A House of Air

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  Yeats, greatly admiring Esther Waters, invited Moore back to Ireland to collaborate on a play, Diarmuid and Grania. Moore saw this as a sacred mission; indeed, walking down Royal Hospital Road, Chelsea, he heard a voice—‘no whispering thought it was,’ he says in Hail and Farewell, ‘but a resolute voice, saying “Go Back to Ireland.”’ There he thought to become the champion of the Gaelic League, perhaps of the whole Irish Literary Renaissance, but was received without much enthusiasm by the president, Douglas Hyde. The mission changed direction; Moore saw now that he was fated to become Ireland’s Voltaire and to produce what Gray rightly calls ‘an autobiographical fantasy,’ showing up everybody, and the Renaissance and the Catholic Church in particular. ‘I knew the book to be the turning-point in Ireland’s destiny.’

  As a novelist, he no longer followed the French masters. Zola had died in the autumn of 1902, asphyxiated by a charcoal stove. ‘Innumerable paragraphs and leading articles made Moore jealous and angry; he hated his own past in Zola. He talked much to his friends on Saturday nights. “Anybody can get himself asphyxiated.”’ This is from Yeats’s Dramatis Personae, in which Hail and Farewell is quietly annihilated.

  Tony Gray gives the later novels, The Brook Kerith (1916) and Heloise and Abelard (1921), a fair hearing, but he also wants to explain his subtitle, ‘A Peculiar Man.’ This was one of Moore’s descriptions of himself, implying satisfaction with his distinctive work. Gray, however, applies it to his private life. What would Moore have seen if (in James Joyce’s phrase) he had ‘put down a bucket into his own soul’s well, sexual department’? Moore, Gray concludes, though he tried to give the impression of a reckless Irish bachelor, was no more than a voyeur from first to last. As a student, he was obsessed with naked models, and when he was in his seventies, he persuaded Nancy Cunard, who knew him as a friend of her mother, to take off her clothes for him. On the other hand, everything which he said took place—for example, in The Lovers of Orelay, ‘in the middle of a great Empire bed, under the curtained tester’—existed, most likely, only in his mind. Peculiar, too, Gray thinks, is Moore’s love of unfamiliar words. He quotes ‘fluctuant tides,’ ‘tedded grass,’ ‘wis,’ which, he says, is ‘in the dictionary, it means “know”…it is still a very odd word to use.’ And then, Moore was a liar, not only about sex. He worked usually from some basis of reality, but had some all-purpose tall stories; was it Emerald Cunard or Mrs Pearl Craigie whom he once kicked in Green Park, ‘nearly in the centre of the backside, a little to the right’? Here Gray seems more bewildered than necessary. Both these tendencies—to collect unusual words as if they were jewels, and to tell lies on the scale of Wilde and Whistler—were Aesthetic, and Moore, even as a Naturalist, remained at heart an aesthete.

  By the end of the 1920s he had separated himself from nearly all his old friends, ‘AE,’ Yeats, St John Gogarty, his own brother Maurice. At his home in Ebury Street, a new circle attended to him devotedly, but ‘by fifty,’ he said, ‘we should have learned that life is a lonely thing and cannot be shared.’ To some of his readers—‘Dear ones! Dear ones!’ as he calls us—this is saddening. But his genial, energetic biographer doesn’t dwell on this. He says he’s come to think of Ireland as a fatal disease, from which both Moore and himself ‘were lucky enough to escape for the greater part of our lives.’

  Times Literary Supplement, 1996

  NEW WOMEN AND NEWER

  Dear Sphinx

  The Little Ottleys, by Ada Leverson, with an introduction by Sally Beauman

  Ada Leverson (1862—1933) said she had learned about human nature in the nursery. A little brother got her to help him make a carriage out of two chairs, but when he was taken out in a real carriage he was not in the least interested. Certainly she never underestimated the human capacity for imagination or for disappointment.

