The 'hero'

on a pedestal

Christopher Woodward

THE ARCHITECT AND HIS WIFE by Jane Ridley

Chatto, £25, pp. 488, ISBN 0701172010

Some years ago Jane Ridley (with her mother Clayre Percy) published the letters of her great-grandfather Sir Edwin Lutyens to his wife Emily. The architect's last child Mary died in 1999 and now Ridley has completed the authorised biography. This is an outstandingly good book, the best biography of an architect that I, at least, have ever read and as sad a story as Ford's The Good Soldier.

It might be called 'The Architect and his Women'. Lutyens had no close male friends but was taken up by a succession of adoring older women. As a young man the society hostess Barbara Webb played Pygmalion to his Eliza Doolittle, correcting his flippant manner and shabby dress; Gertrude Jekyll introduced him to English vernacular architecture at the reins of her pony and trap; many years and many gilded commissions later, Lady Sackville of Knole gave him a Rolls-Royce and a chauffeur named James.

The male characters who capture the reader's imagination are Ned and Emily's fathers. Charles Lutyens was rich enough to resign his army commission at 28 and become a horse painter. Living in Surrey, he was a passionate hunter — only happy on horseback, says Ridley — and became obsessed with discovering the 'Venetian secret', a lost pigment which he believed was the clue to Titian's genius. He painted darker and darker landscapes; the money disappeared; 13 children lived on cabbage cooked in oil. Charles rode a gipsy's old pony, and Ned was dressed in a dead brother's trousers.

Robert Lytton was a diplomat and son of the writer Bulwer Lytton, who at Knebworth in Hertfordshire had created a neobaronial folly as dusty, melodramatic and captivating as one of his own novels. Robert chain-smoked, took opium, had affairs and wrote poems under a pseudonym; one was entitled 'Last Words of a Sensitive Second-Rate Poet'. In 1876 he became a gaudy and theatrical Viceroy of India, but when he died 15 years later the family were too poor to stay at Knebworth.

Emily's life shows not only the fragility of Victorian fortunes — in its way her poverty was as humiliating as Ned's — but also the emotional vulnerability of a sensitive girl. As a teenager she was infatuated by the 50year-old traveller and philanderer, Wilfred Scawen Blunt, and Ridley concludes with the light but decisive analysis typical of this book, 'Emily was a worshipper'. When she met Ned she decided her purpose was to place his genius on a pedestal. The two were genuinely in love, and one of his sketches which are scattered through the pages of the biography shows the two cycling home in inky moonlight after their first kiss. He was too poor to many an earl's daughter, of course, and Lady Lytton only granted consent on receipt of a certificate showing his life was insured for 113,000. The premium cost a fifth of his income: in effect, he had mortgaged his talent to buy his wife.

Lutyens was a workaholic, who died with designs for Liverpool cathedral pinned up over his bed. The book does not have to argue his merits as an architect — who today would dispute that he was the greatest British architect since Wren? — but what is shocking to the admirer of the houses advertised in Country Life or the genial, pipe-smoking portrait in the Art Workers' Guild is his ruthlessness in pinching jobs from lesser architects. He was all but expelled by the Architects' Institute; his rivals Herbert Baker and Reginald Blomfield, cricketers on and off the pitch, concluded that he was a 'bounder' and a 'spoilt child'. Indeed, he was his mother's favourite and as an adult designed circular nurseries so that no child could be made to stand in the corner.

What Ridley does better than in any architectural history I have read is to show how for Lutyens architectural form was as warm and potent as a human embrace: the spreading wings of a great house were as alive and loving to him, he said, as a family. When Barbara Webb sat dying of cancer he distracted her with coloured drawings of her dream palace. And there is the touching story of the young architect meeting a blind, 80-year-old Gurkha colonel who had designed a cathedral in his head. 'I'll draw it for you', said Lutyens, taking squared paper from his briefcase. At two o'clock in the morning the colonel's wife came downstairs in her dressing gown.

'Oh! But ifs beautiful!', and the old man's blind face lit up as though all sorrow was of the past.

Lutyens described this to Emily when they were still sketching the dream house they never built. In 1909, after 12 years of marriage, Emily fell under the spell of Annie Besant, leader of the Theosophists and 'a skilled manipulator of a weird and unruly flock of fanatical middleaged women, defrocked priests and paedophiles'. That was the year that Krishnamurti, a 15-year-old boy, was abducted from Madras by a paederastic Theosophist named Leadbetter and proclaimed by the sect as the World Leader.

-Get yer 'air cut!' shouted Londoners. The boy went to Harrow, had his shoes made at Lobb, and chuckled 'by Jove!' as he leaned against the mantelpiece reading P. G. Wodehouse. 'I am one of those people to whom hero-worship is the greatest joy in life,' said Emily. Now Ned was on his pedestal she worshipped Krishnamurti Indeed, she fell in love with him and in order to sublimate her desire adopted him as her son. She became a vegan — poor Ned loved a good chop — and never had sex again.

Ridley is unsparing about the selfishness of Emily's delusions and of Ned's egotism — the most childlike and impossible of men' — and of the damage they caused their five troubled children, two of whom were to commit suicide. At heart, however, this is the story of two good, idealistic and passionate people journeying through a world of cynics, charlatans and nouveaux riches which might have been invented by the young Waugh. Scott Fitzgerald's reflec

tion on his own life might apply to Lutyens: I am not a great man, but sometimes I think the impersonal and objective quality of my talent, and the sacrifice of it. in pieces, to preserve its essential value has some sort of epic grandeur.

Ridley writes beautifully, with a particular gift for describing the physical presence of a character and the visual texture of a scene, whether it is the polished copper walls of the loathsome Leadbetter's den or in the Surrey of Ned's childhood 'the oak stiles burnished from the friction of the labourers' corduroys'.

Lutyens left no heir to his architectural ability but it struck me that his particular wit seems to have been re-incarnated in Bevis Hillier's articles for The Spectator. Introduced to Mr and Mrs Pim at a party, 'Do you have any Pimples?' At supper he prodded 'the piece of cod which passeth all understanding'; asked to design a monument to F. E. Smith, he proposed a rolling stone ... What I never knew is that this humour disguised such sadness, and exhausted everyone around him by its nervousness. 'One sees people getting quietly out of his way,' said a colleague on an Imperial War Graves Commission tour, 'simply because the effort of sympathetic laughter is overwhelming.'