Tales from Lamb House and around
Michael De-la-Noy
WRITERS IN ROMNEY MARSH by bin Finlayson Severn House, £12.95, £5.95 As worthwhile subjects for full-scale literary biography shrink, both in numbers and size, presumably someone will. shortly take their cue from Writers in Romney Marsh and home-in on Hampstead, to produce a similar scissors-and-paste pot- pourri, based on gossip, scandal and monthly literary luncheons in condemned Greek kebab houses. Joanna Richardson may imagine her typewriter carriage flys back and forth unremarked in Flask Walk, Beryl Bainbridge perhaps thinks she can hide undetected forever beneath the kitch- en table when the telephone rings, Michael Holroyd delude himself that because he so seldom appears on television his fame has left him incognito. But lain Finlayson, or someone of his ilk, is almost certainly already creeping up on them all, preparing a sequel to Writers in Romney Marsh, a book of slightly uneven interest but spiced throughout with pungent comment and sufficient literary allusion to afford an appetising taste of the talents of such disparate denizens of the Marsh as Joseph Conrad and Noel Coward. Fortunately, unlike their modern counterparts, the liter- ati who descended on Rye and its environs from the turn of the century still wrote letters. They also wrote, some of them, a prodigious number of books (E. F. Benson about a hundred, Stephen Crane seven by the age of 27), and although this in no way pretends to be a work of literary criticism, lain Finlayson has read widely in his research and illuminates the work of his subjects as well as their personal obses- sions and eccentricities.
At the centre of any book of reminisc- ence about Romney Marsh and the authors it has attracted must stand Lamb House and its most important occupant, Henry James. He was followed as a tenant by Benson (whose fame rests today upon the half dozen Mapp and Lucia novels mainly set in Rye), and, more recently, by Rumer Godden and H. Montgomery Hyde, both unaccountably missing — like about nine- tenths of the index. And running through the core of the book are two perennial strands all too familiar to frequenters of literary get-togethers; endless social and sexual upheaval, and a grinding concern about money. Thanks to the stupidity of the Daily Express, the Home Secretary (Sir William Joynson-Hicks, of course; who else?) and her publisher, Jonathan Cape, Radclyffe Hall, who lived in Rye with Una Troubridge, ended up with wealth as well as fame, for prosecution of The Well of Loneliness ensured sales of 150,000 copies. But the financial plight of Conrad (who lived in Winchelsea) 'already in debt to my two publishers', and Stephen Crane (an inhabitant of Rye) who died as much from debts as tuberculosis, makes pitiful, if sometimes amusing, reading. When an appeal for funds for Oscar Wilde was sent to Crane, who drank almost as heavily as his cook, and owed his wine merchant £35 at the time, he remarked, 'I owe my brother too much money to bother about helping with subscriptions for a mildewed chump like Wilde. . . My charities begin in the right pants pocket.'
Crane wore pants, not trousers, because he, like Henry James, was an American, and it is easy to understand the attraction of a quintessentially English town like Rye, within an easy train journey of London, to Americans in love with England. James was described by a friend of Crane as 'an effeminate old donkey who lives with- a herd of other donkeys around him and insists on being treated as if he were the Pope', which just shows that however hard a writer may try to hide his sexual prefer- ences from himself, his fellow scribes will ferret them out. It was after he had moved to Lamb House that James fell for the young Norwegian sculptor Hendrik Ander- son. Edmund Wilson has pointed to the surfacing of sex in James's novels, and Finlayson remarks that James now had the alarming experience of encountering a creation of fiction, one of his own, the character of Roderick Hudson — a sculp- tor. The clash of personal and artistic temperament between James and H. G. Wells, who lived at Sandgate, is well brought out. Wells was perplexed by James's concept of the novel as an art form, and thought too that he had no idea of the possible use of the novel as a help to conduct. It is for Wells that Finlayson reserves one of his choicest observations: `he threw himself upon life as he did upon women.'
Ford Madox Ford, Conrad Aiken, Jocelyn Brooke, Sheila Kaye-Smith, Patric Dickinson, E. Nesbit (one of whose books was said to be lying open by Noel Coward's bed when he died) and the Master himself all flit in and out, and some of the walk-on parts provide the best laughs. At Go!- denhurst, Coward installed both his Mum and his bete noire, an aunt called Vida. `Doesn't she look pretty, like a little snowdrop,' Mum commented at Vida's funeral. 'It's a pity she looked so disagree- able when she was alive.' A latter-day brigadier who had been taking pot-shots from the club house at Patric Dickinson's golf balls invited the poet and his wife to dinner in Rye, which consisted first of sherry served in white china pint-mugs and then soup made from 'half a pint of Bovril to half a pint of sherry'. The stilton was accompanied by port again served in pint- mugs. A dead swan resided in the bath, and the meal was first consumed to the strains of Gilbert and Sullivan and then the second Brandenburg. If this is not a parti- cularly serious book neither is it trivial, and anyone who knows The Moth and the Candle, Finlayson's account of Boswell's life, will expect an elegant and witty read. They will not be disappointed. But some irritating repetitions, which should have been spotted by a sharp-eyed editor, hin- der, if only briefly, the invigorating sweep of the narrative. So do involuntary pauses occasioned by lack of information. The name of the Home Secretary who prose- cuted The Well of Loneliness has been omitted, and it is only after about the sixth mention of'Lady Maud Warrender that we are told — inadequately — who she was: she was, inter alia, a friend of Queen Alexandra and a patron of Elgar. E. F. Benson's mother ended up in bed with Lucy Tait, but we are not told that Mrs Tait was the widow of Mrs Benson's husband's predecessor at Lambeth Palace. And most readers will need to be reminded that Lord Olivier was a parliamentary colleague of Ramsey MacDonald. What seems super- fluous is the information that Queen Mary was the wife of Georve V. Stephen Crane's commonlaw wife was married not to Cap- tain Stewart but to Sir Donald Stewart. But unlike the farcical index, these are quibbles in relation to lain Finlayson's discerning eye for the unusual quote and apposite observation. The characters thrust upon him by Romney Marsh were not a happy lot, but they were fortunate in their unique environment. Finlayson's own descriptions of Rye and Winchelsea have not been bettered.
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