A brave Jill-of-all-trades
Alastair Forbes
The Mad Mosaic Gael Elton Mayo (Quartet £9.95)
when, not long after the end of the war, Robin Fedden started to tell me of his delight in the company of the remarkable Australian psychologist- sociologist Professor Elton Mayo, who had lately moved into a flat at Polesden Lacey, the beautiful country house he was then ad- ministering for the National Trust, the name rang a bell. For had not my father given me several years' catalysing subscrip- tion to Harry Luce's Fortune? And had not that forbidding publication written of this friend and pupil of Pierre Janet that 'if there were a Nobel Prize for Labour Rela- tions Elton Mayo should have it'? Robin further confided that he had fallen pottily in love with Mayo's younger married daughter, `Madame Vigny' by name. So that when, one warm midsummer after- noon in Strasbourg, Auberon Herbert in- troduced a pretty girl to me as 'Madame Vigny', and forthwith swept us both off in the front seat of his open sports-car, instead of coming out with some corny cliche like `Advance, Australia fair!' I found myself exclaiming 'Robin Fedden!' This caused the lady to blush under the freckled tan which, I could not help remarking, gave her in the white faille dress she was wearing the ap- petising appearance of a speckled breakfast
egg in its cup.
Thus, some 34 years ago, was first arous- ed in me the interest, which I must as a con- scientious reviewer declare, in the Australian author of this compulsively readable, and often deeply moving account of an unusually careless if seldom carefree life led in a rather crazy cat's-cradle criss- cross between America and Europe. With Auberon's car quickly exchanged for my own, we were soon hitting the road to Brit- tany for the first of a series of memorably happy holidays on both sides of the Atlan- tic. We proved singularly compatible com- panions, coeurs, corps et &nes in the cosiest of concord, later abandoning the hurly- burly heights for that more platonic plateau commonly labelled une amitie amoureuse.
From the outset, I took almost as much pleasure in listening to the tales she unfold- ed of her life as Desdemona once to Othello's. Reversing Shakespeare's roles could say that . . .
loved her for the dangers she had passed, And she loved me that I did pity them' and I have found their recital between hard- covers equally unboring.
She has never quite fathomed what in- duced her adored and adoring parents to drive her from a safe and joyful home in Cambridge, Mass. supposedly to enjoy the European education they had, as third generation Strines, themselves missed, so that all that was left of family life had per- force to be squashed into summer vacations in hotels. Some spoilsport Fee Carabosse must have waved over her cradle a wand that emitted X-rays, for ROntgen's am- bivalent invention has jinxed her ever since. After a dog, rather than a person, from Porlock, had given her ringworm the grown-ups were unconsciously marking the poor child's head, shorn of its golden hair, with blue crosses for deep radiation before sending her back to a teasing boarding- school in a mob-cap. In between there were agreeable intervals in the Norfolk house of an uncle who 'had a private broad' (something that had better get an ex- planatory footnote quick before the American edition). In an Asolando August in Browning's beloved hill-town she, at 16, knew requited love and cannot to this day see why her parents would not accept so ad- mirable a catch as the handsome Paolo, with his palazzo in Venice and Palladian villa in the country, who recited to her the poems of Montale, one of which in Ossi di Sepia I seem to recall warns that happiness is balanced on a sword-blade and life is thin ice all the way. He was to fall dead in the Asolo piazza, perhaps from a broken heart who knows, soon after they were separated. Yet within a year they had allowed her to be carried off by the White Russian refugee Vsevolod who had nothing to his noble name but a tiny cheque from Kingsley Mar- tin's New Statesman for a poem. Their marriage was only 'nearly white for she was heavily pregnant by the time they joined the panicky 1940 exodus from Paris. The birth of her son in a chaotic and unsterile Bordeaux hospital was followed by nearly 10 days of puerperal fever from which she nearly died in another hospital' at Libourne. But when the Mother Superior brought a priest to her bedside she angrily drove him away saying 'I plan to live , which did not prevent that wise nun from later saying to all and sundry 'this girl has lived because of her faith', something not to be denied even after giving some credit to the then very rare sulfanomide drug seren- dipitously acquired by her husband. Getting the latter with his doubtful papers and Nansen passport out of France became her cliff-hanging mission, one that was to eat up most of her dowry and in- heritance, and which was accomplished on- ly after coming under German fire with her baby son stuffed in a rucksack. Reaching Lisbon, after adventures both droll and frightening, they boarded a Spanish tub loaded to three times her capacity and in the filthy steerage faced appalling conditions. Things improved a little when the Spanish Purser fell in love with her and said in a note Siempre iras in mi pensamientos. At a stop- over in Buenos Aires they stayed with a British diplomat who also fell, but less Poetically simply gave her a photograph of himself. Once in New York, the grateful White Russian, having found his American Miss Right, on an ill-judged impulse buy Produced for her a second husband, a glamorous, swashbuckling young Pied-Noir Musketeer in the service of the U.S. Army, the Monsieur Vigny, avid for Grandeur Afilitaire, who gave her a daughter and trouble galore as soon as the war was over.
A polyglot Jill-of-all-trades, painter, Journalist, novelist, model, songwriter and singer she has made a fine art of living from day to day and from hand to mouth, altogether too fine at times for bank managers. She had lovingly absorbed much Aboriginal lore at her father's knee and
Abos are folks neither for thrift nor the rat race.
Later, back in Europe, she was to become very much more than a Girl Friday or legwoman to the Magnum agency, who sent her to Spain, and where she also was to rind '1' homme de sa vie'. A decade later round her with a castle not in Spain but in the former Spanish Franche-Comte in the French Jura and with a daughter by its Jekyll and Hyde French chatelain. Her in- domitable capacity for snatching every scrap of happiness out of even the most un- Promising material was the spoonful of sugar which made Dr Jekyll's intermittently horrid Hyde medicine go down. But one day cancer was found in her mouth and the Possibility of her hitherto happy-go-luck running out has at each repeated operation over ensuing years had to be faced. The fear of this invisible marauder in the house of the body, the fear of the surgeon's insults to that body in his attack on the in- vader, the fear of not being given time to 'ring up a child, of being deprived of a very special gift of enjoying and enhancing life, these have seldom been better described or with such honourable honesty. Worst of all Perhaps are the 30, 40 even 50 days of radia- tion that sometimes have to follow surgery and from which it can take a year or more to recover even if full intermission is Tl.anted; and with it the reduction to zom- eclorn of the patients awaiting treatment in surroundings made as hauntingly horri- ble as only British hospital design can mev!se. In an epilogue addressed to the radiologist whom before his sudden death she had characteristically befriended and who had urged her 'to tell anyone and everyone, whenever occasion arises, that You have been cured', she tells of having two further cancer operations, the latest in the autumn of 1982, but adds that she is Uni.v back at work, and means to stick scuinehow to her slogan of 'Hold on, over- °11.1e'• Alas, only a few days after this bJaye book was published, its author was Yet again in hospital having to let a surgeon
once more risk wiping the blithe smile off her still amazingly young face, so this review is typed with fingers crossed and the hope that Quartet will see that her next book gets the proper editing, indexing, proof reading and promotion this one deserved but did not receive.
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