The Only Poet (42 page)

At that moment Madame Rémy was sitting in the restaurant car of the Paris Express, eating breakfast. She could have had it brought to her in her compartment, but she had felt a desire to have it where the windows were wider and she could see more of the countryside. Her first pot of coffee had been so good that she had ordered a second, and she was spreading the butter on a roll, smiling a little, because it seemed so absurd that after such a night she should have awakened to find herself suddenly freed from the wretchedness that had hung about her for so long. Certainly she had lost none of her troubles; but they no longer appalled her. There came to mind the names of several among her friends who had survived serious operations. As for Madeleine's debts, if nobody paid them it might help the poor silly child to grow up; and the wisest thing, even the loyalest thing, for her stepmother to do was to keep the jewels and the house that Louis Rémy had given her and leave them intact to Madeleine's children. It might well be true that she could no longer support the desperate nature of her present work, but there was no need for her days to be idle, for the great dressmaker, Mariol, had always had a liking for her and had more than once offered her a post in his business. And there was no need for her to think of Claude. If she wanted to think of someone who was not there any more, she could remember Louis.

Some other names occurred to her: the names of people who had not survived operations. But they cast no darkness on her mind; she was conscious only of a certain grandeur, and they went from her. For all her interest was given to looking out of the window at what she was seeing again only because of some inexplicable carelessness on the part of those who were usually careful.

Now the train was running toward the mountains, and was passing through a valley in the foothills. There were cliffs, steel-grey where the sun caught them, dark blue in the shadow, rising to heights patterned with the first snows, glistening sugar-white under the sharp blue sky. At the foot of the cliffs a line of poplars, golden with autumn, marked the course of a broad and shallow river racing over grey shingle; and between the river and the railway track was a field where a few corn shocks, like dried, gesticulating men, were still standing among some trailing morning mists. Across this field, through the mists, an old man in a dark blue shirt and light blue trousers was leading a red cart, drawn by two oxen the colour of the coffee and milk in her cup. Deliberately the two beasts trod, so slowly that they seemed to sleep between paces, so dutifully that if they were dreaming it must be of industry. There was nothing very beautiful in the scene, yet it was wonderful, and it existed, it would go on being there when she was far away.

As the train met the mountains and passed into a tunnel, she closed her eyes so that she could go on seeing the cliffs and the snow and the poplars, the man and his cart and his oxen. Amazed by what the world looked like when one had thought it lost and had found it again, she sat quite still, in a trance of contentment, while the train carried her on to the end of her journey.

The Only Poet

Among Rebecca West's unpublished works there were fragments of what was evidently to be a full-length novel, together with an outline of the plot. It opens with Leonora Morton, a widow of over eighty, going to a party where, in the cloakroom, she meets a woman who seems to be effusively grateful for something Leonora has done in the past. In plotting terms this incident has no importance, though we learn something of Leonora's character and past. She had been married first to Philip Le Measurer, by whom she had two daughters before he died. The incident prompting the flashback which, it seems, was to form the heart of the novel, is Leonora's seeing an old accredited beauty, Avril Waters, the woman whom Leonora perceives as having ruined her life. Leonora's first husband had died ‘confident that she will marry a millionaire, Gerard March, who has long professed a passion for her. But once her husband is dead Gerard March loses all interest in her. She feels hurt and humiliated, and goes to Paris to get over it'. There she meets the rich Greek, Nicholas, with whom she is to have a long and passionate affair which is ended by a brutal incident involving Avril Waters. She returns to London and marries Lionel Morton, with whom she lives in East Africa for some years before returning to London. On a visit to Vienna she encounters Nicholas, ten years after their affair. They spend the night together, and have a long conversation before parting again. And so we return to the party and the novel's conclusion.

