The Pursuit of Laughter (7 page)

The diary abounds in examples of her talents as critic. After reading Katherine Mansfield’s
Bliss
: ‘… her mind is a very thin soil, laid an inch or two deep upon very
barren
rock’ (this in 1918, when Katherine Mansfield was being hailed as a new Chekov). Of Byron: ‘The truth may be that if you are charged at such high voltage you can’t fit any of the ordinary human feelings; must pose; must rhapsodise; don’t fit in. He wrote in the Fun Album that his age was one hundred. And this is true, measuring life by feeling.’ Of
Paradise Lost
: ‘I can conceive that even Shakespeare after this would seem a little troubled, personal, hot and imperfect. I can conceive that this is the essence of which almost all other poetry is the dilution. The inexpressible fineness of the style, in which shade after shade is perceptible, would alone keep one gazing into it, long after the surface business in progress has been dispatched. Deep down one catches still further combinations,
rejections
, felicities and masteries.’

The art of writing was her chief passion; but the following shows her close
observation
, and curiously aloof sympathy: ‘Saw and heard the Salvation Army making Christianity gay for the people; a great deal of nudging and joking on the part of very unattractive young men and women; making it lively, I suppose; and yet, to be truthful, when I watch them I never laugh or criticise but only feel how strange and interesting this is; wonder what they mean by “Come to the Lord”. I daresay exhibitionism accounts for some of it; the applause of the gallery; this lures boys to sing hymns; and kindles shop boys to announce in a loud voice that they are saved. It is what writing for the
Evening
Standard
is for…’

The Woolfs owned the Hogarth Press; they were offered
Ulysses
and refused it—a
curious
parallel to Gide’s refusal, for the NRF, of
Du Côté de chez Swann
.

Most of the chief Bloomsbury figures are dead. Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, Roger Fry, Maynard Keynes—they did not live to a great age, they never reached the
Grand Old
stage of an earlier generation. But some of the younger ones are still alive, and here is the first volume of David Garnett’s autobiography. In it he describes his upbringing, with the typical background of the future Bloomsbury; the intellectual parents (Constance Garnett, a translator of genius, was his mother); the liberal, rationalist opinions; the famous friends; the cranky food; the sofa propped up with books; the solid discomfort. Excellent writer that he is, readers of
The Golden Echo
will eagerly look forward to the next instalment; hoping, meanwhile, for a new novel after too many silent years.

Were the Bloomsburies as parochial as the name suggests? Roger Fry proclaiming the merits of post-impressionism to Edwardian London was an interpreter; Lytton Strachey, E.M. Foster, Virginia Woolf and David Garnett are artists, whose books will be read as long as there is anyone left to enjoy the ‘combinations, rejections, felicities and masteries’ of the English language which they all know how to employ.

A Writer’s Diary
, Woolf, V.;
The Golden Echo
, Garnett, D. (1953)

The second volume of Mr Garnett’s autobiography is a less polished success than
The
Golden Echo
; in places it reads almost like notes for somebody’s memoirs rather than the finished product. Nevertheless the book has virtues, of which the chief is that the author tells tales and anecdotes about his clever friends and contemporaries the Bloomsburies which marvellously bring them to life. If, at times, the narrative seems jerky instead of
running
on ball bearings, it may be that it cost him a good deal to write about the war years which must, in some ways, have been a disagreeable time for him.

Unless he is buoyed up by particularly strong political or religious beliefs there is no doubt that, for a healthy man in the twenties, the position of conscientious objector in war time is a difficult one, even if he belongs to a group of clever and like-minded friends which forms a cushion between himself and the outside world. (Mr Garnett spent part of the 1914 war with Frankie Birrell working behind the lines in France among Quakers, and the rest with Duncan Grant as a labourer on a Sussex farm, where he stayed with Vanessa Bell.) That simple people may suspect him of cowardice is the very least of the
complicated
feelings which he must have about himself and about the attitude of others towards him. Keynes, for example, the only member of the circle to take part in the world of action, faithfully gave evidence for all the Bloomsburies of military age at their Tribunals, and was obviously a great help in getting them exempted from fighting. Yet there was a ‘painful scene’ at 46, Gordon Square when ‘the conversation turned on conscientious objection and Maynard declared that he did not believe anyone had a genuine
conscientious
objection. If he said this to exasperate Vanessa and Norton he certainly succeeded.’

In Mr Garnett’s case the result of these tensions seems to have been that he suffered from nerves and
angst
. Not until a few years after the war, when success came to him, did he become once again the delightful person he was in
The Golden Echo
.

