Five postscripts

This is the point where, back in an earlier century, I would have turned the letter on its side and begun writing across what was already there. Fortunately for your sanity, technology has saved you from having to read the enormity that would be the result of such a technique employed in my hideous handwriting.

1 In writing about So I Have Thought of You, the new collection of Penelope Fitzgerald's letters, I can't believe that I forgot to mention why a good portion of the letters from the first half or so of her life are missing: they were in her houseboat, Grace, when it sank in the Thames. Fans of her Booker Prize-winning Offshore (1979), a novel about an eccentric community of houseboat owners struggling to survive on the muddy banks of the Thames, may not be surprised--at least until they learn that this was the second time Grace sank. Once, for most of us, would have been enough.

2 Maud Newton and I corresponded off and on over several weeks recently about the possible fate of Iris Murdoch's letters, with me worrying that Murdoch's innate secretiveness surely meant that she was a burner of letters. But it took Jenny Davidson to suggest that the answer might be on my bookshelves: demonstrating yet again that she's a scholar while I'm just a dilettante, she pointed out that Peter Conradi, in his Iris Murdoch: A Life (2001), probably at least mentions whether he had recourse to her letters. The resulting list tidbits about the topic, which I fired off in an e-mail to Jenny and Maud, is now part of a post at Maud's site. Short answer: there was probably some serious burning.

3 To close my post Wednesday about Sybille Bedford' s A Legacy, I drew on some praise for the book that Nancy Mitford included in a letter to Evelyn Waugh. Waugh, on the other hand, though he "read it straight through with intense pleasure," disagrees with me about its second half being the richer portion:

For the first half--up to the marriage of Jules & Melanie--I was in full agreement '"one of the best novels I ever read" as you say. After that I found a slight falling off, as though the writer had suddenly taken a stiff dose of Henry James, particularly in the long talks between Sarah & Caroline. Also I think it was clumsy to have any of the narrative in the first person. The daughter relates things she cannot possibly ever have known as though she were an eye witness. But these are small blemishes. What a brilliant plot!

Later in the letter, he, ponders, tongue in cheek, on the identity of the book's author:

I wondered for a time who this brilliant "Mrs Bedford" could be. A cosmopolitan military man, plainly, with knowledge of parliamentary government, and popular journalism, a dislike for Prussians, a liking for Jews, a belief that everyone speaks French in the home . . .

4 In her introduction to the 1999 Counterpoint edition of A Legacy, Bedford notes that the book was less than a success on publication, though Waugh gave it a strong review in the Spectator. "Such reception as it had was mostly bewildered or hostile or both." Even her publisher was less than fully committed to the book, though for extra-literary reasons:

George Weidenfeld was in the midst of troubles of his own--wives and Cyril Connolly--he gave me lunch at the Ritz on a bad day for him and was openly sad.

From Jeremy Lewis's Cyril Connolly: A Life (1997) we learn that this was the period when Weidenfeld, his marriage having collapsed, was busy diving into an affair with Connolly's wife, Barbara Skelton.

It began, Skelton claims, when Connolly himself told her that, as he had fallen for Lucien Freud's wife, Caroline Blackwood (who wanted nothing to do with him), he wouldn't mind her finding "a rival attraction of her own . . . provided he was a gentleman." It didn't take long: accidentally brushing hands at the theatre, Weidenfeld and Skelton "were suddenly aware of an intense and mutual physical attraction"; things proceeded apace, with childishness, misbehavior, and hideous scenes on all sides. Evelyn Waugh, rarely inclined to be generous about another's troubles, complained that

Connolly's cuckolding is a great bore. I dined with him and he went on and on.

Connolly's mother, on the other hand, was more vitriolically understanding, opening her argument with the unintentionally ridiculous line,

I think it is the last straw that it should it be your publisher. . . . I think a lioness would have repaid you more [than Barbara has]--animals have not spite and deliberate cruelty. . . . [P]ut her out of your mind and leave her to her present keeper.

