A House of Air

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  At the end of his strange and deeply interesting story, A. N. Wilson’s attitude is still, I think, a kind of civilized bewilderment. This is especially so when he considers the countless readers and disciples of CSL. Lewis has another life, far apart from his biography, in the minds of three generations of children and in the religious experience of millions. ‘This phenomenon can only be explained,’ Mr Wilson suggests, ‘by the fact that his writings, while being self-consciously and deliberately at variance with the twentieth century, are paradoxically in tune with the needs and concerns of our times. Everything on earth is not rational, and attempts to live by reason have all failed…It is the Lewis who plumbed the irrational depths of childhood and religion who speaks to the present generation.’ And Mr Wilson, who has evidently set himself strict rules, feels that a biographer is not qualified to try out those depths. This in no way weakens his detailed portrait of Lewis.

  New York Times Book Review, 1990

  ‘Not at All Whimsical’

  Me Again: Uncollected Writings of Stevie Smith edited by Jack Barbera and William McBrien

  Stevie Smith (1902—1971) said that she was straightforward but not simple, which is a version of not waving but drowning. She presented to the world the face that is invented when reticence goes over to the attack and becomes mystification. If you visited Blake and were told not to sit on a certain chair because it was for the spirit of Michelangelo, or if Emily Dickinson handed you a single flower, you needed time to find out how far the mystification was meant to keep you at a distance and to give you something to talk about when you got home. Eccentricity can go very well with sincerity, and, in Stevie’s case, with shrewdness. She calculated the effect of her collection of queer hats and sticks, her face ‘pale as sand,’ pale as her white stockings, and also, I think, of her apparent obsession with death. She was interested in death, and particularly in its willingness to oblige. She had survived a suicide attempt in 1953, she was touched by the silence of the ‘countless, countless dead,’ but when in her sixties she felt the current running faster and ‘all you want to do is to get to the waterfall and over the edge,’ she still remained Florence Margaret Smith, who enjoyed her life, and, for that matter, her success. Her poetry, she told Anna Kallin, was ‘not at all whimsical, as some asses seem to think I am, but serious, yet not aggressive, and fairly cheerful though with melancholy patches.’ The melancholy was real, of course. For that reason she gave herself, in her novels, the name of Casmilus, a god who is permitted to come and go freely from hell.

  Stevie was good company and (what is not the same thing) a good friend. She could be ‘Comfort Smith.’ Deep intimacy she drew back from, because she respected it so much. ‘That troubled stirring world of two’ was always strange to her, though love was not.

  In the serious process of trying out friendships, Stevie liked to say exactly the same things to a number of different people. There was even a kind of guided tour of Palmer’s Green, to Grovelands Park, round the lake, and back to Avondale Road. But if, for her own purposes, Stevie was sometimes repetitive, she was never predictable. Patric Dickinson, in his introduction to Scorpion and Other Poems, says that she loathed cruelty, and so she did, but although (for instance) she was fond of children she was not deceived by them, and knew that it could be satisfactory to put them sharply in their place. Again, she was encouraging to beginners, but when she was pressed (probably quite mistakenly) to support Yevtushenko for the Oxford Professorship of Poetry, and was told he would encourage the students to meet and read their poems aloud, she paused for a moment and said: ‘How terrible!’ After her aunt’s death she took to plain cookery, and wrote that she loved to feel a slim young parsnip under her knife.

  One Avondale Road, the ‘house of mercy,’ was certainly necessary to Stevie. She tired easily and had never liked going to the office.

  Dark was the day for Child Rolandine the artist

  When she went to work as a secretary-typist.

