Several Strangers

by Claire Tomalin

  Such are the visions which proffer great cornucopias full of fruit to the solitary traveller, or murmur in his ear like sirens lolloping away on the green sea waves, or are dashed in his face like bunches of roses, or rise to the surface like pale faces which fishermen flounder through floods to embrace.

  The cadences and imagery here take Woolf’s prose very close to poetry. It happens again at another key moment in the book, as Peter Walsh prepares to set off for Clarissa’s party:

  Everybody was going out. What with these doors being opened, and the descent and start, it seemed as if the whole of London were embarking in little boats moored to the bank, tossing on the waters, as if the whole place were floating off in carnival. And Whitehall was skated over, silver beaten as it was, skated over by spiders, and there was a sense of midges round the arc lamps; it was so hot that people stood about talking…

  And here a shindy of brawling women, drunken women; here only a policeman and looming houses, high houses, domed houses, churches, parliaments, and the hoot of a steamer on the river, a hollow misty cry.

  This is the lyrical Woolf, steeped in her Shakespeare and Wordsworth and William Dunbar, with his

  London, thou art the flour of cities all.

  Gemme of all joy, jaspre of jocunditie,

  Most myghty carbuncle of vertue and valour.*

  The other central theme of the book is the posing of a simple question: what is the connection between a fortunate, upper-class, sociable, party-giving, middle-aged London lady on the one hand, and an insignificant, mad and suicidal young man suffering from self-hatred and alienation from the rest of the human race on the other? Septimus is a clerk, meagrely educated but in love with English literature, which he studied in the Waterloo Road after running away from his parents’ home in Gloucestershire. He volunteered for the war early, eager to save the England of Shakespeare’s plays. He lost his best friend just before the Armistice, married Lucrezia, the daughter of a Milanese innkeeper, brought her to London, opened up his Shakespeare again, and went mad at the new message he found there, hidden in the beauty of the words: the message that ‘the secret signal which one generation passes, under disguise, to the next is loathing, hatred, despair’.

  Septimus knows he is going mad, because he hears his dead friend speak to him, and because he can feel nothing. He suspects that the world is without meaning, and that human beings in the mass ‘have neither kindness, nor faith, nor charity beyond what serves to increase the pleasure of the moment’. He will not allow Lucrezia to have children, and regards himself as a sinner for having married her without love. She is simple, good, practical and protective, wishing to shield him from the brutal interference of the doctors; but in vain. And when one of the doctors comes to Clarissa’s evening party and announces the suicide of his patient, Clarissa shrinks from the doctor as evil, at once suspecting him of making life intolerable for Septimus. She withdraws from her party and considers his death. ‘She felt glad that he had done it; thrown it away.’ She sees it as a successful act of defiance:

  A thing there was that mattered; a thing, wreathed about with chatter, defaced, obscured in her own life, let drop every day in corruption, lies, chatter. This he had preserved. Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate; people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone. There was an embrace in death.

  For Clarissa too feels at times terror and ‘overwhelming incapacity’ in the face of the necessity of living her life to the end. Although she returns to her party, and is greeted with love, the reader has been made to feel that she and Septimus are indeed, however tenuously, linked, both by their response to beauty – the beauty of words, the beauty of London – and also by their terror of the controls and demands laid on them by others.

  The great power of the book lies in this question as to how Septimus and Clarissa are connected with one another; and the question itself has become more compelling in the fifty years since Virginia Woolf’s death, because we can see, as few of her early readers could, that it is being addressed by the author to herself, and that she is both the celebrant and the mourner, both the person who is driven mad and the beloved person at the party – both Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Smith. There is something magnificent as well as touching about her achievement; as about the fact, noted in her diary with pride, that it was the first of her novels to be completed without the interruption of mental breakdown.

