Solitude_A Return to the Self

by Anthony Storr

  It is also interesting that the creative period in which all her best books were written lasted a mere ten years. In 1913, in spite of bitter opposition from her parents, Beatrix Potter married a solicitor, and settled down to farming in the Lake District. In 1913 also, Beatrix Potter reached the age of forty-seven. It could be argued that, as age renders childhood increasingly remote, creativity based upon childhood phantasy is bound to decline. It could also be surmised that, when another human being became for the first time the emotional centre of Beatrix Potter’s life, the intensity of feeling with which she had invested the lives of animals diminished, and her motive for inventing stories about them disappeared. She is not the only example of a writer whose interest in imaginative invention seems to have declined in similar fashion; but other women writers, like Trollope’s mother, carried on writing in spite of marriage and maternity.

  At the beginning of his chapter on Beatrix Potter to which we have already referred, Humphrey Carpenter postulates

  a stereotype in many people’s minds of the typical children’s writer of the late Victorian and Edwardian period. He or she is supposed to have been a lonely, withdrawn, introverted individual, scarcely able to achieve normal human relationships, and only capable of communicating his or her deepest feelings by talking to children or writing books for them.7

  I share Carpenter’s dislike of stereotypes; but it is nevertheless quite often the case that adults who find it difficult to make relationships with their contemporaries are more at ease with children or animals, whether or not they happen to be writers. Let us briefly look at some examples of writers who showed these characteristics and whose emotional development and choice of career were partly determined by early separation from their parents.

  Edward Lear, whose nonsense rhymes and comic drawings have entertained both adults and children for over a hundred years, was the twentieth child of his parents. When his father ran into debt, the family split up. At the age of four, in order to ease the burden on his mother, Lear was entrusted to the care of his elder sister, Ann. From then on, his mother had nothing further to do with his upbringing. Vivien Noakes writes:

  He was a rather ugly, short-sighted, affectionate little boy, and he was bewildered and hurt by her unaccountable rejection of him.8

  Although his sister proved an affectionate guardian, and the family were later reunited, Lear seems never to have formed close ties with either parent, and, from the age of seven onward, was subject to recurrent attacks of depression which he called ‘the Morbids’. His psychological disturbance was further complicated by epilepsy and asthma. He grew up to become a lonely adult, predominantly homosexual, but probably never consummating his desires.

  His search was not for physical love, but for someone who would want him as a person in the way that his parents had not wanted him as a child. Through his sensibility and charm he was sought after as a friend, and he loved to be with children because they liked him and showed it. But what he was searching for, and never found, was real spiritual involvement with another person.9

  Vivien Noakes subtitles her biography ‘The Life of a Wanderer’, for Lear spent much of his life in travel, making his living as a painter. Perpetual travel, or frequent moves of house, are often engaged in by the maternally deprived or by those who, for other reasons, find it difficult to create a place which they can consider ‘home’. Lear, in spite of his charm and the lovable qualities which brought him many friends, never overcame his essential loneliness.

  Rudyard Kipling is a particularly striking example of a writer whose early deprivation and unhappiness had a profound effect upon his future. Kipling was born in Bombay on 30 December 1865. His father, John Lockwood Kipling, was principal of a school of art in that city. On 15 April 1871, Kipling’s father and mother, together with his younger sister, who had been born on 11 June 1868, returned to England for a six-month leave of absence. In those days, it was customary for the children of English parents living in India to be sent home for their education. This was partly to avoid the risks of disease and premature death, which were certainly greater in the hot climate of India, and partly for snobbish reasons. Children brought up by Indian ‘ayahs’ were less likely to acquire the habits and manners of the English middle-class.

  Kipling, just before his sixth birthday, was left with his sister in the care of a retired naval captain and his wife, Captain and Mrs Holloway. The parents did not inform their children that they were returning to India without them. Kipling was not to see his mother again until April 1877. The five years which he spent in what he later called ‘The House of Desolation’ marked him for life. He was bullied by the Holloways’ son, a boy some six years older, and ruthlessly punished, both by beatings and by enforced isolation, at the hands of the hateful Mrs Holloway. He was also bullied at the local day-school to which he was sent, and at which he performed badly. Every night he was cross-examined as to how he had spent his day. Each contradiction which the frightened, sleepy child produced was treated as a deliberate lie, and further proof of punishable wickedness. One of Kipling’s biographers, Charles Carrington, remarks that his long years of suffering at the hands of Mrs Holloway taught him

  the stoic lessons that the mind must make its own happiness, that any troubles can be endured if the sufferer has resources of his own to sustain him.’10

  In his story ‘Baa, Baa, Black Sheep’, Kipling gives an autobiographical account of this dreadfully unhappy part of his life. Angus Wilson writes:

  The writing of it was extremely painful to him as we know from his friend, Mrs Hill, in whose house in Allahabad he was living when he wrote it.11

  Kipling referred to his treatment by Mrs Holloway as ‘calculated torture’; but he also said that its effect was to make him pay careful attention to the lies which he had to tell, and concluded that this was the foundation of his literary effort.

