RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR

by Philip Hoare

  Throughout the night Stephen’s ‘transparent dreams’ were assailed; the windows banged and the rain lashed the ground, and his calm was only restored in the morning, when the bright light of day brought a letter from Morgan Forster, who was coming on a visit. A week later, having moved inland to Forest Row to escape the raging sea, Stephen sent his Rolls-Royce to the station to meet his friend, who may or may not have been surprised to find bouquets of roses, gladioli and carnations arranged inside, with a pair of tropical butterflies perched quiveringly on the flowers, their frail beauty Stephen’s gesture to the aftermath of the storm.

  As an ‘aquaeous’ darkness fell outside the dining room, the two men talked late into the night. They spoke of Stephen’s evening with T.E. Lawrence in his hut-like cottage in Dorset; Morgan liked Stephen’s description of the hero of Arabia talking in ‘morse code’; the memory was more acute because Lawrence had since died after an accident on his motorbike. Morgan recounted his recent dinner with Noël Coward, whose equally staccato voice he imitated, and recalled a weekend in Amsterdam with Christopher Isherwood, Klaus Mann and Brian Howard. Then the two men fell to discussing Moby-Dick and the character of Queequeg, the tattooed savage, who fascinated them both. In an essay published in 1927, Forster had called Moby-Dick a ‘prophetic song’ beyond words, and saw Billy Budd as a ‘remote and unearthly episode’, its sadness indistinguishable from glory. For his part, Stephen’s love of Melville merged into the photographs of sailors he stuck in his journal and the fantastical Lascars of Marseilles he drew alongside them, characters from Jean Genet out of Jean Cocteau.

  The convivial evening ended with Morgan playing the piano and reading aloud from his stories. But when he announced he had to go, Stephen incurred his displeasure by quoting Virginia, who had complained, ‘Morgan’s always in such a hurry to leave me.’ Stephen could not imagine why anyone would want to leave him.

  On 20 November 1935, Stephen sailed from Southampton on the White Star liner Aquitania. He was bound for America, a journey Virginia had been able only to imagine. A century before, Robert Browning had written, ‘there is but one step to take from Southampton pier to New York quay, for travellers Westward’. The transition was seamless for Stephen, whose home travelled with him, carried into that great white vessel like the starman’s wardrobe.

  He took: a new blue jumper with red zips by Schiaparelli, a powder-blue hussar uniform with silver braid and skin-tight breeches, and a sensible herringbone suit for the country (Rex Whistler told him it looked like the kind worn by men who said, ‘Well, I’m going to turn in’); a travelling library that ran from a biography of William Beckford to Sylvia of Hollywood’s beauty tips, No More Alibis; numerous cosmetics, perfumes and journals; and a little ‘Jane Austen’ cabinet containing his most precious shells. Stephen had only reluctantly turned down a suggestion by Peter Watson that he should take his new Rolls-Royce as well.

  Six days later, after an unsteady voyage installed in a stateroom on A Deck – Rex was travelling on B Deck below – Stephen arrived in Manhattan and was swept from the honking, bustling streets into the solace of the St Regis Hotel. There he rang down from his nineteenth-floor, pistachio-green suite, where he was reading the New Yorker, to Rex on the fifth, to say that he was too tired to dine with Tallulah. He was saving his energy for Willa Cather.

  Ever since he was a teenager, Stephen had been fascinated by Cather, whose novels evoked the sea of grass of Nebraska and the prairies where she had grown up as a tomboy, complete with a crewcut. Now she lived in New York, where she would walk barefoot in Central Park every day to reconnect herself to the land. After writing fan letters to Cather for nine years, Stephen was about to meet his heroine. She greeted him at the door of her Park Avenue apartment wearing a flamingo-pink satin tunic and black satin trousers – he couldn’t believe he was talking to the author of A Lost Lady and My Ántonia. Over tea, these two gender-challenging people – an English aristocrat and an American pioneer – discussed Cather’s favourite places in New England. And so, a few days later, Stephen left New York and Tallulah and Cole Porter and Elsa Maxwell behind and journeyed north to Massachusetts where he settled for the winter, like a migratory bird.

