A House of Air

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  Jali will be the ruler of the future, but for the present power still rests with Rajah Amar. Book Three returns us to the problem we set out with. Is the Rajah justified in giving up the near for the far, or is his longing for detachment only another name for the refusal of responsibility? In the face of Gokal’s misgivings, he still prepares to withdraw from earthly concerns. But on the very point of leaving he is summoned to the Camp; there the whole nature of evil is brought home to him by another of the book’s apparently unimportant moments, the horrible incident of the white cat. Now Amar has to decide, at his own risk, whether in the face of recognized evil a man can ever be absolved from action. The Rajah does not choose what happens to him, but Myers has shown that though there are strict limits to the human will, there are none to human vision: Amar sees what is to be done.

  When Gokal brings his fallen body back across the lake, we do not even know whether Amar is dead, or what effect, if any, he has made on Daniyal. Like the relationships of the characters, which have been, all along, subtle and ambiguous, the story never yields a conclusion. ‘There is no illusory sense of understanding,’ Myers said, ‘only the realisation of what is.’ But the trilogy unmistakably ends with a return to life. The thought had come to Gokal that if the Rajah were to die without recovering consciousness, it might be as well. ‘But he condemned that thought,’ and as he goes up the path towards the house on the farther side of the lake, he hears Han, Sita, and Jali talking together on the verandah. With these quiet everyday sounds Myers concludes his strange masterpiece, which, it has been said, ‘brought back the aspect of eternity to the English novel.’

  from the Oxford University Press edition, 1985

  Betrayed by His Century

  Foreign Country: The Life of L. P. Hartley, by Adrian Wright

  When I was working on a Life of L. P. Hartley I went to see Princess Clary, one of the kindest of his hostesses in Venice, who said to me, ‘My dear, how can you write the life of a writer? If he had entered into politics, if he had commanded an army in warfare, but what life can a writer have?’ I felt the force of this, but only gave up when I realized that what I was finding out would be distressing to Hartley’s surviving sister, Norah.

  In Foreign Country: The Life of L. P. Hartley, Adrian Wright says very little about the staff surrounding Hartley in his later years in London ‘rough trade,’ young men who amused him more than they amused his visitors; sometimes, apparently, wheedling for fur coats and cars. There is little revealed about the unsavoury hangers-on and his unfortunate political views and behaviour: he upset his country neighbours by killing swans.

  Wright’s biography is, however, well written and well constructed; it is elegant and discreet and would have suited Norah exactly. And it is the last opportunity to have written his life with access to the family papers. Norah died in 1994, after giving instructions that all surviving material was to be burned.

  Norah and her elder sister, Enid, lived in the Victorian-gothic Fletton Tower, on the outskirts of Peterborough, all their lives. The house had been built from the proceeds of their father’s lucky investment in a brickfield. Leslie, the doted-on but ruthlessly ordered-about son, was the only one to leave home. His mother was obsessed with her son’s health, and he was sent to Harrow simply because she had heard it was on a hill and thought it would be good for his chest. At Oxford, he realized that it was necessary for him to be a writer, and also that he wanted to breathe a different air—different, that is, from Fletton. He became friends with Eddie Sackville-West and Anthony Asquith, and also with Lord David Cecil, with whom he fell irretrievably in love. As an expert in avoiding disagreeable facts, he perhaps believed that this golden friendship would never suffer mortal change, but in 1932 Cecil married.

  Wright had to decide at an early stage in the biography whether or not to call the amiable, sociable Hartley a snob. Hartley was deeply fond of many people who weren’t distinguished at all, and he never hesitated to invite his grander friends back to the heavy atmosphere of Fletton. On the other hand, he had a passion for grandes dames. He loved to be given orders by the imperious and to do errands for people who already had everything. One of the first of his patronesses was Lady Ottoline Morrell.

