by Susan Hill
If a diarist chooses to make his own life and doings, reflections and reactions, public, that’s up to him, but I do wonder how far it is acceptable to tell us about his friends and casual acquaintances while they are still alive, even more so when I discover in published pages accounts of people I myself have known (and indeed, sometimes do not recognise, so different is the person I have met from the one the diarist seems to have encountered).
I find volumes of diaries in almost every room. Here, snugly beside the complete novels of Graham Greene, is the paperback of The Roy Strong Diaries, which make good reading for two reasons. The first is that they are a clear record, not to say indictment, of the dreadful 1960s and 1970s, when the trades unions held such sway in this country, and Roy Strong, as Director first of the National Portrait Gallery and later of the V&A almost lost his health, strength and sanity in the war of attrition against them.
Otherwise, one reads Roy for gossip. Like so many people who have danced on the sidelines of Royal circles, he spills the beans about them with enthusiasm. I have noticed this in others, even in apparently very close friends of the Royals – they make the worst (or best, depending on your point of view) gossips about them, telling all sorts of tales out of school. No wonder the Royal Family really only trust one another. But aside from the froth and bubble of society, Roy Strong has one of the gifts of the great diarist – the knack of getting to the heart of a person, pinning them down on paper in a paragraph, of cutting out appearances and summing them up acutely. You have to trust that the diarist gets it right and the only way of being sure is to judge by a swift pen-portrait of someone you have actually known. Roy passes this test almost every time. Plenty of people have written about the London society hostess Pamela Hartwell – she crops up in many a diary. But Roy Strong’s summing up of her is brilliant, incisive, shrewd, affectionate but clear-eyed.
When last we had lunch together shortly before Christmas she was as vibrant, strident, dominant and magnificent as ever … That she was an extraordinary woman there can be no doubt. Her problem lay in the fact that her intellect had never been trained … As a consequence, her life was one long explosion of misapplied and frustrated energy as she bulldozed her way first as a political hostess, then as the presiding deity of British couture, and latterly as a lady of art. The result was an eternal unfulfilled restlessness as she pursued first this path then that. This erratic progress was matched by her guest-list, which also speedily changed as people came on it and as quickly came off it. Politics, fashion and art fell beneath her chariot wheels but she never actually displayed any deep knowledge of any of them … So what was it about her that one found so compulsive? I think that it was her vitality and energy, which were on a terrific scale, and her appetite for people … Pam stood firmly in a line of descent back to the eighteenth century, that of a great hostess bringing people together. They intrigued her and she needled out of them all she could. Liking them certainly didn’t enter into it. And she was never happy at anyone’s party except her own.
Once, she must have had some dress sense for she was the mainstay of post-war revived British couture. But for as long as I knew her she always wore violent-coloured rather ethnic dresses and vast clanking gobbets of artificial jewellery
She could have come straight out of one of Trollope’s political novels.
I now realise that it is a diary that I have been looking for all over the house, a diary with a life round which numerous other lives, celebrated and obscure, revolve, a diary with an interesting diarist at its heart but one with whom I do not always see eye to eye. I do not need to like my diarist but I want to find their company stimulating. I have gathered up, from the highways and byways of various bookshelves in various rooms, two complete sets of diaries. I am going to read those again.
The Diary of James Lees-Milne has magnificent titles; as enticing as those of Diana Cooper’s autobiographies, The Rainbow Comes and Goes, Trumpets from the Steep and The Light of Common Day; or of Osbert Sitwell – who would not want to read a memoir called Laughter in the Next Room?
Lees-Milne’s most enticing titles are from Coleridge – Caves of Ice, The Milk of Paradise, Holy Dread, and here they are, hardback first editions laid in a row, above another row I have set out on the table, the complete diaries of Frances Partridge, whose titles are more pedestrian.
I have a problem with both these diarists, and it is exacerbated because I have read them both so many times, and always want to read them again, always want to re-enter their worlds, always find innumerable good companions there. Yet they trouble me. My own interest in them troubles me.
I selected two volumes of Frances Partridge’s diary and started reading them again. The first thing that strikes me is her tenacious bravery and stoicism in carrying on living after the deaths of her husband and, three years later, her only son, Burgo. She questions her decision from time to time, discusses possible suicide, quite rationally, before rejecting it. She decides to live on (and, indeed, she was 104 when she died) in the hope that the meaning she finds in various aspects of life – friends, work, art, music, the intellect – will continue to give her reason for doing so. It seems that it did, and who could not salute her courage?
Yet there is the cold aura of Bloomsbury arrogance and lack of feeling about these diaries, a retailing and dissecting of the behaviour of close friends, and recounting of incidents which show them in a bad light, which repels. Partridge, like most of the Bloomsbury Group, was sure her way, the way of clear reason and the intellect, was the best, the superior, the only way to live and the downside of this is the scorn with which she dismisses those who found other ways. She holidays with Rosamond Lehmann, apparently with some enjoyment, yet makes her both look and sound a vacuous fool because of her belief in a God and an afterlife. It is all dismissed as ‘Ros’s spooks’.