Divorce ensued, followed by a quick marriage between Skelton and Weidenfeld that the bridegroom described as "a dismal affair, more like a wake than a wedding." The marriage itself was as brief and unpleasant as the affair had been long and passionate:

Life as a publisher's wife proved entirely uncongenial to Barbara. She claimed that she hated being woken every morning to the rustle of newspapers, was bored by Wiedenfeld's business talk and tireless ambition, and refused to play the part of the compliant, charming publishing hostess, despite his begging her to "Gush! Gush! You must be more gushing!"

It's not hard to see why Anthony Powell fixed on Skelton as the model for Pamela Widmerpool, isn't it? Skelton wrote two volumes of memoir, which I'm beginning to think I need to read.

5 This final item doesn't quite qualify as a true postscript, as I haven't really written about Cyril Connolly in recent weeks, but as he's a topic that's perpetually bubbling under the surface in these parts, you can consider it a postscript to I've Been Reading Lately in general. From his journal for 1931, a few lines for a city summer:

London now completely summer. Trees, tawdriness spreading west from Tottenham Court Road, evening pavements crowded with aimless sex. V. Woolf asked Elizabeth what unnatural vice was--"I mean what do they do?"

And that's all for tonight, for I find myself once again, as Connolly jotted down elsewhere in his journal, "Proust-ridden." The Prisoner calls.

Sybille Bedford's A Legacy

Sybille Bedford's A Legacy (1956) tells the story of three German families in the years leading up to World War I: two neighboring landed families from the Catholic South and a Jewish manufacturing family from Berlin. Narrated by a woman whose mother was the product of one of the marriages that over the years intertwined the families, the book relates their very different ways of being in--and, despite their wealth and connections, largely being at the mercy of--the rapidly changing Germany of the turn of the twentieth century. Bedford describes one of the Catholic families, the Feldens, thus:

[T]hey were neither backwoodsmen nor courtiers, but country gentlemen of cultured, if not general, interests. They drank hock and claret, but they also drank and knew how to make their own wine. They dabbled in the natural sciences; they enjoyed and contributed to those branches of the arts that increase the amenities of linving--domestic archietecture, instrument-making, horticulture. They were bored by the abstract, bored by letters, and their acceptance of thought was confined to acceptance of thought about things. They liked new theories of acoustics, but turned from ones of government with suspicion and distaste. They played music like craftsmen, and made objects like artists.

The Feldens are lovably eccentric: for example, one of the sons, Julius, keeps chimpanzees that he treats like people. The family leads a charmingly bucolic countryside life that would seem farfetched if it didn't jibe so well with what Patrick Leigh Fermor discovered on his mid-1930s trek through that area. But that life of near-Edenic plenty and ease has done little to fit them--Julius in particular--for life elsewhere, where one must find new activities and occupations, and when love draws Julius to Berlin, he is unmoored and to some extent never quite recovers.

The other southern family, the Bernins, is more politically active, its members staffing government departments and holding cabinet positions, while the Berlin family, the Merzes, is almost entirely contained within its large townhouse, which is stuffed with spinster aunts and ungrateful uncles and autocratic grandparents. The events of the outside world reach them in confused fashion; then that blurry information is endlessly talked round and suspected to the point of negation. This scene, where the patriarch, some cousins, assorted other family members, and the butler discuss the extravagant gambling debts run up by the eldest son, Eduard, shows the mix of obliviousness, confusion, and petty cruelty that reigns in the house; it also serves well to demonstrate Bedford's light touch with comic dialogue:

"Whist, I suppose."

"Not whist, papa."

"Well, some fool game. Good money out of the window. Daresay it's in the family. Look at your uncle Emil. Wake up, Emil!" His brother-in-law, who was fifteen years younger and neither deaf nor napping, looked up. "Edu's lost more at the tables than you ever had a chance to spit at."

"Poor Sarah," said Emil, who was a nice man.

