Important to Me

by Pamela Hansford Johnson

  The style of Proust is so iridescent that it seems (until one is used to the enormous lengths of his paragraphs and his unique rhythms) difficult to the beginner: which it really is not. No Oxen of the Sun-like parodies here, and singularly little, during the entire long work, which is truly extraneous. If the essence of Proust’s style could be expressed in painting, the result would be rather like one of Monet’s great Nymphéas.

  I have deliberately refrained from speaking here of living writers because I think we lack the perspective to do real justice to our contemporaries, and may fall into grave errors which we might recognise in twenty or thirty years’ time. God knows it was hard enough, as a weekly reviewer of fiction (I was one, for seventeen years) to make snap judgments. It was necessary, of course, but it always left me with an underlying sense of unease. How far did I overrate Lagerquist? Underrate the later Thomas Mann? I did try not to let my claws show very often and think that, except in one or two cases, I succeeded. The novelist-reviewer has often been criticised, but at least he, or she, knows something of the intentions of the work under review, and understands the difficulties that have gone into achieving it.

  The highly self-conscious style is usually, to me, an irritant: unless, like Wilde’s, it serves the cause of wit. The Importance of Being Earnest is highly-stylised, and remains one of the great English comedies. But prose is different. I have always been maddened by Walter Pater. ‘Hard, gem-like flame’, indeed! What bosh. And what on earth does it mean?

  I think my perpetual urge to know what things mean adds to my suspicion of formal ‘styles’, as an end in itself.

  To sum up. The difficulty of style should only be consonant with the difficulty of the work. There is no need to create difficulties, even if they make the writer seem profound. Finnegan’s Wake is an unjustifiable complication of a subject matter insufficient to bear so much weight.

  Complication is one of the manias of our era. If you are saying something really complex, you should do your best to spell it out for the reader in so far as is possible. Sense and Sensibility is by no means an ‘easy’ book, but Jane Austen did not try to make it more difficult than it actually was. The Wings of a Dove is a difficult book, and James did wrong, stylistically, to obfuscate it. The Parables of Jesus are not at all easy, though he used the form that they might be more so. (Though I have never yet understood The Unjust Steward.)

  In fine, it is no use showing off. You will only, when the chips are down, have produced the effect of having done so. The nineteenth-century novelists were wiser than we.

  36. Endings. (1) A Partial Conclusion

  This may be the last book I shall write. If I should follow it up with half a dozen more, I shall look a fool for saying so. But what could I conceivably care? Self-concern is a prerequisite of youth. To my old confrères, the critics, I tip my cap in respect, because we have shared the same profession, and I shall read with interest what they say – and may on occasion, perhaps, be gratified: but on the whole, I shall not care.

  In writing this book, the one thing that has caused me some pain is the need for reticence on some subjects. I should have wanted to say much of Charles: something more about my children than I have done. But I am revolted by any idea of a moral striptease. My house is mine. If my children care to make it theirs, then it is theirs. We shall all talk as much, and as seldom, as we please.

  I have called this book, Important to Me: and now realise that there is no end to that. To begin with, I wish to say that sexual-plus-emotional love is all important. It is at the deepest foundations of life and joy. Take my word for that. (You may not, but so much the worse for you.)

  It does not, of course, remain at that peak of excitement for ever. But something else then intervenes: a kind of exquisite friendship. An absorbing unity of interests.

  To children: fall into love, before you fall into sex, otherwise you are going to get horribly let down.

  This is my final homily, to you, or to everyone else. And I know of what I speak.

  Last week I went to Max Adrian’s memorial service at St Paul’s Church, Covent Garden. It struck me that, for so ebullient a man, it was a trifle overweighted. I kept on thinking of his ditties, ‘Jolly, jolly Customs men are we’, and ‘I’m in love with a wonderful ghoul!’ I am not suggesting that an amalgam of these should have formed an organ voluntary. But I think I did want to say goodbye to him more gaily.

