4 JUNE 1983, Page 27

Books

The beautiful life

Caroline Blackwood

Mary Berenson: A Self Portrait from her Diaries and Letters Edited by Barbara Strachey and Jayne Samuels (Gollancz £12.95) `She was undoubtedly a Queen' wrote Mary Berenson's niece, Julia Strachey.

She saw her aunt as 'radiantly healthy, brilliantly blooming and resplendently col- oured and fleshed as the summer hollyhocks.' And certainly there is a resplendent quality in Mary's letters and diaries which have now been skillfully edited by her grand-daughter Barbara Strachey.

Mary Smith, who was later to marry the art historian, Bernard Berenson, was born in Philadelphia in 1864. Her father was a Quaker. He was a manic depressive and a fervent preacher who went to England where he became very popular in an era of revivalism. He was eventually debarred his preaching when he started seducing nis disciples. He returned to the United States and lost his faith. He then went into glass manufacturing and proved himself a highly successful salesman. His wife, Hannah, was also a Quaker preacher. She was a violent feminist and she had such a severe mistrust, it almost amounted to a horror, of men. She gave birth to seven children, but Mary was by far her favourite child. Hannah wrote that she would have been 'in raptures' over her son, Logan Pearsall Smith, but 'Mary is so splendid she uses up all my capacity for en- thusiasm.'

Mary soon discarded her mother's religious faith and although Hannah ir- ritated her and she complains that her mother's passion for the Bible 'drives me nearly crazy,' she remained unusually at- tached to her and wrote to her nearly every day. All her life Mary continued to use the Quaker address of 'thee'. In one letter she writes to Hannah, 'Thee can't imagine what solid comfort lies in the thought which is always, always present at the back of my mind, that thee is there.' Freud believed that the son who feels himself to be the undisputed favourite of his mother retains throughout life the feel- ing of a conqueror. Mary Smith was Inusual, for Hannah treated her as certain mothers treat their beloved son, showering her with adoration, and entrusting her with the burden of all her own ambitions and aspirations. This sense of being the unique- ly favoured child certainly seems to have given Mary the feeling of the conqueror. She shows an extraordinary energy in her letters. When she leaves Philadelphia and

goes off to Europe it's as if she is going off to conquer it.

Brilliant, reckless, and ebullient, she rushes at life as if she is making a headlong military charge by which she hopes to cap- ture every possible aspect of experience.

She first marries an English Catholic lawyer called Frank Costello and she moves to London where she finds that 'most mar- ried women here are stupid and foolish to a degree that is hard for an American woman to realise.' Mary gives birth to two girls, Ray and Karin, and then she starts to become bored, and restless, and depressed, feeling the marriage is allowing no outlet for her intelligence and resenting the way her time is being wasted in dreary domestic routines.

In her journal Mary says of Costello, 'I feel quite sure that there could not be a more unselfish, self-sacrificing husband. I am far more selfish in every way. Yet whose life is it we lead? Frank's of course . .

She complains that her husband has 'had his splendid education — he cannot con- ceive what it is to be without it — and con- stantly feeling the lack ...'

She then meets the brilliant, handsome Bernard Berenson and falls passionately in love with him. She leaves Frank Costello and her little daughters and she goes off to Italy to live with him.

To her five year old daughter, Ray, she writes to explain why she has left. 'I love thee more than anybody else in the world, except myself. People do not usually tell the truth and say they love themselves most of all ... Now that I have found studying on my own is what I really like to do, I do not want to give it up in order to stay with thee all the time ... '

Mary takes a new lover startlingly soon after she has broken up her marriage for love of Berenson. When this relationship breaks up she has an affair with Bertrand Russell while he is engaged to her sister, Alys, whom he later married.

'Love in whatever form it comes is a God,' she writes, 'and even if it destroys all one's so called "moral nature", it remoulds the world "nearer to the heart's desire". Why should we put faithfulness above it?'

There is sometimes something rather ruthless about her desire to seize every possible pleasure out of life, but she writes so well and she is so honest as to her motives that she manages to pull the reader on to her side.

