BOOKS

The Uses of Obscurity

By WILLIAM GERHARDI

MARVELLING in the glow of turning over a new leaf at a quarrel resolved in mystic bliss by simply blaming himself and exculpating others, Tolstoy then drops a curious aside: 'How, this tempers one's desire for fame!' The ravenous old wolf has bad his fill of fame—no man more. Couldn't he desist, without recourse to first and last things?

What, after all, is fame? One has always been well known to oneself—an acquaintance not made closer by extension. The answer to a writer preoccupied with considerations of his fame is—It's none of your business!' (Being the privilege and pleasure of whomsoever, by d:nt of reading him or general curiosity, it may concern.) For how does it profit a knower of hearts to be puffed up? And, wisely, he wel- comes benign obscurity come to purify him who has had his meed of praise Obscurity is a protective covering hiding the ultimate creative caverns from premature ex- Posure to the public glare. It is like snow, re- vealing, under the pure white mantle, when spring is here, unpredictable surprises. The gruelling question of our daily bread answered vicariously through the potent and unfailing agency of prayer, obscurity opens inner doors, fame shuts them. Chaste obscurity is nothing less than the Artistic Order of monasticism; yet furthered rather than impeded by the incalcul- able dynamics of eroticism—an impact upon the living flesh of concupiscence, conception and generation of human love transmutable into a Work of art with real flesh and blood to animate the body of desire.

It follows that no seasoned writer should attempt his magnum opus save under cover of Obscurity. And, rightly, Olivia Manning was im- Pressed when a brother novelist solemnly in- formed her that he had been working steadily °Pon his novel foN twenty years, in steadily gathering obscurity. When she, in turn, informed him that I had been working fifteen years on mine and it might take me fifteen years more, be clutched his head and howled: 'It would haPpen to me! I've never had any luck!'

I need hardly say that to consummate a, tetralogy condensed con amore into a single volume in under fifteen .years is to betray in- decent haste. Still—I am sixty-six. I haven't long to live. Another six-and-sixty years—at most. So I have thought fit to entrust Neville Bray- brooke with an ad interim publication of my tetralogy's opening and closing chapters (after the fashion of the Prelude and Liebestod played as

a, Concert piece) in his forthcomffig year-book, he Wind and the Rain—meanwhile integrating the middle under the menace of a fast-shrinking obscurity.

For, of late, increasingly, I have been unjustly called the most unjustly neglected of writers. In mortal fear 1 draw the cumulative inference that, if my obscurity be stressed long and loud enough, it will inevitably make me the most famous living writer in England. Since all editions of my books are out of print and the public libraries are fast incinerating the remaining copies, it will comfort my rivals in obscurity to know that I cannot possibly stand to gain any- thing, save bother, by any attempt to thin the cloud of my own.

So I rang up the poet Michael Ivens to con- sult him whether, if I made it clear that I was the originator of the humorous tragedy—a new art-form disliked by addicts who want their tragedy and humour neat—that alone would keep me decently obscure a little longer.—`Yes. So long as you don't obscure my Spectator image of you as the originator of a new minor art-form—the telephone conversation.'—'But they might think I was blowing my own trumpet. That would never do. Unless, of course, I emu- lated a former Minister of Transport who, aware that the Belisha beacons were named after him- self, said grandly: "It is the work that matters, and I care not who takes the credit." '—`Yes, say just that. For, as you say, for forty years you have been writing novels that are tender humorous tragedies; and, by a consensus of singularly obtuse opinion, they have been labelled satires; with the result, I say, that your own life has been a tragedy singularly humorous.'

So I telephoned Olivia Manningt 'I've been asked to write an essay on the baffling obscurity of my old friend, the late Hugh Kingsmill; with special reference (the more the better) to my own bottomless pit. Can I say what various illus- trious writers have said in my praise?'—`If you add that you believe them to be mistaken.'— `The public have a right to know 1'—'But you must say you are no good: then everyone will say you're marvellous!'—`But think of the clumsy girl whom her fond father nicknamed Trundle; and Dr. Johnson adding that if nobody else will do it for them, you can trust people to brand themselves!'

So I telephoned Christine Brooke-Rose. 'Can I say, without appearing an egregious ass, that D. H. Lawrence called me to my face an im- mortal spirit, and the reigning trinity of Shaw, Wells and Bennett bestowed on me the accolade of genius; megaphoned by Beaverbrook to the wide world? (Provided, of course, I said that it was their vision that mattered, and I cared not if they took the credit?) Can I say this?' —`Certainly!' she cried. 'It isn't fair to them to hide their light under the bushel of your

obscurity.'—'l beg to differ,' I said testily. 'I choose to stand amazed at my own modesty.' And I rang up Michael Holroyd.

Michael Holroyd is my literary adviser. I in- variably consult him, after I have made up my mind. He is a writer in his early twenties, burdened with the wisdom of the ages He is quite simple and unassuming, except with his two grandmothers and visiting young girls—when he is the grand old man of letters. Sulking in other people's homes rather than his own, Holroyd (like myself, buried alive in mine) is a recluse. To evade the gleam or the collective spirit, at Eton he was Keeper of Squash; and his father, though encouraging a literary career, regrets that, in pursuit of the quite hopelessly neglected Kingsmill. Michael should be seriously neglect- ing his squash. 'Can I say,' I asked, 'that we have outgrown Greek tragedy and that my humorous tragedy answers our need; evidenced by a number of distinguished followers I am too modest to name—all having crossed the perilous traffic of the novel by my humorous and tragic beacons—but panicked at the tenderness? Can I say that without offence?'—'Hardly.'--'But a novel without tenderness is an absurdity.'— 'Agreed. But it would be better if they said it.' —'You're right. Let it skip.'—`Better stick to Kingsmill,'

Michael Holroyd is the author of Hugh Kings- mill—a work declined (not because of Holroyd but because of Kingsmill) in such glowing terms that it may fairly rank as the best book never published. 'Kingsmill,' I point out, 'has written his own epitaph in these tragic lines: I heard men crying in the streets, That the horse my shirt was on, The great horse Sprig o' Rosemary, Had finished last but one.

