Junior posting
PATRICK ANDERSON
The Best of Hugh Kingsmill edited by Michael Holroyd (Gollancz 80s)
In my experience even quite literate people show a strange unawareness of how quickly books go, and stay, out of print, with their authors soon following them into oblivion. Cheery prattle about 'second editions' or 'It must be in paperback'-or 'He's due for a revival any day now' can only bring wry smiles from those confronted with the mys- teries of literary fashion and the impenetrable darkness of most publishers' minds. Literary criticism, when it is not academic, is largely a matter of weekly journalism; -the book- reviewer copes with a spate of new publica- tions, is concerned with the immediacies of the moment, and may even be to some extent at the mercy of his literary editor's taste or feeling for the newsworthy. To sort the good from the indifferent, to relate the present to the past, to give some sense of the general movement of ideas and sensibility, necessi- tates to my mind much by way of re- appraisal—and also some pretty stern review- ing of us reviewers ourselves.
Mr Michael Holroyd has now raked the ashes and brought up some smouldering and pungent chunks from the works of the late Hugh Kingsmill, a warm writer if ever there was one. In his introduction, having regretted the ease with which reputations fade, he goes on to suggest that there is a kind of 'shadow cabinet' waiting its chance to take over from those in power and, although this puts the case too neatly for complete truth, I have long thought that it would be a delight to find a paper on modern literature which con- tained questions on writers other than Joyce, Lawrence, Eliot and Woolf—Norman Doug- las, shall we say, and Ronald Firbank and Hart Crane and J. C. Powys? I write as some sort of academic here, but not perhaps inappropriately, for Mr Holroyd lays the neglect of Kingsmill and others at the feet of 'the English literature don [in] the role of cicerone' and of 'educationist critical sys- tems', a phrase too sinister to need further explanation. But surely the passion of the young for Yevtushenko or the Liverpool Poets has nothing to do with Cambridge?
Hugh Kingsmill was among other things a humane and eminently readable biographer who got thoroughly involved with his sub- jects, discovering in them some psychological propensity or conflict which served as the mainspring of their activities. His gift for epigram helped him to strike home to what he considered the truth. Thus, of G.B.S., 'He had felt in Ireland, he would act in England . . . By splitting life up into the external world which was real, and the internal world, which was unreal, Shaw committed himself from the beginning of his career to looking for the kingdom of heaven outside himself'. And of Wilde: 'Wilde was a poet entangled with an aesthete by some inner malforma- tion . . . The aesthete is all circumference and no centre.' And of self-dramatisation in Yeats: 'His effect on those who met him began by being mysterious but ended by being only mystifying'.
But these quotations are not from the bio- graphies, where he had greater space in which to give his involvement, and tendency to self-identification, full play, and so to arrive at a picture of his subject which was different from the myth that his own or other people's desires had woven about hint. Mere. dith had fallen for Frank Harris; it was Kingsmill's task to reveal Harris as a great comic figure, an outrageous rogue. Boswell had presented Samuel Johnson as a moral bully, all confident rationality and brusque commonsense; Kingsmill redressed the bal- ance by bringing into focus the hideous physical and nervous disabilities, the tender heart and inwardly pervasive melancholia. Chesterton had made of Dickens 'a great- hearted lover of his kind, a laughing demo- crat blowing away all pretensions', but to Kingsmill he was a deeply-flawed egotist who was never able to reconcile his sentiments with his practice, and whose emotional life never managed to suffuse his comic vision of the ludicrous and grotesque. Mr Hol- royd's extract has some very searching things to say about the notorious blacking factory episode, together with the hysterical fuss Dickens made of it in adult life.
Kingsmill tended to see human existence as a conflict between the will (notably ex- pressed in power-systems and Utopian plans to run other people's affairs) and the imagin- ative heart. Thus %viten he came to write of D. H. Lawrence—the 'Youth' chapter is printed here—he sprang gallantly to the de- fence of Mr Morel, a genial earthy man from whom Paul-Lawrence 'inherited what was glowing and tender in his nature' and he gave-Miriam the benefit of every doubt— both were victims of Mrs Morel's ruthless will and of Paul's frantic, insensitive attempts to justify himself. 'He needed [his mother] to protect him against the fear which over- whelmed him when he rose above the will into the imagination. She had wrapped him round in her will. and Miriam took the wrap- pings off, and so his need of Miriam was always followed by a recoil of fear .
The Best of Hugh Kingsmill also contains an amusing short novel, a few parodies, a number of essays and a long extract from a book in which Shakespeare returns to earth and comments on his plays in relation to his own life and development—a difficult subject which, for all its wide sweep over the plays, doesn't to my mind really come
off, the modern Shakespeare's mind inevit- ably lacking the note of wild adventurous- ness one supposes as belonging to its original, the conversation being a bit stilted, and the 'explanations' dubious: '1 feel Elizabeth in Caesar's senile conceit and vacillation.'
My own favourite is the selection from After Puritanism, a wonderful Orwellian account of Victorian attitudes to childhood; the one I like least the study of power in The Poisohed Crown which, despite a splen- did credo at the end, seems altogether too sweeping. Of the period 1880-1930, for in- stance: all the world-wide reputations . . . were made by men who drew attention to themselves by denying the individual and exalting the community—Shaw, Kipling and Wells, Lenin, Mussolini and Hitler'. One can't help murmuring 'Ibsen, Proust Joyce . . . ?'
Amongst Mr Holroyd's shadowy hopefuls Hugh Kingsmill is not, I think, quite of cabinet rank but would be a powerful can- didate for a junior post in the Home Office (what other department really matters for a writer, except possibly foreign affairs?) of which the late E. M. Forster is still the charming, indispensable, if incorrigibly reluctant head.
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