  Oxford University Press, 1992

  Daily Bread

  English Bread and Yeast Cookery by Elizabeth David

  In my English grandmother’s house the children knew exactly what to expect on the table by the day of the week, as the huge Sunday roast was put through its ritual reincarnations, cold, hashed, rissoled, etc., until the dubious relief of fish on Friday. This was not uncommon in lower-middle-class Edwardian households, I am told. At the same time, during the first decade of this century, my French grandmother was making her potages and ragouts and omelettes with a wood-burning stove. She continued to feed her family through two wars, and coal and gas and electricity, and helped her English daughters-in-law to become lively and comforting cooks in turn. My mother could and did make a gratin savoyard as well as a treacle pudding.

  This was the old family way for kitchen customs and tastes to travel from region to region. Elizabeth David, rather like Boulestin before her, has given us all French and Italian grandmothers. But where Boulestin wrote for a public still supposed to employ cooks, Elizabeth David’s influence has been as much in transforming our batteries de cuisine, the aspect and atmosphere of our kitchens and gardens, as in putting the flavours of the Périgord, of Lyons or Rome or the Veneto on to our plates. She has made us nostalgic – and never more so than when John Minton embellished her words with his drawings in French Country Cooking (Penguin) in 1951 – for worlds most of us could not possibly know.

  For two and a half decades she has turned our faces away from England. We were a very willing generation to grow greedy and reject Anglo-Saxon culinary conditions. Our infancies had been ruled over by Truby King (of New Zealand), so that many of us were starved by his system of clock and bottle in our cradles. The war and rationing encouraged whole worlds of fantasies about food and travel to flourish in our heads. In the fifties standard English cookery books were still recommending the use of dried egg and margarine, with a pinch of sage as the most dashing herb on the shelf. Against such a background Elizabeth David appeared as liberating and delightful as Homer Lane to the young Auden. Our eclectic kitchens became the hearts of our houses.

  Now we are being led to consider one of our native traditions again. Elizabeth David’s occasion is partly her bafflement that what is sold in our shops as bread by the big bakery companies can be consumed willingly by anyone; it’s also a sense that numbers of men and women are prepared to spend time baking their own bread but that we have lost our traditions here. So English Bread and Yeast Cookery has much more than the touch of history and topography that one finds in all good cookbooks. It is a work of devoted scholarship, using all manner of records of the past to re-establish its practices.

  A good half of the text is given to a rigorous and carefully illustrated account of types of wheat and flour, milling processes, yeast, ovens and factories. There is a formidable amount of detail involved, and some readers will be impatient to reach Part II on p. 255, where the practical instructions begin. But even if you decide to start the book there, you will find yourself turning back for references and practical advice. For instance, the old belief that yeast needs sugar to feed on is scotched here. Or we are usefully told that there is an operative stone-mill off the Old Kent Road in London whose flour you can buy from the Ceres retail shop. Again, an account is given of the Chorleywood Bread Process, evolved in the sixties, whereby most of our factory bread is now made by an instant method – that is, with much larger quantities of yeast and no proving time at all.

>   For those who don’t know, the ‘proving’ is the enlarging of the bread dough as the yeast works on it, ‘like a lively white cushion, growing bigger and bigger’ (so Alison Uttley described it). Mrs David’s suggestion for home cooks that the dough be left to prove overnight or even longer under a polythene sheet, with a smaller amount of yeast, transforms breadmaking at once from a nervous and uncertain activity into pure satisfaction. While you sleep, or work, or go to the opera, your bread peacefully makes itself.

  A mournful chapter on the present all-too-observable decline of traditional French bread offers a crumb of comfort: it is not traditionally French at all, but a Viennese import of the eighteenth century. With characteristic sense, Mrs David refuses to persuade us that we can hope to reproduce the classic baguette with our flour and domestic ovens. She is discouraging too about the combat fatigue induced by attempts to make croissants, but she gives again her marvellous saucisson en brioche recipe, and one for petits pains au chocolat, on which generations of impoverished Sorbonne students kept going.

  Still straying from England, she restores the pizza that dare not give its name to an honourable state. But her emphasis remains English. Listen to the roll-call of our regional breads and cakes: lardy and saffron, wigs or wiggs, bockings, barleymeal bonnags, Mrs Tashis’s little puddings, singing hinnies and Sussex plum heavies.

