NEW AUTOBIOGRAPIP;PS:
Glow and glimmer
PATRICK ANDERSON
My Father's• Son Frank O'Connor (Macmillan 42s) A Few Selected Exits Gwyn Thomas (Hutchin- son 30s) The Years of Promise Cecil Roberts (Hodder 42s) It was Matthew Arnold who said that if you want a lot of great writers you must first get yourself a 'national glow of life and thought' such as existed in the age of Sophocles or Shakespeare. A single very good writer could, however, be produced by no more than an intellectual atmosphere, a current of fresh and animating ideas. Goethe was a case in point: 'the creation of a modern poet . . . implies a great critical effort behind it.' Wordsworth was inferior to Goethe because he didn't know (or read) enough.
All this is too grandiose to be strictly relevant to the literary autobiographies and memoirs under review—its scholarly idealism is difficult to apply anyway. Our modern cosmopolitanism discounts the 'national,' our theories of the genesis of works of art emphasise unconscious motivation, and we are aware nowadays of Mallarmes reply to Degas, that poems are made not with ideas but with words. Neverthe- less I couldn't help reading the late Richard Aldington's Life for Life's Sake with the thought that this minor poet, novelist and scholar was a child of his guttering age in his sense of isolation, his loyalty to little but the 'republic of letters,' his choice of that 'current of ideas' which would protect him from the worst excesses of modernity and at least remind him of the 'glow' to be found in Greek or Latin and in the civilised productions of the Italian Renaissance and the French eighteenth cen- tury. The critical efforts of his friends Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence—all men who looked outside Britain--helped to give him his Arnoldian nourishment. Society was bitterly disrupted: belonging was 'difficult (Aldington lived much abroad before emigrat- ing to the States); creation tended to be rootless.
To turn to the late Frank O'Connor's second volume of memoirs, My Father's Son, is to be immediately entranced by the grace, speed, humour and poetry of writing which combines literary history with what must be the very best of Irish gossip. As O'Connor, a working-class youth with a revolutionary background and the ability to speak Irish and to translate its poetry, moves off from his slum in Cork to various librarianships, friendships with Yeats and A.E., and then a position on the board of the Abbey Theatre during difficult days, one becomes aware of a cohesiveness, a cosiness, at times a claustrophobia, which suggest, even after 1922, a distinct national glimmer, if no longer a positive glow of life and thought.
The Irish Revival never had, perhaps, a very strong current of ideas, let alone ideas drawn, as Arnold hoped, from the best of the thought of all Europe; and after the death of Synge and Augusta Gregory, in the days of Yeats's deellning-vigour, what current there was thinned to a shallow lake reflecting the vivid faces of a number of highly individual characters. Yet,
compared with Aldington's self-insulating geniuses (Ezra in Rapallo, Lawrence at Taos), how rooted they all seem! Of course they intrigue and quarrel endlessly. The shy, formal and devious Yeats has a love-hate relationship with the furiously affectionate A.E., 'drooling and beaming.' The Irish language scholars score off each other. The wildly indiscreet F. R. Higgins sets traps for the melancholic Lennox Robinson. The Abbey is torn between compet- ing with the Gate by presenting international plays and sticking to the old peasant farces. No one is at all happy with the Establishment of priests, politicians and puritans. Indeed, A.E., the father of three generations of poets, shouts, 'I have to get out of this country before it drives me mad,' and departs to die in England.
As for Wales, it has, so far as I know, pro- duced some excellent writers but as yet no revival. I shudder to think what Arnold would have said of Mr Gwyn Thomas's A Few Selected Exits. Mr Thomas is a nice man and has, I understand, many admirers both as a novelist and as a wry self-absorbed comic on the telly. To me he gives the impression of someone enormously lonely and self-conscious who is impelled to be funny at all costs. The result is an absolutely relentless stream of wise- cracks and picturesque turns of phrase, good, bad and indifferent, whose effect is as embarrass- ing and fatiguing as the attention-getting exhi- bitionism of a child. If only he would give his real freshness and sympathy a chance and drop his pose as the universal fall-guy. Holy Week in Seville produces this : 'Women with so many flowers in their hair they move in a double-yoke of dandruff and hay fever.'
I am afraid one doesn't get much more evi- dence of ideas or cultural glow from Mr Cecil Roberts's The Years of Promise. This is a fluent, not to say exuberant, account of a careerist young clerk from Nottingham as he began to bound up the ladder of success by writing poems, giving public speeches and working as a journalist during the First World War. Not too pleasant a time for the display of boyish euphoria, one has to admit, noticing a photo- graph of Prince George of Battenberg and his wife brooding over phrases about servicemen such as The muscles of their lithe young bodies slid rhythmically under the satin flesh . . . Twenty-one, with a flame-like mind, physically handsome. . . . I felt he had his hands firmly on the driving wheel of life,' and then turning to the poems printed, sub-Georgian and semi- Brooke as they rather expectedly are.
No, it is the Aldington and the O'Connor which matter. It is tragic to think that the English publication of the first was delayed for no fewer than twenty-eight years (Aldington himself died in 1962) because there is far more generosity to this book than to the carping studies of Lawrence of Arabia and of Norman Douglas, and it is good to hear a man one had thought embittered speaking so much of the enjoyment of life. Here we have the Imagist Movement, originating in 'the prissy milieu of some infernal bun-shop full of English spin- sters'; a brief but pungent reference to war service; much scholarship and translation of a sort one imagines unlikely to lead to celebrity; and attractive divagations into Berkshire local history and the delights of travel abroad. But the book will be most valuable for its sympa- thetic portraits of D. H. Lawrence, T. S. Eliot, the helpful but crotchety Ezra and Ford Madox Ford, who was so roughly handled in Heming- way's memoirs.
Frank O'Connor's autobiography, is more personal than Aldington's, and is written with greater charm, but although O'Connor was a more consistently imaginative author—in one sense 'glow' as compared with 'ideas,' human sympathy with scholarship and satire—My Father's Son tells us less about the author than about his family and friends. The Yeats, in particular, is a superb evocation.
Previous page