Diana Stainforth sorted and typed the mass of existing material, and chose a logical order for it all, while providing the many alternatives. I am more indebted than I can say for the lovingly scrupulous work she has done, and for the notes she has provided. The material was, she writes, ‘in manuscript (handwritten) books or part manuscript books, frequently muddled up with other works, many loose manuscript pages, one short, incomplete typescript version and a number of loose manuscript pages. The typescripts have no [corresponding] manuscript, although there are similar versions. There are many rough drafts of some sections.

‘Most of the material is very rough and heavily corrected, and very difficult to read. Most is in the form of notes. The manuscript book “Notes for Nicholas”, which covers much of the affair and forms the core of the story, is entirely in note form with no regard for chronological order. Amongst the rest there are several
“Chapter l“s and from this it is deduced that Rebecca West was trying out alternative beginnings.

‘The manuscripts are written in ballpoint pen, with the odd page in fibretip. The probable dating is therefore between the late 1950s to the late 1970s. Mention of the New Berkeley hotel, which opened in 1972, shows that some of the … material was written then or later.

‘It is also likely that this book was worked on at varying times between the dates given. The evidence for this is not only in the type of ballpoint pen used, the paper and the handwriting, but also in the inconsistencies, i.e. the number of husbands Leonora had (two or three), their names, her age at the time of the party (seventy or eighty).

‘Although the notes and drafts span most of the outline there are gaps. One point not clear in the material is the moment when Leonora recalls her affair. It appears that Rebecca West had not quite decided if the long recall should come immediately after Leonora sees the woman who ruined it, and then she feels ill and dies, or if she feels ill and then recalls the affair.'

With some conflations and recensions, Diana Stainforth's is the order used here, with Leonora seeing the woman she blamed for ruining her love affair, recalling the love affair and then falling ill. It should be emphasized that this makes no pretence at being a scholarly version: it has been ordered to give as much of the original material as is consonant with providing a coherent narrative. Thus the different names which Rebecca West tried out for many of the characters have been reduced to one name each, usually following the ‘Notes for Nicholas' manuscript, and Leonora has two husbands rather than the three of some drafts. Dating has been left vague, since more than one decade seems to have been tried out. The story seems to work better if Leonora is eighty or more at the time of the party. Her first husband fought in the 1914-18 war, and she foresees her second husband rejoining the army for the threatened Second World War. Her affair with Nicholas, therefore, would have occurred in the middle to late twenties, when she was thirty-one, and their meeting in Vienna when she was forty-one.

The arrival at a coherent reading version has meant that a few passages of attractive material have had to be omitted. For instance, there are two versions of the house in which the party is held, the alternative one with some beguiling details of rooms plundered from a demolished Mayfair house. These, however, were too incomplete, hinted at too many subplots, to do more than confuse the narrative. A very few passages have been omitted even when there was no alternative version, because their inclusion would have muddled the narrative or characterization. However, the passages in note form which were often all we have of the central love affair have been left as they are: they are charged with
life and narrative suggestiveness. The selection and conflation of various versions have left some minor inconsistencies, but these have been left on the principle of including as much of the original material as possible.

Wherever feasible, Rebecca West's characteristic light punctuation has been left as it is. Material in square brackets and Roman type comes from her notes. Italic type indicates my editorial interpolations.

The Only Poet

The only poet is the nervous system – (Paul Valéry)

B
eing over eighty, Leonora Morton often fell asleep quite suddenly in what are usually counted as working hours. That was how it looked to her juniors, but actually she was passing judgement on the moment and sentencing it to oblivion if it lacked interest, and she was doing that as she drove through the spring night to Patricia Stone's birthday party. In a fusion of dream and memory she had gone from London, which was now simply a stage where she had once given a performance of no particular interest to her, and was back in the country house where she had lived for thirty years: lying in bed in the room which ran right across the house behind the pediment of the colonnade, a window in each of the four walls to show the raspberry-stained night sky over the towns that lay beyond the hills to the north and south and east and west. Half a dozen books lay scattered over the counterpane so that her mind could nibble itself into a doze, and outside the hoots of the owlets in the spinney across the road fell through the night softly as feathers, making wakefulness restful as sleep. She should never have left the country. There was always something to do, from morning till night; and in her remembrance, in her dream, it was morning, and she was dawdling down the garden with the old labradors – but that showed the folly of wishing she had died a year before she sold the house – and she was kneeling by the rubble-poor bed on the south side of the walled garden. She was thrusting her fingers deeply and delicately down into the coarse rampage of flags to find the minute tight-fisted pencils of iris slytosa that would unfurl in the warmth of the house and be a high, singing blue. They were odd flowers, uncertain like stocks and shares; perhaps forty in all in a bad season, and one hundred and twenty a day if the year was good, and no reason for it.