"Sarah is a rich woman," said Cousin Markwald, who was neither.

"Well, she forked it out. How much did you say it was?" said Grandpapa who knew, but wished to hear again.

Friedrich named a figure.

"Round," said Grandpapa.

"Has poor Edu been losing again?" said Grandmama. "He's always such bad luck. I'm sure they swindle him."

"Him," said Cousin Markwald.

"The results do not point to that conclusion, sir."

"Well, yes, mama, I think the money-lenders take him in. It's hardly conceivable otherwise; no-one could stake so much in cold blood."

"I never heard of anyone staking in cold blood," said Emil.

"Money-lenders?" said Grandmama. "What would the poor boy want to borrow money for?"

"Has my son been to the money-lenders?" said the old gentleman, really stung. "I'm going to cut him off. Who does the fool think he is, a Goy?"

"Everybody goes to them nowadays, papa," said Friedrich.

"It does sound degenerate of us," said Emil.

Bedford makes that sort of comedy seem effortless. She's just as skilled at showing how the refusal of each of these families to engage fully with reality and its problems not only dooms them to loss and decline but also, when ramified through a whole society, ultimately aids the rise of the Nazi horror.

But the novel really comes to life when Bedford begins to focus more clearly on Sarah, Eduard's long-suffering wife. Early on, when Sarah--who, unlike her in-laws, always lives in the world as it is, rather than as she'd have it be--is beginning to come to terms with the fact that she's married a wastrel, Bedford offers this capsule description:

She was a woman who had to know herself just in all her dealings. She liked few people, had never loved and liked at the same time for long; she could not afford not to like herself. Dignity and consience were her shell and her recourse. She had presence, she was instructed, she judged, she was too tall; men treaterd her as she appeared to them, and never, once, had she been spoken to in the way Julius spoke to Tzara, his chimpanzee. Nor was there anyone from whom this could have been entirely acceptable: she sought rectititude, success, character; looks, wit and mind, and had never found them united in one person. Without looks she could not be moved, looks and a civilized facade; mind she was long resigned tofinding only among those of her acquaintance who were slovenly and self-interested, or slovenly and indifferent; and at that period of her life she was quite alone.

Sarah's natural toughness, her cold facade, are drawn so convincingly, made so familiar and comprehensible--and, importantly, sympathetic--that when we learn, in a passage I quoted from yesterday, that she has fallen in what Bedford describes as "late love," the very revelation is moving. When we find (and here those of you who might be thinking of reading A Legacy should probably stop reading; the scenes on which I'm basing the rest of this post are best encountered in context), perhaps not unexpectedly, that the object of her love is fickle and flighty and probably unworthy, we ache for her--yet at the same time, Bedford draws that love so well that we understand.

The object of Sarah's love is revealed to us at a dinner party. She turns out to be a married woman named Caroline, who arrives decidedly late, spraying apologies to the assembled:

"How can you ever forgive me? That endless Brahms--you know the way that never stops. And then of course no cabs, there's a blizzard--"

She whirls through the party, "hugging silence, sometimes bubbling to the surface in a splash of talk," at one point managing an amusing exchange with Sarah's brother-in-law and friend Julius:

"Dinner parties," Julius told her, "so unnecesary. Large ones. So many people eating together. The after-dinner faces--it is so unbecoming to the women."

"How like Lord Byron."

"The poet?" said Julius with the recklessness of someone trying a very long shot.

She smiled at him, all on the surface now. "Lord Byron, the poet."

But later, when the crowd has thinned, Sarah corners her:

"My dear."

"And I wanted to say, I don't see how you can forgive me for tonight. It was unpardonable. But you know--"

"My dear--it was not Brahms this afternoon, it was Schumann. I know: because I was there."

"No? What a lark." She smiled at Sarah with her eyes. "Darling, then you're able to say that you saw me."

"Please, please my dear, be careful. Oh I beg you."