  The art of fiction may in part spring from the capacity to make lies convincing, but this is not its only source, and Kipling is being unnecessarily self-deprecating in suggesting it. What he also records is his delight in discovering that, if only adults left him alone, he could, through reading, escape into a world of his own.

  As an adult, Kipling remained elusive and shunned publicity. He resented enquiry into his private life, wishing to be judged on his writings alone. His marriage was of a kind characteristic of creative people whose principal wish is not close intimacy, but the freedom to pursue their imaginative work without interruption. Carrie Balestier, whom Kipling married in 1892, was a capable woman who protected him from visitors, took over the running of the household, and managed his business affairs and correspondence. Although he enjoyed his fame and had widespread social contacts, Kipling remained reserved, and was apt to retreat into reverie on social occasions. Carrington thinks that the marriage was more satisfactory on his side than it was on his wife’s.

  Kipling’s inner tension revealed itself in insomnia and duodenal ulcer. Like Edward Lear, he was at his best and most relaxed with children. He also exhibited an extraordinary capacity for inspiring confidence in others, who found themselves telling him their troubles in the assurance that he would not betray them.12

  This particular trait seems to depend upon an unusual capacity to put oneself in other people’s shoes, to identify oneself with others. It often originates in the kind of premature concern with the feelings of others which Kipling describes himself as having had to develop as a child; a concern which we also observed in Trollope. Kipling became watchful and wary; alert to the changing moods of adults which might presage anger. This prescient awareness of what others were feeling and of how they displayed their emotions probably stood him in good stead when he came to write.

  Fear of punishment is not the only reason for this kind of watchful anxiety. Children with depressed mothers, or with mothers whose physical health is a matter for concern, develop the same kind of over-anxious awareness. Such children keep their own feelings to themselves, whilst at the sam
e time taking special note of the feelings of the other person. They are less able than most children to turn to the mother or other care-taker as a resource. In adult life, the watchful, over-anxious child becomes a listener to whom others turn, but who does not make reciprocal relationships on equal terms of mutual self-revelation. The same temperament is not infrequently found in psycho-analysts and doctors, who invite confidences but who are not called upon to reveal themselves.

  Kipling knew his confidants better than they were allowed to know him. As often happens with writers, Kipling’s revelation of himself was mostly indirect and confined to his fiction. ‘Baa, Baa, Black Sheep’ is exceptional, in that it appears to be autobiography undiluted.

  H. H. Munro, the author ‘Saki’, is a striking example of a writer whose imagination owed much to bereavement, loss of parental love, and emotional isolation. Saki was born almost exactly five years later than Kipling, on 18 December 1870. Like Kipling, he was born abroad; not in India, but in Burma, where his father was an officer in the British military police. Whilst on furlough in England, in the winter of 1872, his pregnant mother was charged by a runaway cow. She both miscarried and died as a result of this untoward accident. Saki and his elder brother and sister were left behind when their father returned to Burma, to be brought up by their widowed paternal grandmother and her two fearsome daughters, Aunt Charlotte, known as ‘Tom’, and Aunt Augusta.

  These two formidable women were in constant, bickering competition with each other. Both were rigid disciplinarians. Augusta, particularly, was irrationally punitive, adding the threat of divine wrath to her own. Ethel, the eldest of the three Munro children, described her as:

  A woman of ungovernable temper, of fierce likes and dislikes, imperious, a moral coward, possessing no brains worth speaking of, and a primitive disposition. Naturally, the last person who should have been in charge of children.13

  Saki repeatedly revenged himself on his aunts in his stories, of which the most vindictive is ‘Sredni Vashtar’, in which the guardian of ten-year-old Conradin, who is clearly modelled on Aunt Augusta, is killed by Conradin’s pet, a polecat-ferret.

  Saki grew up to be a dandy and a homosexual. Like Noël Coward, he concealed his feelings beneath a protective mask of cynicism; and, although beloved by many, was intimate with few. In his perceptive introduction to The Bodley Head Saki, J. W. Lambert writes:

  Even the tributes of his friends (except perhaps those in the Army) seem to suggest the charming courtesy which is rooted in indifference. Society was for him a breeding-ground of inanity. When he turns from the attack he becomes a celebrant of loneliness. There is no close human relationship in any of his work, except the twisted skein which binds and cripples Francesca Bassington and her son [see The Unbearable Bassington].14

  Saki shared with Kipling and with Lear a preference for the company of children rather than that of adults. All three were animal-lovers and introduced animals into their stories.

  Saki and Kipling also shared a certain interest in physical cruelty which sometimes manifests itself distastefully, as in the ‘Stalky’ stories of Kipling, and in Saki’s description of Comus caning a boy at school in The Unbearable Bassington. Both men carried with them into adult life a sadistic streak which, as such things often are, was probably derived from a wish for revenge on those who had tormented them in childhood. Fiction provides an acceptable outlet for the discharge of violent feelings. How one wishes that those who act out such emotions by attacking the innocent and helpless were gifted enough to express their feelings in the form of fiction!

