The saddest and gayest of beings
Peter Levi
TOO DIRTY FOR THE WINDMILL: A MEMOIR OF CARYL BRAHMS by Caryl Brahms and Ned Sherrin
Constable, £12.95
Caryl Brahms was my closest cousin and favourite relation, and this book ends with a longish poem by me lamenting her. She looked like a Shakespearean sparrow inhabited by the ghost of one of those searing Jewish sages from Pirke Aboth. She never ceased to dazzle and amaze, as she had set out to do from childhood, and now she has done it again with her memoirs, edited in lively dialogue by Ned Sherrin after her death in 1982. She was then three days off 81. We scarcely shared a background, since I was 30 years young- er, and in youth not allowed to meet her as she was thought to be bohemian. When we did meet, she seemed as grand and as kindly as the Queen Mother. I began to discover other levels of her mind only as we sat over tea in the old Mitre and an academic procession passed by. 'Look', she said, as pleased as a little girl, 'there go the dear old boys in their drag.'. I was simple enough to ask her if she knew what the word meant.
I have never know anyone so generous to the young, so devoted to the great in literature and the theatre, or so male- volently witty. Some of the jokes were not so funny, but many were extremely funny, and the same hit or miss quality ran though her literary production and is apparent in this book. But at her best and at the book's best, she was memorable. She was also appealingly vulnerable. She had brief affairs and very long amities amoureuses, but 'not marriage, not that thing', as I recollect her hissed advice. She was a creature of the Twenties, for better and worse. She once longed to be a ballet star, but her body was the wrong shape. She worked intensely hard to master English prose, but I think she knew how short she fell. And yet we have not heard the last of her writings. She was popular on a scale most of us only dream about and that comforted her, but she often had prepost- erously bad luck, and time is going to
rectify that. Much of her work will be revived.
She worked best in collaboration, screaming with laughter in motor cars under the Blitz. She was extraordinarily gallant, the unlikeliest of air-raid wardens and negotiators of overdrafts at four banks at once. Her collaborators were S. J. Simon and Ned Sherrin; she had a standing ovation in a New York theatre, but her professional life was a crater-studded bat- tlefield. And yet she never lost her inner tranquility. She understood Chekhov bet- ter than anyone else I have known or read, and a large part of her memory was full of Shakespeare, who was her god. She was the saddest and gayest of human beings. This book is full of anecdotes, many of them new to me. She used to write the captions of Low's cartoons in the Standard, but the Italian embassy complained about her calling a dog Mussolini, so she com- promised at Musso. When S. J. Simon was passed fit for conscription she said 'But you've got flat feet.' Not at all, my dear, too much trouble to lift them.' Two of her friends were bishops; she called Mervyn Stockwood 'the third if you count Trini- dad'. She wrote of Alec Guinness as a young man that he had the face of a dispirited haddock. When she wanted something from him years afterwards he said that was unforgivable. She asked ho which he was disputing, dispirited or had- dock. He ended his correspondence by telephoning: 'This is Mr Haddock Guin- ness.' These witticisms crackle, they do not purr, they resound on an emptiness, like so many of Oscar Wilde's. Some of them are revealing about other people, T. E. Lawr- ence and Eddie Marsh, for instance, but seldom about herself. Of herself she shows shyness, embarrassment, high spirits and 3 sort of despairing love of life. She is poised, not posed, and mysteriously deep where she meant to be enigmatic. Her public manner was brittle but her personal- ity was not. In her fifties and sixties she liked to drive around the City at night thanking heaven the Blitz had left so much of it, and to watch St Paul's by moonlight from Wren's house on the south bank close to the spot where Shakespeare's theatre once stood.
Her memoirs are mostly a writer's diary but they do also contain, and Ned Sherrill has patiently supplemented, a rather com- plete skeleton of her life. This is the part 1 thought I knew best and which surPrlse,s me most. The photographs are wonderfully evocative, particularly of our grandparent who came from Constantinople and had 21 children, and of the wooden house on Canvey Island like every holiday house we ever took. Best of all is adorable uncle Ned, who is said to have married a girl; from a sweet shop, securing his parents permission by pretending that she Was • and pregnant. They lived into their eighties a
died within a few days of each other. 'le` had crazes for stamp-collecting, or motor
boats or, in this picture evidently, for cameras. The motor boats went to Dun- kirk. Caryl's own photographs show a for- midable child, a sweet young girl and a saddened, quizzical old lady. Somehow the child re-emerged. Ned's and Caryl's most successful mo- ment was probably That Was The Week That Was. It is hard now, as it is with so many of their works, to recall just how original they were, and in what choppy waters they sailed. I well remember their being shut down at one stage for fear of their influencing a general election. Caryl was praised often, but never, I think, seriously criticised. Her writing was thought to be zany, or out of date, or before its time, or just to dissolve like bubbles in the brisk airstream of life. Her reputation was largely by word of mouth. She was not a monumental writer but her Chekhov book and her collected criticism and several of her fictions and dramatic writings have a durable quality. So I think have these memoirs. If they were less patchy, they would be less alive. Like many of the best memoirs of the last 200 years, they open into more worlds than one and show them in unexpected rela- tionships.
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