  He checked into Mount Pleasant House, a shining, snowbound hotel in Jefferson, its verandah overlooking the same mountains that the Fruitlanders saw from their utopia. And there, in the New England countryside where the Apostles of the Newness had wandered penniless in chintz smocks, Stephen, an itinerant soul insulated by his own sense of beauty and letters of credit from London, watched as the snow fell in ‘great white goosefeathers’, their drifts casting ‘the longest sapphire shadows’.

  In his solitude he’d take the bus into the nearby town of Worcester, passing wooden houses which looked rather temporary, as if they were made of matchsticks, the rocking chairs on their porches put away for the winter. The countryside rolled past the bus window, its low pines and sandy grass all dusty with frost and snow. One evening Stephen walked to the Jefferson village post office as the sun was setting. ‘The snow was an oblique toneless white, the sky startling in its clarity … shaded like some tropical bird, soft saffron yellow – deepening to flamingo pink & then to violet … the cold seemed to hold & embalm the moment.’ Stephen had only stepped into the shop – to buy more amethyst-coloured vases – when the sky had turned ‘gentian blue, the stars in freezing splintering splendour – the snow a dim miraculous glimmer on the ground’. He felt blessed by the place, free in this New England.

  On Christmas Eve, Stephen left Jefferson for Jaffrey, being driven thirty miles north – Pas plus vite, monsieur, nous ne sommes pas presses – into New Hampshire. The Shattuck Inn was still run by the same family, the Austermanns, whom Cather had known when she had begun her visits there twenty years before, writing her novels in a tent in a field before moving into the inn, and rooms which were reserved for her at the top of the building so she wouldn’t be disturbed by other guests walking overhead.

  Like Thoreau, Stephen wrote in his journal because he was lonely. He liked the Indian names of the places around him – Pawtucket and Lackawanna – and relished the fact that he was only an hour from the house in which Emily Dickinson had spent most of her life as a recluse – ‘one hour from Paradise in any latitude’. All the while he received a stream of letters and telegrams from Cather, anxious that he should be enjoying the place she loved: ‘Please write to me when you can, everything you think about the country, and everything you do there will be of intense interest to me.’

  The Austermanns were certainly solicitous of their titled guest. Their son George – ‘such a nice boy … I was reminded how well I like ordinary brown hair’ – would drive Stephen into town so he could shop for snappy American clothes and admire the Christmas lights, so much more gay and splendid than those in England. A handsome Norwegian ski instructor, John Knudson, took Stephen to a trail in the woods which he was working on. Stephen sat on a pile of logs listening to the chickadees as John chopped down saplings; he even cut down one young birch himself, ‘& only felt sorry 3 hours afterwards – we were so happy & busy’. John told Stephen about his brother in the Canadian Mounted Police, ‘& we discussed the joys of camp life’.

  Stephen’s love of nature sat oddly with his life of artifice. He revelled in pigeons and chipmunks and mice – ‘when I want solace I think of the raccoons faces’. But like Thoreau he surveyed his utopia of one, created in his own image; there was no room for anyone else. And where Thoreau was deemed ugly and Stephen beautiful, and the former lived in a wooden hut and the latter in a stately manor, the two men’s spirits shared the same state of separation and ecstasy, standing apart from the world in order to better regard it. They even shared the same poetic disease, consumption. Perhaps they might have set up home together, these two, holed up in another hut in the woods, albeit one exquisitely decorated, probably in chintz. If Stephen could win round Willa Cather or Virginia Woolf, I daresay the philosopher would have soon been rapt by his tales of c
urious mice and the latest haute couture.

  But that winter, New England outgrew its romantic appeal. Stephen was haunted by his broken relationship with Sassoon – and despite the comforts of Whipple’s Cosy Café, of trinkets and little vases bought in Jaffrey’s shops, of excursions to Boston in the snow, drinking sickly liqueurs in smart hotels – in spite of all of this, he fell ill, as much with nostalgia as anything else, and not even Cather could console him. ‘You have seen our winter at its most terrible,’ she wrote; ‘there has been nothing like it since 1917. But there’s a kind of glory about blizzards, don’t you think? not when you are ill though, poor boy.’

  Extreme weather seemed to follow him that year. Where he had been disturbed by the storm at Seaford and its rising waves, Stephen now felt oppressed by the snow that came dun-coloured with sand from the west, besmirching its beauty. His mood lowered as the season dragged on, and the glamour was replaced by a greater grimness. The gay nineteen-twenties in which Stephen had shone like a shooting star had been replaced by a different, darker, more punitive decade.