  Elizabeth David dislikes uniformity, as all true cooks do. How right she is to blame the toaster that aspires to produce evenly brown slices. She uses instead a metal plate over the gas burner that makes every piece different, ‘differently marked, irregularly chequered with the marks of the grill, charred here and there, flecked with brown and gold and black’. She also detests falsity. Here is the passage in which she describes a modern confidence trick whereby factory bakers install ‘live’ bakeries within their retail shops, the idea being to lure in customers with the smell of hot bread:

  Those who fall for the hot and crusty line regardless of the price soon perceive for themselves that while its aroma may be as heady as the scent of a beanfield in midsummer its taste is suspiciously like that of the supermarket loaf, its texture still that of boiled wool. For all that your bread shop may be decked out as a wholesome little old country bakery with smell to match, the dough has been made by methods very little different from the ones used in the great big shining factory. And it is a fact of life that all bread, home-made, factory-made, bakery-made, good, indifferent, and just plain awful, gives out a glorious smell while it’s baking and for a few minutes after being drawn from the oven.

  I find this exceedingly sad: the smell of baking bread, like the smell of freshly cut grass, has always spoken of innocence and virtue. Now we know it’s no guarantee of anything.

  Sunday Times, 1977

  Two Essays on Thomas Hardy

  1. The Boy in the Grass

  The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy. Volume I:1840-1892 edited by Richard Little Purdy and Michael Millgate An Essay on Hardy by John Bayley The Older Hardy and Young Thomas Hardy by Robert Gittings

  When Thomas Hardy was a small boy he lay on his back one day, felt the sun’s rays filtering through his straw hat, and decided he did not want to grow up. He ‘did not want to be a man, or to possess things, but to remain as he was, on the same spot’. His mother was not pleased when he told her, but the idea that it might be better not to live life did not go away. It comes in a letter to Rider Haggard on the death of his child:

  Please give my kind regards to Mrs Haggard, & tell her how deeply our sympathy was with you both on your bereavement. Though, to be candid, I think the death of a child is never really to be regretted, when one reflects on what he has escaped.

  Hardy was fifty-one, and childless; and a child to him is often himself as a child. He told Gosse, in one of his rare letters that approach intimacy, ‘You would be quite shocked if I were to tell you how many weeks and months in byegone years I have gone to bed never wishing to see daylight again.’ On his eighty-sixth birthday he was still claiming that ‘He had never expected much’ and that he was not one who loved life desperately. This degree of reluctance to embrace life, so odd in a man who studied its appearances so lovingly, is one of Hardy’s most strongly marked characteristics. It’s as though he had to keep perpetually on guard against being caught out and disappointed.

  The letters indicate someone careful, efficient, closed; there is no flow of outgoing warmth. It is well known how tenacious he was of his privacy, how he dismissed and lied to would-be biographers and wrote misleading memoirs, intending to pass them off as his second wife’s work. The biographer’s problem with Hardy is how to relate this dry, defensive man to the diffident but super-responsive presence felt in the poems and novels, a presence so attractive, so aptly described by John Bayley as a ‘tremulous tender fleeting entity’. Secrecy lies like a crust on his skin, suggesting something abnormally sensitive or damaged within.

  Some of this crust was lifted by Robert Gittings in the first volume of his biography of Hardy, revealing enough to make it clear that he could not find him a likeable man. In the second volume, which is again exactly researched and well weighed in its judgements, he confronts the question of Hardy’s adult personality more fully. He shows him torn between his Dorset peasant roots and success in the literary social world. He describes him as a perpetual adolescent, unable to escape from his obsessions, crushing first one wife and then the next.

  Gittings reveals that Emma Hardy’s terminal illness went almost unnoticed because of Hardy’s passion for Florence Dugdale; and that Florence was no sooner his wife than she too receded into one on whom many burdens were coldly placed with no return of tenderness. Evidently Thomas was not a good husband, self-centred to the point of cruelty, self-concealing, touchy and mean, giving (in Emma’s phrase) ‘neither gratitude nor attention, love, or justice, nor anything you may set your heart on’.

