A House of Air

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  Victoria Glendinning says in the introduction to her new biography of Rebecca West that it is ‘the story of twentieth-century woman,’ but that it is a sadder story than she had expected. She has divided her book into episodes: ‘Cissie,’ the unstoppable young new arrival in London; ‘Panther’ (this was Wells’s name for her), fearlessly launching into questions of history, politics, and morality, and into bed with Wells; ‘Sunflower,’ the fiery successful international author and unsuccessful mistress of Beaverbrook; ‘Mrs Henry Andrews,’ the awkwardly married famous writer; ‘Dame Rebecca.’ The divisions are helpful, though rather like breakwaters trying to hold back a high tide. It is a fine biography, which for several reasons can’t have been easy to write. To start with, Stanley Olson, who became a friend of Dame Rebecca’s in 1974, was entrusted with the full-length Life. To conform with this, Victoria Glendinning decided to cut down on the later years. Rebecca lived to be ninety, and the elision somewhat weakens the sense of endurance and of seeing the century through, also of that indestructibility—surely an active rather than a passive quality—which is dear to the British public. Another difficulty must have been the richness of the literary and political background, or battleground, and the sheer number of subsidiary characters. For all of them there was ‘an overwhelming mass’ of material. The only evidence missing seems to have been some diaries and papers which are restricted during the lifetime of Anthony West, and the correspondence with Beaverbrook, which Rebecca and Max burned together at her flat in 1930. With great skill Victoria Glendinning concentrates attention on the story she has been asked to tell. Rebecca was to the end, as one of her housekeepers put it, ‘black and white and crimson and pu rple and wild.’ Victoria Glendinning treats each episode, black or white, with calming, professional good sense. She makes very few direct judgements, only once or twice risking a sad question—‘How could she behave so unwisely or so badly?’ Some of the story has been paraded almost too often, some not at all. The book is equally successful with the well-known and the unfamiliar aspects, particularly with Rebecca’s marriage to Henry Andrews, who is usually thought of, if he is thought of at all, as the wealthy, totally faithful, slightly deaf, typically English banker with whom she found security and a country life. Slightly deaf he certainly was, but he soon ceased, it turns out, to be a banker, was partly Lithuanian, and was unable to resist a long series of tepid affairs with younger women. In Buckinghamshire, where they bought a house and farm, he was quite at a loss. ‘Rebecca wanted to do everything, having a flair for everything. She took over the management of the greenhouses and the kitchen and flower gardens from Henry…complaining that he could not even take the dog for a walk.’ Henry pottered, and was considered in the village to be a comical old bugger. When he died, in 1968, he left thirty almost identical dark suits from Savile Row, each with money in the waistcoat pocket, ready for giving tips. Yet he lived with Rebecca and travelled with her and drove her about, often losing the way; and he was a man about the house. Victoria Glendinning re-creates him with something like tenderness, and points out that ‘it was not so different from many marriages.’ It is only strange as the choice of the brilliant and stormy woman who wrote that ‘the difference between men and women is the rock on which civilisation will split.’

  But perhaps ‘strange’ is not the right word, because consistency was never Rebecca West’s main concern. In The Meaning of Treason (revised in 1962 to include studies of Philby, Burgess and Maclean), she sometimes confuses treachery with treason and examination with cross-examination, but this doesn’t affect the dazzling intelligence of her case histories. As to why she wrote, she gave a number of explanations. She began ‘without choosing to do so—at home we all wrote and thought nothing of it.’ ‘My work,’ she said, ‘expresses an infatuation with human beings. I don’t believe that to understand is to pardon, but I feel that to understand makes one forget that one cannot pardon.’ She also said that she wrote her novels to find out how she felt. Victoria Glendinning believes that ‘she most revealed herself when describing somebody else.’ She has, therefore, to look even more attentively than most biographers at the correspondence of what Browning called House and Shop. This is a complex matter when it comes to the later work, in particular Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. In 1936 Rebecca was sent to Yugoslavia by the British Council (who might have guessed what would happen) as a lecturer, and she went there again in 1937 and 1938. Her book was a testament to the country with which she had fallen in love on a majestic scale. It was not finished until 1942, when the Yugoslav resistance to the German invasion had given it a new intention. The travel book was still there, with Rebecca as the passionate explorer and interpreter and Henry supplying—not always convincingly—the statistics, but it had deepened into a vast meditation on the history, politics, geography, and ethnology of Eastern Europe, following, as she said, ‘the dark waters’ of the Second World War back to their distant source. To do it justice, Victor ia Glendinning has had to summarize the troubled history of the southern Slavs (Rebecca was heart and soul with the Serbs), the shifts of British policy, and the devices of the SOE and the Foreign Office. At one extreme, there is the ‘emotional, curly-haired, Serbian Jew’ who acted as Rebecca’s official guide and fell in love with her; at the other is her vision of Europe’s history as a crime committed by man against himself. The exposition here could not be clearer. When Rebecca declared that she had never made a continuous revelation of herself, she was admitting that she made a discontinuous one. The novels are probably the best place to look for her. ‘Nonfiction,’ she said, ‘always tends to become fiction; only the dream compels honesty.’ So the biographer arrives, with admiration and caution, at her own view of Rebecca West’s view of herself.

