in playing golf to spare him anything but the hours of darkness. An unkind woman friend remarked, ‘Ethel not like idea old maid so trumped up little affair’: characteristically, Ethel reports this, as she reports the detestation in which she was held by several eminent people, including Archbishop Benson, who was put off his sermon by even a glimpse of her through the windows of Lambeth Palace.

  In one aspect she does resemble a baby bent on world conquest. Ethel’s tweeds and tie, Ethel’s voice, Ethel’s emotions, were all larger than life. Each of her friends was perfect, each interest became obsessive; even her dogs were all canine prodigies. The heroic scale on which she lived allowed her to get on well with royalty, with whom she was always a favourite; neither the Kaiser nor Queen Victoria daunted her, and she was on intimate terms with the Empress Eugénie, whom she fondly saw as a great champion of women’s rights.

  In her fifties Ethel became a star suffragette. Her own struggles to get her music accepted in a male-dominated world made her naturally sympathetic, and a meeting with the elegant and queenly Mrs Pankhurst provided the coup de foudre. Ethel’s attempt to teach Mrs P. to throw stones – they were practising for Downing Street -is one of her fine comic episodes; but it wasn’t all comedy. Ethel bravely got herself arrested and imprisoned for the Cause.

  One of the most endearing aspects of her memoirs is her awareness of her own comicality. Because she never stands on her dignity, she takes on true dignity and strength. And although the book is packed with wonderful anecdotes, it is also a record of an entirely serious professional pursuit. I do not know her music, a piece of shameful ignorance I shall now set out to remedy. Bruno Walter and Thomas Beecham were both admirers, which seems a sufficient commendation, and late German romanticism crossed with English traditional sounds – well, I shall find out. If it is anything like as good as her writing, it must be worth listening to.

  [P. S. When I did listen to the music, I found it hard to distinguish from Brahms.]

  Observer, 1987

  Never Bland

  A Woman of Passion: The Life of E. Nesbit 1858-1924 by Julia Briggs

  We, and our daughters, and our nieces – and perhaps a few sons and n
ephews – have all read The Railway Children, The Story of the Amulet, The Treasure Seekers, The Wouldbegoods, The Phoenix and the Carpet. They were written at the turn of the century, were hugely popular with children and adults, admired by writers as various as Kipling and Wells, and have remained in print ever since. They have been televised and paperbacked; it’s a rare household that cannot muster a battered Nesbit Puffin or two. Their recurring theme of lost and found fathers addresses itself to children’s deep fears and hopes (and during two world wars it spoke to their common experience). Another theme, that of the wish granted that turns out to be awkward or frightening, goes similarly straight to the heart of the fantasies and semi-conscious terrors of many children. Subsequent writers have learnt from their triumphant mixture of the magical and the down-to-earth, which children take to so readily.

  Despite her androgynous name, E. Nesbit’s readers knew very well that she was a mother herself; she once wrote a letter to the New Age magazine, which had been running articles on the horrors of childbearing and brutal lack of consideration of husbands, insisting that most women are devoted to their husbands and adore having babies. The picture of a loving mother, drawing charmingly on her observations of her own large family for her stories, seemed to fit.

  This comfortably maternal image was strongly established and important to her. As Julia Briggs writes, ‘in her books, as in her correspondence with her admirers, [she] showed herself anxious to conform to their comforting picture of her’; and when Doris Langley Moore came to write a biography of the much loved author in 1933, she felt she simply could not make use of a great deal of the material she had gathered in the course of her extremely thorough research. Nesbit had died in 1924, but it would still have caused too much offence, not only to her surviving family but to her devoted readers.

  Langley Moore’s gift of her notebooks and research material to Julia Briggs, fully and warmly acknowledged by her, was indeed an act of generosity; it is also a rather singular occurrence in the annals of biography, this gift of material she herself felt obliged to set aside from one biographer into the hands of another. The results are to everyone’s credit. This is a wonderfully solid, thorough and balanced book. The story it tells is consistently interesting and at moments extraordinary, and although some of the true facts of the Nesbit/Bland household have been known since Langley Moore’s revised Life of 1966, the picture presented by Julia Briggs is still fuller and franker.

  Edith Nesbit – ‘Daisy’ to her family – was born in 1858 in Kenning-ton, now part of the grey, undifferentiated mass of south London, but then still countryside, with flower-edged lanes and farms. She was the youngest, a fact Briggs thinks important, for she craved all her life the attention and petting that goes to the baby of a large family. There was a much older stepsister by her mother’s first marriage, a sister and two brothers. The death of her father when she was four marked her imagination indelibly; but her twice-widowed mother was intelligent and resourceful, and gave her orphaned children an excellent upbringing. There were visits to the Crystal Palace with its dinosaur park, to the British Museum and Madame Tussaud’s (both of which Edith continued to love in her adult years); there were schools, mostly hateful because they meant banishment from family life, but then restoration to the family when Mrs Nesbit decided to take them all to France. The chief reason for this was the tuberculosis from which Edith’s sister Minnie was suffering, for which travel abroad was believed to be a palliative.

