Limited success

Joanna Richardson

The Constant Novelist A Study of Margaret Kennedy (1896-1967) Violet Powell (Heinemann £10.95)

Margaret Kennedy was born in Hyde Park Gate on St. George's Day, 1896. She was the daughter of a barrister, Charles Moore Kennedy, and she was the eldest of his four children. When she was still a small girl, her father decided that he would prefer the life of a country gentleman to that of an under-occupied barrister, and the family moved to High House, at Leaves Green, a Kentish village not far from Biggin Hill. There was a legend that the house had been a private lunatic asylum; certainly it had a depressing influence on Margaret.

Isolation!

Desolation!!

Desperation!!!

Cut off from the nation, Five miles from the station . . .

So she confessed in verse at the age of eleven and a half.

But oh! [she ended] it is so awfully Triste Up here.

The sadness and the isolation vanished in the summer, when the children were taken on holiday to Cornwall; perhaps the young Margaret hoped that boarding school would give her a wider, more exciting life. It was at her own request that she was sent to Cheltenham Ladies' College in 1912, three months before her 16th birthday. She took against the College at once, but recognised the excellence of the education, and worked hard enough to go up to Oxford in 1915.

It was a remarkable generation at Somer- ville. Dorothy L. Sayers was to give a glimpse of it in Gaudy Night. Small wonder that the Press referred to 'the Somerville School of Novelists.' Winifred Holtby swept down the corridors ('tall and dignified, a Norse goddess — if one can im- agine a Norse goddess with a little eye-veil on her impeccable hat'). Vera Brittain was busy gathering material for Testament of Youth.

Occasionally at lectures [she wrote] 1 met a girl who was then in her last term „ . waiting to take her History Finals; I never spoke to her, but I carried away a definite impression of a green scarf, and dark felt hat negligently shading a nar- row, brooding face with arrogant nose and stormily reserved blue eyes; it was Margaret Kennedy.

One afternoon, an admiring Somervillian by the name of Hilda Mellor 'was most flat- tered when Margaret asked me to go with her for a walk round the Meadows, and I must have been the first to hear what she

always referred to as an idee for a book. Much later, I realised that this was the germ from which grew The Constant Nymph.'

Margaret Kennedy took a second-class degree in history, and plunged immediately into her literary career. She started with a distinct advantage. On the recommendation of A. L. Smith, the Master of Balliol, she was commissioned to write A Century of Revolution: an account of French history between the fall of the Bourbons and the collapse of the Second Empire. The book was published by Methuen in 1922; the following year there appeared her first novel, The Ladies of Lyndon: a romantic, ironic story set in the last days of the Ed- wardian age. In some ways, it has been observed, Margaret Kennedy never did anything quite so accomplished again. She herself once told a reporter that 'the memory of its appearance is sweeter even than the success of The Constant Nymph.' But it was The Constant Nymph, in 1924, which caught the public imagination so for- cibly that over the next five years a million copies were sold.

Margaret Kennedy was 28, and a celebri- ty. However, as Violet Powell writes, 'the determination that success and consequent personal fame should not go to her head kept Margaret's eyes firmly fixed on the Sales in Knightsbridge, and averted from the slightly more dashing shops.' She was dowdy, but it did not matter. In 1925, while she was dramatising her novel, she also married David Davies, a young barrister who had been one of Asquith's secretaries and was in time to become a K.C., a judge, and a knight.

Two daughters and a son were born, and there began a life of 'highly civilised' dinner-parties at Campden Hill Square (`the food was cream of tomato soup, boil- ed trout, ham on pineapple, saddle of mut- ton and chestnut pudding (a failure). Everybody like the ham on pineapple.') Everybody included Arnold Toynbee and his wife (the daughter of Gilbert Murray), Mr and Mrs Mackail (related to Stanley Baldwin and Rudyard Kipling), and Sir Leonard and Lady Woolley (Ur of the Chaldees). Margaret, we are told, 'was pleased that she had provided David with his ideal dinner-party, all the men distinguished and all the women well-bred.' However, 'she was getting accustomed to a new tooth which she had not dared to leave in place during a dinner-party, so the sense of a gap in her mouth may have been a han- dicap to conversation.'

Her fame increased, her civilised dinner- parties continued, she fraternised with the famous (Elizabeth Bowen, E. M. Forster and L. P. Hartley). She wrote numerous novels and five plays (Noel Coward and John Gielgud starred in The Constant Nymph); she was engaged in film work, and she remained very happily married for 39 years. Her husband died in 1964, and she followed him in 1967.

Her life is a story of private and public success, and it might perhaps have inspired a lively book. Alas, the present study is shapeless and very dull. It makes one aware of Margaret Kennedy's defects, rather than her virtues. One sees the un-maternal mother, the social snob, the anti-Semite; she seems strangely limited and strangely dated. Re-reading The Ladies of Lyndon and The Constant Nymph, one is even slightly sur- prised by their success.