A House of Air

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  While Tolstoy and William Morris both came to doubt art’s power to change society—and if it failed in that it failed for them in everything—James Joyce and Virginia Woolf entrusted themselves to it, for its own sake, entirely. ‘Now they’re bombing Spain,’ said Joyce in 1936. ‘Isn’t it better to make a great joke instead, as I have done?’ Virginia Woolf’s Miss La Trobe, in Between the Acts, is her last version, perhaps consciously her last, of the artist in relation to society. Finishing the book, as always, was a strain on her perilous mental balance. It was written, but not revised for the press, when she walked out of her garden gate and down to the river to drown herself.

  From 1938 onwards Leonard and Virginia Woolf were living for longer and longer periods in the country, at Rodmell in Sussex. Between the Acts is contained in a day and a night, and in one country house with its barn, pastures, and gardens. Poyntz Hall is old but middle-sized and ordinary—as far as anything described by Virginia Woolf is ordinary. There is no mention of it in the guidebooks, but ‘driving past, people said to each other, “I wonder if that’ll ever come into the market?”’ But although its beauty is real, its suggestion of a settled contentment is not. A closer look shows ‘vast vacancies’ of body and spirit. Children are divided from adults, husband from wife, servants from employers, and Poyntz Hall itself seems cut off from the war and almost unconcerned, although at any moment ‘guns might rake the ancient land into furrows.’ Miss La Trobe is the unlikely force that will make for wholeness. She is a bizarre, disconsolate figure, a lesbian deserted by her lover, fond of drink and known to the villagers as Bossy. Her art is as a presenter of pageants. She ‘gets them up,’ composing everything herself, words, music, and passing shows. A setting is required—Poyntz Hall itself—and an acceptable cause, in this case a collection for the repair of the parish church, but these are not the things that matter to Miss La Trobe. A heap of old clothes and a cast of amateur actors who don’t always know their parts are all that she has to work with, and she despairs, or almost despairs, of making her audience ‘see.’ What she had had in mind to show them had been the whole history of their island, back to the ‘night before roads were made, or houses,’ through to the present moment when they would be asked to see their own reflections in great mirrors and looking glasses, borrowed from the Hall and held up to their view. All this had been her intention, but in her own judgement she has failed. She needs company, she needs a drink, but in the village she is an outcast and she knows that when she goes into the public bar, the customers will fall silent. This, however, is not important to her (just as Virginia Woolf tried to persuade herself, time after time, that what her critics said was unimportant). For her the failure—worse than death—is failure as an artist. But when the pageant is over and the audience has drifted away, leaving the park to the cows and the roosting swallows, Miss La Trobe is already possessed by a new idea. She has ‘heard the first words.’ These are words that other characters in the book will speak, but have not yet spoken. In fact, we never know what they are. But Miss La Trobe does know.

  She strode off across the lawn. The house was dormant: one thread of smoke thickened against the trees…From the earth green waters seemed to rise over her. She took her voyage away from the shore, and, raising her hand, fumbled for the latch of the iron entrance gate.

  from End Games, edited by Maura Dooley,

  South Bank, 1988

  INDEX

  The pagination of this electronic edition does not match the edition from which it was created. To locate a specific passage, please use the search feature of your e-book reader.

  Ackland, Valentine, 247—8, 250, 252; Whether a Dove or a Seagull (with Sylvia Townsend Warner), 250

  Ackroyd, Peter: Blake, 12, 14—15; Dickens, 14

  Acworth, Dr James, 93

  Aiken, Conrad, 189

  Alain-Fournier (Henri Alain Fournier), 305—10, 354; Colombes Blanchet, 306; Le Grand Meaulnes, 305, 306—7; translated as The Lost Domain by Frank Davison, 305, 309—10

  Albert, Stephen, 529

  Aldington, Richard: enlists, 161; Images, 165

  Allen, Walter, 52

  Allston, Washington, 19

  Amis, Sir Kingsley: correspondence with Larkin, 375, 377

  Amory, Mark, 331

  Andrews, Henry Maxwell, 315—17

  Angier, Carole: Jean Rhys: Life and Work, 318—19

  Annan, Noël, Baron, 277

  Anscombe, Elizabeth, 356

  Apollinaire, Guillaume, 167

  Arbuckle, Roscoe (‘Fatty’), 467

  Arkell, David: Alain-Fournier: A Brief Life, 1886—1914, 305, 308

  Arnim, Elizabeth von, 149

  Arts and Crafts movement, 129—33

  Ashbee, Charles Robert: biography by Fiona MacCarthy, 129—33; From Whitechapel to Camelot, 129

