REVIEW OF BOOKS
Simon Raven on the perverse Mr Kingsley
On Thursday, January 23, Charles Kingsley will have been dead for one hundred years. He is chiefly remembered for his juvenile classic, The Water Babies, and after that for two rollicking costume yarns, Westward Ho! and Hereward the Wake. Largely forgotten are Alton Locke, a novel of fierce social protest, and Hypatia, a theological extravaganza; forgotten also is the body of his poetry, though he wrote several famous lines that are often quoted in isolation ("for men must work and women must weep") and have become unattributable folk sayings.
Two things at least are therefore clear about Kingsley as a writer: he was vigorous and he was versatile. And not only as a writer. He was, as Susan Chitty reminds us on the first page of The Beast and the Monk*, a forthright and brilliant preacher, a Royal Chaplain, a prominent Christian Socialist, a fearless if somewhat slap-dash polemicist, a gifted amateur scientist (Fellow of the Geological Society), and a Regius Professor of Modern History in the University of Cambridge. He was also a prodigious sportsman, a much loved Parish Priest, an obsessive pipe smoker, and a man of violent contrasts. All his life he championed the * The Beast and The Monk A Life of Charles Kingsley Susan Chitty (Hodder and Stoughton £4.95)
poor, but he spoke with extreme contempt of Irishmen ("white chimpanzees") and negroes ("ant-eating apes"); he was full of humane works yet longed to kill Russians in the Crimea; he was a notable apostle of fresh air and physical fitness — and also a most cunning and talented hypochondriac. Versatile, indeed — to the point of perversity; and in nothing more versatile and more perverse, it now appears, than in his private life.
For Susan Chitty has been made privy to some three hundred of Kingsley's hitherto unpublished letters to his wife, Fanny, and also to a locked diary which was kept by Fanny during the period of the couple's courting. This diary contains some drawings done by Kingsley which, in the opinion of Nathaniel Hawthorne, "no pure man could have made or allowed himself to look at." Although they will raise few eyebrows today, they do serve — those of them that Lady Chitty reproduces in this biography— as suggestive illustrations of a certain condition of Kingsley's mind, at once passionate, unwholesome and thoroughly ridiculous, which the letters now disclose to the world for the first time.
Lady Chitty has made a cool and efficient job of comment and collation. With beautifully calculated dead-pan malice (never nudging or giggling, but quietly bringing each item of evidence before us, leaving it on view for just long enough, and then smoothly exchanging it for the next) she sits behind her magic lantern, as it were, in an attitude of modest propriety, murmuring to us in a still small voice as slide follows slide. And what we see is this. First, Kingsley the infant, precociously religious, much in awe of a distantly lowering father, adoring his mother. Then Kingsley the schoolboy in Cornwall, sometimes moody but on the whole active and enquiring, ill taught in conventional subjects but copiously instructed, by a master who was to become a life-long friend, in the ways of west country flora and fauna. And so to Kingsley, the undergraduate of Magdalene College, Cambridge: a genial rather "cracky" young man, liked by the smart set for his knowledge and love of field sports, fond of pleasure, sceptical now of his childhood religion, and Much plagued by lust; then the inevitable visit of exploration to the brothel at Castle End — this followed by horror, guilt, disgust, by a longing to return to the Christian fold but continuing disbelief in the divinity of Christ. Who shall save him? Who but Fanny Grenfell, whom he meets one vacation and instantaneously loves? Fanny shall bring him back to Christ.
As indeed Fanny does. But again Lady Chitty changes the slide, and now (for we have reached the period covered by the unpublished letters), Kingsley, newly curate of Eversley, is discovered lying naked on his bedroom floor, mortifying his flesh: he longs for Fanny's white body, but the Grenfell family are making difficulties about the marriage, and meanwhile, although the flesh is sacred and joyful, it must be scourged and kept pure against the great day. Yet the great day could also be anticipated, up to a point: every Thursday night, Kingsley instructed Fanny, they were to lie, in imagination, in each other's arms: "When you go to bed tonight, forget that you ever wore a garment, and open your lips for my kisses and spread out each limb that I may lie between your breasts all night." It was for his own share in these indulgences that Kingsley must do penance by scourging himself, which he did every Friday.
"Oh," wrote Fanny in her Diary, "how I long to kiss away those stripes." Hence to a culmination of hysteria: Kingsley now proposed that even when they were married Fanny should "remain for the first month in my arms a virgin bride, a sister only." By thus postponing their bliss, they would somehow earn the right, when they reached heaven, to orgasm that would be prolonged to eternity. This they are apparently enjoying in a .drawing that faces page sixtyfive; Kingsley, fitted out with wings, is ascending slowly into the sky, while Fanny, clasped between his thighs, resembles a discarded waxwork.
Faced with nastiness and silliness of this order, one wonders how Kingsley ever became the respected and almost revered public figure which we know he did indeed become before he died. The clue, I think, is to be found in George Eliot's criticism of one of the novels, "Kings ley," she wrote, "sees, feels and paints vividly, but he theorises illogically and moralises absurdly" Similarly, in his life and clerical career he must have been a plausible and even a compelling man (seeing and painting vividly), a man to be found out only by those few sharp enough to look under the surface to the moral absurdities beneath. Lady Chitty has looked under the surface; but most of his contemporaries, dazzled by his undoubted charm and ability, could not. Of those that could and did, Newman routed him utterly and Thomas Hughes (formerly a close friend)
thence fought very shy of him — as, it sometimes seems, did Fanny herself, who spent much of their later married life apart from him on one pretext or another. Whether she joined him in heaven for an eternal orgasm, cannot say; as the years went on she seems to have been interested in little save money, for which she constantly applied to him, on more and more frivolous whimsies, in the most sickening tone of wheedling rapacity. Brenda Colloms, who did not have the benefit of the unpublished letters, has written a standard work of piety, decently done in its own terms**. Miss Colloms gives us Kingsley's official face, the face which everyone has seen . until now. A careful examination of this will much increase one's pleasure in watching the deft removal of the mask by Lady Chitty.
* Charles Kingsley The Lion of Eversley Brenda Colloms (Constable £5.00) Simon Raven has recently published Bring Forth the Body, In his 'Alms for Oblivion' series of novels.
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