Private lives
PETER VANSITTART
Edward Thomas: A Critical Biography William Cooke (Faber 50s)
My Life and Times: Octave 9 Compton Mackenzie (Chatto and Windus 45s) My Father: Joseph Conrad Borys Conrad (Calder and Boyars 35s) A Suppressed Cry Victoria Glendinning tRoutledge 25s)
The Twentieth Century: A Personal Record R. H. Mottram (Hutchinson 30s)
Interest in Edward Thomas remains: Mr Cooke lists a considerable and continuing bibliography. Rejected by Marsh and Monro (Monro regarded Prufrock as 'absolutely inane'), for de la Mare he `ennobled by sim- plification', and for Leavis 'he was a very original poet who devoted great technical subtlety to the expression of a distinctly modern sensibility'. His life was a pilgrimage of anxiety, poverty, overwork, which menaced a disposition in which-self-criticism too often became self-contempt. 'You are a poet or nothing,' Robert Frost told him, but hack-work almost overwhelmed him. A single week's reviewing could include fifteen books including a life of Tchaikowski, a folio Chaucer, a new Keats, the Heptameron, the Decameron. Between 1910 and 1912 he published to order twelve prose books. Mr Cooke examines all this and shows too much of the prose stuffed with what his verse dis- dained: verbosity, literary ornamentation, self-indulgence. 'My imaginings ail all in a cupboard and only my lies are in print.'
Yet his Richard Jeffries won from Q. D. Leavis. 'a classic in critical biography. to stand with Lockhart's Scott and Mrs Gas- kell's Brontë.' His was the first favourable
review Pound received. Mr Cooke shows his developing poetic self, tracing the origin, refinement and completion of individual images and poems through unpublished sketches, diaries, letters, criticism and prose paraphrases in other contexts, and contra- dicts any notion that Thomas wrote no poetry until 'liberated' by the war. One poem is dated 1898. He also upsets the interpreta- tions of some critics who failed to realise that no surviving poem was actually written in France. 'A correct and more meaningful approach would be to explore his decision to enlist ... the whole perspective of his poetry needs to be changed.' (Thomas himself partially blamed his late development on having been taught to read before he could write.) This book does so examine, keeping con- fident balance between the man and the writer, the solitary and the husband. 'Our life.' Helen Thomas was to write, 'was ter- rible and glorious but always life.' Thomas rejected his first enthusiasms, Pater, Swin- burne, Wilde, as having drained words of life and movement, reducing them to helpless tin soldiers. Here he can be seen, winning or losing campaigns to make words not describe but become the animals, quarrels, friend- ships, landscapes, walks, chance meetings that provoked his real work. Like the gradual, sometimes unsteady stripping of willow, even in sleep.
Compton Mackenzie's latest Octave, apparently his hundredth book, not counting his contributions to a Flook comic strip, is a less formidable wrestle of soul. Much of it describes travels in Asia and North Africa for his Indian Army book. Sometimes flat as a travelogue, sometimes scornful, tender, funny, it is a mixed bag, filled with letters from the great, mostly of forbidding banality, extracts from previous work, expert obser- vation of flowers, butterflies, birds, energetic comments on taxation, Lord Montgomery,
pagodas, Nepalese elephant-training, Japanese atrocities. 'Any doubts I had about the rightness of dropping the [atomic] bomb vanished after my visit to Malaya.'
He seems to forget nothing: the singular, the dull, the grotesque. 'Kingsley Wood tried hard to put a purchase tax on books and was only deterred by his fear of what the Metho- dist Conference would say if he taxed the Bible.' Notables flit by: Wavell, the Auk, de Valera, Rosamund Lehmann, the Mount- battens, never for long enough to solidify, but minor details expand vividly. In Tunis, 'the most depressing house I'd ever seen,' dark, blighted, gaunt, turned out to be the home of the composer of 'Home, Sweet Home'. He noted that in 'Mandalay', Kipling sited the Moulmein pagoda inaccurately. In the Savoy Hotel he finds a waiter who'd written an excellent book on rare Alpine plants. An Indian store in Burma carried the inscription: 'Always tell the truth. Give up your bad habits. Might is right. God Almighty. Don't spit here. R. A. J. & Co.'
Mr Conrad offers an affectionate close-up of his father, calm in crisis, agitated by trivialities. He has inherited no literary talent nor any very great perception but conveys Conrad's paternal qualities. his devotion, exacting standards, his unflagging interest in children's games. riding on buses, con- versation of tram-drivers and the intrica- cies of cars. The anecdotes are slight but pleasant . . . Wells ignoring Mrs Conrad's long-prepared lunch for a glass of milk and two aspirins, Joseph mistaking a senior officer for a hotel commissionaire, Hugh Walpole turning green. Mrs Glendinning's book is a different matter. Her ancestor, Frederic Seebohm, was a distinguished Victorian historian. His family were enlightened, united, loving. We are shown Winnie, one of his six children, born 1863. She was ardent, impulsive, con- cerned, wanting to break out of the conven- tions of genteel Victorian womanhood, when to button one's glove in public was unseemly, when most domestic duties were merely bad habits, when the visiting-card, the fainting fit, the annual confinement were the degrad- ing climaxes of feminine experience.
She travelled, she visited Tennyson, who kept silent, and Browning, who did not. She went to Newnham. Yet at twenty-two she was dead of some psychosomatic illness, apparently a victim of family love and high- minded ignorance that had aborted a love- affair and consistently forced her to over- control her. emotions. Her ambitions con- flicting with family loyalties, she found the parental domination closing down over her like terrible furniture. Her letters make sad reading, interesting too, for their evidence of early university life for women. Thousands of Winnies must have endured massacre slower but no less crass than that of the men beneath the grim parapets reaching from Sedan to the Somme.
Mr Mottram's book is a gentle survey of public events mingling with his own career as bank clerk, soldier, author, lecturer, Home Guard, Lord Mayor. In 1906 he was earning less than fl weekly, paid twice a year. A music-hall song went, 'Stand Fast, little Japanese, while Big Brother Britain holds your hands.' He was on the blackleg Flying Scotsman when it was derailed by strikers
in 1926, but bore no and tolerantly endured a PEN Congress of mutual hatred at Buenos Aires. His comments are unexcep- tional—though 'pitiful' is surely an inade- quate verdict on Franz-Josef—and his toler- ance, extending even to his four years on the Western Front as a 'temporary gentleman', may surprise those reared on Sassoon, Montague, Owen.
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