  Ashbee, Henry Spencer, 130

  Ashbee, Janet (née Forbes), 131

  Askwith, Betty: Two Victorian Families, 76

  Asquith, Anthony, 327

  Asquith, Herbert Henry, 1st Earl of Oxford and Asquith, 188

  Atherton, Gertrude, 229

  Athill, Diana, 318

  Atlantic Monthly, The, 24

  Auden, Wystan Hugh: influence on MacNeice, 347, 352; John Lehmann publishes, 341; MacNeice travels with, 348

  Augustine, St, 313

  Austen, Jane: final illness, 5; on romantic imagination, 395; Emma, 5—11; Northanger Abbey, 10; Persuasion, 506—7

  Austen-Leigh, James E. (Jane Austen’s nephew): memoir of Jane, 10

  Austin, Alfred, 104

  Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, 44n

  Bacon, Leonard, 169

  Baker, Michael: Our Three Selves: A Life of Radclyffe Hall, 253—8

  Balcombe, Sussex, 468, 486—90

  Baldwin, Louisa (née Macdonald), 105, 115, 137

  Balfour, Arthur James (later 1st Earl), 145

  Banks, Leslie, 483

  Barbera, Jack and William McBrien (eds): Me Again: Uncollected Writings of Stevie Smih, 358—63

  Barrie, Sir James Matthew: on attempting to grow up, 306; on Mrs Oliphant, 511; and Peter Pan statue, 189; visits dying Mrs Oliphant, 72; Peter Pan, 213

  Basire, James, 13

  Batemans (house), Sussex, 142

  Batey, Mavis, 84

  Batten, Mabel (‘Ladye’), 255—8

  Battiscombe, Georgina: Christina Rossetti: A Divided Life, 97—100

  Bawden, Edward, 168

  Bayley, John, 502

  Beach, Sylvia, 168

  Beardsley, Aubrey, 139, 177

  Beardsley, Mabel, 140

  Beauman, Sally, introduction to Ada Leverson’s The Little Ottleys, 233—5

  Beaverbrook, William Maxwell Aitken, 1st Baron, 315

  Beck, Ian, 310

  Beckett, Samuel, 414, 505, 525

  Bedford College, London, 173—4

  Bedford, John Russell, 4th Duke of, 453

  Beerbohm, (Sir) Max, 233

  Bell, Clive, 281, 283

  Bell, Julian, 283, 338

  Bell, Quentin, 275, 277, 289

  Bell, Vanessa, 280—4, 289, 291

  Bellow, Saul: Henderson the Rain King, 424; Ravelstein, 424—6

  Benda, Simone, 306, 308; Sous les nouveaux soleils, 307

  Bennett, Alan, 215

  Benson family, 280

  Benson, Arthur, 73, 75, 196

  Benson, Edward White, Archbishop of Canterbury: biography by Geoffrey Palmer and Noel Lloyd, 73—8; and loss of eldest son, 281

  Benson, Frederick, 73, 75, 280

  Benson, Hugh, 73, 75—6, 280

  Benson, Maggie, 73, 75

  Benson, Martin, 75

  Benson, Minnie (née Sidgwick), 73—5

  Benson, Nellie, 73

  Benson, W.A.S., 138

  Bernhardt, Sarah, 139

  Besant, Annie, 118

  Bethlehem, 459

  Betjeman, Sir John, 346, 445

  Biala, Janice, 295

  Blackwood, John (publisher), 32, 38, 40, 58,
67

  Blackwood, Major (publisher), 40

  Blackwood, Miss (John’s sister), 52

  Blackwood, William, 61

  Blackwood’s Magazine: Mrs Oliphant writes for, 40, 43, 57, 67, 70

  Blake, Catherine (née Boucher; William’s wife), 13—14, 16

  Blake, James and Catherine (William’s parents), 12—13

  Blake, William, 12—16, 313, 358; ‘Schoolboy’, 168

  Bloomsbury group, 277, 289

  Blunden, Edmund, 354

  Blunt, Anthony, 346, 348

  Blunt, Wilfrid Scawen: on Charlotte Mew, 178; on William Morris, 107; Love-Lyrics & Songs of Praise, 124

  Boer War (1899—1902), 245

  Boll, Theophilus, 179

  Booker Prize, 477—9

  Boos, Florence, 104

  Bottomley, Gordon, 150

  Bourget, Paul, 235

  Bowen, Stella, 295

  Bowra, Sir Maurice, 99

  Boylan, Clare (ed.): The Agony and the Ego: The Art and Strategy of Fiction Writing Explored, 507