  The nursery was in lavish 21 Hyde Park Square, and her father was a successful property investor. Her mother, descended from a distinguished Jewish family, was beautiful, talented, and leisurely, with moments of intuition, called ‘Mamma’s flashlights.’ They did not warn her that Ada was going to escape, as she did at the age of eighteen, into a luckless marriage. Ernest Leverson, a diamond merchant’s son, was unfaithful, a gambler, and couldn’t manage the money, although it is true that Ada was extravagant, and notably more so after she met Oscar Wilde. She became Wilde’s fast friend, and for a few golden years was surrounded by London’s artists, actors, and first-nighters. (Max Beerbohm, of course, was a second-nighter; he advised on the decoration of her new house.) Ada Leverson was not worried by Wilde’s train de vie. To another friend, who said he was on a strict regimen ‘in the hope of keeping my youth,’ she replied: ‘I didn’t know you were keeping a youth’—this, like other unpredictable things, in a low voice, almost thrown away. To use her circle’s favourite word, she was impayable. She had the gift, too, of amiability (Henry James felt that in her at last he had found the Gentle Reader) and of pure high spirits: all the family had them—one of her brothers was the original of Charley’s Aunt. After Wilde’s disgrace and death she may have lost heart a little. But just as she had stood by her ruined friend, so she put a brave face on her marriage until Ernest, on the verge of bankruptcy, was sent away to Canada in the company of his illegitimate daughter, at the diamond merchant’s expense. Then Ada retreated to Bayswater with her children.

  Wilde had told her that she had all the equipment of a writer except pen, ink, and paper, and in fact she had already contributed, on and off, to Punch and the Yellow Book. Now Grant Richards, who says in his Memories of a Misspent Youth that ‘an introduction to Mrs Ernest Leverson was one of the most important things that could happen to a young man,’ persuaded her to turn novelist. Her grandson, Francis Wyndham, has told us that she hated writing, though it seems almost perverse of her not to enjoy something she did so well. Six novels came out between 1907 and 1917. After that, Grant Richards—although she was in love with him—could only persuade her to write the introduction to a fortune-telling book, Whom You Should Marry, which amused her. Three of the novels, Love’s Shadow, Tenterhooks, and Love at Second Sight, make up a trilogy, and these have now been reissued by Virago.

  It was indeed confusing of Oscar Wilde to call Ada Leverson ‘Sphinx.’ (‘Seraph’ would have been better—that is, if seraphs laugh.) Still, Sally Beauman worries unduly about this. There were many Sphinxes about in the Nineties. One of them appeared to Richard Le Gallienne as he sat in a restaurant eating whitebait, others to Gustave Moreau and to Khnopff. Nor would I agree with Sally Beauman that the tone of the Sphinx’s novels is ‘unmistakably descended from Jane Austen.’ It seems to me much more nearly related to her own contemporaries, Paul Bourget and ‘Gyp.’ The passing remarks of Bourget’s characters (‘tout est pour le mieux dans le meilleur des demi-mondes,’ ‘avec les femmes tout est possible, même le bien’) are in the Leversonian mode, so is the worldly entanglement of Mensonges (which Edith, in Tenterhooks, is reading for the first time). But Ada Leverson never indulged in the clinical analysis of the psychology of love, for which Bourget pauses between almost every speech. She has her own lucid shorthand for the emotions. ‘Gyp,’ on the other hand, wrote almost entirely in dialogue, whereas we couldn’t do without the Sphinx’s droll commentary.

  I don’t mean that Ada Leverson was an imitator: rather, that she was enchanted by the times she lived in. The three novels that make up The Little Ottleys change subtly with the passing years, not only in reference but in atmosphere. In Love’s Shadow (1908) there are ageing poets surviving from the Nineties, nouveau art, amateur theatricals. In Tenterhooks (1912) you can choose whether to take a hansom or a taxicab, Debussy and Wagner are ‘out,’ and at dinner parties ‘one ran an equal risk of being taken to dinner by Charlie Chaplin or Winston Churchill.’ The Turkey Trot is discussed along with Nijinsky and Post-Impressionism: ‘Please don’t take an intelligent interest in the subjects of the day,’ the hero begs. In Love at Second Sight (1916) he is in khaki, and wounded. At the
same time the viewpoint grows, not less intelligent, but more sympathetic to the absurdity of human beings in a trap of their own making.