  London Review of Books, 1987

  Raging Martyr

  Jean Rhys: Life and Work, by Carole Angier

  A novel has to have a shape, Jean Rhys thought, and life doesn’t have any. Hers, however, had a pattern, which disastrously recurred: a cycle of effort, excitement, happiness, collapse, unexpected help, resentment at being helped, black rage, violent scenes, catastrophe.

  She spent her life with lovers or husbands, but wrote about loneliness. In choosing these men—or letting herself be chosen, for there was an oddly passive side to her nature—she wanted protection (otherwise she was frightened) and also risk (otherwise she was bored). The contradictions were never resolved.

  This charming, sun-loving creature, brought up in the West Indies and entitled (as she saw it) to affection, warmth, and spending money, ended up as an abusive, drunken old woman trapped in what for her was a place of terror, a damp Devonshire village. By then she has almost stopped writing. In 1957, when she was nearing seventy, two saviours appeared: the publisher Diana Athill and the most understanding of critics, Francis Wyndham. They cajoled her into finishing what is perhaps the finest of her novels, The Wide Sargasso Sea. Her earlier work was republished, she was awarded a CBE. For the first time since the 1920s there was money, and she had at least a short time to spend it in the 1920s style.

  Carole Angier is a warm-hearted narrator who allows us to feel for Jean’s bewildered victims, especially, perhaps, for the gentle Leslie Tilden Smith, her second husband—she gave him a black eye more than once. This book, however, is, by and large, the life of writer as martyr. In the search for perfection, Jean Rhys drove herself to the edge of madness.

  The horrifying ending of Good Morning, Midnight was so hard to get right that she tore up both her contract and her manuscript. It took her nine years to finish The Wide Sargasso Sea and to release it reluctantly for publication. If she had written in any other way she would not, she explained, have ‘earned her death.’

  She also said: ‘All of a writer that matters is the book or books. It is idiotic to be curious about the person. I have never made that mistake.’ But she would have to forgive Carole Angier for this truly sympathetic study in depth.

  Evening Standard, 1990

  The Near and t
he Far

  An introduction to The Root and the Flower, by L. H. Myers

  L. H. Myers (Leopold Hamilton Myers, 1881—1944) was born into a distinguished scholarly family. His father, F. W. Myers, was one of the founders of the Society for Psychical Research; their home in Cambridge was a centre of hospitality and intellectual discussion, but it was also rather an odd place to be brought up in. Frederic Myers was set upon demonstrating the immortality, or at least the survival, of human personality by acceptable scientific methods, and his children were half frightened and half fascinated by the procession of mediums and ‘sensitives’ who came to the house to give evidence. Leo’s mother was passionate and possessive; his father expected rather more of the family than they could give. When he died Leo had to cut short his time at university to take his mother abroad; F. W. Myers had made an appointment to manifest himself after death, and had named a time and place, but the meeting failed. Leo lost faith, but only in his father’s methods. He saw now that though reason must always be distinguished from intuition, it should never be separated from it. They must work together.