  I don’t know whether anyone will give me a Memorial Service, or not. On the whole better not: I have a terrible feeling that nobody might turn up. But if this did take place, I should like it to begin with the First Movement of the Third Brandenburg, and end with Widor’s Toccata in F – usually, nowadays, a wedding voluntary, but remorselessly cheerful. I should like someone to read the final paragraph of A la Recherche du temps perdu, in Stephen Hudson’s translation.

  All very quick – it is bound to be a very hot or a very cold day, transport may be tricky, and people will be wanting their luncheons. This will serve to write me off completely, and so much the better. Taxi! Taxi! I can hear the rushing feet, see the upstretched arms.

  How awful if no one came! Perhaps better forget the whole idea, no more than the fantasy of a moment.

  I don’t know what has forced me into such a fit of morbidity, except that, at the moment, I am suffering from a beastly complaint called bronchial spasm (through eating my fill of that stranded whale) and sometimes it is hard to breathe. I shall pick up all right, I suppose, and in a fortnight may be playing my favourite game of miniature golf at Coq-sur-Mer (de Haan) – which has long been a favourite place of mine on the Belgian coast. Though I must add rapidly that no such tragedy as occurred in my novel, to which De Haan partially provided a background, has ever darkened this delightful place, and the dunes are bare of menace.

  I am much looking forward to the future. Philip says I must go to Tanzania – well, I will get there somehow. Raymond Burr, of Ironside and Perry Mason fame, a good actor and a great philanthropist, once offered to take Charles and me to Kyoto – though this, I feel, might be too much of a strain on me. Who on earth wants a travelling companion who constantly needs to retire to bed? I have to say that even in my girlhood, two in the morning was the latest hour I could endure. But there are great parts of Italy and France that I have not visited! What do I know even of England? Not the Derbyshire Dales, nor the Lake District. What I know of Scotland, is cold, cold. The rocks are beautiful and precipitate down to the foaming sea, and the fulmars beautiful as they fly: but everyone seems to want to open windows. The Scotch are a hardy people. I do not much, in fact, care for places which have not the artefacts of man. Scenery is not enough. Delphi, now – but Delphi has everything, including circulating flights of miraculous doves, and at the end of it all, the Castalian spring, and the eager Bronze Charioteer, whose guardian loves him like a son. ‘Look at the callouses on his poor heels!’

  Where should I like to make an end? Well, not on the Steppes. I had an irrational dread of that. I should have been so far away – from what? I do not know. But far away. Very far away.

  Not that I should wish, wherever my ashes were, to be ceremonially visited. I just want to lie in English earth – or, more precisely, to be scattered somewhere around it. (Not put in some wretched urn in a hole in the wall.)

  Am I afraid of death? Honestly, I do not know. I will know when the time comes. But I hope I have much to look forward to before that happens. As I have said, I have still not seen Piero’s Resurrection at Borgo di San Sepolchro. I wonder if I ever shall? I have not seen Hugo Van der Goes’s Adoration of the Shepherds, because when I went to Uffizi, it was away being cleaned. My luck. I have seen my fill of my beloved Flemings. And I have seen most of the great Museums – and some private collections – in the United States. But there is so much more, so much more!

  Time runs out like the bath-water. In the bath, one can always put the plug back in. But then it grows cold. Time is like that.

  For me, no madeleine di
pped in tea, no stumble on a paving-stone in the Baptistry of St Mark’s. I have had fleeting experiences of this kind, of course: most people have. But I have never been able to grasp them as they flew. They have never spurred me on to creation. Dear Proust: even if all his ‘experiences’ brought back only one thing – his childhood – and the later ones in the drawing-room of the Princesse de Guermantes were a little suspect, he deserved them. He had worked long in silence, solitude and sickness, long before he began to write A la Recherche du temps perdu. His was a heroic life.

  In 1971, the centenary of his birth, the name of Illiers was changed to Illiers-Combray. This was a gesture so graceful, so absolutely right, so exquisitely French – in the most classical French manner – that it is beyond praise. I can’t think of another writer who has ever had such a tribute paid to him.

