by David Lodge
He signed the lease in August 1911, and they used the house initially as a weekend retreat, but he and Jane both liked it so much that the following spring they made the Rectory – renamed ‘Easton Glebe’ to weaken its ecclesiastical associations – their permanent home, keeping on Church Row temporarily as a London base, but with the intention of selling it and purchasing the Easton house on a long lease. The boys revelled in the wide open spaces that surrounded the house, and their freedom to explore them. A tennis court was laid out on one of the lawns, and the barn was cleaned and furnished for indoor games and theatricals on wet days. On most weekends they had a party of friends to stay who were always enchanted with and envious of the place. He had a spacious study on the ground floor but intended to create also a secluded suite on an upper floor where he could sleep or write at any time of the day or the night as the mood took him. Jane, as resourceful as always, took on the task of executing his plans, and herself set about restoring the neglected gardens to order.
Meanwhile he accompanied little E to Switzerland to observe the progress of the Chalet Soleil, which like every other building under construction in the history of the world was behind schedule, and would not be completed by the autumn, but was promised to be ready by Christmas. They stayed in a neighbouring chalet owned by the singer Jenny Lind, and spent their days hiking through the foothills and pine woods, taking a simple picnic with them in their rucksacks, and making love after their lunch on mattresses of pine needles covered with their clothes. Little E enjoyed sex in the open air as much as himself, and relished the sensation of sun and breeze on her naked skin. They knew where the local peasants were working and there were few tourists about in early summer, so there was little risk of being surprised in flagrante. He took trips with her that year to Amsterdam, Paris and Locarno, where they stayed in grand hotels and disported themselves decadently on sprung mattresses and among pillows stuffed with goosedown, but no lovemaking between them pleased him as much as those rustic copulations on the hillsides of the Valais, rendered all the more natural by the circumstance that contraceptive precautions were, she assured him, no longer required. She had reached that stage in a woman’s life conveniently early.
In September Marriage was published, and was rapturously received, fulfilling to excess his hopes that it would restore him to respectability in the eyes of the great British public. ‘A book that thrills with the life, the questioning, of to-day. Whatever the autumn publishing season may produce, it is not likely to bring us anything more vital, more significant, than “Marriage”,’ declared the Daily Chronicle. ‘What a brilliant, stimulating, and even exalting book this is … The observation, the cleverness, the almost vicious gaiety, the religious curiosity of the book, are wonderful,’ said the Daily News. ‘Alive with flashes of the most perfect insight at every turn … It grips the reader from cover to cover,’ enthused the Sphere. He had not had such a royal flush of laudatory reviews since The War of the Worlds. Even his old journalistic enemies, the scourges of In the Days of the Comet and Ann Veronica, were charmed, and purred their appreciation: ‘Mr Wells has put all his cleverness into this long story of an engagement and marriage between two attractive and, we may add, perfectly moral young people,’ said the Spectator, while T.P.’s Weekly described it as ‘a thrilling and inspiring book – and one that can be placed on a puritan’s family bookshelf’. He laughed disbelievingly as he leafed through the cuttings sent to him by Macmillan with a congratulatory covering note – even the author didn’t think the book was that good. But the extravagant praise made up for some of the critical injustices of the past, and he was not going to complain about it.
There was only one starkly dissenting review, albeit in a publication of small circulation. A writer called Rebecca West wrote a withering critique of Marriage in the Freewoman, a lively little magazine less than a year old which aimed to broaden the feminist agenda beyond the single issue of the vote to include sexuality and culture, and even dared to criticise certain aspects of the suffragettes’ campaigns. The previously unknown Rebecca West’s witty, combative contributions to this journal had already attracted his attention, beginning with a bold attack on Mrs Humphry Ward, who personified the English idea of a ‘serious’ novelist, partly on the strength of her genealogy (granddaughter of Dr Arnold of Rugby, and niece of Matthew Arnold) but mainly because her novels were about the waning of Christian faith, and had characters who earnestly debated how its theology could be modernised and its morality preserved. ‘The idea of Christ is the only inheritance that the rich have not stolen from the poor,’ Rebecca West asserted in ‘The Gospel According to Mrs Humphry Ward’. ‘It is now a great national interest (not a faith), and as such is treated with respect, and as securely protected from “modernising” as the tragedy of Hamlet. And although Mrs Ward has been “turning her trained intellect” (to quote her publisher) on the universe for nigh on sixty years, that has not struck her. She regards the Englishman as going to church with the same watchful eye for possible improvements as when he attends the sanitary committee of the borough council.’ He knew good polemical writing when he saw it, and chuckled appreciatively. Mrs Humphry Ward was used to fending off the arguments of orthodox Christians on the one hand and of militant atheists on the other, but it was easy to imagine her discomfiture at being attacked from this quite unexpected direction and being portrayed as an ideological robber of the poor. He did not however enjoy being at the sharp end of Miss West’s scorn himself. Her review began:
Mr Wells’ mannerisms are more infuriating than ever in Marriage. One knows at once that Marjorie is speaking in a crisis of wedded chastity when she says at regular intervals, ‘Oh, my dear! … Oh, my dear!’ or at moments of ecstasy, ‘Oh, my dear! Oh, my dear!’ For Mr Wells’ heroines who are loving under legal difficulties say ‘My man!’ or ‘Master!’ Of course he is the old maid among novelists; even the sex-obsession that lay clotted on Ann Veronica and The New Machiavelli like cold white sauce was merely old maid’s mania, the reaction towards the flesh of a mind too long absorbed in airships and colloids.