  Unashamedly her friends are pictured in her novels, and her own unhappiness, and, for that matter, the courage with which she faced it. Perhaps because of this, they show a great advance on her Yellow Book stories, ‘Suggestion’ and ‘The Quest for Sorrow.’ Love’s Shadow is a set of variations on the theme of jealousy. Ada herself felt that jealousy was allowable, but envy, never. Hyacinth Verney’s guardian is in love with her, Hyacinth is in pursuit of the fashionable Cyril, Cyril has a hopeless tendresse for Mrs Raymond, who is neither young nor beautiful but seems merely ‘very unaffected, and rather ill.’ For counterpoint, there is Edith Ottley, who is beginning to be tired of her own patience with her husband, Bruce, but who is not yet the victim of human emotion. Critics, and even the Sphinx’s own family, found the book frivolous, but I don’t know that any book that proclaims so clearly the painful value of honesty can be frivolous. Its real heroine is the uncompromisingly plain Anne Yeo, hideously dressed in a mackintosh and golf-cap, and ‘well aware that there were not many people in London at three o’clock on a sunny afternoon who would care to be found dead with her.’ Sharp-tongued Anne is in love with Hyacinth, the only genuine passion in the novel. When she has done all she can to help Hyacinth to capture Cyril in marriage, she is seen for the last time on her way to Cook’s. She has decided to emigrate.

  Whether Ada Leverson originally intended it or not, the Ottleys become central to the next two novels. Grandly careless in small details, she changes Edith’s age and the colour of her hair, and makes her far more witty and admired. Bruce is, if possible, more monstrously selfish and witless. (When Ernest Leverson came back on one of his infrequent visits from Canada, it was said that ‘he talked just like Bruce.’) Possibly the Sphinx is too hard, at times, on her creation. Faultless is Edith’s clarity, ruthless are the sharp-eyed inhabitants of the nursery. But, after all, Bruce is well able to protect himself. ‘With the curious blindness common to all married people, and indeed to any people who live together,’ Edith has not noticed that Bruce is making sly advances to the governess. Meanwhile, she herself has fallen in love with the impulsive Aylmer Ross, but ‘how can life be like a play?’ she asks sadly, and to Bruce’s relief (for he can now feel injured) she simply gets rid of the governess. In contrast to her self-restraint, there is the interlocking story of her devoted friend Vincy. A dandyish observer of life, Vincy has a mistress, Mavis, an impoverished young art student whose red hair is ‘generally untidy at the back.’ Her poverty, which brings her close to starvation, is disquieting, but Vincy discards her without pity: ‘Shall you marry her?’ ‘I’m afraid not,’ he said. ‘I don’t think I quite can.’ For all their humour and good humour, these novels can sometimes seem unrelenting. At length, the easily persuaded Bruce runs off with Mavis. Edith, however, for the sake of her children, rescues him once again.

  But Ada Leverson is writing in terms of comedy, and Edith Ottley must be left happier than she was herself. To bring this about, she introduces, in Love at Second Sight, a grotesque creation, powerful enough to dominate the situation. Eglantine Frabelle, perfectly well-off and perfectly self-satisfied, is a guest in the Ottleys’ small London house and shows no signs of ever going away. She is, wrote Siegfried Sassoon, like ‘a really great impressionist picture by Whistler or Manet,’ who, ‘to tell you the truth, rather dumps the others, dear Sphinx.’ Sassoon was right. Edith and Aylmer are less interesting than this stately, tedious widow of a French wine-merchant, whose name has undertones of frappant and poubelle. Always knowledgeable, and invariably wrong, she is detestable, and admired by everybody: even Edith is devoted to her. When Bruce (it is 1916) finds that listening to the war news is affecting his health, and he must leave for America, he elopes—and we know he will never escape again—with Madame Frabelle. Once she has left the book, even though Aylmer and the delightful Edith are free to marry, the interest fades. We seem to be waiting for her to come back.