Berenson also wanted to be always in love; the marriage was therefore a very stor- my one and there was much pain and in- fidelity and jealousy on both sides. Beren- son resented and disliked, first her children, and later her grand-children, and this created much dissension between them. These letters provide a fascinating portrait of a very complex, in many ways agonising, yet lasting relationship. They both shared a passion for art and had the same dream of `the beautiful life'. With Berenson, Mary was able to study and realise her ambition of becoming a respected art historian and expert in her own right. Together they created a luxurious, cultured, now legen- dary world at the Villa I Tatti.

As a writer, Berenson relied very heavily on Mary, recognising that her style was much better than his and her role in regard to his work was that of best friend and severest critic. 'Today B.B. handed me over his manuscript for correction. Correcting his writing is one of the things I least enjoy doing ... It is an absolute mystery to me how he cannot at least say things in a straightforward manner and how he, who I know is so extremely sensitive to bad style in what he reads, crowds his pages with confused and ungrammatical sentences, and occasionally offends seriously against good taste by some occult jibe, dripping with jocose bitterness. The worst of it is that when I attempt to eliminate these jeers and sneers he gets into a perfect fury. He has developed the theory that I have ruined his style, that if I encouraged him to let loose all the fury and rage that he feels against his fellow-connoisseurs he would have been a second Carlyle in invective (the thirty-fourth way in which I have "ruined his life" !!!)' Berenson suffered from persecution mania and was always going into fearful rages. The end of this book is darkened by his ghastly uncontrollable tantrums. Mary, despite her enthusiasm for life, had a strong depressive streak; the fury that her husband directed at her, the barrage of criticism to which she was subjected every day, plunged her into despair. Both the Berensons had nervous breakdowns.

`B.B.'s rage was awful,' Mary writes. 'He fell on his knees and made shocking faces at me. He beat his head on the wall and shook his fists at me and called me a selfish brute who never considered his feelings, selfish, inconsiderate and always working against him ... Of course it is pathological and I try to estimate it that way. But the nerve shock of those faces and gestures and that high voice — yes, and the things he says hurt something deeper than reason.'

Berenson emerges from his wife's letters as rather an unpleasant and babyish character. But then he has no opportunity to give us his side.

'He says if he had life to live all over again he would try to marry a woman who had no other thought but Himself,' Mary complains. 'How can men be such mon- strous fools? I am sure wives would be only too glad to merge their existences in their husbands' if they could, but human nature isn't made so, and alas, men are not so ab- sorbing as all that, except in that fatal period of being in love.'

Yet when Mary gets so desperate she feels she is going to kill herself after one of her young lovers leaves her, she writes to Beren- son that she will die if he stays away from her. And when she is close to death from a fever she 'manages 'to pull herself back to life when he kneels by her bed and begs her not to desert him.

In her last years Mary becomes increas- ingly pessimistic. She is constantly oppress- ed by her sense of life's futility. She writes to Berenson: 'This summer I have begun to realise the incessant necessary small services that make our lives what they are. I watch Barbara's delightful nurse a great deal, and see her washing and mending and tidying up and cleaning and then beginning it all over again — the whole of a human being's time just to keep one child good and clean and her clothes and surroundings dainty. I look on amazed, as at a sort of miracle, to think that all our lives mean this, all along, one way or another. Are we ants or bees to support the existence of this ceaseless small toiling, over and over again? I cannot ex- plain to thee how it makes me feel — almost as if civilisation were a leaky raft kept crazi- ly afloat a force de minutes soins, never en- ding, using up the time and strength of our fellow-creatures baling out the leaking-in water . .

Mary Berenson had a horror of tedium and she retained some kind of lasting love for Bernard because, despite his frequently outrageous behaviour, he was the only man who never bored her. And reading her vivid, frank, intelligent letters, one has the wonderful feeling that one is in the com- pany of an extraordinary and highly-gifted woman who is never, for a moment, going to bore one.