  By the end of the 1920s, he was a regular visitor to Venice and its Anglo-American palazzi. Wright has been able, therefore, to connect his book with a series of waterscapes: the Northamptonshire fens, the glittering Venetian lagoons, and the reaches of the river Avon. After the Second World War, Hartley bought Avondale, a large, old, inconvenient house on the riverbank at Bathford. There he intended, taking Henry James’s Lamb House as a model, to live among friends and books. That meant staff and a personal manservant. Hartley always insisted that he was unable even to fill a hot-water bottle.

  Charlie Holt, the manservant who was with him from the first at Avondale, massaged him every day (comparing him to a beached whale) and staunchly protected him for twenty years. After Charlie’s death, the situation soon deteriorated. Hartley began to revel in the domestic upsets that gave him the precious sensation of having something urgent to do. One of his difficulties as a novelist was to ‘raise’ his material sufficiently for twentieth-century readers, which he managed by killing the characters off, physically or spiritually. Life at Avondale, and later in London, was ‘raised’ by a series of increasingly sinister male factotums. Wright is particularly sympathetic here to Hartley as a frustrated homosexual, knowing himself swindled and insulted but finding it half pleasurable.

  Many readers will be grateful for a biography of manageable length, although something surely should have been said about Hartley as a collector. Persian rugs and carpets were his speciality. When, after agonizing indecision, a new one arrived from Bernadout’s, some authority would be invited to give gracious advice. He himself had been taught about antiques by his aunt Kathleen, who was a shrewd buyer and seller. But Wright gains a lot from seeing Hartley as a tragic rather than a comic figure. All the lamentable charade of his final years—the gin, the rough trade, the boozy shuffling about in carpet slippers, the ravings against the working class, the Inland Revenue, and the swans who impeded his boat—all these turn into the sad phantasmagoria of a man who outlived so many friends and felt that his country and his century had betrayed him.

  Some of Hartley’s books are very bad, some are classics, such as The Go-Between (1953), which gained an additional large audience after the 1970 film with Alan Bates and Julie Christie. Wright, in search of the ‘running shadow’ that he thinks must have darkened Hartley’s life, turns to the fine autobiographical novels and, above all, to The Go-Between. There, Wright believes, the author ‘tells us what we should never be allowed to know about him,’ and suggests a childhood wounding that shocked him irrecoverably. However, Hamish Hamilton, his long-suffering publisher, said that ‘Leslie was impotent and that was all there was to it.’ Dr Patrick Woodcock, who looked after him untiringly, thought that ‘Leslie never gave away his emotional life to anyone, not even to himself.’

  What is certain is that Hartley himself wouldn’t have welcomed any investigation that went further than this book. Although he admitted that ‘Freud was in the air the writer breathes,’ he objected strongly to the idea of Freudian analysis. This is clear enough from one of his most disturbing short stories, ‘A Tonic.’ A tonic is all that the patient, Mr Amber, wants or needs; but, while Mr Amber is unconscious, the famous specialist conducts a complete examination, ‘which in all his waking moments he had so passionately withstood.’

  The Times, 1996

  The Only Member of His Club

  Evelyn Waugh: The Later Years, 1939—1966, by Martin Stannard

  During the second half of his life, Evelyn Waugh became the victim of his own game, not of Let’s Pretend, but of Let’s Pretend to Pretend. He was impatient when others didn’t understand his rules, and impatient with the game itself when it didn’t—as games should do—provide a satisfactory alternative to real life. It was played en travesti—wit
h embarrassingly loud tweed suits, weird ear trumpets, and a house full of Victorian bric-a-brac, with the tiny Master threateningly aloof in his study, emerging with the message: I am bored, you are frightened. Sometimes he was aghast at the sight of his own bloated face in the mirror. He was asking, it seemed, to be judged severely, and he has been. No one condemns Robert Louis Stevenson for playing king in Samoa, but Evelyn Waugh, it seems, can hardly be forgiven for his nineteen years as the tyrannous squire of Piers Court, his country home.