  He was educated at Eton and Cambridge, and although he was always as popular as he would allow himself to be, he bitterly hated both of them. He rejected, in fact, every social structure to which he belonged, including the literary circles that London offered him. To Myers, all of these fell grotesquely short. ‘Just as an individual cannot live for himself,’ says the Rajah in The Near and the Far, ‘so society cannot live for itself, but must keep a self-transcendent idea before it.’ In holding this ideal, and in devoting his writing career to it, Myers was unflinchingly sincere, but his life was not consistent with it. He was neither an ascetic nor a revolutionary. Between his seduction at the age of sixteen and his marriage he had a number of affairs, some, he said, ‘very squalid.’ When in 1906 he came into a legacy he moved through society as a generous patron of the arts, but also as a detached and elegant young man, with a taste for racing at Brooklands. Even when, after running through every other political solution, he became a Communist, he still had a part-share in an expensive French restaurant, Boulestin’s. Myers, of course, noticed these discrepancies, since he possessed (in the words of his friend L. P. Hartley) ‘an exquisite wry sense of humour, of which he was half-ashamed.’ But Hartley has also described how, with the close of the 1930s and the threat of war, Myers’s self-knowledge darkened into pessimism. A slow and scrupulous writer, he had always depended greatly on the advice of his friends. Now he quarrelled fiercely with most of them. As a young man he had asked himself the question: ‘Why should anyone want to go on living once they know what the world is like?’ On 7 April 1944, he answered it for himself by taking an overdose of veronal.

  Myers left his great trilogy, The Root and the Flower, to speak for him. Like his other books, it has an exotic setting, in this case sixteenth-century India under the reign of Akbar. He did not pretend to accuracy and indeed he had never been to India, though he visited Ceylon. His motive, as he said in his 1940 preface, is to give us a clearer view of our own social and ethical problems from the ‘vantage-point of an imaginary world.’

  This world, though anything but safe, is a very seductive one. The slow rhythm of the palace, the desert and the river are like an audible pulsation of the Indian heat, but at any moment we may be asked to look at something as small as a mark in the dust or a dying moth, or stretch our ears for a minute sound. We do not, however, do this for nothing. The descriptive passages hardly ever stand still, they give the sense of something about to happen:

  At the door he paused again; from the roof there hung down wisps of dry, grey moss; ants had built a nest against the threshold and the droppings of wood-pigeons whitened the window-sills. Contrary to his expectations the latch came up when he tried it; the door opened and a curious smell spread upon the fresh air.

  The absence of the moon and stars made the night intimate and earthly; dry leaves, lifted from the ground, were swept across his hands and face. It seemed as if the earth’s secret energies were working upon him, and he yielded to a process which he felt to be beneficent. His spirit lay still in a quiet excitement; a sense of expectation gathered; it was like that of a woman who is awaiting the first pangs of her first childbed.

  She showed him the place where the young man was buried. There certainly were some suspicious marks upon the ground. The soil was cracked, having swollen up in a blister, and this seemed to indicate that the work was not the work of Thugs, for Thugs always drove a stake through the body to allow the gases of decomposition to escape without a sign.

  Myers wants us to look at his world of appearances and beyond it. Appearances cannot be dismissed as an illusion, for no illusion can be created except by reason. On the other hand, the life of the spirit is just as real as the pigeon dung and the bloated corpse. ‘I am’ has no meaning without ‘There is.’ How can the two be reconciled? On this problem depend the three great questions of the book. First, how can an individual be sure that he has found himself? ‘If everyone is pretending to be like others,’ says Prince Jali, ‘who is like himself?’ Second, if each individual is a solitary heart, how is he to unite with other human beings? Third, if he does so, how can he be sure that the society he lives in acknowledges ‘the supremacy of the spirit as the guiding principle of life’?

  Reading a long book is like living a long life; it needs an adjustment of pace. Myers is asking us to slow down, and so to deepen the consciousness. At the beginning of the trilogy, a story of war, betrayal, torture, and political power, we have to consider what seems a very small incident. The little prince, alone on the palace balcony, sees a snake crawling along the gutter. The wind stirs a twig, and Jali, watching, ‘entered into the snake’s cold, narrow intelligence and shared its angry perplexity.’ It strikes, loses its balance, and falls to its death on the roof below. The snake shares ‘the terrible numerousness of living beings, all separate, all alone, all threatened.’ It could not tell that the twig was not an enemy. It was deceived by appearances. But a little earlier Jali had been gazing at the serene desert horizon, which had looked so different when they made the six days’ hot journey across it. ‘He clung to the truth of appearances as something equal to the truth of what underlay them. Deep in his heart he cherished the belief that some day the near and the far would meet.’