  Brenan, Gerald, 289

  Bridges, Robert, 166

  British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC): John Lehmann at, 342; MacNeice works for, 349, 351; Penelope Fitzgerald works for, 472—5

  Brittain, Vera, 253

  Brontë, Charlotte: Villette, 66

  Brontë, Emily, 98

  Brooke, Rupert, 157

  Brooke-Rose, Christine: Amalgamemnon, 506—7

  Brown, Ford Madox, 294

  Brown, Frederick, 289

  Burnand, Francis, 208

  Burne-Jones family: at The Grange, 133—4

  Burne-Jones, Christopher, 134

  Burne-Jones, Sir Edward: death, 142; decline in popularity, 141; exhibits, 137—8; fears de Morgan’s wife, 126—7; at The Grange, 136—40; illustrates Kelmscott Chaucer, 124, 141; indulges granddaughters, 141; infatuation with Helen Gaskell, 141—2; Kipling visits, 101; liaison with Mary Zambaco, 108—9, 135, 145; marriage, 108—9; Mary Nicholson keeps house for, 117; meets George Eliot, 36; resigns from Academy, 139; stained glass, 137, 146; supports William Morris, 124; tours Italy, 137; watercolours reviewed (1993), 143—7; Golden Stairs, 138; ‘The Merciful Knight’, 144—5; Phyllis and Demophoön, 136, 145

  Burne-Jones, Georgiana, Lady (née Macdonald): on Edward’s ‘The Merciful Knight’, 144; at The Grange, 135, 140—1; in local politics, 118; marriage, 108—9; on Morrises’ marriage, 117; on servant problems, 92, 139; settles in Rottingdean, 142; William Morris’s dependence on, 119

  Burne-Jones, Margaret see Mackail, Margaret

  Butler, John, 529

  Butler, Samuel: Erewhon, 115

  Butts, Thomas, 14

  Byron, George Gordon, 6th Baron, 19—20

  Cage, John, 529

  Canaletto (Giovanni Antonio Canal): exhibition (New York 1990), 450—6

  Cannan, Gilbert, 166

  Carlyle, Thomas, 21

  Carpenter, Edward, 130—1, 242—3

  Carr, James Lloyd: The Harpole Report, 380, 386; A Month in the Country: Introduction to, 380—7

  Carrington, Dora, 288—91

  Carroll, Lewis (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson): biographies of, 80—6; deaconate, 193; Alice in Wonderland, 83; Sylvie and Bruno, 85; Through the Looking Glass, 83

  Cartwright, Julia, 140, 142

  Cather, Willa, 25

  Cecil, Lord David, 327

  Chalmers, Martin, 432—3, 436

  Chang, Jung see Jung Chang

  Chapbook (Harold Monro’s periodical), 160, 166—8, 170

  Chapman, John (publisher), 37—8

  Charles I, King, 446

  Chaucer, Geoffrey: Kelmscott Press edition, 123, 141

  Chelsea Bookshop, 162

  Chelsea Broadsides, 162

  Chipping Campden, 129, 131—2

  Christ Church, Oxford: Lewis Carroll at, 81

  Christian, John, 146

  Christ’s Hospital (school), 19

  Clarke, Revd James Stanier, 6

  Cobden-Sanderson, Annie, 118

  Cockerell, Kate, Lady, 182

  Cockerell, Sir Sydney, 124, 171, 181—2, 188

  Cohen, Morton N.: Lewis Carroll: A Biography, 80—5

  Coldstream, Nancy, 348

  Coleridge, Mary, 188

  Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 17—21; Biographia Literaria, 20; Notebooks, 20; Remorse (play), 19

  Collins, Wilkie: The Woman in White, 57, 134

  Coltman, Ella, 187—8

  Compton-Burnett, Dame Ivy, 505

  Connolly, Cyril: edits Horizon, 341 Conrad, Joseph: friendship with F.M. Ford, 295—6

