Cat-portraits
A. N. Wilson
Customs and Characters Peter Quennell (Weidenfeld and Nicolson £10.95) Evelyn Waugh, if we may judge from his letters and diaries, was not often moved to pay Peter Quennell a compliment. When he did so, the words shriek out from the page, like the voice of a man still shouting at a dinner table when everyone else's con- versation has momentarily hushed. Writing to Ann Fleming to say how little he had lik- ed her brother's novel Picnic at Porokono Waugh complained, 'He has no feeling for English and goes at it slap dash hitting the wrong word on almost every page'. He sug- gested, as a remedy, literary partnership with Mr Quennell (designated, admittedly, with an unflattering sobriquet), who 'has in his dry vacuous way a mastery of language'.
From such a quarter, this is praise in- deed. In a moment of truth, cor ad cor loquitur. Evelyn Waugh recognised in Mr Quennell one of the most supremely stylish practitioners of the difficult and rare art of English prose. Anyone who keeps Customs and Characters by the bedside will find themselves rereading it compulsively. This is not merely because Mr Quennell has trained himself in the school of high gossip, the school in which Saint-Simon, Proust and Boswell are the great masters. It is because good gossip — as opposed to tittle tattle — is as rare as good prose; and in this book you get both. A first reading gives you the pleasure of urbane conversation. Reperusal brings the quiet satisfaction of seeing a craft perfectly executed, as in his description of the painter Matthew Smith: `Shy, small, pallid and myopic, he seemed difficult to associate with his heavily en- sanguined nudes, which suggested that, before he began to paint, a stoutish model had been skinned alive and then left to bleed to death upon a pile of satin cushions'.
Customs and Characters is less a con- tinuation of Mr Quennell's beguiling volumes of memoirs, The Marble Foot and The Wanton Chase than a series of sketches of people he has known. The seven prin- cipal characters depicted are Greta Garbo, Mrs Keppel, Roger Fry, Augustus John, Elizabeth Bowen, John Hayward (the com- panion of T.S. Eliot) and Daisy Fellowes, that half-forgotten femme du monde, heiress of Singer sewing-machines, who broke so many hearts and marriages in the inter-war years, likened here to Balzac's Princesse de Cadignan. Those are the figures in the foreground of the canvas but many other equally interesting characters flit about its borders and, as in his memoirs, thoughts about historical characters are in- terlaced with pen-portraits of Mr Quennell's contemporaries. The guiding principle of the book, and its title, are ex- plained by the epigram from Prosper Merimee: 'In history I love only anecdotes, and among anecdotes I prefer those where I think that I can distinguish a true picture of the customs and characters of any given period'.
Here, then, are not full-length studio portraits, but attractively executed vignet- tes. Mr Quennell has done for his circle of friends in prose what John Butler Yeats did for Augusta Gregory's salon in that remarkable series of pencil sketches. We overhear Garbo, turning to the author to exclaim, over luncheon, 'I /uv carrots. They are zo zexy'. Or we feel what it was like to touch Rose Macaulay: 'She seemed intense- ly vigorous and yet alarmingly fragile; and if I embraced her — which, whenever we met, I did — I was almost afraid she might break up in my twentieth-century arms like the mummified body of an ancient Egyp- tian queen'.
A good literary anecdote or vignette does not have to have a punch-line, or indeed any shape. So often, as we read the biographies or visit the houses of historical characters, we crave a tiny plausible detail which will summon back their presence. Nothing conveys more to me what it would have been like to dine with G.K. Chesterton than A.C. Benson's memory: 'Chesterton sweated so that when we shook hands and he held his cigar downwards, the sweat ran down and hissed at the point'. It is in such imaginative details that Mr Quennell's historical books abound. And now he has laid down, as it were, for posterity, a store of snapshots. Future generations will not read this book for a general survey or assessment of literary, or bohemian, or high life in the mid 20th century. But when they do so, they will find those worlds brought vividly to life by countless glimpses which a more formal biographical method would probably have lost. I particularly treasure two such details: an excruciating evening with Ivy Compton Burnett and her friend Miss Jourdain is the first. Conversation coagulated to the point where the novelist, to break the post-prandial silence, 'told us that tarred wood-blocks, of the kind then used to pave the London streets, made, she and Miss Jourdain had just discovered, an excellent and inexpensive fuel. My fell°: guests ... registered polite attentioa; Some people, having read the sketch, Would wonder why it was worth recording. But it stays with you, as an evocation of fol' Compton-Burnett's chilly presence, molt than some of the 'set-piece' anecdotes im wider circulation. Equally vivid is the 0.,,c' count of going to the lavatory in Elizahe, Bowen's house, a journey which involved penetrating the quarters of her husband' Alan Cameron. 'Above, all was light 3,1d
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space and charm. Below, we entered a °`5 dusky room, which contained pipe-racks' bags of golf-clubs, a wooden shield bealt college arms and an old-fashion mahogany tantalus enclosing a cut-glass, flagon of whisky, heavy tumblers groaPieu beside it, on a solid leather-topped desk; Around the wall hung numerous pictures cats, life-sized or slightly larger than licei: each painted in the dominant style of at° Victorian military portrait' ... Carrier°14 discovering Mr Quennell to be a fellow" worshipper of the cat, escorted him around the room, telling him the name of each cat' and its story. The Elizabeth Bowen portrait is perhaps the most sympathetic in the book (tlica/I''ip not without inaccuracy — her last n°„",,, was Eva Trout, not Eva Stout). One of ti!' reasons why this chapter carries weight ls that Mr Quennell in this case met his slihie ject before the days of her fame. He is 8";„ to describe his chance encounter with her; a railway carriage in Rome, he aealThe 18-year old, she a young woman on :`,3 point of marrying Mr Cameron. There " considerable contrast between this earnest' pale young woman and the coughi°13; horse-like old woman of letters glitnilse" s few months before her death. He conveYr the sparkle and the demandingness of held conversational mannerisms, which ectu d sometimes erupt into cross words an rebuke ('s-s-shut up, you', she said fiercierYs to a three-year-old son of Mr Quenfle"„ who was trying to charm her with his eo' versation). But he also sympathetically stIL gests some very plausible reasons for ti; strain of melancholy and insecurity which all who knew Elizabeth Bowen detected I
her formidable manner. in Mr Like most of the 'characters' „s Quennell's gallery, Elizabeth Bowen '14'0 not strictly speaking 'nice'. It is not 5,, much that she was nasty as that 'niceties", was not even a word which would conic to mind in her company. The brittle I an worldly atmosphere of the recollections has in general a charm almost more French than English. Balzac's Princesse de CadignarI,I,, invoked, and likened, very deftly, to pal% Fellowes. But it was not in that chapter alone that one thought of the Princess d: secret, disclosed to the marquise d'EsPare: Ve me suis amusee, mais je n'ai pas aiffl It is not that Mr Quennell, as a chronicler, is deficient in the milk of human kindness' rather that he has chosen subjects 0111°_,' however many emotional conquests theY made in their lifetime, inspire in our homelY modern hearts, more amusement than love.
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