  It was the privilege of employers, the rich, to waste the time of the poor, and in particular the forty-five minutes or so it took for her to travel back to Palmer’s Green. The problem of getting her home as soon as she wanted to go became, in fact, one of the first considerations of her friends. ‘Riding home one night on a late bus, I saw the reflected world in the dark windows of the top deck and thought I was lost for ever in the swirling streets of that reflected world, with its panic corners and distances that end too soon.’ Everyone wanted to spare her this. But once she was safely back, the beloved suburb where she had been brought up became a refuge. She was not known as a writer there, and could keep the observer’s stance that was precious to her. ‘Through the laburnums and the net curtains,’ she said, ‘you may snuff the quick-witted high-lying life of a suburban community.’ Her heart went out to all she saw and overheard of the lonely, the peculiar, the poisonously nice, the fatally well-intentioned, and to those misplaced in life who, respectable to all appearance, would prefer to give up and ‘storm back through the gates of birth.’ She also liked to sense the warmth of ‘father’s chair, uproar, dogs, babies, and radio,’ and ‘yet she would point out that she was really on the edge of the open country,’ only six stations to the middle of Hertfordshire. The sky was clearer in N13 and she could come to terms with herself there. At the same time she insisted she was driven to write because there was absolutely no company for her in Palmer’s Green.

  When Kay Dick interviewed her in 1970, Stevie complained about her photographs. ‘They make me look dead, and as if I’d been dead for a long time. I haven’t got a thing about age but I do rather have a thing about looking dead and buried.’ She made no particular objection, however, to being written about, though her three novels and twelve volumes of poetry seemed to have taken her self-portrait as far as it need go. It might be thought, too, that after the death of her sister in 1975 the truth about Stevie, if hidden, would be hard to find. However, her biography has now been undertaken by two American scholars—a matter of satisfaction in itself, since during her lifetime she was not much appreciated in the States. One can only admire the courage of the joint venture. Not only are they collaborating at long distance (Barbera at the University of Mississippi, McBrien at Hofstra), so that they can only meet to compare notes twice a year, but, as neither of them ever met Stevie, they are getting to know her by running the documentary film about her life over and over again. No investigators can have worked harder. And although she has proved elusive (there is no evidence, for example, that George Orwell was her lover), and has turned out to be a somewhat offcentre eccentric, they have remained sweet-tempered and continued to gather, research, and file their discoveries together. The first result of all this is Me Again, a handsome selection of uncollected stories, essays, reviews, and poems, and sixty-odd letters, only two of which have been printed before.

  For some reason that the two editors don’t reveal, nothing, except for the letters, is arranged in chronological order. James MacGibbon, Stevie’s literary editor, does not comment on this, but says in his rather cautious preface that their choice is ‘tantamount to an autobiographical profile.’ This is not quite so, but he is surely right in saying that the book will give most readers their first authentic idea of her religious convictions. These were self-convictions. She had almost made up her mind that God was one of man’s most unfortunate inventions. What needed explanation was not man’s failings but his continued demand to love and be loved, even when

  Beaten, corrupted, dying,

  In his own blood lying.

  But that was not enough, and the frail poet hurled herself against Von Hügel, Father D’Arcy, Ronald Knox, and all the propositions of the Catholic and Anglo-Catholic Churches. ‘Some Impediments to Christian Commitment,’ which is a talk she gave at St Cuthbert’s, Philbeach Gardens, just over two years before her death, is an account of her own spiritual history, a touching one, with her own particular sense of the sad and the ridiculous. It has never been printed before. ‘Torn ab
out,’ as one might expect, by the loss of her childhood faith, she was driven year by year to conclude that ‘the Redemption seems a Bargain dishonourable to both proposer and accepter.’ Uncertainty, however, which she finally settled for, proved treacherous, and she had to admit finally that she was a backslider as a non-believer.