Many of the best Bloomsbury sagas are told. There is the Garsington peacock, named Argus by Aldous Huxley, which got carbuncles and conveniently died in December 1917 and was roasted for Christmas dinner; when the guests were violently sick. Lady Ottoline said it was an appendicitis epidemic. And Lytton Strachey’s evidence when he came before the Tribunal for conscientious objectors, where he was accompanied by his whole family:
The Military Representative was inspired with a flight of fancy and asked: ‘What would you do, Mr. Strachey, if you saw an Uhlan attempting to rape your sister?’ Lytton looked at his sisters in turn, as though trying to visualise the scene, and gravely replied in his high voice: ‘I should try to interpose my own body.’

The Flowers of the Forest
, Garnett, D. (1955)

In her nineties, the last of the Bloomsbury group, Frances Partridge, has produced a delightful book, full of indiscreet gossip, amusing stories and fascinating journeys. There is something for everyone in these diaries, far and away the best she has bestowed upon the public.

Sharply observant, she gives a lyrical description of restored Warsaw and St Petersburg, enjoying every moment despite the bitter cold. Then there is a calm visit to David Garnett in his French cottage with its pastoral setting, walks in woods, hunting for wild flowers, talking about the past.

In Italy she goes on a rather frenzied tour with Dadie Rylands and Raymond Mortimer, visiting cities, palaces, cathedrals and museums, almost too much beauty; Raymond is rather tiresome with his schoolmaster-like comments forced upon his companions. For her journeys abroad she chose her companions well on the whole, not as easy as it sounds. Spain was perhaps her favourite country.

Back in England life was very different. Strikes galore, rubbish in the streets, electric fires sadistically fading during ‘cuts’, torch batteries and candles unobtainable: London in the early 1970s became almost as uncomfortable as it had been in the war.

All Frances Partridge’s friends were ill, some desperately so. She herself is a widow mourning her clever husband as well as their only son, who died in his twenties, yet she flies to comfort her ailing contemporaries. Her greatest friend Julia Strachey, always
neurotic
, at this time goes completely mad. The account of the descent into hell of the
charming
, intelligent Julia is frightful and sad as only the truth can be. It is a relief when Julia herself insists upon enmity where once had been deep friendship. Frances was getting to the end of her fund of sympathy when she was forced to abandon the terrible task to
others
.

There is a close-up view of many a broken marriage, when she is called to help in a situation where there is never much hope. There are also happy marriages, Heywood and Anne Hill for example, and visits to the Hills and Anne’s eccentric brothers for the Aldeburgh Music Festival.

Two snowy Christmases she stayed with the David Cecils, another happy pair. David
Cecil talked himself and everyone else into a stupor, and when Frances retired to her room she heard the Cecil voices rising uninterruptedly through the floorboards.

Very naturally, she dreads the Bloomsbury-hounds, and the cinema and television absurdities, pretending to tell the ‘truth’ about her famous friends and making a hash of it. But these talented and articulate people are not really at risk.

Frances Partridge reveals herself, as diarists always do, from Pepys to Chips, from André Gide to Alan Clark and James Lees-Milne. She is a puritan who responds to
beauty
. She hates war, cruelty, stupidity. But she also hates luxury, grandeur, and even, almost, comfort. She fails to see the superb beauty of Houghton, within and without. Or if she sees it, she cannot approve. She says aristocrats are arrogant, picking on one lady, Kathleen Stanley, who was the kindest of women.

Her Puritanism just occasionally shows the tip of its ear, as the French say. Perhaps it is one of her virtues. Be that as it may, her book deserves the success which it will surely have.

The Diaries of Frances Partridge: 1963-66
, Partridge, F.
Sunday Times
(1998)

Here are the scrapings of the barrel, more or less everything left behind by Henry Yorke (for that was Henry Green’s real name) when he died. Much of it is well worth
preserving
: interviews, unperformed television plays, chapters of unfinished novels, scenes of family life half-truth half-caricature written in the merciless and sardonic way he had. Henry Green’s grandson has edited these literary remains, putting them in chronological order. It is easy to see influences—Kafka, Henry James—but from the beginning Green’s was such a distinctive voice that only he could have written these pages.

Greatly admired in his lifetime by other writers, Waugh, Auden, Isherwood, V.S. Pritchett for example, there will probably never be a school of Henry Green. As he
himself
said of Joyce, his style, his jokes, his marvellous dialogue were his alone.

He might have echoed Gide’s cry: ‘
Familles! Je vous hais!
’ There is bitterness in the way he describes a boring family evening, father and mother bickering and two sulky sons
leaving
them to it. There is a fantasy about a giant who appears in the park at Petworth. Henry Green’s eccentric Wyndham uncles and aunts see him out of the window and are half
terrified
, half outraged. How to get rid of him? The butler is sent out, but is blown into the lake. Finally the giant goes, but not before bellowing that he had come there hoping to hear the family engaged in intellectual conversation.