Time Exposures
A Matter of Life and Death. By Virgilia Peter- son. (W. H. Allen, 21s.) Scenes from an Armenian Childhood. By Vahan Totovents. Translated by Mischa Kudian. (O.U.P., 15s.) JACK LINDSAY came to England from Australia in 1926, and from then until the early Thirties he was part of London's Bohemian life. He was one of the founders of the Fanfrolico Press and of The London Aphrodite; he either knew, or knew people who knew, the celebrated figures from Tallulah Bankhead to several Sitwells.
All this Mr. Lindsay describes vividly in Fonfrolico and After, the concluding volume of his autobiographical trilogy. Conversations which took place twenty-five years ago are recorded with unnerving confidence, while old but com- plicated anecdotes about the sexual lives of friends and acquaintances are thrown off with an air of still lively interest. And Mr. Lindsay appears to have been in on sonic delicate secrets —he refers en passant to Lawrence's suppressed homosexuality. Though Mr. Lindsay's enthusi- astic and jocular manner runs rather against many of the events he describes—the mental and emotional breakdowns, the sexual intrigues, the quarrels—he manages to build up a picture of what the blurb calls 'the now-fabulous Bohemian days.' A picture, that is, of squalor, pathos and moral irresponsibility: One day, as I was coming home, I met the Owenses, who took me into a pub, and after some embarrassment told me they had been worried by some of the anti-Elzas talking about the need to get rid of her by pushing her under a bus, or something like that. They did not specify which of her enemies had been indulging in this loose talk, which I did not take very seriously, knowing how such schemes can be elaborated in the midnight of booze without having any reality in the hangover dawn. However, I made the mistake of telling Elza what had been said. I did so only because I wanted a good alibi for coming home later than usual with a smell of beer; but in her disturbed condition she was strongly affected and her feeling of being ringed by malignant foes was deepened.
Much as I dislike Mr. Lindsay's book, it does have a weird fascination. Virgilia Peterson's autobiography, though weird, is never fascinat- ing. The facts of her life lie concealed behind a flow of heavy hints and bitter-sweet allusions, but one gathers (mostly by guesswork) that she was born in New York City, and after a tremulous and introspective childhood went to several Ladies' Colleges and then to Grenoble, where she studied French and picked up some useful information on the side—or, in Miss Peterson's idiom : 'If 1 did not learn more than a fraction of what there was to be learned at the Faculty of Letters, I learned all that I was capable of learning in that twentieth year of mine at the Faculty of Love.'
Something came between Miss Peterson and the Polish prince she met there, in spite of the Faculty of Love, and she returned to the States and married, had numerous seedy but genteelly remembered afiaires, got a letter from her Pole (Miss Peterson calls him 'my Pole') and divorced her first husband to marry him. She lived in Poland until the beginning of the war, then re- turned to the States, where she quarrelled with her mother. She fell in love again while making a name for herself as a television in- tellectual, took an overdose of sleeping-pills after making an enigmatic phone call to her lover who was able to rescue her, divorced her Pole and remarried.
All this might have had a certain garish in- terest, but Miss Peterson chooses to recount it in the form of a letter to her dead mother, against whom she holds an only vaguely speci- fied grudge. The sweetly whining parentheses that result are as confusing as the unprovoked meditations on larger subjects. ('Where in the brain, I wonder, is memory scaled?' she rumin- ates at one point. 'Does anyone understand why it sleeps and why it wakes?') Fortunately Miss Peterson is sensitive to language—or as she her- self has it, she is 'accessible to the sonorities of those who converse with eternity.' Her own prose style kept me at the end of my tether.
So finally, and with relief, to Vahan Toto- vents's Scenes from an Armenian Childhood. Totovents, too, has his weird moments: My mother had gone to the shed to milk a cow. She had been gone for a long time and had not yet returned.
'What has become of our sister-in-law?' my aunt suddenly exclaimed. 'She went to the shed and has not yet returned.'
They hurried there and found my mother sitting near the cow, clasping a blue-eyed child to her bosom.
I was that child.
But once past this kind of dramatic simplesse, and the old Armenian saws and metaphors, there is much that is striking. Neither the village in which Totovents lived in the 1890s nor the coun- try as a whole is brought genuinely before us, but the stories of incidents remembered from childhood, vividly and yet serenely told, remain in the mind. And after a time one comes to accept those great, improbable moons and suns, those sentimental stars, as necessary setpicces within a strange convention.
SIMON GRAY
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