As the car slowed down and went into the gates she awoke, and looked out across the lawn at Patricia's house, frosted in the light of the moon that was caught like a kite on the topmost branches of an elm tree over towards Lord's Cricket Ground. How time changed that which seemed unchangeable, and in fact had not changed. Fifty years ago people had been so rude about the house, so sorry for poor Patricia, who was so elegant, so like Gertrude Lawrence, and who simply had to live in the horrible thing, since it was a wedding-present from her father-in-law, who had been brought up in it and thought it the most beautiful house in London, and anyway revered his own father, who had built it in the eighties. It had been ironical, he was suffering as much from leaving it as poor Patricia was from moving into what one of her friends had likened to a deserted wife of the old National Liberal Club, dumped down on the edge of mediocre Maida Vale, to sulk over an inadequate alimony. But now nobody would have denied it was simply splendid, the moonbeams glistening on the turrets and balconies and
oeils-de-boeuf
and creatures on the upper storeys, and underlining them with sooty shadows and the golden glow of the party shining through the huge windows on the ground floor and making patterns through the trefoils and quatrefoils of the tracery, so silly anywhere but in a cathedral, so nice. Somebody with no self-consciousness had managed to think of Winenberg and Venice at the same time, in a thoroughly English way, and it was as succulent a morsel of Betjeman-meat as could be found in all London. Patricia would die if she had to leave it.

As Leonora Morton came up the steps, which were covered with the confetti of blown-about cherry blossom, she called to the butler, ‘Am I late, Mr Macnab? Has everybody come except me? Had I better go home?' and he answered, coming out into the spring night chill to give her an arm up the last step, ‘Oh, there's a few to come yet, Mrs Morton.' When they got inside, under the chandeliers, he did not let her go, but said soothingly, ‘Anyway, if we had to stay up all night for you, you'd still be welcome,' and helped her up the inner staircase to the octagonal hall, though the steps were shallow and she could manage them perfectly well. ‘I must be looking ghastly,' she thought, but that was not unnatural at her time of life, and Mr Macnab could easily fall back on the brighter memories of her he must have accumulated in the forty years of their acquaintance.

Leonora Morton crossed the octagonal hall slowly, she did not want to hurry through it, Gordon and Patricia had made it so pretty when they had had the house redone. Though Lord's Cricket Ground was only a hundred yards away, the room had a country air to it, which in her eyes was a great recommendation. Who would not be in the country if they could? The country was the place to live, there alone could one see the change every day brought to the look of the land, the only justification of time. Had she still lived at Buttermilk Hall she would have walked out early that morning, through the lemon-sharp sunshine to the shaw nearest the house, and peered about among last year's rust-red beech leaves for the first white violets, not for picking, just for looking, while the two old labradors (but this was simply dreaming, she was dreaming as they used to as they lay before the library fire after dinner, for they had died a year before she sold the place. Both dogs were like the ideal family solicitor, chasing the woodland smells as if they were getting concessions out of the Inland Revenue). But it was no use going on about that. When one was old, one had to creep back to London, it was the only place where one could get what one needed, good dailies and indoor swimming-pools, which were oddly enough not what she had expected. Nobody had told her that when one is over seventy what one wants more than anything else is access to a good indoor swimming-pool. One got something of what one had got from love-making, from that first thrust into the water, the surrender of the whole body to an unusual element.