  No madeleine for me. But I hope mine comes to me from some other source. (Why should it? Still, one can always hope: and trust.) In the time that remains to me, I hope to tell in my writing, the absolute truth. Of course, since I write novels, they must of necessity be largely fabrications: but I want to tell the psychological truth as stringently and as clearly as I can see it. It is an odd thing that after a lifetime of adoring Shakespeare, Proust, Dostoevsky, it is Tolstoy who finally gives me an ideal. I care for Anna Karenina – which is sometimes dreadful in its truthfulness – I have read, re-read, and am, I confess, largely untouched by War and Peace. Yet it is the truth of Tolstoy that I reverence.

  I should like, in my fiction, if I write any more, never to tell a psychological lie to make a situation more easy, or to make it fit. Many of the novels I read today seem to me full of the most preposterous psychological shenanigans. We may be in the grip of a contemporary desire for fantasy, which I confess I do not share. I am left cold.

  At least, I am left cold by this kind of fantasy, which far too often purports to represent life. Books of fantasy read in my childhood hold for me a permanent joy: later, I have been enthralled by some – not all – of the C. S. Lewis’s Narnia stories. Tolkien does not move me, and I don’t know why: this is something of a chagrin to my son Philip. In my childhood, the Brothers Grimm were far more important to me than Hans Andersen, who seemed to me either slightly cruel, or soppy. The Brothers Grimm were frightfully cruel, when they wanted to be – but soppy, no. My edition had all those brutal-looking German woodcuts. I think they enriched my youth, never gave me a vestige of a nightmare, and added up to the wonderful accretions of the creative imagination.

  So I come towards the end of this book. It has been a selfish book: it has been about the things that were important to me. Now I think nothing is so important, as what happens to Charles and to my children.

  I think I can fairly say that I have no hates, unless it were for bullying girls, much larger than I, who made a part of my school-days a misery. I don’t care now, of course.

  As it happens, our living-room looks on to an open road, with the fine black and white spire of St Mary’s at the end. No one can build us in, so we shall have the sunshine through our windows to the end of our days. On fine nights, it is a perpetually marvellous spectacle. Aeroplanes, helicopters, slip across an infinity of Tiepolo sunsets. So we ourselves sweep across that expanse of sky from time to time. So, I imagine, metaphorically from life to death. One day – the end? Well, there must be an end, mustn’t there? The more luminous the better.

  I like the image of a life as a swallow flying in from the darkness into the great hall, and, after its moment of light, out into the darkness again. But if it is to be acceptable to me, the swallow, after the second darkness, must come into the light once more. ‘Timor mortis conturbat me’

  Few intellectuals have been undisturbed by this. It has a ring to it that is almost a jingle. It could be a song for skipping to:

  Eenie, meenie, miney mo,

  Timor mortis conturbat me.

  I don’t know why we all regard death as so peculiarly special. It is the great commonplace. Birth seems much more extraordinary.

  Meanwhile, it would be as well if I started thinking about writing another novel.

  37. Endings. (2) The Sea

  I was sitting at a café window, on the promenade at De Haan, watching a stormy sea. The great rollers, dung-coloured, charcoal and black, breaking into dirty white crests, thundered up the beach, exploding but never reaching the sea wall. The sky above was leaden, the gales moaned and the rain cracked against the windows. Even inside, in the warmth of the room, I could feel the inner chill: it had been a terrible beginning to April, and bitterly cold during the days we had been in Belgium.

  At that moment there appeared, in the sky, not a ray of sunshine, but something like a tremor of light: which at once lent a less dirty touch to the breakers, but left the rollers unchanged. Then, simultaneously, the rain came down harder and there grew, high up, a patch of Poussin blue. A pale rainbow glimmered over the dunes to the right. The blue spread, the sun poured down and the rain ceased. The rainbow faded. The water was now changed to a lighter grey, a purer yellow, with blue hardly perceptible but full of promise. Within a few minutes, the promenade was alive with children on their hired bicycles, the frames bright red and yellow and green, fighting joyously against the gale, all of them a danger to life and limb. It was filled, too, with adults in leather coats and anoraks, determined to be in a holiday mood at all costs.

  I felt a considerable uplift in my spirits, which had been lowered by the icy and blustering walk to the café. From the window now, it really was possible to delude oneself that it was spring.