  A third example is a writer of a very different kind, P. G. Wodehouse. He was born on 5 October 1881. Although he was born in England, he passed most of his first two years in Hong Kong, where his father was a magistrate. At the age of two, Wodehouse and his two brothers, aged six and four, were taken to England by their mother and put in charge of a stranger, a Miss Roper, who was engaged to look after them. After three years of her regime, the boys were moved to a school in Croydon, run by two sisters, and then to a school in Guernsey. Wodehouse himself wrote that he was just passed from hand to hand, and that it was an odd life with no home to go to.

  He was not desperately unhappy. In an interview toward the end of his life, he actually claimed to have had a very happy childhood, and contrasted his own fate favourably with that of Kipling. But the lack of any close, abiding affectionate ties in his earliest years inevitably had its effect. His biographer, Frances Donaldson, remarks:

  He simply detached himself from the cold and unrewarding world and retreated into phantasy. From the earliest age he was happiest alone with his own company, and in the absence of any family life or stimulus to the emotions, he cultivated his imagination in solitude. He said he could remember no time when he did not intend to be a writer and he started to make up stories even before he could write.15

  In an interview which he gave for the Paris Review when he was ninety-one, Wodehouse was reported as saying: ‘I know I was writing stories when I was five. I don’t know what I did before that. Just loafed I suppose.’16

  After yet another change of school, P. G. Wodehouse was sent to Dulwich College. Here, Frances Donaldson tells us, ‘he acquired, for the first time, a degree of permanence and stability’.17

  For Wodehouse, Dulwich College became the focus for emotions which, in children who have experienced a normal background, usually become attached to ‘home’. Forty years after he had left the school, Wodehouse was still following the school’s football matches with undiminished emotional intensity. He himself described his years at Dulwich as being like heaven. He was good at games, above average intellectually, and, in the atmosphere of a public school, not required to make close relationships. As Frances Donaldson puts it, ‘he could participate without being drawn in’.18

  Wodehouse’s mother re-entered his life when he was fifteen, but he never formed any close relationship with her, and seems to have remained emotionally inhibited and dependent in his later relationships with women. As often happens with the maternally deprived, Wodehouse was drawn to women older than himself. When he married, in 1914, his wife Ethel took entire charge of his financial affairs, and made him a small allowance. She protected him against the world, and, although she sometimes pressed him into social engagements which he shunned, saw that he got the solitude he needed. In these respects, Wodehouse’s marriage closely resembled Kipling’s.

  P. G. Wodehouse continued to dread individual social contacts, hated being interviewed, loathed clubs (though he belonged to a number of them), and lavished on animals the affection which he could not give to his fellow-creatures. When his wife was looking for an apartment in New York he asked her to find one on the ground floor.‘“Why?” she asked, and he replied: “I never know what to say to the lift-boy.”’19

  When he visited his daughter at school, he had to wait outside until she joined him because he was frightened of facing her headmistress without support. He was a sweet, kind, rather childlike character who used his work as a retreat from the world and who was hugely prolific as a result. It is reckoned that he published ninety-six books, as well as writing lyrics for musical comedies and much else besides.

  In the ordinary course of life, one usually admires people who make light of their troubles by turning them into jokes; but P. G. Wodehouse made use of humour as a defence to a point at which it distorted his appreciation of reality. His indifference to money, for example, other than the change which he carried for tobacco or a new typewriter ribbon, involved him in recurrent encounters with the tax authorities. Interned in France by the Germans during the Second World War, he did immense damage to his reputation by agreeing to make some light-hearted broadcasts from Germany about his experiences as an internee. Anyone with a normal appreciation of reality, let alone any sense of politics, would have realized that such an act would be looked upon as support for the Nazis, but Wodehouse blithely took it as a chance to keep in touch with his public and to thank his Amer
ican friends for the parcels which they had sent him, without any suspicion that he would be labelled a traitor.

  Kipling, Saki and Wodehouse had in common the experience of being ‘farmed out’ at an early age, and of lacking the amenities, affection, and support of an ordinary home. As a result, all three suffered subsequently from difficulties in making close relationships and tended to show more affection toward animals or children than they were able to show toward adults.

  All three learned to use the imagination, both as a retreat from the world, and also as an indirect way of making a mark upon it. Kipling and Saki expressed in their fiction some of the resentment which they felt toward those who had abandoned them and left them to be mistreated at the hands of strangers. Wodehouse, who was not ill-treated, but merely passed from hand to hand, developed an imaginative world in which there is no violence, no hatred, no sex, and no deep feeling. Although some of Lear’s rhymes exhibit a humorous kind of violence, his imaginative world is also sexless and without profound emotion.

  It is legitimate to assume that, in these examples, the development of such highly complex imaginative worlds was the consequence of being cut off from the emotional fulfilment which children with more ordinary backgrounds experience in their relations with parents and other care-takers. These writers (and here I include Beatrix Potter and Edward Lear, who were emotionally, but not physically, removed from parental care) compensated for their isolation by their invention, and by, in four instances, partially substituting love of animals for love of people.