Reading this he felt rather as he had imagined Mrs Humphry Ward must have felt, for he was not accustomed to being likened to a celibate spinster. It was a very long review, and a very thorough demolition of his novel. ‘His first sin lies in pretending that Marjorie, that fair, fleshy being who at forty would look rather like a cow – and the resemblance would have a spiritual significance – is the normal woman; and the second lies in his remedy: “Suppose the community kept all its women, suppose all property in homes and furnishings and children was vested in them … Then every woman would be a princess to the man she loved.” The cheek of it! The mind reels at the thought of the community being taxed to allow Marjorie to perpetuate her cow-like kind.’ The real answer, Rebecca West asserted, was to let women earn their own living.
He might have been more annoyed to receive such a dismissive review by a little-known critic in a journal that he regarded as being on the same side as himself if he hadn’t had such a unanimously good press for Marriage everywhere else. As it was, he could afford to be magnanimous and admit to Jane, who had read the review first, and passed it to him with the advice, ‘You’d better take a few deep breaths before you read this, H.G.’, that the woman had put her finger on some vulnerable points in his novel, and certainly knew how to write. This Rebecca West seemed to have an interesting mind and a great deal of self-confidence – wouldn’t it be amusing to ask her down to Easton Glebe for lunch one day, and see if she had the gumption to walk into the lion’s den and defend herself ?
‘It seems to me that it is you who will have to do the defending,’ Jane said drily. ‘But invite her if you like.’
Accordingly he wrote to Rebecca West, care of the Freewoman, to say that he had read her review with interest and invited her to lunch to discuss further the issues it raised, adding information about the most convenient trains from Liverpool Street, and how to request a stop at the Easton private stati
on. She accepted by return of post for the earliest of the dates he had offered, the 27th of September. She arrived at one o’clock and they talked with hardly a pause until six-thirty, by which time it was too late for her to return to London, so they carried on talking and she stayed the night.
– And that was how it began …
– That was how it began.
– Again! Another young virgin, half your age, bright, impressionable, rebellious, eager for experience – just like Amber. You invite her into your life and of course she falls in love with you, the great writer, as you might have known …
– I didn’t know. I thought from her review that she regarded me as an old fogey.
– But that needled you, didn’t it? The ‘cold white sauce’ and the jeers at your heroine’s conversion to the Endowment of Motherhood, rankled and you wanted to teach this impertinent young bitch—
– I didn’t know she was young.
– You could guess that a contributor to the Freewoman nobody had ever heard of before was young. And you thought to yourself that you would invite her into your elegant country house, sit her down in your study surrounded by all the editions of your books and other insignia of your fame, and turn on her the full power of your personality, that combination of sparkling intelligence and seductive charm that you knew from experience was usually irresistible to women. The fact that she turned out to be extremely attractive herself made it very easy.
– I had no intention of making her fall in love with me, and I resisted her advances for a long time.
– But eventually you succumbed.
– Eventually I fell in love with her myself.
And made her pregnant, and plunged yourself back into all the complications and embarrassments and time-consuming responsibilities you had experienced with Amber.
– Only this time they lasted longer. A lot longer.
– Would you never learn?
– Where women were concerned, it would seem not.
ONE OF THE many intriguing things he discovered about Rebecca West on the first occasion they met was that it was not her real name. She had been born Cicily Fairfield, the youngest of three daughters of a Scottish mother and an Anglo-Irish father who mysteriously disappeared when she was thirteen and was never heard of until he died in poverty five years later. To her great credit Mrs Fairfield, with very limited means at her disposal, ensured that her three girls received an excellent education. Cicily’s two older sisters had both gone to university and one was already launched on a promising professional career in medicine, but she herself had opted to train as an actress – a mistake, she declared, because she discovered that she would never excel in that vocation and dropped out before completing the course. It seemed to him, however, that the training had given her the confidence to express her vivacious personality without inhibition. It had certainly not prevented her from reading a great deal, and she seemed to possess, like himself, the precious gift of remembering everything she read. Astonishingly, considering the wide range of literary and intellectual reference she displayed in conversation, she was not yet twenty years of age. She was, he thought, an exceptional young woman.
Given the way they had been treated by Mr Fairfield, it was not surprising that his wife and daughters were sympathetic to feminism, but Rebecca was evidently by far the most radical and committed member of the family in this respect. She told him she had been an active suffragette for a time, parading and demonstrating and getting roughly handled by policemen, and also joined the Young Fabians, after he had parted from the Society. But she had been dissatisfied with the narrow perspectives of both these groups, and found the circle who gathered around the Freewoman more sympathetic to her heterodox feminism. This journal was however regarded at home as having a dangerously immoral tendency and Mrs Fairfield actually forbade her to read it, so when she became a contributor she thought it prudent to use a pseudonym, choosing the name of the radical heroine of Ibsen’s tragedy Rosmersholm, one of the last parts she had played at the Academy of Dramatic Art, and in due course she adopted it as her own name for all purposes.