  Among the ten stories retrieved for us is perhaps the most lyrical of all, ‘Beside the Seaside,’ a languorous fin-de-saison holiday impression, the pebbles of the beach still warm to the touch but deeply cold underneath, and her friends’ tempers just beginning to fray. There is a variable delicate friction between the interests of wives, husbands, and children, and between human beings and nature—one might say between the seaside and the sea. Helena (the Stevie of this story) detaches herself, unable to help doing so, and wanders away inland across the marshes, returning ‘full of agreeable fancies and spattered with smelly mud’ to confront the edginess of the party with her artist’s sense of deep interior peace. In ‘The Story of a Story’ she again defends herself as an artist. This wiry situation comedy shows why Stevie sometimes longed, in her character as Lot’s wife, to be turned into a pillar of asphalt, since she seemed to give offence so often. Her friends did not want to become her material, as they had in ‘Sunday at Home’ (also reprinted here), and her publisher hesitated, afraid of libel. ‘The morning, which had been so smiling when her employer first spoke, now showed its teeth.’ Sitting alone in the rainswept park, the unhappy authoress regrets the loss of friends, but much more the death of her story. She had worked on it with love to make it shining and remote, but also with ‘cunning and furtiveness and care and ferocity.’ These were the qualities that went into Stevie’s seemingly ingenuous fiction.

  About the poems, also industriously tracked down, I am not so sure, since she herself presumably didn’t want them included in the collected edition of 1975. Stevie Smith had a remarkable ear (‘it’s the hymns coming up, I expect’), and when she was manipulated by whatever force poetry is, she knew that all she had to do was listen. She produced then a kind of counterpoint between the ‘missed-shot tunes’ that haunted her and the phrasing and pauses of her own speaking voice. Not all the verses in Me Again seem quite to reach this, although you can hear her distinctive note of loneliness which as she pointed out ‘runs with tiredness,’ in ‘None of the Other Birds’ and ‘Childhood and Interruption.’

  In the end, one of Stevie’s greatest achievements was to be not only a connoisseur of myths, but the creator of one. Out of an unpromisingly respectable suburb at the end of the apparently endless Green Lanes she created a strange Jerusalem.

  London Review of Books, 1981

  Washed Off the Rock

  J. G. Farrell: The Making of a Writer, by Lavinia Greacen

  J. G. Farrell was half English, half Anglo-Irish. At the beginning of the 1950s, he was a tough young man, fond of cricket but concentrating on rugby. He was at Rossall, and at the end of his last term spent seven months in the Canadian Arctic as a general labourer on the Distant Early Warning System. He was selected because of his evident strength and health. His father, Bill Farrell, had gone out to Bengal as a boxwallah, but had been driven back to Dublin by increasing deafness. In 1956, Jim was able to go up to Oxford, to Brasenose. He was supposed to be studying law, but turned out twice a week for rugby as a centre three-quarter. At the end of his first term, he collapsed quite suddenly, and was taken by ambulance to the Slade Isolation Hospital. It was polio, and when he was discharged in the spring of 1957 he was told not to ask too much of himself, as it would take time to learn to live again. His balance was affected, and there would always be pain in his right side. Sexually, there would be no impairment, but he must make allowance for lack of upper body strength. His old friends in Dublin were taken aback. He looked shrivelled and lessened. His hair had turned grey, almost white.

  He came to London, perched in holes and corners—at one time in a conservatory in Kensington—and concentrated all the frail remainder of his strength into establishing himself as a writer. What was the competition? William Golding had published Lord of the Flies in 1954, The Inheritors in 1955, and Pincher Martin in 1956. Andrew Sinclair, deeply disliked by Farrell, had brought out My Friend Judas in 1960. Iris Murdoch’s The Bell came out in 1958 and A Severed Head in 1961, Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook in 1962. Farrell, meanwhile, wanted to write a book that would not only sell, but be remembered in the same way as Camus’s La Peste. In 1963 he would be thirty. He was facing, Lavinia Greacen says in J. G. Farrell: The Making of a Writer, ‘the descent from dreams.’ How did people handle that? He felt he had earned the right to guess.

  Most people who have lived alone and tried to write, even without physical disabilities, will feel sympathy with Farrell. He made his bed every morning without a wrinkle and left a sheet of clean A4 on top of the pile, to begin the next day’s work. What about women? While he was writing a book, he was entirely absorbed, but this made him lonely, in a state of ‘Sarahlessness’ (Major Brendan Archer’s expression for it in Troubles), or (for they came and went) Sandylessness, Dianalessness, Carol Driskolessness, Bridget O’Toolelessness. He was aware of ‘a curious anarchy inside me that requires me to smash to pieces every promising relationship.’ But he showed great managerial skill, parting from them without enmity.

