Woman of Some Importance
.12/EAR Sphinx,' Oscar Wilde called her; and it s as Wilde's admirer and—at his time of greatest need—rnagnificently loyal friend that Ada Lever- son is mostly thought of today. It is, perhaps, the way in which she would have liked to be re- membered; her last published work was a charm- ing little volume called Letters to the Sphinx from Oscar Wilde, which preserves her final memories of Oscar. Yet she was herself a writer of elegant if restricted talent, who published six novels between 1907 and 1916. Three of them --Love's Shadow (1908), Tenterhooks (1912) and Love at Second Sight (1916)—arc collected in this volume, published one hundred years after her birth in 1862. In a fervid introduction, Colin Maclnnes pays eloquent tribute to Mrs. Leverson as a person and a writer, though in his laudable efforts to disentangle her reputation from the Sphinx legend Maclnnes seems to me to underestimate heavily her literary indebtedness to Wilde. I Can't imagine her early novels being written without the inspiration of Wilde's comedies. We don't have to read very far in Love's Shadow before discovering epigrams with a distinctly Wildean ring—'so many artistic young men had told her she was like La Gioconda, that when she first saw the original in the Louvre she was so disappointed that she thought she would never smile again'—and later in the novel there are distinct verbal echoes of An Ideal Husband. Mr. Maclnnes claims that on the whole Ada L. everson did it better than Wilde, which may be so; but Wilde certainly did it first. Ada Leverson's use of Wilde as a model isn't at all surprising; in the Nineties she published several neat and amusing parodies of his work in Punch—Wilde loved them—and this no doubt helped to form her style. Mr. Maclnnes does in fact remark on the theatrical element in her writing, Ind in particular her extensive use of dialogue. don't think rs. Leverso evr wrote p dialogue form which, like Anthony Hope's .11,°'13? Dialogues, for example, were popular at less turn of the century. This kind of writing was ',..e".ss unusual than Colin Maclnnes implies; there 'as, after all, the august and intricate example I The Awkward Age, published in 1899. Mrs. everson could handle dialogue brilliantly, and ‘,was theatrical without being stagy; though in
novels as Love's Shadow and The Limit her aleessive reliance on dialogue led to a certain diffuseness. Tenterhooks and Love at Second
gat are tighter, more conventionally novelistic. during the few years in which she was writing .74* In the three books collected as The presented Ottleys we have the same heroine, but Fenented with successively greater depth and • The Ottleys are a tall, handsome couple- niellY called 'little' by their friends—who live
very new, very small, very white flat in Zoightsbridge,' though it's still large enough for averY adequate staff of servants. Edith is et: utiful,
good-leek•
witty and intelligent; Bruce, though
the r ing, is a brainless oaf; he works in Or inclination Office, though without much talent i_ettinclination; he is grotesquely vain, and an ;ICH. !able philanderer. Ada Leverson evidently ell love with Edith, for she devoted two more „e's. to tracing her marital vicissitudes. rial.Ee.is not, Perhaps, an entirely credible mar- ever ' how could so wonderful a girl as Edith
for ski a nitwit like Bruce, we wonder. Lever hints at a long-vanished physical
attraction—Edith was only twenty when she married. She is devoted to her children, an ad- mirably rendered pair called Archie and Dilly, but apart from them the marriage has been reduced to little more than an appearance, which Edith loyally strives to preserve—though she herself, in Tenterhooks, falls deeply in love with a barrister called Aylmer Ross, a widower of noble but passionate temperament.
Ada Leverson has a beautiful sense of comedy; in a succession of terse scenes the pre- tensions of the clownish Bruce are gently ex- ploded by Edith: seldom have masculine folly and self-delusion been so effectively skewered. But at the same time she conveys with decorum and accuracy the intensity of Edith's and Aylmer's mutual passion. To be able to write so
coir/incingly about sexual feeling without a sense of heavy breathing and general embarrassment is in itself a remarkable achievement. Ada Leverson modulates deftly from hilarious comedy to emotional gravity and back again, and without losing her innate poise. I did at time; feel, though, that the disproportion between the three-dimensional vitality of Edith and the puppet-like Bruce was excessive; this union of a Shakespearean heroine and a Wodehousian silly ass is a mesalliance in more ways than one. Ada Leverson never, perhaps, quite solved all the problems of moving from a quasi-theatrical to a properly novelistic way of writing. But what she could do, she did magnificently, and The Little Ottleys forms a delectable collection.
BERNARD BFRGONZI
Previous page
