BOOKS

A lost crab, sometimes crabby

Colin Welch

THE CAMPBELL COMPANION: THE BEST OF PATRICK CAMPBELL edited and introduced by Ulick O'Connor

Michael Joseph, £12.95

My generation was lucky to have Patrick Campbell (b.1913) towering, stut- tering and marching along about ten years ahead of us — not so much marching, indeed, as 'walking with a slight tendency to drift sideways', recalling, to Frank Muir, `a young lost crab'. West Britons among us read him early on in the old Irish Times, which then still spoke for the descending Anglo-Irish ascendency in the superb prose appropriate to that task. More of us read him later in Lilliput, in humorous essays (or stories?) which, according to Ulick O'Connor in his excellent biographical and critical memoir, 'he perhaps never excel- led'.

We remember not only laughing till the print swam before our eyes but also great swathes of what we laughed at. Patrick Campbell was not one of those restricted it's-not-what-he-says-but-the- way-that-he-says-it raconteurs. Manner and matter, theme and development were co-equal in his hilarious lucubrations. Thus, when precise felicities of phrase become lost, dim or distorted in the memory, the strong lines of comic narra- tion survive, or vice versa. There is always something left to recall with delight, to pass on with confidence to the young.

Later still we read him in the Spectator, `paid the usually miserly Spectator rates' (Oho! £20 apiece — not quite so miserly in 1958); and in the Sunday Times — a `prestigious' paper according to Mr O'Con- nor, who may have said here more than he meant to. Gold from all these golden ages is here collected, marvellous to have; but I don't doubt that there is many times as much of the best still available for sequels.

One minor fault of this collection: pieces are not dated or placed. For instance, Paddy was invited to 'just a quiet evening' in Chelsea: 'we've hardly any rum, but some writers are coming in'. He under- standably did not see how the first situation could be improved by its juxtaposition to the second, but went along anyway. He leant on the door, to fall into a foaming sea not of writers but of white dogs, hundreds of them, so it seemed, leaping, barking and snarling in the darkness. In fact there were only two, of which one held his wrist in a vice-like grip for a whole embarrassing and disastrous soiree. Rum? Rum nowadays sounds rum, but does it not in fact locate the story in that dire epoch under the Attlee terror when only nauseating rum could be got and precious little of that? A date would have helped.

A happy few of us knew him, I myself only very slightly, and will be astonished at Mr O'Connor's assertion that Paddy was curiously incapable of making or keeping friends. A man so gifted should surely have had numberless friends. But Mr O'Con- nor, seemingly a friend himself, denies it and should know. An interesting conun- drum, like the Cretan who asserted that all Cretans are liars. True or false?

In a sense we all knew him from his appearances on the telly, on which often mendacious and misleading medium no one can surely have been more at ease or uniquely and memorably himself. We could all see him as Frank Muir saw him:

unbelievably tall; a few choice hairs the colour of a Kellogg's cornflake; eyes as close together as a pair of cuff-links; when sur- prised, (rearing) up, eyes rounded, the picture of an ostrich which had sat in something.

We could all relish, as Paddy had taught himself to relish and exploit, that 'attrac- tive impediment in [his] speech', as he himself called it. He never permitted the use of the word 'stammer': 'sr in a word presented difficulties for him. 'Ste beat him every time. Importuned by tourists in France — 'Aren't you the one on TV with a stammer?' — he would reply with hauteur, 'I am Dame Edith Evans'. A fluent rendering of, say, 'I am Lytton Strachey' (or Igor Stravinsky) might have been even more persuasive.

What it cost him to make a joke of his impediment we can't know. I dimly recall his account of a baffling encounter with a librarian similarly afflicted. 'Have you got Proust's R-r-r-arah . . ."We have P-per-p- apah . . ."I mean the first v-v-ava-avol . . .' The librarian at last exploded: 'Are you trying to take the per-p-p-per-pah . . .'. Did I read or hear it? The tale is not in this book.

Various manifestations of the impedi- ment are here recorded. For several weeks at a time all that could be emitted would be the 'muted gibbon' cry: 'May I — awah awah awah awash my ahah ahah ahands please?' This was followed by days of `inhalation' in which nothing, not even `oh', could be produced while breathing out. 'This sounded like wind blowing under a door, and it was a sharp man who made anything of it.' An 'impassive' period would follow. Held up, he would abandon all effort to speak, fold his hands neatly on his lap and wait expressionless for the next word to come, like an Elgar theme, from the air around: 'The audience never really knew if the show was over'.

Paddy was invited to a smart lunch to make up the number, and forbidden by his hostess to speak a word: 'I don't want them to think we're mad.' Another guest, also a gagged stammerer, would fill gaps in his discourse and build himself up for further effort with short melodious whistles. At lunch a dreadful silence suddenly fell. Paddy forgot his orders, launched into a long series of muted gibbon calls, 'with rotation', i.e., with the blood-filled head rotating ponderously from left to right and back again. To his horror on one rotation he noted that the whistler, his eyes clamped tight shut, had also got busy, emitting short, piercing trills. In the en- suing strained and strangulated struggles, both would-be conversationalists might well have called for strychnine if they could have got the word out.