  Soon, Philip’s friend, another Philip – Philip Mansel – joined us for a few days. He drove us over one morning to Ghent. The weather was as horrible as ever, the wind worse: even Charles, who seems to have a remarkable inner thermostat, was glad to get out of the cold. St Bavon was closed till 2.30, so we had a drink at a café and then a leisurely lunch. I was excited at the thought of seeing again, for the third time, Van Eyck’s The Mystic Lamb, for me the most beautiful of all paintings. The chapel was freezing; even the custodian, huddling by his little electric fire, was shivering. On chairs set along the wall there were the usual tourists, but no crowds this time.

  Then the painting, the first impression like an enormous display of incomparable jewels, dazzling, mind-shaking. The falling into place of the marvellous panels: the martyrs passing by their hedge of roses. St Christopher leading his pilgrims, angels with faces of ineffable purity raised in song, Saint Cecilia absorbed at the organ, sad Adam and Eve, all hope gone: the Immaculate Lamb, so mild on his altar, blood spouting in a slender fountain from his breast, angels worshipping about him: and above all, the three great figures: the Virgin Mary, crowned with lilies and roses, rubies and pearls, St John the Baptist in a green cloak, and in the middle, Christ in Glory. He is a young man, with only a delicate growth of beard: but so fatherly, He seems not only the Son but the Father himself. I think of him as God. Max Friedländer, does indeed call him ‘God the Father’. His face is serene, stern, but promising mercy. He is wonderfully attired, in triple tiara and robes richly embroidered: a glittering, blazing, vermilion robe at His feet; almost a blinding crown, the golden filigree set with a multiplicity of emeralds, rubies, diamonds and sapphires. But it is this thing above all that gives the painting such majesty and peace: it is God’s beautiful hand raised in benediction above us all.

  Most of my friends are, I suppose, agnostics: yet I myself find it impossible to believe that they are not moved even for a fleeting moment, by a mystery outside of themselves, if only by the involuntary realisation of the accretion of the passionate faith of five hundred years ago.

  If there are not too many people about, it is best to get as near to the painting as possible, so as to study the detail of landscape and flora: sometimes it seems like a complete herbarium. It is necessary to look away from it time and time again, whenever the glory begins to dim, and then to catch it again, suddenly, the peace of its wonder; all its colours restored by t
he momentary resting of the eyes.

  When I left the chapel, I felt, on that bitter winter’s day in mid-April, that something extraordinary had happened to me: not in an exaggerated fashion, not as a revelation, not, I suspect, in any sense of mystical experience. But for some time I had been rather ill – not very – with a respiratory complaint, and was making a somewhat slow recovery. As I said, or implied somewhere else, this would plunge me suddenly into fits of depression or of inner turmoil – not long-lasting, but distressing at the time. Suddenly I felt that I had only to fix my mind on that hand upraised in benediction to become peaceful again at once: peaceful, and still. Is it presumption to use a great painting as a sort of icon? Icons themselves have, for centuries, been peace-giving.

  We drove around Ghent after that, passing but not entering the Gravensteen, seeing beautiful houses that we had missed before, and willow-hung canals: Philip Mansel found the house where Louis XVIII had lived (a monarch for whom he has a singular fondness), now a smart antique shop: he was able to go in and photograph it. We came home in excellent spirits, discussing just what news had been brought from Ghent to Aix. We were all tired, but we had had a happy day. Happiness. ‘The absence of pain?’ Only someone who had never experienced the earthly paradise could have reduced it to that.

  I am a natural worrier, as my mother was. If I have nothing to worry about, I invent something. If Charles or the children do not come in about the time I expect them, I foresee atrocious accidents – the consequences, the In Memoriam notices, the funerals, the unthinkable grief. But above all, these imaginings are disgustingly practical. I have to have my plans worked out to the last detail. Needless to say, all this would be a terrible bore to my husband and children if I said very much about it. When they do come in, with perfectly reasonable explanations for their lateness, I greet them with casual pleasure and return to The Times crossword puzzle.