  The game continued while his religious, moral, and aesthetic convictions demanded to be taken with total seriousness. It has often been said that he created a fantasy world out of the England and the Roman Catholic Church he knew because it was useful to him as a novelist. Waugh could never have accepted this for a moment. He saw himself, from the time he wrote Brideshead Revisited onward, as a defender of the faith and of the last vestiges of a vanishing civilization.

  The second volume of Martin Stannard’s biography opens after the outbreak of World War II, with Waugh as a trainee officer with the Royal Marines. There follows a sober account of the six painful years of his war service. He had courageously volunteered, at the age of thirty-six, because (as he told students of the University of Edinburgh in 1951) ‘I believe a man’s chief civic duty consists in fighting for his King when the men in public life have put the realm in danger.’ But he pictured himself as doing this alongside his aristocratic cronies—a ‘club of upper-class toughs,’ Mr Stannard calls them—who alone would understand him. But they did not want him, and in pursuit of the ideal posting he fell out with so many commanding officers that he was generally considered unemployable. Finally he was sent on a mission of support to Yugoslavia, where he ended up on a furious and lonely crusade, not on behalf of Tito and his partisans, but of his own fellow Catholics on both sides in the war and the civil strife that followed. This made him such a nuisance to the British Foreign Office that Christopher Sykes (Waugh’s official biographer) believed that there was some question of court-martialling him. Mr Stannard, however, going patiently over the records, concludes that the question was not seriously raised.

  By the time Waugh was demobilized in 1945 he had a family of three daughters—Teresa, Harriet, and Margaret—and a son, Auberon. With his gentle, long-suffering, but independent-minded wife, Laura, he moved back into the house he had bought for them, Piers Court, in Gloucestershire. At first, hoping to escape the hated ‘century of the common man,’ he had thought of moving to Ireland, but he became reconciled to a country life in England, a little travel, an occasional rampage in London. ‘If this regime sounds placid,’ wrote Mark Amory, the editor of Waugh’s letters, ‘it must be remembered that it led to the crisis on which The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold is based.’ Gilbert Pinfold hears ‘voices’ that put in words his own worst fears about himself, and they drive him mad.

  Meanwhile, during the disastrous, quarrelsome, and drink-sodden war years, Waugh, as always, had protected his breathing space as an author, writing a riotous satire, Put Out More Flags, and the enormously successful Brideshead Revisited. Charles Ryder, in that novel, during his long love affair with a great and ancient Catholic family, meets the power of the True Faith in action. In the later war trilogy, Sword of Honour, Guy Crouchback, like Ryder, is a reserved and decent man, but belonging to an ancient family himself: he is faced with the ruin of all his illusions. Neither of these characters is in the least like their creator, but they justify him—his romanticism, his snobbery, his crusade against the world as it is.

  Most novelists, after all, take the opportunity of self-justification. It’s the compensation of their profession. Certainly it is too simple to say, as Mr Stannard does, that Waugh’s power to hurt was the mainspring of his comic power. In fact, it might be felt that the mainspring of both his tragedy and his comedy was his experience of being hurt.

  The 1950s were the years when the income-tax inspectors, kept at bay until then by his agent and his accountant, closed in on Waugh, and at the same time he lost (deliberately, as it seemed) some of his old friends—though never Graham Greene or Nancy Mitford. At Piers Court, Laura farmed with a particular interest in her cows, and Waugh developed the bizarre persona that he justified by his belief in an independent world of the artist, one that he had the right to defend against all invaders. On visits to the United States he accepted hospitality grudgingly, told Igor Stravinsky that he couldn’t stand music, and pretended to believe that if he died there the undertakers would refuse him burial because of what he had said about them in The Loved One. On the other hand, he was prodigally generous to Catholic charities. And although he affected to think little of his children (except for his favourite, Meg) he in fact got to know them, as individuals, very well. The family, as so often happens in large country households, formed a conspiracy against the outside world, not feeling the necessity to explain itself.