‘I never liked my real name anyway,’ she said as she stirred cream and sugar into her second cup of coffee. She had eaten lunch with himself, Jane and Fräulein Meyer, deftly contributing to the conversation over watercress soup and poached salmon, and afterwards he had suggested the two of them should adjourn to his study and have their coffee brought there.
‘No, I don’t see you as a Cicily,’ he said, ‘or a Fairfield for that matter.’ Rebecca was fairly small in stature, but solidly built, and had a head of rich dark brown hair with eyes to match, set off by very white skin. Her features were full of character, from the broad forehead to the determined chin, and she had a way of keeping her lips just parted while listening to him as if to inhale more deeply the oxygen of ideas. ‘“Cicily Fairfield” is a name I might have invented for a blonde, blue-eyed, English rose in a novel,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ she said, smiling, ‘it would have done quite well for your Marjorie if she hadn’t had red hair. By the way, I want to apologise for the abrasive tone of my review. I read it through again on the train this morning, knowing that I would soon be meeting you, and it suddenly seemed unforgivably rude. I blushed so deeply that I believe the gentleman in the seat opposite thought I must be reading something very improper.’
‘Oh, don’t worry about that,’ he said, waving his hand in a vague gesture of absolution. ‘It’s stimulating to have one’s ideas challenged so forcefully.’
They argued for a while about whether women could ever get the same satisfaction out of work as men. ‘It’s not that I believe them to be inferior – not at all,’ he said. ‘But a man can forget everything else to focus on his work, using sex merely for relaxation and refreshment. Whereas for a woman sex is of paramount importance because it’s bound up with reproduction. It’s a biological imperative: to find a mate and reproduce – she can’t get away from it. That’s why I believe in the Endowment of Motherhood.’
‘You sound like one of Shaw’s characters, Mr Wells,’ she said.
‘Well, Shaw does have some good ideas mixed up with the silly ones,’ he said. ‘Have you met him?’
‘Once – at a Fabian Summer School,’ she said. ‘He moved among us like a flirtatious Moses.’
‘Very good!’ he chuckled. ‘But look here, you say at the end of your review …’ He picked up the magazine from his desk and read out a passage which he had marked: ‘“Supposing she had to work?” – Marjorie, that is – “How long could she stand it? The weaker sort of Marjorie would be sucked down to prostitution and death, the stronger sort of Marjorie would develop qualities of decency and courage and ferocity. It is worth trying.”’ That’s a brutal piece of social Darwinism – you condemn half your sisterhood to disgrace and death by throwing them all into the job market and letting the fittest survive. As a man I’d be run out of town if I dared make such a suggestion.’
‘It needn’t be as brutal as that,’ she said. ‘If women were allowed to compete in the workplace on equal terms with men, and men did their share of housework and childrearing at home, all the Marjories might be fulfilled.’
He laughed. ‘And I thought I was a Utopian!’ he said. ‘But what sort of work do you have your sights set on, yourself ? Writing, I presume – but what kind? Criticism? Fiction?’
‘All kinds,’ she said. ‘And some that haven’t been discovered yet.’ He laughed again. He liked her self-confidence and her ambition.
They discussed modern literature, beginning with Henry James, on whom she had very decided views, adoring some of his works, especially the stories about writers, but condemning others, including the much-admired Portrait of a Lady, on the grounds that the heroine’s motive for marrying the odious Gilbert Osmond – that he would make better use of her fortune than she could – was totally unconvincing. ‘You’d think it would cross her mind from time to time that he would be a very cold fish in bed,’ she s
aid, ‘but she never seems to think of him as a lover at all. She has no desire for him – how could a woman marry without desire?’
‘Many do, I’m afraid,’ he said. ‘My own first wife, for one.’
‘Really?’ She looked intensely interested, and hopeful of further revelations. He inwardly cautioned himself against making intimate confidences to someone he had known for only a few hours, a journalist to boot, and quickly steered the conversation back to literature. ‘Writing honestly about sexual desire in novels is always difficult. I’m not very good at it myself, I admit, but then English novelists never have been, not since Fielding. After him prudery and hypocrisy got a grip on our society. You have to go to the French for the truthful depiction of sex in fiction.’
‘Have you read D.H. Lawrence?’ she said.
‘I’ve read his things in the English Review. In fact I was one of the first people in London to hear about him. I was dining with Ford Madox Hueffer at the Pall Mall restaurant, along with Chesterton and Belloc, and Fordie said to us he had just received some poems by someone called D.H. Lawrence which in his opinion were the work of a genius. I remember turning round to the neighbouring tables, full of writers as usual, and shouting out, “Hooray, Fordie’s discovered another literary genius! Called D.H. Lawrence!” We had all had a fair amount to drink by then.’
