Ambivalent
Francis King
Angela Thirkell: Portrait of a Lady Novelist Margot Strickland (Duckworth £5.95) On the first occasion that I met Angela Thirkell, she complained at length to me about her 'char' (as she called her). 'I'm prepared to put up with all the cups of tea but I'm not prepared to talk to her while she drinks their'. This morning I had to listen for at least quarter of an hour while she told me all about her husband's illness. If it weren't so difficult to get any kind of domestic help these days, I'd have told her that I had better things to do.' A monster, I decided; and no subsequent meeting caused me to modify this initial view of her. The razor of her tongue was whetted on what had become, by her middle years, a stone of a heart.
Yet, as Mrs Strickland skilfully demonstrates, Angela Thirkell had been capable, as a young woman, of dangerously spontaneous passion, not once but twice. Meeting James Campbell McInnes, a then famous singer of romantically working-class origins, she at once fell for his heroic looks and latent savagery so different from the languid refinement of many of the young men whom she usually encountered. She was not to know that he was bisexual by nature, sharing his bachelor life with a soft, delicate-featured composer, Graham Peel, who had considerable private means. The pressure of marriage to a woman so exacting and domineering aggravated his chronic alcoholism. Worse, he raped the nursemaid in the dining-room — the girl, in the manner of those times, was at once packed off home to her mother with a week's wages — and even boasted to his wife of having done so. In later years Colin, the younger of two sons by the marriage, showed that he had inherited from this father more than his magnificent looks and his charm.
After having made one such mistake, Angela Thirkell made another, less dramatic but no less disastrous, when she married a young Australian officer, some years younger than herself, who, wounded in the first World war, was a fellow guest of the Glenconners at Wilsford Manor. While convalescing at Glamis, George Thirkell had already struck up a friendship with the seventeen-year-old Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, later to become the wife of George VI, and there must have been many times when, chivvied, nagged and snubbed by a wife who soon came to hate and despise Australia, he must have wished that it was she and not Angela whom he had married. Graham McInnes, the older of his two stepsons, has written superbly about these Australian years; Mrs Strickland cannot rival him; but nonetheless she succeeds in bringing out all the pathos of a situation which had, in the words of Angela Thirkell herself, become 'just like a bad American novel'. Stalking her suburban cage like an enraged lioness, the Englishwoman savaged anyone who tried to come too close to her and even repudiated her wretched husband's sexual overtures.
After the inevitable, if long-delayed, failure of this marriage too, Angela returned to England, taking her young Thirkell son with her but abandoning the two McInnes boys to their stepfather. At once, with admirable courage and determination, she embarked on the literary career that was to bring her so much success and money. It was Colin's view that, from the moment that she left Thirkell and began to turn out her novels, usually two to a year, she lost all true capacity for feeling. She had suffered a grievous wound: the wound, not of losing a husband, but of having to make public acknowledgement that she, who set such a value on good sense, should have acted, not once but twice, with a total lack of it. She was also acutely sensitive about her ambivalent position in society — to which she was always eager to conform. The general view of the time was that to lose one husband might be a misfortune but to lose two looked suspiciously like flightiness.
Even during her lifetime it was generally acknowledged that here was a novelist who worked embarrassingly close to her own experiences and those of the people about her. Both her handsome publisher, Jamie Hamilton, and her beloved and admired friend, Lady Wemyss, appeared, thinly disguised, a number of times in her books. Neither of them had cause for complaint; but there was an elderly governess, Miss Bennet, who was transposed into Miss Bunting, much to the fury of her employer, Lady Helen Smith, who had entertained Angela Thirkell at Bere Court at the instigation of Ian Robertson (future Keeper of the Ashmolean). Robertson broke off his friendship with the novelist.
I think that Mrs Strickland tends to underestimate the novels. She calls them 'middle-class novels for middle-brow tastes'; but even today the majority of novels that reach the best-seller lists are precisely that. For the present Angela Thir kell's snobbery, anti-semitism and increas ingly right-wing views tend to alienate many readers; but with the passing of the years all these things will — as in the case of her cousin, Kipling — be seen merely as the outdated attitudes of an era and will in no way detract from the liveliness of her style, the incisiveness of her characterisation and the sharpness of her wit. I foresee a revival for her, similar to that now enjoyed by E.F. Benson.
Mrs Strickland has an irritating habit of padding out her narrative with the flock of public events no more relevant to Angela Thirkell's life than to that of anyone else in England at that period. She is also some times careless. Ralph Vaughan Williams is consistently given a hyphen. The Kaiser is described as attending the 'unveiling' of the Albert Memorial in 1911, though that monument was completed in 1864. She is under the impression that Lady Ritchie, who lived on into the 'twenties of this century, was Thackeray's sister, not his daughter.
But these few blemishes apart, she has produced a strong, solid biography of a strong, solid woman. That she has failed to make her likeable, let alone lovable, is not surprising; that she has found much that was admirable in her is testimony to the breadth of her sympathy.
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