I always turn to the Partridge diaries eagerly and read them with absorption, but I leave them feeling, for some of the time at least, that I should not have been reading them at all. Occasionally, I answer them back. ‘No, no, you’ve got it quite wrong. X was not like that.’ And if X was not like that, what about all the others? Do I take her word for it?
I have to take James Lees-Milne’s word for it on the subject of himself, for that is really the point of reading the volumes, published with such alacrity during his lifetime. Yes, they are a record of his times, and he is a valuable recorder of the workings of the National Trust during an important period of its existence, as Roy Strong is of the V&A. These are the diaries of a name-dropper and they irritate, as every page is littered with symbols pointing to explanatory footnotes, which interrupt the flow. Lees-Milne is the snob to end all snobs, vain, intemperate and intolerant, self-regarding and self-important. But his saving grace is that he knows it and bewails his own follies and foibles in such a manner as to disarm all criticism. I came to love him as I read his diaries for the first time because such a clear-eyed and unforgiving view of self is so rare and entirely refreshing.
Here are the diaries, on the table – I could spend my year reading from home on diaries alone. And if I had to pick one? Virginia Woolf’s A Writer’s Diary is never away from my bedside table, well worn, much-loved, a constant inspiration. It was by way of that single volume, extracted by Leonard from her many volumes of diaries, that I was led to her novels, and so to the woman I have loved and admired and been fascinated by for fifty years. And still am, still am. But I know the book so well, have read the print off its pages for so long, that it has become part of me. I must choose something else. Simon Gray’s diaries, then? A late love, these, and diaries like no other; specific, funny, mordant, heartening and saddening at the same time. His last, Coda, about his final year after diagnosis of lung cancer, is almost unbearable to read, so candid is he about his feelings and fears, so wonderfully, generously revealing of himself, for our edification and delight, and even comfort. The first, The Smoking Diaries, might be the one to read this year so I’ve picked it up and as I
do so, of course, I wish for the thousandth time that we had met. We almost did. I kept saying that we would, to Victoria, his wife, promising to meet up when I was in London with an hour free for coffee. For anything. Somehow, I never did, somehow, it was always going to be after Christmas, or when you get back from Barbados, or when I’ve finished my book or …
Simon sent me a copy of the third diary, The Last Cigarette, with a friendly inscription. And then he died and I still hadn’t made the extra effort, found the day in London with an hour to spare.
Do it now. I thought I’d learned that lesson a long time ago.
In the end, I turn from all of them to a single fat paperback.
Like Proust, like James Joyce, like War and Peace, the novels of Sir Walter Scott appear on most lists of Unreadable Books, though once they were as popular as the novels of Dickens, and every self-respecting middle-class home had a complete set of them.
So it was with various failed attempts to get through Rob Roy or The Heart of Midlothian in mind that I greeted a copy of The Journal of Sir Walter Scott when it arrived on my doorstep, sent by the friend who edited it, Eric Anderson. I glanced at the book and glanced away, and for some months it sat on the low table in the drawing room, resolutely closed. Then, one grey afternoon in February, I sat in the armchair, thinking to read and, before I had quite decided what I would read, picked up that book.
Two hours later, I was delightedly absorbed in the journal and making the acquaintance of a man I liked, admired and found the most wonderful company in the world. Never mind the novels, read the man himself, who speaks plainly yet whose powers of description are mighty, whose great spirit, courage, uprightness, generosity and warm humour leap out of these pages. He almost persuades me to enjoy Jane Austen, his praise of her is so high-hearted and generous.
That young lady had a talent for describing the involvements and feelings and characters of ordinary life which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with. The Big Bow-wow strain I can do myself like any now going, but the exquisite touch which renders ordinary common-place things and characters interesting from the truth of the description and the sentiment is denied to me. What a pity such a gifted creature died so early.
But not being able to enjoy Jane Austen is a subject for another day. I have found my book and as it is a cold, grey afternoon, I will light a fire in the drawing room, and begin again The Journal of Sir Walter Scott.
‘One Half of the World Cannot Understand the Pleasures of the Other.’
AS JANE AUSTEN says. I knew she would understand. But I need to get to grips with this problem because there could scarcely be a more key author for me to miss the point of than Austen. And I do miss the point, almost entirely.
I married into a handsome Oxford set of the novels, and here they are, pale-grey bindings, fine creamy paper, elegant font, well-designed on the page, weighing nicely in the hand, so I cannot complain of having to read old paperbacks or that it is all the fault of the tiny print in the small World’s Classics edition.
I cannot blame school or the exam system either, for Austen was never a set book, and I skimmed with a light foot over the early nineteenth-century novel when I was reading for my degree, leaving barely a trace of my passing. I have never had to dissect and analyse and compose an essay on Austen, I have simply had to enjoy her. And I don’t.
Worse. I am bored by Jane Austen.
There now, I’ve said it.
