An exuberance of irrelevancies
Philip Glazebrook
PATHS FROM A WHITE HORSE: A WRITER'S MEMOIR by Peter Vansittart
Quartet Books, £11.95
Somewhere in this intriguing and secre- tive memoir Peter Vansittart remarks on the value of long walks taken alone as the means of solving problems encountered in writing; and the book itself rather resem- bles the interior dialogue of a puzzled man on a ramble. The charming, reflective, infinitely discursive voice murmurs on as its owner strolls through the dark woods and tree-shadow of England, the path ahead by no means apparent amid a thousand windings and diversions, the light intermittent through thickets of quotations and asides, with here a pause while he considers the suicide of a Hampstead fishmonger, and there another to plumb the significance of a Hove clergyman who, having tumbled from his cycle, asked God to blind the children who had laughed at him. Of the framework of facts and events — Haileybury, scholarship to Oxford, teaching, marriage — we learn sparsely. Vansittart is less concerned with facts than with the areas of doubt and darkness between them.
What he describes as his 'dour and literal mind' notices such spaces of darkness, and dwells in them, where others leap the gap, or ask a question. Hearing the song `Polly, put the kettle on' he worried about where 'they' had gone, and what had occurred between the two lines to make Sukie take it off again. He saw that a story was needed to plug the gap. He asked no question, preferring to have work for his imagina- tion. Indeed he says, 'I can never remem- ber asking my mother or step-father a serious question' (inhibited perhaps by his mother having told him 'irritably that but for me she could have afforded a small car').
Nor did he cease to rely on the imagina- tive answer. He writes, 'My obsession with Germany continued for many years and produced a clutch of novels. Not until long after the war did I actually visit the country. The visit answered the questions hitherto catered for by my imagination and I have never since written of Germany.'
This memoir, then, is really the history of his imaginative life, illustrated by such events only as seem to him worth consider- ing. Fittingly, the most notable figures to show their faces in the book are probably — he does not commit himself — inven- tions of his imagination. There is a Dr Golder, who, at children's parties, electri- fied a pool of water containing silver coins, and watched the children crying out in pain as they fought over the money. There is Ivor, sinister, a mafioso schoolboy who exerted influence by 'no more than a curious pressure of the eye'. Gold and Ivory — these two associate well with other significant and mysterious figures who have supplied ideas for Vansittart's novels — Lancelot, Robin Hood, Merlin — and, in this book, outshine many of the real people depicted.
Invention and embroidery abound, but there is also the honesty of a man who has no illusions about himself. There is no boasting, no excuse. 'My complaint,' he says, 'is not against life but against myself. . . . My own marriage, to a sensitive and intelligent girl with a delightful and humor- ous daughter, failed entirely through my own fault.' A master at a prep school, he reported the supposed theft of £10 by a pupil and then, lacking the courage to own up when he found the flO in a pocket, watched the whole school punished by seven weeks' loss of half-holidays. Such frankness, propelled by charm, disarms criticism. We trust the man who confesses, even when he has confessed to dishonesty.
Frank in this way as the book is, and by no means reticent, it is also full of a kind of hesitancy, which blurs outlines and qual- ifies statements. Between alternatives Vansittart cannot decide, and includes them all. 'Kites swung above Parliament Hill, their tails scribbling ghosts, snakes, spectres, on the blue and white air.' Too many choices for my mind's eye here, where one of these fine images would be graphic. Each chapter has three epigraphs; each page is crammed with lists and quota- tions; what might conceivably be relevant in a footnote is embodied in the text. Wodehouse's Psmith is mentioned: we are immediately told what Somerset Maugham said to Eddie Marsh about Wodehouse's books and, absorbing that, we forget why Psmith came in. An exuberance of irrelevancies can, and does, interest the reader; the mistake, I think, from the writer's point of view, is to suppose that all cases, all alternatives, are central to the issue and belong equally in the text.
At Haileybury Vansittart began keeping the notebooks from which all these margi- nalia are disbursed. He wanted 'to grab the oddities flying past me'. I heard him say this with the same misgivings for his art as I heard him say, 'Hotels absorb me: short stories sit at every table.' Good short stories sit at very few tables. Those seem to me the words of a man who overvalues raw material, underestimates the need for re- jection, connection, artifice, choice. Such pleasure in incidentals muffles analysts; blurs images. He says, 'I cherish "perhaps' . . . and have embedded it in myself.' I remember that Ezra Pound, in scoring out a 'perhaps' used by Eliot in The Waste Land, scribbled over it 'Dam per' apsey'. 'Perhaps' is at the heart of this ramble Vansittart has taken through his past. I was intrigued by his company, listening intently to the distinctive voice (`The 20th century is strewn with millions of dead, despatched by those of high intelligence and low, scarcely visible, character') and anxious to make sense even out of the misprints (in Hitler's Olympics Jesse Owens 'outran the Ayrans') in case I was missing a clue, a point, or some other inference in these cryptic reflections. I think, though, that the author has been all his life under a Imo apprehension as to the effects of long walks: they do not solve a writer's prob- lems, they merely put him into a good enough humour with himself to enable him to continue writing. I hope that Paths from a White Horse will have achieved that end for its author, as well as exercising and diverting the many readers it richly deserves.
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