Several Strangers

by Claire Tomalin

In fact, her first real literary success was not until 1899, with The Treasure Seekers, which means that Barron’s influence was almost entirely retrospective; but it persisted, and from now on she was firmly established as a favourite. Kipling wrote her fan letters, and she believed he stole her plots. Numbers of young women and children also wrote and, when permitted, visited and worshipped. She earned large sums, and she spent freely. For a considerable time she kept three households going: Well Hall, the large family house at Eltham in south London, a cottage at Dymchurch on the Romney Marsh, and a flat in Dean Street for herself. Like many rich people, she also indulged herself in a totally absurd hobby, keeping a researcher called Tanner in her London flat for years while he worked on ‘an arithmetical cipher of Francis Bacon’ which proved not only Bacon’s authorship of Shakespeare’s entire works but also his prominent part in Freemasonry.

  The story of the quarrel between Bland and Wells over his attempt to run away with Rosamund (Hubert’s and Alice’s beautiful daughter) for a weekend of healthy sexual fun has been told many times, and nothing new emerges here except perhaps Rosamund’s loyalty to Wells’s memory in the novel she wrote later. But far worse than any incestuous inclination of Hubert’s is the simple fact that both Rosamund and John, the two children he had by Alice, were brought up to believe that Edith was their mother until they were adult. Alice was known as ‘Auntie’. This was presumably out of deference to the system of Victorian virtue. Not surprisingly, the Bland children were bitterly divided in their loyalties, some worshipping the memory of their vigorous father, some despising him for his behaviour towards women.

  He died first, leaving Edith overwhelmed with grief and indignation at the obituary article by St John Ervine, which failed to mention her at all and instead heaped praises on Alice (in whose arms he had in fact died, Edith being away in her country cottage). She soon cheered up when another admirer appeared, Thomas Tucker, or ‘the Skipper’, a ‘fat little Cockney robin’, Captain of the Woolwich ferry, a widower of sixty with strong socialist views, who dropped his aitches and wore no collar. Collar or no collar, ‘I feel as though someone had come and put a fur cloak round me,’ wrote Edith to her brother Harry, announcing her remarriage in 1917. It was the Skipper’s assured fidelity that entranced and comforted her: she had never encountered such a thing before, among her journalists and Oxford graduates. The next five years were accordingly the happiest of her life, she said, even though the money was running low.

  For the last two years her smoker’s lungs were eaten by cancer, and she ended her days, still devotedly cared for by the Skipper, in an air force hut on the Romney Marsh. Noël Coward was an admiring visitor; he had saved up his pocket money as a child to buy the instalments of her stories, and even pawned a necklace of his mother’s for an entire book by her. He showed her his plays, and said she was ‘the most genuine Bohemian I had ever seen’. Many years later, one of her books lay beside his own deathbed.

  The Times Literary Supplement, 1987

  London Innocents

  Dear Girl: The Diaries and Letters of Two Working Women 1897-1917 edited by Tierl Thompson

  Here is a little gold mine of information about the lives of two Edwardian women. They were neither famous nor notorious; their world was the world of third-class railway carriages, terraced suburban houses and dingy offices. They were not even ladies, as then defined. But they were articulate and finely alert to the social questions of their time. Ruth Slate was the daughter of a City clerk, her friend Eva Slawson the illegitimate child of a baker’s daughter; they were born in the 1880s, and met through the Nonconformist chapel attended by their families at Walthamstow. Both, after leaving school at thirteen, worked as clerks for companies that exploited them; both kept diaries, and corresponded with one another until Eva’s early death in 1916.

  They were attractive and gifted young women, keen readers, given to self-examination in the Methodist tradition, and eager to serve the community: girls who should have gone to a university, who should have had proper medical care (Eva died of undiagnosed diabetes) and decently paid jobs. Instead, they struggled with unpropitious circumstances, using much of their precious spare time to work with the children of still less fortunate families.

