Zeitgeister
Francis King
A Kind of Survivor Guy Chapman (Gollancz £5.00) I Could be Happy Sandy Wilson (Michael Joseph £6.00) If one were AO judge then solely in terms of material success, one's verdict on Guy Chapman would be 'Too little, too late' and on Sandy Wilson 'Too much, too early.' Though Chapman writes of his experiences in the First World War "to the years between 1914 and 1918 I owe everything of value in my make-up", it was not until he was forty that he found his true bent as a historian and met the woman, a talented and public-spirited novelist, who was to prove the love of his life. Sandy Wilson, on the other hand, was already famous by the time that he was thirty, achieving a worldwide success that he has frustratingly been unable to repeat in the subsequent twenty and more years. Yet both lives, as recounted in these two books, seem to have been happy; and though one guesses that their authors would have had little use for each other — Sandy Wilson would probably have found Chapman "stuffy", Chapman would probably have found Wilson • "trivial" — two likeable, admirable and modest people nonetheless emerge. Chapman wrote one small masterpiece, A Passionate Prodigality, about his war experiences; a life of the Caliph of Fonthill, which is good but would have been even better if he had not worked from the curious premises that Beckford was not essentially homosexual and that his lengthy life was, to all intents and purposes, over by the time that he was thirty; the first volume of a history of the Third Republic, to which a fellow historian paid the somewhat ambiguous compliment "a magnificent quarry"; and an account of the Dreyfus Case exemplary in its lack of prejudice or partisanship. Here, he writes with characteristic succinctness and lucidity of his life as a Westminster day-boy; of the terrible but exalting ordeal of the war — "what the survivor remembers is not the fears he knew, the pains but the faces and a few words of the men who were with him"; of his years as a publisher, with a taste for fine printing; of his bravely improbable decision to read economics at LSE when he Was already over forty; and then of his career as a professional historian, culminating in nine years as professor of history at Leeds University: Just as married couples come to speak like each other, using the same intonations, the same slang, the same favourite words, so they also come to write like each other and the style of this book — gritty, elliptical, precise — is uncannily the style of Chapman's widow, Storm Jameson.
There are .times in this posthumously published autobiography when Chapman strikes one as curmudgeonly and ungracious; but he himself is so much aware of his defects that they cease to be unattractive. During a PEN conference in Venice, Auden congratulates Chapman on successfully guiding the British delegation to the Palazzo Widmann
Foscari with the words "Good staff work". .Chapman thinks "And what does this embusqud [shirker] know about staff work?" Mean and petty, the reader is about to conclude when Chapman forestalls—him: "Yes, know how crude and uncivilised that is, and it is not amusing:' When he worked for Alfred Knopf, running his English house for him, he was obviously irked by the American's "more than papal infallibility"; and when he was supplanted as principal of the Army School of Education at Coleg Harlech, he no less obviously thought that "that talented creature" Norman Fisher had intrigued against him; but he is scrupulously fair to the two men nonetheless. There is formidable intelligence in the book; the courage to put forward unmodish and even unpopular ideas; style and discrimination. But the dominant quality is a kind of stoic decency, of the same kind that he praises in he otherwise unremarkable men who died. uncomplainingly around him in the trenches. The workings Of the zeitgeist cart be cruel in their irony. The Boy Friend, a frail and charming pastiche, brought Sandy Wilson premature fame and fortune, becoming Der Boy Friend in Germany, Le Boy Friend in France and, more circumspectly, Los Novios (The Fiancés) in Spain. Valmouth, surely the best English musical of postwar years, had none of the same success. Yet if each had appeared five years later, it is Valmouth that would have been the triumph. Mr Wilson writes nothing about Va/mouth — perhaps he is saving it for another volume — and, for my tastes at least, far too much about The Boy Friend. Does one really wish to be told in such detail how this or that obscure understudy took over from this or that equally obscure principal; how this or that song was cut or lengthened; how this or that scene was played? We are not, after all, reading of the first performance of Hamlet or Parsifal. On the other hand, Mr Wilson's account of his years at private school and Harrow, of a career in the Army of which Mr Chapman would certainly have been contemptuous (another embusque!) and of his emergence at Oxford as a writer, composer and actor, is marvellously entertaining. Since we were exact contemporaries, it was his evocation of postwar Oxford, "a unique place and a unique time," that I particularly ,enjoyed. How could I have forgotten Ken Tynan's dreadful pium_coloured suit; the monologue that he claimed to have written for himself in an "ETC revue but that some of us recognised as the already published work of Robert Benchley; his tendency to confide in people whom he wished to shock "Of course I'm a hereditary syphilitic, just like Oswald"? It was good to be reminded of Michael Croft, now of the National Youth Theatre, playing an importunate sailor in one of those revues that were called 'Oxford Circus' or 'Oxford Marmalade' or 'Oxford Bags'; of all those would-be actors posturing and preening in the Playhouse Bar every morning instead of attending lectures; of Stanley Parker, acclaimed as Mae West — then on a visit to England — by the audience at a theatrical performance in a church hall of the Woodstock Road, until a certain swarthiness under the make-up and a certain muscularity under the frills and flounces aroused suspicion.
Jameson emerges as the most influential person in Guy Chapman's life, Vida Hope in Sandy Wilson's. Like the angular and acid Joan Swinstead, the busty and bouncy Vida Hope first made her name in those Farjeon little revues that so delighted the would-be sophisticated in the years immediately before the war, Sadly, neither of these two incomparable personalities appeared very much on the stage again.
Guy Chapman has a certain old-fashioned reticence in writing.of the intimacies of his life. Sandy Wilson displays far more apparent candour. But, paradoxically, one feels after reading these two highly entertaining autobiographies that the older man has revealed far more about himself than the younger and that one knows him that much better. Like David Hockney in A Bigger Splash, the central figure of I Could Be Happy is cannily careful of betraying no more of himself than he thinks to be politic.
Francis King has most recently written A Game of Patience.
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