Where are the Snows of yesteryear . D uring the Civil
War the minor reli- gious poet George Wither, fighting for Cromwell, had the misfortune to be taken prisoner by Royalist troopers. One of their officers was Sir John Denham, known to literary historians as an elegant forerunner of Dryden and Pope, and it was he who saved the wretched hymnodist's life when fellow captives were lined up to be shot. `Spare Master Wither,' he pleaded with a peremptory colonel, 'for while he lives there will be one worse poet in England than I.'
If bad writing is an infallible spur to emulation, so too is that rarer kind whose relaxed professional assurance both chal- lenges and encourages aspiring artists to pit their strengths against it. The expertise here has none of that resentful insecurity with which certain writers seem perpetually on guard against potential rivals. Instead the author's condescension to the reader is of a sort which implies that life would be an altogether jollier business if more people were doing the same kind of thing.
Few writers comunicate such welcoming complicity better than Pamela Hansford Johnson, whose success as a novelist during the present century's middle years has apparently doomed her to obscurity as we near the millennium. None of her 20-odd titles is currently in print. Even in the brave old days of Virago, which cast its net indul- gently enough, she wasn't, for whatever reason, deemed worthy of resurrection between those meritorious green covers. Perhaps the double-barrelled name put them off, though her fictional world consis- tently spurns gentility or smartness. Was it a suburban girlhood in south London, a youthful fling with Dylan Thomas (the pair actually contemplated marriage) or what she saw as a neat tactical avoidance of university Eng Lit courses which gave Johnson's novels their singular mixture of acrid edginess and saloon-bar bonhomie tinged with jeering menace?
The tone at any rate was always unmistakable. In 1935, aged 22, she pub- lished This Bed Thy Centre, a novel which almost everybody except Cyril Connolly found unsettling in the shamelessness with which, having shaken together the minutiae of lower-middle-class life around the fringes of Clapham Common, it slapped them hard across the reader's face. Among Elsies, Maisies and Adas, crazy female god- botherers, picture-palace Lotharios, one- guinea perms at the hairdresser's, tap-dancing in the Admiral Drake and neighbours who set the road tut-tutting by taking a bath more than once a week, the story — which for obvious reasons I'm not going to tell you — pulses with a crude, resistless impatience at the assumption that out-of-town lives are barren of pathos or imagination.
By 1959, when Pamela Hansford John- son wrote The Unspeakable Skipton, her technique may have refined itself, but the voice remained keen-edged, confident, without showing off but emphatically not that of the orthodox woman writer `You look lovely with the Sun in your hair, Mavis.' unbudgeable within her feminine perspec- tive. Skipton himself, a down-at-heel expatriate author who lives by wheedling, swindling or bullying the various acquain- tances formed during economic exile in Belgium, is modelled on Baron Corvo, whose Desire and Pursuit of the Whole offered Johnson an armature on which to mould her narrative. Without Corvo's bilious axe-grinding she is much funnier, but at the time regretful of her characters' squandered talent and energy, springing a perpetual tension between the serene mediaeval gravity of a Belgian town by the sea and the unedifying pettiness, backbiting and mendacity it embraces.
Evidently the Skipton materials were too good to throw away, and several of its cast — the bibulous photographer Duncan Moss, Cosmo Hines, the satanic bookseller, and his preposterous Antipodean poetess consort, Dorothy Merlin — turn up in Cork Street, Next to the Hatters, a novel whose grip on its comic resources seems altogeth- er less assured than its predecessor's. The verve, however, is irrepressible in the book's depiction of a London demi- Bohemia now totally vanished, its former territories, Fitzrovia and Soho, turned respectively into a smart urban village and a gay souk. What can modern literary life offer in compensation, beyond networking at book launches, dinners in W11 and the smirk on the face of an agent concluding a six-figure deal?
Impossible therefore not to read a Hans- ford Johnson novel without some yearning for that world of blighted promise and baffled ambitions, with its plays eternally unproduced, its novels never destined to completion, poetry snowed under with rejection slips, drink-sodden, lecherous, fatally addicted to anecdote and reminis- cence, but forever more enchanting and humane than the aseptic shopping-mall of modern publishing and authorship.
Impossible also not to envy the writer's instinctive relish of her craft and its myster- ies. Nowadays facility is instantly suspect, and the making of fiction is ideally a busi- ness of agonised Flaubertian perfectionism followed by prolonged silence. From time to time we need a dram of Hansford John- son's acrobatic fluency to remind us that the job is easier than we think.
Jonathan Kcates
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