  In 1957 Waugh was working on a book of which he had very great hopes. This was the life of his friend Monsignor Ronald Knox, inadequately described by Mr Stannard, who teaches English at the University of Leicester, as ‘a country-house priest with a keen enjoyment of upper-class society.’ In fact Knox was a brilliant apologist and the translator of the Old and New Testaments. Mr Stannard seems to have taken against Waugh’s Life of the Right Reverend Ronald Knox, and speaks of ‘a certain dishonesty in its tone’ and a ‘thinly disguised rancour.’ Waugh’s aims were certainly very different from Mr Stannard’s. He was not a scrupulous collector of facts but an artist who gave to every book he wrote a strong and elegant pattern. Ronald Knox’s family—he was my uncle—knew that the Life was inaccurate in places, and that it had proved impossible (for instance) to get Waugh to grasp the deep, wordless affection between Ronald and his brothers. But they admired his courage in criticizing the Catholic hierarchy where he thought fit, and they welcomed the book, which, in its very dryness and melancholy, gave a living likeness of Knox.

  When the book appeared in 1959, the Prime Minister was Harold Macmillan, who had been Knox’s pupil. Macmillan had been encouraging from the start, and Waugh felt that Knox’s biographer might well be rewarded with a knighthood. ‘That’s what one really needs,’ he told Anthony Powell. Now a letter arrived from Downing Street. It offered to make him only a Commander of the Order of the British Empire. Mr Stannard says that the creases in the letter show how Waugh crumpled it up in a fury before writing to decline.

  Minute attention to detail, perseverance, diligence Mr Stannard certainly has, and his two volumes will be standard reading for students of Waugh. He has used diaries and letters, published and unpublished, memoirs, reviews, personal interviews. But his researches have not been authorized by the family, and when it comes to analysis of character and motivation he never quite seems to find his feet. Laura, for example, is compared as a mother to Dickens’s Mrs Jellyby, which would mean that she neglected her children. But soon afterwards we’re told that she ‘spent much time deflecting his anger away from her brood and on to her own head.’ Again, Mr Stannard says that ‘no one persecuted Evelyn Waugh more relentlessly than himself,’ but, a few pages later, ‘his sanity depended on his being right.’ These discrepancies don’t represent changes or new developments. They are the result of Mr Stannard’s day-by-day, pile-’em-high accumulation of details, which makes it hard for him to stand back and see exactly where he is.

  At the end of 1956 Waugh left Piers Court for somewhere still more secluded, Combe Florey House, in Somerset. But for how long could the twentieth century be kept at bay? Above all, he felt threatened by the decisions of Vatican II and the changes in Catholic ritual. ‘The awful prospect is that I may have more than twenty years ahead,’ he wrote to his daughter Meg. But after he had published the first volume of his autobiography in 1964 he had only two more years left. ‘The distress caused by the Vatican Council was widespread,’ Diana Mosley said recently. ‘It killed Evelyn Waugh.’

  Boredom can also kill. In fact Waugh collapsed with coronary
thrombosis in the downstairs lavatory of his home, and Mr Stannard concludes that he died, as he lived, alone. How he makes this out I can’t tell. In spite of, or because of, his outrageous behaviour, Waugh was never without a sympathetic friend, and by his family he was offered more love than he was ever able to accept. I don’t call that loneliness.

  New York Times Book Review, 1992

  * * *

  1quoted in Constance Babington Smith, Rose Macaulay (1972)

  2‘The world my wilderness, its caves my home,/Its weedy wastes the garden where I roam,/In chasm’d cliffs my castle and my tomb…’—Anon.

  THE FORTIES AND AFTER

  What’s Happening in the Engine Room

  John Lehmann: A Pagan Adventure, by Adrian Wright

  The first volume of John Lehmann’s autobiography, published in 1955, starts: