At a pin's fee

Christopher Hawtree

A Portrait of Fryn Joanna Colenbrander (Andre Deutsch £12.95) is perhaps a sign of the times that F.

Tennyson Jesse's A Pin to see the Peep- show should have exchanged the green jacket of a Penguin for that of a Virago modern classic. Whether one chooses to regard it as criminal or feminist, it is cer- tainly a remarkable piece of fiction. By chance, on the page opposite her obituary in The Times there was an article lamenting that publishers no longer fill their end- papers with advertisements for other books 'which will be of interest to the reader'; what a slant it gives on an age, to see Brown, Smith and Jones accorded as much space and as enthusiastic reviews as Hardy and Meredith — it is an insight which readers in 2011, perhaps ignorant of Shame, will be deprived.

A similar effect is given by this biography. As the author, F. Tennyson Jesse's last secretary, remarks in her in- troduction, the book has its origins in the vast collection of cuttings and other papers collected over the years by Fryn (a name

that evolved via Wynifried and Fryniwyd). Although something of this strange woman does emerge, the result is less of a biography than a collage of invariably laudatory news-cuttings and somewhat em- barrassing letters; a curious attempt at order is imposed by breaking up the life in- to sections named after the seasons of the year. Of her first novel, The Milky Way, published in 1913, Rebecca West wrote in The Daily News, 'her faculty is marvellous- ly intense... she describes Provence in glit- tering English that gives one not only the lights and shadows of that land, but its winds and its silences... English writing will be the better for her.' Not only was this an astonishing way in which to describe a book that now appears as the most grinding whimsy, it was also a rash prognostication to have made. Even the author, who would later without irony urge various publishers to issue 'a complete list of my immortal works', admitted that The Milky Way was 'a very bad book', explaining that it had to be written quickly to earn some money.

Rebecca West was on safer ground when she remarked, 'I have never seen a lovelier girl. The three great beauties of our time

Ertz, Rosamond Lehmann and Fryn.' The life that such beauty was to give her makes a more absorbing story than any, with the ex- ception of Peepshow, that Fryn ever wrote. There is an almost moral symmetry to the hardship she overcame, the arrival of riches tahnedsetthn turn the difficulties d lead. aandd. decline to which Born just over 96 years ago, Fryn Was the maternal grand-daughter of EmilY Ten- nyson, sister of the poet, who had been engaged to Arthur Hallam. The 'black blood', lunacy, melancholia and absurd proclaiming of the d'Eyncourt connection which the family inherited along with the ability to write might just have survived the best of marriages; Emily's choice of tins- band, Richard Jesse, resulted in two strange sons — Arthur, who took to drink after be- ing cashiered from the army for helping an old lady across a stile, and Eustace. The tat- ter's career, with a pass degree and his first curacy, began tolerably enough, Marred„°,

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, ly by the death of his first love from ganny, ing consumption; presently, 'with a horn,' of his own and a church of his own, he took leave to fetch a wife.' At much the sahlt time, it became apparent that he was 11°._ suited to the Church; whatever he said the pulpit was sure to anger somebody, and thus began, children in tow, the search to find a congenial incumbency.

comic way, this took them, together an apart, to Balham, South Africa, GuernseY,. Sicily, France, Plymouth and Ceylon. F: of the world's inhabitants appear been much comforted by to have Eustace In its tragi, ministrations.

Such an upbringing almost

gave Fryn an independence of mind' Resisting her mother's attempts to force her into a nunnery, at 19 she took up pain in at Stanhope Forbes's Newlyn School la Cornwall. It seems to have been time. In a way that anticipated the cur- a joilY inevitably riculum at Dartington Hall, `sometinies Dod and Cicely and I have birthdaY-snikt evenings, posing on the big bed, t nothing on but a silver belt to make us lee' barbaric, and a hand-glass so that we c.all joufdegheetehke,effect.' Having lost only `virginitY London a' ndassesht eupcalaledhoiut,seshteharnt came to accomodate all manner of waifs' including her wandering father. With irn pulsiveness that would nowadays bay everyone in the basement downing too she walked into The Times and demand work. Pieces began to appear there, and she otuvedurritne published a story, 'The Mask', in,_ I English Review which would bring heher contact with the man eventually to be husband, the playwright H.M. Harwood

`Tottie' as she called him. oriee

In an early review, Virginia Woolf wished of an author that he had sufferee some slight accident to the fingers of In tua right hand. Such was to befall Fryn', that seems symbolic of those careire carefree days before the Great War, la, travel could be made cheaplY arld ,„rie pulsively, she decided to try an aerbP' flight. With the propeller whirring invisibly behind the passenger-seat, she turned and waved good-bye. 'It didn't really hurt. I Pulled the hand back into my lap, and wat- ched fascinated as a pool of blood reached to my knees.' The accident was hideous, but it was not to prevent her from writing; it did, however, set in a dependence on Pain-killing morphia, so much so that she became a registered addict. Mrs Colen- brander, rightly, does not harp on this, but the worry was always there; the need for drink, too, became such that, when she was Older, she tied a bandage around her foot to provide a ready excuse should she fall over. Despite the gay round of Twenties and Thirties parties in her many homes (`Noel angelic as usual'), sadness was never far away. Dogged by the thought of Tottie's s°11 by an earlier lover and her own miscar- riages, she attempted suicide several times. It seems almost churlish to find her novels unreadable when faced by such a life. Varied as they are — Cornwall, the high seas, Burma, France — they lack the clear realistic prose which makes Peepshow such a convincing account of frustrated im- agination and the subsequent adultery and Murder; the final pages, the gaol seen from Within, must be one of the most cogent arguments against hanging ever written. It with some surprise that one remembers it appeared in 1934; the novel is suffused by sexual feeling in a way that is perhaps more real than in all those books that had to be Published in Paris. Certainly it is more credible than her later Act of God which, set in the South of France in a sub-Huxley or sub-Connolly manner, tells of a spurious miracle. Her satire is as heavy-handed as her earlier vision of fauns. Among the characters lapping up the sun is a Marquise who 'wore beautifully cut beach pyjamas with a handkerchief top, and she had... become very Grecian, for she was wearin o g ne breast exposed, the nipple painted to match the lacquered nails of her fingers and cet. This was somewhat startling.' As this biography continues on its way, re wishes increasingly that there were glue vigour and less of the scissors and Pot, for beneath it there is a genuinely ue-p° tL;',j story. Instead, the narrative is punc- I,'" by such details as the fact that a anish translation of a book was published 0,,1973; of Fryn's history of Burma one is .,iy told of its dedicatee and the fact it con- tains eight illustrations — how much more interesting it would have been to find a aitiseussion of the dispute with Orwell which 4rovoked (reprinted in his collected jour- 1,1.sm); one is told retrospectively of her _ula friendship' for Conrad, but of nothing “Ith°e detailed than that. The final effect of bersi book, as Tottie walks up and down the his

in 1958 with his dead wife across

bee arrns, is of a bibliography that has become mixed with the elements of Jaco- roll tragedy. Useful as it is to have The es 's bland obituary supplemented, one cann,, feel that the editors of the DNB sil.e committed a howler in excluding her. might have thought differently.