  They were passionately eager for culture and passionately interested in debating moral questions. They read The Women Who Did as carefully as they read George Eliot, they idolized Edward Carpenter, they went to see Isadora Duncan and thought her splendid, they were excited by articles in the New Age and tried to visit its offices (Orage would have loved them). They queried the necessity of marriage, and, like D. H. Lawrence, thought it too exclusive, requiring the adjunct of close friendship with a member of one’s own sex. They were interested in the state endowment of motherhood, and gave support to an unmarried mother (in Ruth’s case) and a widow with children (in Eva’s). They believed that the question of women’s emancipation went deeper than the suffrage.

  Their writings are thrilling to anyone who likes to enter the past through living voices rather than through theoretical or generalized versions of history. We feel the pulse of the age as we read. Ruth’s first lover and then her younger sister Daisy die agonizingly of tuberculosis; we follow Daisy’s slow climb from seventy-fifth to the top of the Brompton Hospital waiting list, only to find when she gets there that it is too late to help her. Pathetically, the family moves away from its roots to the south of London in the hope that the air will be better for damaged lungs; the breadwinners, Ruth and her father, have to travel up on the early workers’ train every day to save on the fares.

  Ruth’s second lover, the dreadful Wal, puts up anti-suffrage posters in his lodging window to tease her, and warns her that socialism is against family life. Eva’s friend Minna imagines a community of women untroubled by men; at the same time she lets the minister, Mr James, seduce her in the front parlour. Minna’s little daughter has to appear before the Poor Law Guardians to beg for a few shillings when her mother is confined of a fourth, posthumous child. Eva notes that poverty, not ignorance, is the cause of much of the sickness she observes.

  Ruth is jilted by Wal – the reader heaves a sigh of relief – and an admiring American pays for her to be trained at a Quaker centre outside Birmingham, where she qualifies as a social worker. So, to a certain degree, her life is a success story.

  But that is not the point of these documents, which she preserved until her death in 1953 and which her husband handed on at his. No one who values the quieter voices of history should miss them. They light up a great area of English life that is usually ignored, and they do so with complete and haunting innocence and honesty.

  Observer, 1988

  No Consolation

  Freud: A Life for Our Time by Peter Gay

  Halfway through this 800-page biography I thought Peter Gay had succeeded in the nearly impossible task of making Freud dull. Gay is a super-efficient scholar, summarizer and sifter of material, but he has little feeling for character or narrative, and there is something leaden about his tone. He uses words like ‘epoch-making’, tells us that Freud, if offered the Nobel Prize, ‘would have grabbed it with both hands, that ‘the 1920s proved a stormy decade’, that a short visit to Athens was ‘unforgettable’ (and so on). It makes a long, long plod, compared with Paul Roazen’s Freud and His Followers, a book with the sparkle of life on every page (and about which Gay is rather censorious).

  Yet Gay’s Freud is packed with material of extraordinary fascination, some of it new; and as I proceeded I found myself drawn in and held. A solid and convincing portrait does emerge, as though from a rough, enormous piece of rock: a figure overwhelmingly ambitious (the conquistador, as Freud described himself), tyrannical, quarrelsome, and abusive in quarrel, overbearing, unable to face up to his own neurotic traits; at the same time generous, subtle, humorous, brave and stoical. A great archaeologist of the human mind who nevertheless knew and cared to know little about the female half of the human race, in practice or theory; but whose wis
dom reached into innumerable corners of the world.

  Two examples of his political prescience are given by Gay: in 1930 he wrote, ‘One asks oneself uneasily what the Soviets will do after they have exterminated their bourgeois.’ In the same year he wrote to Einstein, apropos Zionism, ‘I can muster no sympathy whatever for the misguided piety that makes a national religion from a piece of the wall of Herod, and for its sake challenges the feelings of the local natives.’ Freud’s scepticism is always more impressive than his certainty. The bravest and most profound words he ever wrote may be his confession, in Civilization and Its Discontents (published in 1930, when he was seventy-four), that ‘My courage sinks to stand up before my fellow humans as a prophet, and I bow before their reproach that I do not know how to bring them consolation – for that is fundamentally what they all demand.’