  Apart from one terrifying experience when her sisters took her to see the catacombs of Bordeaux with their hideously preserved, hairy corpses (still very horrible, according to Briggs, who most conscientiously repeated the visit), France was idyllic, remembered and revisited with joy thereafter. It did not, however, cure Minnie. Leaving Edith at school in Dinan, Mrs Nesbit took her sick daughter back to London, where the doomed girl made friends with Christina Rossetti, and became engaged to a blind Pre-Raphaelite poet, Philip Marston, only to die a few months later. (The whole incident resembles a ghastly parody of Christina Rossetti’s narrative poetry at its most morbid.)

  By now Edith had become a poet too. She longed to be great, ‘like Shakespeare, or Christina Rossetti’, but she knew that in reality she wrote ‘like other people’. She was, however, persistent and prolific, and soon began to be published in magazines. The Nesbits settled in Kent, in a big, rambling house, but during the 1870s they appear to have lost their money; they disappear and bob up again in Islington, where Edith met her future husband, Hubert Bland.

  Bland is one of the minor enigmas of literary history in that everything reported of him makes him sound repellent, yet he was admired, even adored, by many intelligent men and women. A quick, clever Woolwich lad whose family was unable to buy him the commission he craved, he became, briefly, a bank clerk. While still living with his mother (he was also a spoilt youngest child) he invented aristocratic Yorkshire forebears, at the same time becoming a keen socialist for a while, and then a founding Fabian. He did not aspire to be consistent. He allowed his wife to support him with her pen for some years, but was always opposed to feminism:

  Woman’s métier in the world – I mean, of course, civilized woman, the woman in the world as it is – is to inspire romantic passion… Romantic passion is inspired by women who wear corsets. In other words, by the women who pretend to be what they not quite are.

  Corset-wearing women were never lacking, and he had a voracious sexual appetite. When Edith met him he had a mistress already with child, and she herself was seven months pregnant before he married her. No sooner did she introduce a housekeeper, Alice Hoatson, into their establishment, than he proceeded to father children on both her and Edith regularly. In mid-life he joined the Catholic Church, a further cosmetic touch to his old-world image, but without modifying his behaviour or even bothering to attend more than the statutory minimum of masses. By then he had become a hugely successful journalist with a particular following in the north of England, his column in the Manchester Sunday Chronicle proving so popular that it gave him a secure income for life.

  Whatever the lesson to be learnt from bogus Bland, when Edith met him she saw the ardent, handsome, poetry-loving young man, the great talker who was to persuade Bernard Shaw along to his first Fabian meeting and who seemed an ideal literary collaborator. Even when he had come to seem less ideal, he was still the only person who could talk her out of her ‘blights’ – the black moods that descended on her when she had too much to do, or when she felt slighted; they enveloped the entire household, and only Hubert could relieve the misery. It is scarcely surprising that she was subject to them, on a diet of ceaseless hack work to pay the butcher’s and baker’s bills – a formidable bibliography attests to this – plus pregnancies leading to several stillbirths as well as three living children and, on top of this, an unrequited passion for Shaw.

  ‘Unrequited’ is not exactly the right term, for Shaw did initially get in quite deeply, as his notebook entries, with their little accounts of shilling and pence, show. For a while there were taxis and first-class carriages when Mrs Nesbit was in question (the extra fare might ensure privacy); these are followed by the usual Shavian manoeuvres of hasty, determined disentanglement. She suffered, and held it against him; and he felt something, if not remorse at least enough to lead him, years later, to pay a contribution towards her stepson John’s university education. The two best, wittiest, strongest letters in this book were both penned by Shaw; his power to upstage all his women friends posthumously would have pleased the old fox infinitely, no doubt.

  Shaw was of course a feminist, while Edith wanted love; the two things are a puzzle to fit together even when one partner is not reluctant. But for a while Edith found the way of life that suited her, and inspiration too, according to Briggs, when, about the year 1890, she met a young journalist called Oswald Barron, who began to collaborate with her. He was one of a band of her ‘courtiers’, recent Oxford graduates who joined the Fabian Society and were fascinated b
y the Blands, and notably by Edith. For she was beautiful in her own style – lots of hair and a strong face, trailing Liberty dresses, ropes of beads and dozens of bangles on her arm, incessant cigarettes in a long holder – and the parties she and Hubert gave were famous, with huge meals, wine and games played all over the house.

  Julia Briggs credits Edith with a very large number of ‘lovers’ among the young men who gathered about her, some acting as her secretary, more joining in family holidays in Kent or in France. It is never clear whether they were lovers in the modern sense, and, while perhaps it does not matter too much, the picture of Nesbit is undoubtedly changed if she was holding court like Messalina, or on the other hand simply receiving sentimental homage. Whichever was the case, Edith enjoyed the adulation of many young men, but Barron gave her something more; he was erudite, possessed a historical imagination, and ‘his way of looking at the world came to colour hers strongly’. Barron acted, says Briggs, as her ‘muse or midwife’; and of course she gave his name to Oswald Bastable. Sadly, when he married in 1899 he walked out of her life without a backward glance, and was at great pains in his respectable old age to persuade Doris Langley Moore to omit his name from her book, which seems sad and silly too, if Briggs is right in her assessment of his role.