  ‘Europe continues to grind its teeth,’ he wrote on 11 March 1936. ‘Hitler has re-armed the Rhine, France is hysterical with fear – rushing guns & planes to the area. Flaudin demands that German troops be ousted. Eden wishes to consider Hitler’s peace pact suggestions … Nazi troops by radio-wireless photos entering Cologne – while girls cheer & pile flowers on to them. Outside my window – old dirty snow slips with a soft rushing sound off the roof – mild rain – wet air blows in.’ Stephen’s response to European politics was to order perfumes from Paris via Boston – Caron’s Fleurs de Rocaille, Millot’s Crêpe de Chine (which Siegfried had once given him in the Pavillon Henri IV, St Germain), Guerlain’s Shalimar and Liu, Chanel’s No. 5, and Gabilla’s La Violette – an exotic, narcotic library whose old-world scents might, by their civilised fragrance, exorcise the evil stench.

  But these evocative distillations – many of them containing ambergris, the essence of the ocean derived from deep-diving whales once hunted from New England’s whaling ports – failed to achieve their magic. Here, on 14 March 1936, Stephen’s journal ends abruptly with a pencilled note, in what I thought was a literary quotation – ‘thinking of the wonder & exstasy of being alive – I feel that although I am often unhappy & disappointed – it is never life’s fault – always my own …’ – yet which, when entered into a search engine, comes up with references to clinical depression.

  Twelve years later, after the world had been overturned by war, Stephen was taken to a clinic outside London and electric currents were passed through his brain. The rubber contacts were placed on his golden hair, as they would be clamped onto Sylvia Plath’s blonde head, the Bakelite switch was turned on, and Stephen’s body shook with convulsions. The machine sought to shock him out of a melancholia that a later tenant on the Wilsford estate, Vidia Naipaul, would diagnose in his reclusive landlord as accidia or ‘monk’s torpor’. It left Stephen bereft and abandoned.

  The violence – external and internal – had even threatened his home. During the war Wilsford had been requisitioned as a military hospital; the nurses complained that wounded soldiers should not be expected to use lavatories which had been painted gold. For his part, Stephen’s greater contribution to the conflict had been to climb one of the Wiltshire downs and lay a bouquet of flowers at its summit. He was right, of course: chalk turf and rising larks were more sacred than any cenotaph. But Stephen closed his eyes to death, and when Virginia filled her pockets with stones and stepped into the river to drown herself, he could barely bring himself to register the loss.

  He had spent most of the war in a suburban-looking nineteen-thirties flat in the centre of Bournemouth. From there he wandered the parks and chines whose pine-scented air was believed to aid the tubercular, as well as evoking his beloved Mediterranean. His fellow consumptives Robert Louis Stevenson and Aubrey Beardsley had come here for their health, although the resort failed to expel the infection from their lungs – Beardsley had haemorrhaged onto the clifftop path, leaving vivid crimson flowers in his wake. For Stephen, walking or bathing on the wartime strand was problematic: it was strung with barbed wire to keep out the expected invasion.

  With the coming of a sort of peace, Stephen returned to Wilsford. As the trees grew taller around the silent manor, he retreated into past glories and future triumphs. He became obsessed with his would-be masterpiece, Lascar: A Story of the Maritime Boulevard, whose quayside tarts and muscled Lascars he drew over and over again in increasingly crowded images, as if they couldn’t be confined by the page: the women extravagantly costumed like operetta versions of themselves, the sailors’ bodies graphic with tattoos, while their faces all seemed to have the same features, the idealised matelot of his dreams. Spilling out into its margins, Stephen wrote endless notes to himself in ever-changing ink, cerise and turquoise and vermillion, along with poems about a boy with broken rose-red wings falling into a sea full of tears. He announced, in a self-published flyer printed in Portsmouth, that his book’s spiritual godparents were Joseph Conrad, Emily Brontë and Herman Melville, that it would bear ‘the sea’s illimitable detachment’ and ‘restlessness and mysterious moral strength’, and he had its cover published in Horizon.

