In search of love
Isabel Colegate
Rosamond Lehmann: An Appreciation Gillian Tindall (Chatto & Windus/Hogarth Press £10.95)
Reviewing Rosamond Lehmann's The Weather in the Streets in the New Statesman on 11 July 1936, Elizabeth 8owen wrote, 'the most remarkable, the Most natural of her qualities is the power to give emotion its full value and play.' This is Ihe quality which has led to Rosamond Lehmann's being called a 'romantic' writer a word with meanings so various that to some it conveys something predominantly good and to others something decidedly ad. Whatever the quality exactly is, Eliz- abeth Bowen was right to call it 'natural'. A critical book which calls itself an `appre atton' presumably sets out to be some el'ind of interpretation; but because so Much of Rosamond Lehmann's writing has been about the sort of emotions most Z°Plc feel at some time in their lives, and cause her prose is nearly always lucid as /7ell as harmonious, she hardly needs an 1,Inerpreter. With all Rosamond Lehmann's books in print, thanks chiefly to Virago, do we need Gillian Tindall? She h. erself says she felt a need to exorcise an luence she had found almost too strong, 'Tying succumbed to it in her impression- aMe adolescence. Certainly, she fulfills her self-appointed task well, touching on Rosa- Inond Lehmann's own life story where she 'eels it relevant, and resisting the tempta- !ion to see simple fact where complex fiction is intended. She does not pre-empt the eventual biography, and has consulted k)samond Lehmann throughout. Indeed, there are times when one seems to hear the voice of the subject, patient, polite, some- tittles a little uneasy, (. . . 'the obsession You point out with the most embarrassing correctness . . .') more clearly than the voice of the 'critic. Gillian Tindall places much emphasis on t,he happy pre-1914 childhood, beside the peautiful benign river on which the be- loved father coached the young gods whose beautiful broad backs as they pro- relled their slender craft so straight and
rue through the clear water promised such
Strength, such confidence, such reliability — and such charm. The post-war generation °I young men — especially for a girl who Was clever as well as beautiful — could not h°1:le to measure up. Doubting intellec- tuals, preoccupied with politics or self- examination, they could never offer either the dependability or the authority, though they might have, in fatal measure, the charm, So it came about that Rosamond Lehmann wrote with the upmost percipi- ence about what Gilllian Tindall calls rather unfortunately Lehmannwoman, the intelligent girl in search of love, believing in love as the centre of being, falling for masculine charm, finding the loved one unable to take the full weight of such love, such expectations, and suffering according- ly; and then, rather than attributing blame, feeling it incumbent on her to make the tremendous effort of imagination neces- sary to understand that his failure to mean what she means by the words 'I love you' are not his fault; it is all because he is a man. This painfully true and occasionally exasperating female prototype is one that Rosamond Lehmann 'does' better than any- other contemporary writer. But to concen- trate on this figure is to forget how much else she does - what beautiful, rhythmical and at the same time disciplined prose she writes, how keen an eye she has for the comic, how observant she is of the habits and moods of the natural world, how clear a gaze she fixes on the class differences of the inter-war period.
It is also to ignore her later work. Gillian Tindall does refer to it briefly but seems to be embarrassed by it. Having always been subject to intimations of 'something far more ' deeply interfused', Rosamond Lehmann was likely, if anyone was, to have the sort of mystical experience she did have after the shattering death of her adored daughter at the age of 24. As she herself writes, we are perfectly entitled to regard all such matters as 'heavy luggage, to be sent on ahead', but if we are to trust her powers of observation, her intelli- gence, her capacity for true feeling, her skill in using language to convey experi- ence, when it touches on the familiar, we are surely not justified in withholding that trust when she ventures into the unknown. For Rosamond Lehmann herself, the search for meaning which she feels under- lies all her explorations through fiction has shown her a significance whose full import she would presumably not claim to know, but the awareness of which has become the central fact of her life. For her the river has flowed into the sea, and if we.cannot follow it all the way, we need not pretend we have not seen the direction of the current.
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