It is not that I simply cannot get through the novels – they do not join Proust or James Joyce on the Impossible shelf. I have read them all, several times, and if I am obliged to read one again it will be Northanger Abbey, which I have enjoyed tolerably well. But that is surely not enough. Look at the Janeites, look at the widespread ability to quote whole paragraphs, whole chunks of dialogue, out of pure love. Look, even, at the huge success of every film and television adaptation. Though I am not a fan of the Classic Serial, many have been led to great books via that route.
My younger daughter learned to love Jane Austen from the BBC television adaptation starring Colin Firth and a clutch of other fine actors. She watched it so many times that she knew it by heart and could hardly be deterred from reciting entire scenes for our entertainment, until, like Mary, she had delighted us long enough. I have watched it several times with her and although Firth is not my idea of Darcy, many of the other characters were perfectly cast. Alison Steadman and Benjamin Whitrow as the Bennets could not be faulted.
Perhaps the nineteenth century, whose style of dress and architecture, design and manners, I find cold and distancing, is to blame for my inability to appreciate Austen, whose cool, ironic style is somehow all of a piece with that formality and porcelain veneer. Yes, there is wit, there are acute asides, there is a sharpness of observation and judgement, but I never feel empathy with, or closeness to, an Austen character. That may be because their author, their creator, discourages intimacy. She is herself politely distant, keeps me at arm’s length, is too private and reserved. I cannot get to know her and if I cannot do that, how can I like her or be interested in what she has to tell me about her characters and their situations? It is all too patterned, too much like one of those boring formal dances they performed, all too stylised. I want someone to break out of the elegant little drawing-room circle and go mad. Lydia Bennet almost does it.
If every other book in the house was stolen and I had to spend my year reading Jane Austen only, I would either become an ardent fan, after suddenly getting the point, or I would be the one to go mad.
Then I remember what an English-teacher at school told me long ago when I confessed to her – a passionate and knowledgeable Janeite – that I could not get along with the novels. ‘Nor could I at your age. Don’t worry. She will seem very different when you grow up.’
So I put the Oxford complete novels back on the shelf, to wait until then.
‘Life is a Handful of Short Stories Pretending to be a Novel.’
I JOTTED THAT anonymous quotation down on the inside of a notebook some time ago. So many of those neat little matchbox quotes seem profound at first acquaintance but rapidly lose their profundity the more carefully you analyse them. That one is not especially profound but it is fairly true. About life, though, not about the short story. It was William Faulkner, that novelist of the Deep South whose books I so loved when I was twenty and cannot now read, who said: ‘Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry first, finds he can’t and then tries the short story, which is the most demanding form after poetry. And, failing at that, only then does he take up novel writing.’
Which has some truth in it, though about writers rather than about short stories. It is certainly true that far more people write short stories than read them, and true that most aspiring writers begin with the short story – they probably think that, because it is shorter than a novel, it must be easier, which is far from being the case. Faulkner is right there. I have always found writing a short story infinitely harder than writing a novel, if only because absolutely every word counts, there can be no slack and no hiding place. I also find that ideas come along with the form in which they need to be written, and those for the short story come along far less frequently than ideas for novels. I have no idea why. But a very few writers have committed themselves to the short story exclusively, or at least made their reputations by it, and have succeeded totally, magnificently, enviably.
There are a lot of short-story collections in this house and I could live for several months on them alone, though I wouldn’t want to. I read a short story very occasionally, and carefully. Like poetry, they require a different sort of still, slow, intimate attention from the reader, and they also seem best when read one at a time. Follow one short story with two more and the impact of any one of them seems to be dissipated and diluted. I re-read short stories often. I have a handful of favourites that I know almost by heart. And if I have an idea for one myself, then I need to go back to these others and read them with great attention again, before I can
start writing myself. It is not that I need to imitate, but I do need to be reminded and re-taught how it is best done.
It is a truism among publishers that there is no market for short stories. Magazines used to take them, from the weekly women’s Peg’s Paper which published Romances, through the middlebrow journals to those at the high literary end – the Cornhill, Stand, even the TLS. Nobody wants them now, except occasionally for a Christmas issue. Anthologies pop up from time to time, published by writers’ groups and small presses, heavily subsidised. Nobody buys them but people go on writing them, and reading them aloud in writers’ groups, and submitting them to competitions, and there are correspondence courses which offer tuition in short-story writing and ‘money back if not successful’. Perhaps, as with writing poetry, the activity is an end, and a satisfaction and fulfilment, in itself. It would need to be.
I have dumped an armful of short-story collections on the dining-room table. Goodness, I had no idea we were giving house room to so many. But in each volume, there is at least one which I read again and again, at least one which has helped me to learn how it should be done. Here are the Masters.
Guy de Maupassant, first read in French, for A level, but since then only in English. I suspect that the short story probably loses more than any other form (except poetry) in translation because of the intricacies of language and form. I remember feeling that, although I had read those set-text short stories of Maupassant almost off the page, yet I was still reading them through a fine mist, the veil that always stands between the reader and a language which is not his own.
