In become a footnote to other men's lives is a
common enough literary fate; to become a footnote to your own is an irony so crushing that the egocentric Gilbert Cannan, had he foreseen his destiny, would surely have found it too much to bear. Cannan interests US today in the degree to which he encroaches on the biographical preserves of better-remembered men. He flits through the recollections of Shaw, Wells, Murray, Swinnerton, Russell, Compton Mackenzie, Galsworthy, Lytton Strachey and D. H. Lawrence, several of whom at various Points in their careers and in Cannan's accepted him, if not quite as an artistic equal, then at least a force to be reckoned With. For fifty years now Cannan's incarnations have been vicarious. Modern playgoers who see Shaw's Fanny's First Play Probably don't know or care that the critic Gunn is based closely on Cannon, right down to his notorious remark about 'the most ordinary sort of old-fashioned Ibsenite drivel'. Cannan turns up again in Compton Mackenzie's The South Wind of Love, Where, in the flimsy disguise of Frederick Rodney, his pacifism during the first world War is held up to affectionate ridicule. And third, of course, Cannan is the rosy cloud of romanticism floating on the horizon of J. M. Barrie's glum life, winning the neglected affections of Mrs Barrie, standing by her during the divorce, marrying her like a true English gentleman, and living long enough to regret what he came to regard as an act of misplaced chivalry.
Seen in the half-light of the revelations of Others, Cannan has always appeared to a casual reader to be a highly attractive, Interesting, rather likeable chap, whose one Chance of salvation, his writing, was lost When the balance of his mind was destroyed; Cannan spent the last thirty-five Years of his life in various institutions. The thought is almost macabre that he should have lived on until 1955, by which time the literary epoch in which he figures so prominently had become dusty history for research scholars. None of his books has been in print for a generation at least, and were it not for the recollections of his more fortunate contemporaries, his name would Mean nothing at all to the modern readers. As things are, Cannan enjoys a curious status as the perpetual supernumerary, the Mysterious blonde romantic who hovers ever the dramas of others without ever quite alighting on solid ground.
The effect of Mrs Farr's book, however, is disconcerting. What seemed engaging and even tragic in the half-light is perceived to be something very different when fully illuminated. Cannan could be a vicious critic, and succeeded in alienating even the most genial of men. As a writer, his pretensions appear to have soared far above his limitations, and Mrs Farr, who resists referring to messianic tendencies until the last few pages, might well have succumbed much earlier with justification. Even his great moment of romantic glory, the marriage to Mrs Barrie, is spoilt by the doubts attaching to the motives of the interested parties. Was Barrie really pushing an unwanted wife into Cannan's convenient arms? Was Cannan gulled by Mrs Barrie's cunning into the liaison? Was his marriage to her ever consummated? Was his romance with anyone ever consummated? The questions are vital to any consideration of Cannan, because it would seem from Mrs Farr's tightly controlled narrative that Cannan might have eluded the demands of his own flawed temperament had he only had the gift of holding one woman to him. Not one but several slipped from his grasp, and one feels that there were at least three who might have proved to be his salvation.
There is, of course, a fourth example of Cannan's vicarious fame, and that is the famous declaration of March 1914, in which Henry James named Cannan as one of the four young novelists whose work was likely to be significant. (The other three were Mackenzie, Walpole and Lawrence.) Was James so wrong? The question is difficult for the reader to answer for the simple reason that it has become impossible to lay hands on any of Cannan's books without considerable effort. In fifteen years Cannan published twenty-seven books, and it is one of the great virtues of Mrs Farr's account that she guides us through the labyrinth of allusion and caricature to explain to us how Cannan used the two sections of his experience, family background and literary
friendship, to create his novels. For his friends it must have been like dining with a cannibal, for every one of them was at last reduced to the two-dimensional life of a character in a Cannan novel.
The most famous of these was Round the Corner, which explores the Manchester Cannan family background. I remember reading it in my teens and giving up halfway through because of a sensation of dry ness. The fault may well have lain with the reader and not the writer; it would be interesting if some temerarious publisher would give us all another chance. Mrs Farr, a fam ily connection of Cannan's, manages to reconcile deep sympathy with critical sob riety, and if at the end of it all there remains a desire to cross over to the other side of the street, it is perhaps because not only Can nan, but everyone else too, appears to have behaved so badly. The biggest surprise of all is the fall from grace of Mrs Barrie, trans formed here from the innocent victim of Barrie's oedipal wounds to the predatory older woman ensnaring her prey. Cannan would have written a novel about it.
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