  At least Gittings has done Emma the justice she yearned for, in taking her character and unhappiness seriously. And he has performed the same service for the infinitely more pathetic Florence, the pretty, sickly Enfield schoolmistress Hardy managed to smuggle into the structure of his domestic life while Emma still lived and to whom Emma, in a moment of grim comedy, confided the thought that Hardy bore a close resemblance to Dr Crippen.

  Later, in a ghastly parody of Emma’s supposed madness, which consisted of keeping a bitter private diary called ‘What I think of my husband’, Florence took to writing hysterical letters to friends, especially young women who still caught the old eagle’s eye. For Hardy was stirred by beauties to the end, like the milkman scolded in The Hand of Ethelberta for ‘pouncing upon young flesh like carrion crow – ‘tis a vile thing in an old man’. But he defends himself with’ ‘Tis; and yet ‘tis not, for ‘tis a nateral taste.’

  This natural wisdom was noted by Hardy when he was still under forty and not long married, in a novel about a woman struggling to lead a double life between her Dorset peasant family and her grand friends. Emma Hardy disliked it: ‘too much about servants’, she said. It also suggests a deeper source of distress in his life.

  Gittings establishes with beautiful clarity the pattern of Hardy’s repeated fallings in love after his marriage. Most of the ladies were literary women whom he was able to help in their careers, but in all these affairs they remained sexually inaccessible, whatever he may have hoped. They were of a class in which anything else was apparently unthinkable. Now, as Gittings points out, the women of Hardy’s own family, all of whom he loved and admired almost without reservation, had been different. Not only his mother but both his grandmothers had conceived children outside wedlock. A good, if not clinching, factual case is made by Gittings for Tess herself being modelled on Hardy’s paternal grandmother.

  John Bayley also points out how Tess, Hardy’s most vivid and intimate creation, the character towards whom he feels most possessive, ‘My Tess’, became ‘both the girl of his youthful dreams and of his adult sense of a lost and unregarded past�
��. The women of the past offered an erotic fulfilment that the women of the present denied to Hardy.

  It is hard to think of anything more withering and numbing than this exceptional responsiveness to the impressions of the world, including women, which made Hardy a great novelist and poet, occurring in such a way that it actually severed him from the fulfilment he sought in women. His ambition, good and pleasing to his mother and grandmothers, led him to a world in which no woman rewarded him as his mother and grandmothers had rewarded his forebears.

  Bayley points to the sense of loss suffered by Hardy as creator, as well as by Angel Clare, at the end of Tess. And there is scarcely one of his love poems that is not washed through with this sense of loss. It is now a commonplace to say that Hardy was more interested in dead women than living; perhaps it was that by dying they seemed to take their places in the lost erotic world of his grandmothers.

  Hardy scholars are already indebted to Gittings, and now doubly so, or perhaps not quite doubly, since it is the first half of a writer’s long life that shapes his work most profoundly. Still, he is good on the notebooks, into which Hardy and Emma copied facts from books and periodicals and which on occasion were poured pell-mell into whatever Hardy was currently working on. Hardy’s abandonment of novel writing is attributed to a wish for freedom to say what he liked both in intellectual and moral matters and in personal revelation. He thought, quite wrongly as it turns out, that snoopers would be less likely to try to track his indiscretions in verse. Gittings adds, with typical common sense, that he may have found novels physically tiring to write. Poems are lighter.

  The Older Hardy is a book rich in observation, always careful in the use to which it is put and occasionally hitting off an inspired phrase, when for instance he talks of Hardy’s life ‘feeding on the failing vitality’ of Florence’s, as in a fairy-tale. The sudden warmth of the deathbed scene is good, with Hardy asking to have kettle-broth made at the bedroom fire as his mother made it; a dish of parsley, onions, soaked bread and bacon. And the horrors of the funeral arrangements, heart to Stinsford, body to the Abbey, tutted over by the pious and getting a shocked cackle from the rustics, are given just as Hardy would have relished them.