  But his work would never be imprisoned between hard covers. Like Orlando, who produces screeds of plays and poetry, there was a sense that it would be vulgar for Stephen’s work to appear in public: ‘to write, much more to publish, was, he knew, for a nobleman an inexpiable disgrace’. As the modern world encroached and he went nowhere, he entered an extended reverie of retrieval, travelling backwards into a vanished life preserved in his journals, which now lay gathering dust in his house. ‘It was dawn – I was flying … I remember the seaplane as it rose above Southampton – slowly turning – and then going on straight – on & on into the first delicate radiance of early sunrise.’ In his mind’s eye he was still sailing down the same waterway in an ocean liner with a retinue that included his valet, his nanny and his plush monkey; or taking off from another airport: ‘The Prince of Wales is getting into his aeroplane which stands next to mine.’ He was lunching with Gertrude Stein in Paris, and taking tea with Willa in New York, or checking into Brown’s Hotel in London: ‘This morning when I ordered breakfast by telephone the waiter said, “Yes, Madame.”’

  And just as he was forever rewriting Lascar in kaleidoscopic colours – merely starting back at the beginning once he had reached the end, so that the entire enterprise became one endless loop – his house was continually reset as a stage for his memories. Its many rooms, once so full of family and visitors, like Mrs Ramsay’s, were now filled with things rather than people. Straw hats from lost summers stayed on the newel posts of the stairs. Stephen replaced emptiness with dreams. His letters lay piled by his side, his jewellery and make-up and books and scarves gathered about him. The pale tide of a pure white carpet laid down when Wilsford had been a luxurious heaven in the nineteen-thirties, like some private film set, was now splattered with starbursts of carmine and ultramarine and emerald as Stephen dipped and discharged his pen, leaving shiny mineral-animal deposits like ground-up shells or crushed butterflies. Outside in his English garden, he ordered twenty-two tons of silver sand to be spread on the lush green riverbank, creating a simulacrum of a Côte d’Azur beach, complete with wheeling palm trees. Tropical birds and lizards escaped from their glass houses and into his illuminated manuscripts; in the winter they took refuge in the conservatory, where they kept Stephen company, listening to South Pacific on his Dansette over and over again.

  Meanwhile the sea invaded his bathroom, its tub and basin filled with shells on which Stephen left the taps running, since, as we all know, they look better that way, the way they do in the water. Stephen himself had been left behind by the tide, like Orlando, who returns to her palace of three hundred and sixty-five rooms surrounded by lawns like a smooth green ocean, wandering into a bedroom that ‘shone like a shell that has lain at the bottom o
f the sea for centuries and has been crusted over and painted a million tints by the water; it was rose and yellow, green and sand-coloured. It was frail as a shell, as iridescent and as empty.’

  It was now that Stephen’s obsession began to overwhelm him, in waves of memories merging into one so that it was difficult to know what was real and what was make-believe, whether he was in Wiltshire or Acapulco. His house became inundated as surely as Brighton Aquarium in the storm of 1935. Multicoloured fishing nets from San Francisco were draped over the banisters as if to catch passing fish; the shells in the bathroom spilled out onto the landing and down the stairs; and Lascar became an ever more elaborate reef of words and images, encrusted with salt and ink.

  To Stephen, as to Virginia, the sea was a place in which to be subsumed. As young students at the Slade, he and Rex Whistler had united in their desire for a Kingdom by the Sea, an image from Edgar Allan Poe’s last, doomy poem, ‘Annabel Lee’, which they both loved: ‘I was a child and she was a child | In this Kingdom by the sea.’ At that peak of his youthful beauty, Stephen had posed for Cecil’s camera on the rocky shore of Cap Ferrat clad only in a fake leopardskin, and had sketched himself half-drowned in a pool, a Narcissus under a serious moon. Thirty years later, Beaton captured Stephen in a photograph in which, purposefully propped up on an ormolu table with its cover turned to the lens, was a copy of Rachel Carson’s The Edge of the Sea, a book devoted to ‘the place of our dim ancestral beginnings’.

  Stephen was now a spectacle all of his own, washed up with his treasures on his bijoux-strewn divan. Beaton brought Isherwood and Capote and Hockney to listen to tales of dear Morgan and Virginia’s peculiarities; Kenneth Anger and Derek Jarman came to hear stories of Garbo and the Ballets Russes and planned to cast him in their films. Stephen’s life had become a movie clip endlessly rerun, ever more scratched and misted.