  Gay traces Freud’s intellectual development through detailed summaries of his written work – good and useful to a general reader such as myself, although less interesting than reading Freud’s own words. He intersperses passages of historical background and discussion of Freud’s character and quarrels – these last two being almost synonymous, for Freud could never let a difference of opinion stay on the intellectual plane, it was always converted into an emotional storm. Like a child, he made people into angels or demons, and readily converted them from one to the other.

  Two subjects that have attracted attention recently are confined to a bibliographical essay at the end of the book. One is the question, raised by Jeffrey Masson, of Freud’s change of mind about the sexual abuse of children. He began by believing his patients’ accounts, then decided they were fantasizing. Masson thinks Freud was right the first time but lost his nerve; Gay rejects the idea that Freud would, or could, act untruthfully. But there is truth and truth, and the recent scandals in England on the subject of child abuse make one pause a bit longer over Masson’s suggestion.

  The other allegation, that Freud had a love affair with his sister-in-law Minna Bernays, cannot, as Gay says, be proved or disproved at present. The important point here may in any case not be the sexual one, but that he did undeniably grow much closer to Minna, intellectually at any rate, than to his chosen wife, who did not care for his theories. Like many a good bourgeois, Freud lived in a state of emotional polygamy, and when his daughter Anna became his chief companion and greatest love, he had three wives. And why not? The arrangement was acceptable to them all; and on the occasion of his golden wedding anniversary, he wrote to another woman friend, Marie Bonaparte, that his fifty-year association with Martha ‘was really not a bad solution of the marriage problem’.

  Gay emphasizes Freud’s ‘last attachment’ to Anna strongly, and suggests that, although he worried about her failure to find a husband or lover, his own need for her was too great to allow him to let her go. He, as a man who believed that women found their best fulfilment in motherhood, worried about this, but there is no reason why we should, for her life seems to have been richly satisfying.

  The other emotional centre was with his disciples. Gay finds Wilhelm Fliess the most significant of these by far. The two men met in 1887, just after Freud’s marriage, and Fliess became the loved and trusted confidant of all Freud’s rapidly developing ideas as well as the most intimate details of his personal life. In 1894 Freud hailed him as ‘the only Other’, and the sight of Fliess’s handwriting on a letter made him ‘forget much loneliness and privation’ – this was written when Freud’s sixth child had just been born. It was also Fliess who prescribed cigars to Freud, to clear up his catarrh, establishing the addiction that killed him: a point that can’t have been lost on the discoverer of the Oedipus complex.

  The intensity of Freud’s fascination with Fliess, which included covering up a serious medical mistake he made, meant that the break when it came was all the more bitter, and subsequent ‘betrayals’ were often referred to as ‘Fliesslike’. Freud took to calling him ‘a hard, wicked human being’, but never forgot or ceased to worry about him, and made great efforts, thwarted by Marie Bonaparte, to have their correspondence destroyed.

  Gay writes from an agnostic position as to the curative value of psychoanalysis and the truth of Freud’s fundamental theories of infantile sexuality, the sexual basis for all neurosis. He is shocked when he catches Freud out using psychoanalytical terminology as a crude weapon of abuse, and he is slyly insistent on his failure to come to terms with his own neuroses, the addiction to smoking being the most blatant: Freud, a doctor, ignored his own pre-cancerous symptoms, and went for his initial treatment to a barely qualified cosmetic surgeon, who botched his work. And nothing would make him give up his cigars.

  ‘Psychoanalyst, cure thyself!’ is not quite to the point. The failures of the great are likely to be on the same scale as their other qualities. Freud’s personal life may have been a little strange; but it makes no difference to the fact that he changed the world. The talking cure, even if it turns out to be no more than a variant on the confessional, is established.

  More important, the way we think about ourselves, our relations with other human beings, our vocabulary, have all been transformed by him and his disciples. However well you know his story, when you come to the last chapters of Gay’s magisterial book, with the bestial madness of the Fascists providing a background for the fortitude of the great ‘infidel Jew’ who had devoted his life to showing how reason is not master in its own house, it is hard not to have tears in your eyes – tears for Freud, and tears for humanity.

  Observer, 1988

  A Hate Affair

  A Far Cry from Kensington by Muriel Spark

  This is a novel about a hate affair. It is told with a sort of black good humour and a boldness approaching violence; if the object of the narrator’s hatred were a real person instead of a fictional one, he would be blasted into the ground by the unswerving force of the contempt he attracts.