  How can Bruce manage to think that he must ‘throw in his lot’ with her? Through wilful misunderstanding. Their day out on the river is tedious. The only boat left for hire is The Belle of the River, as battered as an old tea-chest, and they find that they have very little to say to one another. But both of them have the impression that it has been a great success. With such non-events, or anti-events, Ada Leverson is marvellously skilful. Oscar Wilde had wanted The Importance of Being Earnest to be not paradoxical, but nonsensical—pure nonsense, he said. The second act ends not with an epigram, but a wail: ‘But I haven’t quite finished my tea!’ This is the art of inconsequence, possible only in a society where consequences can still be grave. The Sphinx, also, had a most distinctive ear for nonsense. ‘With a tall, thin figure and no expression,’ she writes, ‘Anne might have been any age, but she was not.’

  London Review of Books, 1983

  Out of the Stream

  Olive Schreiner: Letters, Volume 1: 1871—1899, edited by Richard Rive

  Rebecca West said that Olive Schreiner was a ‘geographical fact.’ Others were reminded of a natural force, admired and dreaded, unchecked by illness, war, or poverty, something new coming out of Africa. To fit her into the history of South Africa, of literature, or of women’s movements is an exhausting business. ‘The day will never come when I am in the stream,’ she said. ‘Something in my nature prevents it I suppose.’

  Olive Emilie Albertina Schreiner (named for three brothers who died before her) was one of nine children born to a German missionary and his wife, Rebecca, a member of Moorfields Tabernacle. The family was reared in the strictest possible Bible Christianity. Gottlob Schreiner was an unfortunate man, difficult to place in the Lord’s vineyard, arriving finally at a mission station in Wittebergen on the edge of Basutoland. Here he was forced to leave the ministry, having broken the strict regulations against trading. As a trader he was even less successful, but Olive never ceased to love the ruined father. Left homeless, she was taken in by her eldest brother, Theo, who first ran a school, then went to try his luck in the diamond fields.

  When Olive was five she sat among the tall weeds behind the house and understood, without having the words for it, that they were alive and that she was part of them. At six, she was whipped for speaking Cape Dutch, and felt ‘a bitter wild fierce agony against God and man.’ At nine her little sister died and Olive, who had slept with the body until it was buried, lost her Christian faith. At sixteen she was possibly engaged to, possibly seduced by, an insurance salesman who let her down: ‘the waking in the morning is hell,’ she wrote in her diary. At about the same time she was lent a copy of First Principles, by Herbert Spencer. She had three days to read it, and Spencer’s vision of human evolution towards the Absolute remained with her for a lifetime. At eighteen she had a long conversation, which was profoundly important to her, with an African woman. This woman said to her: God cannot be good, otherwise why did he make women? At nineteen she was close to suicide, but found strength to go on from reading Emerson and John Stuart Mill. These are her own landmarks, ‘disconnected but indelibly printed in the mind.’ At twenty, she began to write The Story of an African Farm.

  If she had been the child of an English Evangelical parsonage, she would have been conforming, in her struggle from faith to freethinking, to a recognizable pattern. But Olive was self-created. It’s true that African Farm is, in some ways, much what might be expected from a young woman in the 1870s, jilted, working as a governess, writing in a leaky farmstead by candlelight. The heroine, Lyndall, is very small, with beautiful eyes (Olive is small, with beautiful eyes), a penniless orphan, ‘different.’ Her lover rides a hundred miles to see her, and her dull cousin’s fiancé, Gregory Rose, leaves everything to follow her. ‘What makes you all love me so?’ she asks. But Olive, by her own account, had read, at this stage, no other fiction at all. And the African Farm, as it goes on, is a very strange book. Lyndall, in the end, is nursed on
her deathbed by Gregory Rose, disguised as a woman in long skirts. He has shaved off his beard and watched the ants carry off the hair to their nests—an example of the book’s perilous balance between fantasy and observation. More than anything else it is a book of dreams, and specifically the dreams of children. Lyndall has a vision of independence and free choice for women. She refuses to marry the man who has made her pregnant, because she doesn’t love him enough. Waldo, the son of the farm overseer, represents another side of Olive. He dreams, in his ‘seasons of the soul,’ of studying the earth and rocks around him as a scientist. A stranger who rides in from the Karoo tells him a story—‘The Search for the Bird of Truth.’ But Waldo, though he understands the allegory, dies without getting his opportunity. ‘In after years,’ Olive wrote, ‘we cry to Fate, “Now, deal us your hardest blow, give us what you will, but let us never again suffer as we suffered when we were children.”’