Last but one! To me that is even bitterer than last, more humiliating.

That's Kingsmill.'

'If Kingsmill is last but one,' says Holroyd, 'then you are last. Last in the field.'—`And you are a non-starter.'

In his devotion to Kingsmill, Michael Holroyd has been heroic. Rupert Hart-Davis has called Hugh Kingsmill a publisher's nightmare. The late Jonathan Cape confessed that he neither liked the man, whom he had not met, nor the man's books, which he had not read, and bore a grudge: Kingsmill having left unfinished his autobiography. 'But he died!' cried Holroyd.- `And whose fault was that?' I have done Michael Holroyd some disservice by saying that he has genius; an assertion publishers and editors, who nowadays are mostly authors, are slow tQ credit —save to their own pending account. But not all is lost yet! In the last resort—or last but one—all hopes are on the Wizard of the West. He is Mr. Edward Blacksell, the originator of the English Stage Society, and now of the Minority Book Society—the latter to do for un- commercial books what the former has done for uncommercial plays. To Barnstaple, where Mr. Blacksell is headmaster of a secondary modern school, the Holroyd manuscript has gone; there to repose till the new book society is formed.

'Oh, give me Kingsmill!'—'What was he like?' my visitor asks.--'He would have liked you.' Edna O'Brien is the enchanting young author of the enchanting young novel, The Country Girls. 'He would blow. in and sit in that winged chair opposite—and everything, as on Resurrec- tion Morning, would be awash with glory, and new. Blowing in on you, away from the blasts and butfetings of his hard fate, was what he liked best. Such poetry, such insight, and such humour! He would have blown in on a Cabinet

meeting in full session at 10 Downing Street, if blowing in on them were in the least encouraged; and his glowing insight would not, I am in- clined to think, appear irrelevant to their de- liberations—not so at least to the present incum- bent, gifted with imagination and a dry, compassionate humour, susceptible to humorous tragedy in life and letters.

'I wish,' says Edna, 'I had known Hugh Kings- mill!'—`You know me.'—'How is it that, with everybody from Katherine Mansfield and Edith Wharton and from Bernard Shaw and Arnold Bennett to C. P. Snow taking you up, you are almost totally unknown?'—`Because, I must suppose, a kind Providence didn't wish that I should ossify in my own fame; and so obscurity kept breaking through.'—`You are, if ever there was one, a writer's writer.'—`Correct. My books have not made money, but they have brought me friends.'—`You have been called the Pet of the Intelligentsia and the Darling of Mayfair.'— `That was long ago. Now I am a recluse racked by arthritic tantrums.'—`But all who read you wish you well.'—`1t is extraordinary! My well- wishers—they come in waves, always out of the blue—on the one hand so exalted, and on the other so obscure, that in either case their names cannot be mentioned. There have been, to date, seven or eight waves. The next might well be the ninth wave that sinks the ship.'—'It must have been wonderful to have known Katherine Mansfield in the Twenties.'—`Katherine Mansfield in the Twenties and Edna O'Brien in the Sixties: what's the difference?'—`Tell me about C. P. Snow.'—`Le Grand Charles wrote to me, like Max Beaverbrook and everybody else, out of the blue, vowing with his talented associates that he would not cease from mental fight, nor should his sword sleep in his hand, till I was a household name in England's green and pleasant land.'— `Nobody knows you. I asked the conductor where I got off the bus to call on you. He didn't know.'

1 saw the sweetheart of the lettered world into the lift; and wished, if wishing were any use, that my next visitor might be Hugh Kingsmill. Going up to Oxford, it didn't take him long to discover the high incidence of mediocrity among dons. About as long as it takes a man looking for birds of paradise in a hen-house. I was more fortunate there in my day. basking in the English School in the radiance of Professors Walter Raleigh and Nichol Smith. Kingsmill appointed the time of our meeting, usually in ambiguous places. You would turn up at the Tower of London when he meant under the tower of the Alliance Perpetual Building Society in Baker Street. When we finally did meet, the first ten minutes were spent in a contretemps of excited colloquy—'I distinctly said . .'—before sim- mering down to a reappraisal of, say, Coleridge, or Goethe. And, suffering agony in the know- ledge of keeping him waiting, late as ever, this time for his cremation, I ran across the cemetery at Brighton, past graves and tombstones, on a day in May, suddenly turned hot and sunny, burdened by a heavy black overcoat, and, within reach of the crematorium, hardly able to run more, was overtaken by the hearse bearing his coffin; in which lay the man on whom the em- pirical world had long weighed its dead burden and who now perhaps was where he had always longed to be, in a heaven not of undistinguish- able bliss but one where each desire infused itself into the thing desired, so that they were no longer two but one, and where he was himself `and yet .a cloud and yet the curve of a girl's neck and a wave beyond the Hebrides and a hill bright at dawn, the smell of a primrose, the sound of a horn far off.' There, last in the field, I stood; overtaken within a few yards by last- but-one whom I had come to mourn before he passed into the waiting furnace.