Aspects of the novelist
Timothy Brittain-Catlin
FAMILY QUARTET by John Catlin Hamish Hamilton, f12.95 Ibelieve that most parents refer to their mothers as 'granny' or 'grandma': my father, John, always called Vera Brittain `the Novelist'. One of my last memories of him before his early death this year was his delighted exclamation as we looked across the Thames from his childhood home on the Chelsea Embankment to the Buddhist pagoda opposite: 'How appropriate it should be', he declared, 'that the shrine of peace should be erected so close to the home of the late-lamented, blessed, femin- ist, pacifist Novelist'.
The distancing of himself from his pa- rents began in his teens; by the time they died he had quarrelled badly with both of them. He was proud of the fact that they had hoped that a liberated, independent childhood would result in a son who thought as they did and that he had proved them wrong. He ignored the flood of letters — including those published as Humiliation with Honour, dedicated pub- licly t6 him — and he ignored their advice on career and family. He collected books to look at the pictures, and through them lived in a world of his own devising full of baroque palaces and gothic follies where there were no feminists on soap-boxes or academics battling with political and social theory.
He believed he was pushed into fantasy. Unlike his sister Shirley, who compensated for the shortcomings of home life by climbing the bookcases or riding the dumb- waiter, he tried to tackle the problem of the Novelist's inaccessibility. Finding her locked in the timeless struggle of Good and Evil, eternally shadowed by her dreadful encounter with a world she did not under- stand, that of the male knights of pre-war chivalry in the process of bloody self- execution, and eventually ground down by the remorseless routine she set herself of replying in duplicate to each of her many correspondents, the young John could attract her attention only by surprising her by reciting invented nonsense. To some extent she returned the compliment, for example giving her children androgynous second names in case either of them turned out to be homosexual. It was hard work living with the Catlins. The late Lord Stockton, an old friend, visiting for dinner in the fifties, chose to go downstairs and listen to a boxing-match on the housekeep- er's radio rather than join their conversa- tion. Winifred Holtby alone, warm, kindly and vivacious in spite of an unsatisfactory love affair that lasted 20 years, had made John feel loved.
By the end of his life my father had at least begun to understand his own father. Lonely, provincial and poor in his upbring- ing, George Catlin had never learnt to get on socially. Political Science, the subject he brilliantly pioneered, was unrecognised in Oxford in the 1920s and he became embittered by the elevation of undergradu- ate colleagues through fellowships to col- lege masterships, and by the bad luck and Labour Party factionalism that obstructed his political career. He tried to compensate by seeking the company of the famous. He bore a striking physical resemblance to Leslie Howard, which he cultivated; after Howard's death during the war he sudden- ly aged 20 years. His early successful years in the United States were clouded by the fact that his wife had seen too many chocolates and flowers doing the social rounds in snobbish Buxton to want to spend her life receiving them as 'the Professor's Wife' in Cornell. She wanted to be in England where her writing was making an impact. Two letters he wrote to her asking for confirmation of her attach- ment to him went accidentally astray: the fact that she never replied seems to have paralysed their marriage at a very critical time. He emerges from this book as a remarkably patient and loyal man.
It is a shame that my father never told us, his sons, about his family while there was time for us to talk to him and to them. He has ignored various rumoured and advertised suggestions that he was going to implicate his mother in a lesbian rela- tionship, or 'reveal' something about Shir- ley. What he does reveal, inadvertently, is much sadder — that for something like three generations this family has failed to live a close-knit family life. Old familial traits recur. Great-grandfather Brittain be- came excessively self-indulgent in middle age: taking premature retirement he did increasingly little apart from his obsessive household accounting and finally he threw himself off Kew Bridge. My father, like- wise, took to a sort of self-indulgence of extreme austerity, punctuated only by fre- quent church visits; he kept away from his original family and maintained absurd sleeping hours. If he saw his father as Professor Higgins, he himself acted Pygmalion: he discovered happiness only in his second marriage, he says, to his secretary from Stoke-on-Trent who he thought spoke in a Home Counties accent and took around the world when my mother had had to be content with Sandbanks and Frinton.
This is, as one would expect from an inexperienced writer, a jerky and repeti- tive book; it is, however, crammed with the sort of details that make up a compre- hensive picture of a small family's life. There is a lot more to say: for example about the tragedy of Edward Brittain, the heroic brother of Testament of Youth, nicknamed by his men 'the Immaculate of the Trenches'. His death whilst in the process of undergoing court-martial pro- ceedings for a homosexual affair with another officer is open to reinterpretation. Such facts are being addressed in Vera's authorised biography by Paul Berry and Mr Auberon Waugh's sparkling new pro- tégé Mark Bostridge. Until that appears next year, my father has a chance of achieving what he never did in his lifetime — to be thought of as someone in his own right. Even the strange fact that he died on the same day of the week, as well as the same day of the month, as the Novelist, had threatened to deprive him of that.
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