  The first book of the trilogy gives a sense of the imperial war game that will decide the fate of India. Akbar is the ruinous tyrant or ‘great man’ of history. His dream of uniting India’s religions—the Din Ilahi—is folly, and he himself is at heart commonplace. His inheritance is disputed between his two sons, Selim, the brutal soldier, and Daniyal, the perverted intellectual. It is the duty of Rajah Amar, in his small kingdom, to decide where his allegiance lies before he withdraws, as he wishes to do, to a monastery. Almost perversely, he favours Daniyal, because he has always disliked him, and he wants to stand uninfluenced by the affections. Sita, the Rajah’s wife, is a Christian who prefers, for good or ill, to stay with the rest of humanity. These two, husband and wife, are far apart, and yet they are both searching for perfection. ‘The gulf is not between those who affirm and those who deny but between those who affirm and those who ignore.’ The man whom Sita eventually takes for a lover, Han, is a wild chieftain who relishes life at is comes, but all through the first book we can see him gradually driven, step by step, to concede that he cannot after all live through the senses alone. His love for Sita ‘seemed to play not upon the nerves of the flesh, not upon the machinery of the brain, but upon the substance of the very soul…and he said to himself, “What is this?”’ On the other hand, the Rajah’s adviser Gokal, the Brahman philosopher, is caught in sensuality’s trap. He is enslaved by a low-caste girl, Gunevati, who in turn is guided by sheer animal instinct.

  Myers, of course, saw the danger of all this. ‘The impression may come into the reader’s mind,’ he wrote, ‘that what he has before him is a philosophical novel.’ This, he knew, would mean neither good p
hilosophy, nor a good novel, nor, before long, any readers. But his characters are not representatives of ideas, they are an invitation to think about them, which is a different matter. And in spite of Myers’s detached and elegant manner, they are all human beings. Gunevati, for instance, has been taken, I think quite wrongly, as standing for pure evil. Certainly she resorts to poison, and passively accepts the position of fetish to an obscene and forbidden religious sect. But at other times we are asked to pity her, as Flari does, when he realizes what a low price she puts on herself, in spite of her beauty. Beauty has no particular rights in the world as it is. Jali pities her, too, when she turns pale and ill as a captive in Gokal’s house. The truth is that she has no way of knowing herself. To destroy her is not justice.

  Book Two is a Bildungsroman, the education of Prince Jali, the Rajah’s son. This, in a sense, is the simplest part of the trilogy, and, in terms of action, the most exciting. Jali’s ordeals are of the flesh, the mind and the spirit. As a young adolescent he finds, under Gunevati’s tuition, that women are easy enough and he can get into any bedroom he likes. But he wants to understand life, or at least to see it clearly, and his passion for knowledge leads him to explore the secret cults of the Valley and to discover how they connect with the spying and counter-spying of the court. But Jali—for he is only a learner and a searcher—does not know enough, not enough, at least, to outwit his enemies by himself. And after his escape from the Valley he is in greater danger still, as he approaches the neighbourhood of the Camp.

  Here, perhaps, Myers let his prejudices run away with him; the Camp, or Plesaunce, is, as he admitted, a monstrous version of the world of Cambridge and Bloomsbury by which he had once been deceived. It is the stronghold of Daniyal, the artificial paradise of the aesthetes, and to Myers the aesthetes were ‘trivial,’ a word which for him meant the denial of life. They were the sterile self-regarders and self-indulgers; sterility leads to cruelty, and self-regard to the death of the spirit. The Camp, then the travelling court of Prince Daniyal and his entourage, entices Jali with the most degrading materialism of all. If we are in any doubt as to how dangerous it is—dangerous rather than merely absurd—we have only to follow, as Jali does, the fate of Gunevati. It is at Daniyal’s orders that this girl, who can express herself only through her body and her senses, has her tongue cut out; after that she is forced to learn to write. ‘She opened her mouth wide. Jali found himself looking into a cavern—black, swollen, horrible.’ It is this that recalls Jali to himself, so that he will never again be mistaken as to the nature of the Camp.