  He had twice gone across to teach in France, and his first novel, The Man From Elsewhere, showed that he was still under the spell of the French cinema. In July 1963, he was asked to tea at Chatto & Windus, the first time he had ever set foot in a publishing house. But they didn’t accept his book, which made an almost unnoticed appearance in Hutchinson’s New Authors list—£50 on signing the contract, £100 on publication. Next, he made use of his most precious and personal material in The Lung. This got a good notice from the Guardian, but the reviewer added that it showed ‘the developing powers of a considerable talent.’ ‘Considerable’ was a drop of poison, to be brooded over while all the words of praise went for nothing. ‘I seem to have become quite sickeningly ambitious,’ he wrote, almost in dismay, about his third novel, A Girl in the Head, which, as Greacen acutely points out, is not about love so much as the inability to love.

  At this point, he was awarded a Harkness Fellowship for two years’ study in the United States, from which he came back with only one image that would be of real service to him—the sight of the ruins of a vast clapboard hotel on Block Island. Within a day or so it had become in his imagination the setting of his Irish novel, Troubles. For Troubles he was awarded the Faber Prize, which consisted of £250 and lunch at the Etoile. ‘At a stroke, in the world where he most wanted to succeed, his reputation was now made.’ This, however, was not really so until 1973, when he won the Booker Prize with The Siege of Krishnapur.

  Farrell hadn’t been to India when he began The Siege. He had collected a mass of detail from the V&A, the Science Museum, Brompton Cemetery, diaries and letters in the British Museum. He was in that half-hypnotized state of writing a book when material seems to lie in wait for you at every turn. But he saw that both a limitation and an increased depth were necessary. His subject was the Indian Mutiny, concentrating on the siege of Lucknow, which became Krishnapur, then on a handful of characters in the Collector’s Residence, each of whom—even the dogs—would find the siege a crucial test of belief. This proved the hardest part.

  Farrell felt ‘tempted to strip it of all ideas and just leave the action.’ But he persevered, and his book appeared at the end of August 1973. As Private Eye put it, ‘novels about India always win the Booker,’ and none has deserved it more than The Siege of Krishnapur. He was already researching his next Imperial novel, The Singapore Grip.

  Why, in 1979, did Farrell make the move to Ireland? His accountant had warned him that if his health deteriorated further, he might find it hard to manage, and advised taking advantage of the Irish Authors’ Tax Exemption scheme. Farrell himself felt a great anger ‘that it was the first time he was likely to earn a large amount and it co
uld be taken by the taxman,’ as do we all. Eventually he bought, at first sight, an old farm cottage in West Cork, at the end of the peninsula between Dunmanus Bay and Bantry Bay. The local handyman who sold it to him was of the opinion that Mr Farrell ‘wanted to replace his childhood.’

  Farrell threw himself into country life. Never having done any sea fishing, he got someone to show him how to do it and went down every possible evening to try for pollack from the rocks. It was the first sport he had been able to enjoy since he played rugby at Oxford. With his weak shoulder, he was doing an unsafe thing, but this simply meant that he welcomed the element of risk, which is an entirely different matter from feeling suicidal. On 11 August 1979, he chose the wrong evening. It had looked calm enough, but a freak storm got up and washed him off the rock. His body was not recovered until a month later, on the far side of Bantry Bay. Lavinia Greacen begins and ends her book with Farrell’s drowning, to emphasize the sea imagery which, she thinks, runs through his whole life. This is probably a mistake. He was a restless spirit, and there is no reason to think he would have gone on living in West Cork, or anywhere near the coast. He had been thinking of Paris. But this, all the same, is an admirable biography. Greacen had been given access to family letters and diaries as a key to ‘the private life of an exceptionally private person’ and she remains calmly sympathetic, calling in exactly the right way on the reader’s admiration and pity.