One and one make only just enough
Max Hastings
SOMERVILLE AND ROSS: THE WORLD OF THE IRISH RM by Gifford Lewis Viking, £12.95 The English conviction that the Irish are liars is founded upon our false expecta- tions about the use of language. We are a literal-minded people, who take words seriously and, on the whole, expect them to mean what they say. Many of our chronic difficulties with the Irish have been founded upon our inability to cope with a society which treats words quite different- ly, squanders them with an extravagance that confounds us.
During a couple of years in which we lived in Kilkenny, an Irish racing friend once said that when the plumber announced that he would come out from Waterford to mend the central heating tomorrow, he could divine instantly whether the man actually intended to appear tomorrow, next week, next month, or never. This is the code the English in Ireland have never broken; which caused Major Sinclair Yeates to labour under the delusion that two and two make four, `whereas in Ireland two and two are just as likely to make five or three and are still more likely to make nothing at all.'
The Irish themselves like to suggest that Somerville and Ross parodied their style and their speech. In reality, as Gifford Lewis points out in her admirable new study, the authors were among the most accurate reporters of native conversation ever to write in English. Edith Somerville filled notebook upon notebook with over- heard dialogue. Violet Martin possessed a phenomenal memory — she could declaim great tracts of the psalms at will — and turned this to magical effect in the RM books.
In 1968, Maurice Collis wrote a bleak biography of Somerville and Ross, pro- foundly saddening for those to whom their books have brought so much happiness, in which he argued that the relationship between them was lesbian. Mrs Lewis's book is a portrait rather than a biography, enchantingly illustrated with contemporary photographs and Edith Somerville's draw- ings. But it is none the less scholarly for its format. The author argues convincingly that the sexuality of Somerville and Ross was repressed, rather than unnatural. Edith Somerville came close to marrying Hewitt Poole, a personable young cousin who was almost certainly rejected by her father on grounds of impecuniosity.
Money was a chronic problem in their lives, and strongly influenced their writing. Edith Somerville grew up at Drishane, one of those wonderful Irish houses 'of the middling sort' in west Cork. Violet Martin, whom she first met in 1886, was a some- what more consciously patrician figure, four years younger, from Ross in Galway. Mrs Lewis remarks that Edith Somerville's determination to make a career was set as early as November 1880, when at the age of 21, she set a black cross in her diary with her initials and the terse, fierce note: 'I will paint. I will also work.'
Everything that has been written about Somerville and Ross suffers from the abs- ence of any powerful, reliable eyewitness evidence about their collaboration. But it is believed that Somerville provided the raw material, to which Martin supplied the form and finish. It was Martin's social and journalistic connections that ensured their early books were widely noticed. Always desperate for money, they soon under- stood that their comic stories could com- mand a wider audience and greater re- wards than serious novels. They met the demand. Yet if The Irish RM earned them fame, The Real Charlotte possessed a quite different power and quality. It is a sinister, almost frightening book. It captures with deadly precision the overwhelming sad- ness, the melancholy that overhangs Anglo-Irish life to this day, amid all that is also comic and beautiful.
Mrs Lewis remarks that 'Edith and Martin's love of place, and particularly of their houses, Drishane and Ross, was the strongest fixed emotion of their lives.' Their writing catches 'the lurching from comedy to catastrophe' which has always been at the heart of the Irish tragedy. They profited immeasurably from the opportun- ity closely to observe every class in Ireland in a fashion that was never possible in the English countryside, pace Mr Sponge. As Miss Hope-Drummond complains in The Real Charlotte: 'Irish society is so intoler- ably mixed.'
The story of Somerville and Ross is almost intolerably moving. There is the vision of Violet Martin charging blindly at the biggest fences in Cork, scarcely seeing them through the blur of her short- sightedness; of Edith Somerville, with her angular yet curiously graceful features, schooling hunters to keep her beloved Drishane going, and earning more for selling on a horse than for one of their books; of Violet Martin's early death in 1915, from a brain tumour probably brought on by a hunting accident 17 years earlier, which ruined her health.
They knew that their world was collaps- ing as they wrote. In 1916 Edith Somerville wrote a fine and passionate letter to the Times, pleading for clemency for the lead- ers of the Easter Rising. It was, perhaps, her misfortune to live on until 1949. She still wrote, but with much diminished powers. Even her funeral was marked by black comedy. It was found that the spot where she was to be buried, alongside Violet Martin, was solid rock. A neighbour was deputed, with much difficulty, to borrow dynamite from the local garda to clear the grave. The resulting explosion blew up Violet Martin's cross.
Consulting the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, I find it absurd to discover that they are still absent from it: there is not even that immortal description of Flurry Knox, 'who looked like a stableboy among gentlemen and a gentleman among stable- boys'. Yet their literary achievement was greater than that of Surtees. No English- man today could look upon those great Irish wildernesses of gorse and bog, gaping ditches and tangled hedges, in the drizzle under a low, grey January sky, without the memory of those stories clinging to his shoulder. Gifford Lewis's book is a corn- plusory Christmas present for anyone ever touched by the spell.
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