  Constable, John, 482

  Conti, Italia see Italia Conti

  Cooper, Barbara, 343

  Cooper, James Fenimore, 21

  Cornford, Frances: Monro publishes, 165; ‘To a Fat Lady Seen from a Train’, 170

  Corvo, Baron see Rolfe, Frederick

  Cottle, Joseph, 19

  Coulton, Barbara: Louis MacNeice in the BBC, 349

  Cournos, John, 272

  Cox, Michael, 192

  Craig, Edward Gordon, 167

  Crane, Walter, 146

  Crawford, Alan, 129

  Crispin, Edmund see Montgomery, Bruce

  Cronwright-Schreiner, Cron, 241, 244—5

  Cross, John, 37, 39

  Cuala Press, 227

  Dahl, Roald: biography by Jeremy Treglown, 371—3; Boy, 371

  D’Arcy, Ella, 177

  Dartmoor, 446—9

  David, Elizabeth: A Book of Mediterranean Food, 342

  Davies, W.H., 149—50, 161, 277

  Davin, Dan, 344

  Dawes, ‘Toddy’, 380—1

  Delafield, E.M.: Consequences, 268; Late and Soon, 260; Thank Heaven Fasting: afterword, 259—70

  de la Mare, Elfrida (née Ingpen; Walter’s wife), 187—9

  de la Mare, Florence (Walter’s daughter), 189

  de la Mare, Jinnie (Walter’s daughter), 189

  de la Mare, Walter: appearance, 184; and Edward Thomas, 148, 150; and Naomi Royde Smith, 189; poetic qualities, 251; readings at Poetry Bookshop, 184, 277; reputation, 277; supports Charlotte Mew, 182; Theresa Whistler’s biography of, 184—90; ‘Arabia’, 169; ‘The Huntsmen’, 170; The Listeners and Other Poems, 188; Memoirs of a Midget, 189; ‘The Old Man’, 189; Peacock Pie, 184, 188—9, 488; A Portrait, 189

  de la Pasture, Mrs Henry, 260

  Democratic Federation, 139

  de Morgan, Mary Evelyn (née Pickering), 126—8

  de Morgan, William: biography by Mark Hamilton, 125—8; Alice-for-Short, 128; Joseph Vance, 128

  Denman, Gertrude Mary, Lady (née Pearson), 489

  De Quincey, Thomas, 19

  Derby, Edward Stanley, 12th Earl of, 87

  Dick, Kay, 360

  Dickens, Charles: Angus Wilson and, 371; death, 36; dialogue in, 505—7; fictional plots, 497; on lesbianism, 253; not admired by Mrs Oliphant, 57, 64; sets final novel in cathedral city, 45; William Morris cites, 106; A Christmas Carol, 46

  Dickinson, Emily, 358

  Dickinson, Goldsworthy Lowes, 130

  Dickinson, Patric, 359

  Digby, Kenelm: Broadstone of Honour, 112

  Disraeli, Benjamin, 85, 205

  Dodds, E.R., 344, 348

  Dooley, Maura (ed.): Novelists at Work, 517

  Douglas, James, 253

  Doyle, Roddy: The Commitments, 406; The Snapper, 406; The Van, 406—10

  Drabble, Margaret: Angus Wilson: A Biography, 367—71

  Drinkwater, John, 157

  Duffy, Maureen, 99

  du Maurier, George, 206—8

  Dun Emer Press, 168

  Dunn, Douglas, 379

  Dunn, Jane: A Very Close Conspiracy: Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf, 280—4

  Dürer, Albrecht: The Knight, Death, and the Devil, 112

  Eastbourne, 491—2

  Egoist, The (magazine), 179

  Eliot, George: Georgiana Burne-Jones seeks advice from, 136; Karl’s biography of, 36—9; on M
ethodism, 54; Mrs Oliphant on life of, 70; Mrs Oliphant’s Salem Chapel attributed to, 58; on position of women, 31; on working in remote past, 525; Adam Bede, 38, 54; Autobiography, 70; Middlemarch, 28—35, 38, 115, 525; The Mill on the Floss, 31—3; Romola, 39; Scenes of Clerical Life, 44; Silas Marner, 38—9, 46, 511

  Eliot, T.S.: edits Criterion, 167; on learning to care, 98; Monro rejects, 165—6; Pound promotes, 166; proposes toast to John Lehmann, 343; publishes MacNeice’s poetry, 348; reads to Oxford University Poetry Society, 354; takes French lessons from Alain-Fournier, 308; ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, 401; The Rock, 285; The Waste Land, 166, 304, 354

  Ellerbeck, George: Literary Award, 380

  Ellis, Henry Havelock, 242—3, 257

  Ellman, Richard: James Joyce, 529

  Elton, Oliver, 217

  Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 21, 239

  Emma, Queen of the Sandwich Islands, 93

  English Review, 295

  Enright, D.J., 376

  Epstein, (Sir) Jacob, 160 ‘Etherton, George’, 177

  Eton Rambler (magazine), 194

  Evans, Isaac (George Eliot’s brother), 37