It is a favourite and endearing trick of many comic writers thus to make fun of their own amiable failings and incompe- tence. How funny, we think, and what a nice chap. Paddy goes further on occasion, mocking with cool impartiality his own rudeness and acts of cruelty and their victims. He had bullied a boy at Rossall, rubbed a dead rat in his hair. He meets him again in Paris, sponges off him and is subjected to a fearful comic vengeance or is he? The moral of the tale would be clearer if we knew who paid the bill for La Belle Zigzig and the other instruments of his humiliation. To a harmless bore in Bogota he is horribly rude: 'Stuff it up your jumper', he shouts, addressing him there- after in morse code. A nice chap? A friendly old skin? Not entirely, perhaps not always.

For a visit to The Flying Dutchman, the kindly Baronin who keeps his Munich pension thoughtfully equips him with a paper bag full of `blut wurst, sauerkraut and kek'. He drops it superciliously into the umbrella stand in the hall, where it is inevitably and hurtfully found. Why not in a street litter bin outside? These may be some of the funniest tales in the book (they are), but they also artlessly, or honestly or insensitively, reveal a darker side of our man, a heartless contempt for some of the bores and fools who gratuitously supplied his material.

He sponges for a fortnight off a boring young couple — 'you had to talk to them slowly even about the weather'. Primula is pregnant. A Boeotian Irish nurse is sum- moned, who is so importunately garrulous, vulgar, intrusive and familiar that Paddy is ready to kill her and the young couple are forced to dine in their bedroom. Finally, the exasperated husband pitches out both Paddy and Nurse Foley together for 'turn- ing the place into a—a—shillelagh — a bear garden, a shambles or whatever you call it in Ireland.' Paddy is speechless with rage. Lumped and expelled with Nurse Foley! The indignity of it! Ascendancy and bog bundled out unceremoniously together, as if they were just a couple of Milesian sows!

To be loyal to Ireland in a grand way is dignified, but one doesn't like to be re- minded too often or forcibly about what one is loyal to. To have two loyalties, as many of the Anglo-Irish had, may be more dignified still, if one loyalty or the other or both be not betrayed. Paddy's grand Scots- Irish Unionist forebears deftly threw in their lot with the new Ireland, but they showed precious little respect for what they joined and serveci. Paddy himself swiftly left England on 3 September 1939 and joined the Irish Navy. He was later very sensitive about this whole period, Mr O'Connor relates, as indeed a Lord (Gle- navy) might well be. He was 'uncomfort- able' about missing a fearful experience endured by millions of others. We too may regret his decision, if only because in the British forces his humour might have been further enriched by the terror, boredom and incongruity of war.

Paddy's intermittent arrogance must be firmly balanced against his admirable and touching humility as a writer. Every col- umn reduced him to panic; he always feared it would be returned. This insecur- ity, according to Mr O'Connor, 'was at the base of his standard of excellence — he never got to think of himself as too good for his job.' In his memoir Mr O'Connor mentions the names of many great Irish (or Anglo-Irish) writers — as also of Thurber, Leacock, A. J. Liebling and S. J. Perel- man, with whom Paddy was compared. Paddy's gifts fit him for such company, in particular his wonderfully easy prose, cor- rect but informal, based not on wide reading (far from it) but on a typically Irish ear and love for the spoken word. What a blessing in disguise, incidentally, that stam- mer may have been, forcing the young Paddy to write down what otherwise might have been sprayed about, squandered and lost in bars.

From the goodly company two great names are sadly and mysteriously missing, those of Somerville and Ross. These two ladies had so much in common with him: a vigorous and — yes — masculine humour; an unaffected relish for unintellectual com- pany and pursuits, for the physical side of life, for hunting, sailing, race meetings, hunt balls; faultless prose; an unfailing ear for the rhythms and phrasing of the Irish idiom. And they added too a feeling for the beauties of the Irish countryside (as also, in The Real Charlotte, a tragic sense) which Paddy either lacked or rarely expressed.

Why are they not here? Can it be that they are still cold-shouldered, as they were by Irish Catholic literati 40 years ago, as purveyors of 'tasteless buffoonery' at the expense of an Irish people at last liberated, free, respected and self-respecting? It may be so, though it is hard to see why most of the Irish Paddy should not be consigned to the same limbo. Yet it would be a rich literature indeed which could afford to spurn, without loss or self-mutilation, any of them.

After her death, Ross is said to have collaborated still, by supernatural means, with Somerville. As I read Paddy's story `Water! Water!' with its haunting echoes of The House of Fahey, I became strongly aware of their ghostly presence. Were they both still at it, guiding then Paddy's pen? And whose pens are all three guiding now? Someone's, I hope.