  For us, the effect is admirable. The divine Spark is shining at her brightest, neither prolix nor, to my relief, too gnomic either. There was a period when her books required the offices of academic soothsayers to be understood, but in A Far Cry from Kensington this is not the case. Nothing is obscure, and she writes sentences so good that I have been reading them over and over, silently to myself and aloud to friends, in pure delight at their wit and confidence.

  Love arises from the heart, says the narrator Mrs Hawkins, and hate from principle. (She is given to making pronouncements.) Her story is about principles, literary and other, though love makes a gentle entry too. The time is the mid fifties. Mrs Hawkins is a war widow; she had been a landgirl with bookish inclinations, now she is a hugely overweight publishers’ dogsbody. She lodges in a pleasant boarding house in Kensington and takes an interest in her fellow lodgers as well as her colleagues at work. She has a reputation for being capable and reliable; people turn to her for help, and she is good at finding them jobs, and giving practical advice on anything from when to intervene in a row between husband and wife in the next-door house to how to write novels. Some of her advice seems so good that readers may be tempted to take it direct. Mrs Spark would, amongst her other virtues, make a very classy agony aunt.

  Mrs Hawkins is a Catholic, and a member of what she calls the ordinary class; meditating on this at a grand dinner, she concludes ‘it was better to belong to the ordinary class. For the upper class could not live, would disintegrate, without the ordinary class, while the latter can get on very well on its own.’ Read on after this, on p. 95, for one of the best accounts ever written of the bafflement produced by certain aspects of English etiquette.

  The plot moves in two directions at once. Mrs Hawkins is looking back from the 1980s at the way she changed from a very fat, useful person into something quite different. At the same time she is showing up the horrible pretensions of the man who became her bête noire at that time, Hector Bartlett, a hanger-on of the literary scene whose worthlessness and villainy she divines from the start. ‘Pisseur de copie she hisses at him at
an early stage of their acquaintance, and ‘pisseur de copie she continues to hiss whenever his name or work is in question, or whenever he heaves into view himself. It means, she explains to a disconcerted friend whose French is not up to hers, that he pisses hack journalism.

  Bartlett is pushy and without literary talent. He writes vindictive articles in cheap newspapers about literary friends who have got into trouble. He is unkind to animals and uses women to further his ambitions, in particular a successful novelist named Emma Loy for whom he does research, and whose name he later blackens. He affects upper-class manners, and he produces a manuscript entitled The Eternal Quest: A Study of the Romantic-Humanist Position (a title that may well be found in the British Library). When Mrs Hawkins, who rises to a position of influence as an editor with the publishers Mackintosh & Tooley, refuses to handle The Eternal Quest, Miss Loy gets her the sack. This is not all: Bartlett is also a dabbler in black magic, and makes a demonic intrusion among the lodgers in the Kensington lodging house.

  Bartlett is a fairly ludicrous but not at all unbelievable figure, with his black box and his literary pretensions. The glee with which Mrs Hawkins goes into battle against him is spectacular. So is her commitment to the emotions of the past. There is a marvellous vignette of the experience of a war bride, ephemeral as a dream, sharp as a nightmare. Then the world of fifties’ publishers who, though occasionally crooked, were still gentlemen – dotty, charming and exploitative of clever women – is beautifully recognizable to those with memories of it. That well-known publishing maxim that ‘the best author is a dead author’ puts in an appearance, although it is not the view of Mrs Hawkins herself.

  When Mrs Hawkins makes casual allusion to the books she has been reading for pleasure, which are Villette and Frankenstein, she places herself quite deliberately in a tradition of women’s writing which is intense and highly principled. And when later she tells her lover the nursery rhymes and fairy-stories his education has denied him, she is showing her faith in the other power of literature, to delight and console. What she loathes and rejects is the fakery of a Bartlett, who uses ‘literature’ and the literary world for his own base, factitious ends. It’s a point that needs to be made regularly, and it’s made here with the charming ferocity that is Mrs Spark’s particular and cherished hallmark.