"I might. A little. To please you--to throw something to the gods."

"And were you supposed to have changed into this dress in the cab?"

Her look turned inward again as if to meet a memory.

"Should you even talk so much about going alone in cabs?"

"Not alone."

"I am frightened."

"I am happy." The face became drawn; then her eyes met Sarah's fully, she very lightly touched her hand with her hand. "Sarah--I am so happy. The world--"

"It does not make you invisible. Nor invulnerable."

"But it does," said Caroline, "it does, it does."

My god, that recklessness, that life, that glow--can't you see it? Haven't we all fallen for it at some point, despite knowing better? I get chills every time I read that scene, and what follows in the remaining 150+ pages, as relationships, marriages, families come and go, is worthy of that shiver.

A Legacy is a brilliant book; I'm with Nancy Mitford, who wrote to Evelyn Waugh that it "all seemed perfect to me."

"A most disagreeable instrument, I hear."

Midway through Sybille Bedford's wonderful novel of pre-war Germany, A Legacy (1956) there occurs a very funny bit of dialogue between a woman, Sarah, and her brother-in-law, Julius, with whom she has developed a close, if somewhat mutually uncomprehending, friendship over the years. We have been warned in the preceding paragraph, in Bedford's simultaneously elliptic and epigrammatic fashion, that, unexpectedly, something is up with Sarah:

Late love has this in common with first love, it is again involuntary. In the event, Sarah did make a large sum of money by playing the French Rente; she did not get the Monet, but she bought another, and she also bought a Seurat, yet these achievements hardly weighed with her at all: if she had chosen them to keep herself diverted and absorbed, she was that winter--rapt in discovery, borne on laughter, freshly, involuntarily, magically absorbed. She was also something else, she was happy.

But we've as yet been given no details when the next paragraph opens with dialogue:

"Do you know anyone who can help one to get a telephone?"

"Telephone?"

"T e l e p h o n e."

"A most disagreeable instrument, I hear," said Julius.

"Obviously you're no help."

"A friend of mine has one. Somebody put it in for her as a surprise. It is used for ordering oysters when it's too late for sending a petit bleu. But the petit bleu is quicker."

"Extraordinary housekeeping. Your friend could hardly be willing to wrench it off her wall and give it to me? We must get our benighted Embassy to do something. You must speak to them."

"I?"

"The brother-in-law of the Foreign Minister."

"Oh, poor Conrad; I don't think of him in that way."

"It's the way that best bears thinking about. They say it takes three weeks normally. I want it now."

"The telephone?"

"Yes, Jules."

"Whatever for?"

"To talk. To talk to one's friends in the morning."

"Sarah?" said Julius. "You are not expecting me to talk to you on the telephone?"

"No," Sarah said. "Not you."

In fewer than twenty lines Bedford sketches the heart of the difficulties that perpetually beset this family, the reliable inability of nearly every family member to properly attend to one another as actual people, with wishes and desires that just possibly might not be coterminous with their own. That she does so while also making us laugh--and at the same time beginning to cultivate the ache she'll later make us feel over Sarah's foredoomed love--is as good an example of the power of concision (or, as I referred to it the other day in writing about that past master of the art, Penelope Fitzgerald, the art of leaving out) as you'll ever see.

If I'm sufficiently organized, I'll have more to say later this week about this novel. Tonight, though, I have a question: when I first read this exchange, I immediately was sure I'd read a conversation about telephones in an Ivy Compton-Burnett novel that ran along similar lines. If it exists, I'm sure it's in one of the two that the New York Review of Books Classics line has reissued, Manservant and Maidservant or A House and Its Head. But in paging through those volumes a bit, I haven't been able to find it. Does this strike a chord with anyone else, or am I imagining it, based on how very Compton-Burnett the passage is?

{By the way: thanks to About Last Night contributor Our Girl in Chicago for leading me to pick up this novel. Compare something convincingly to Anthony Powell and you've got me every time . . . }