A Dog's Life (9 page)

Circe was as much in need of exercise at home as she was within the relatively wide open spaces of the park. Throwing a ball for her was neither sensible nor feasible because there were too many objects in the house that could be easily broken. What else was there to hurl down the stairwell? Socks, old socks, was the answer.

The discarded socks were David’s and mine. They were made of cotton or light wool, and therefore not resistant to Circe’s strong teeth. Her saliva soon rendered them offensive to the touch. Jane Grigson was sitting with me in the kitchen on a fine summer evening a few weeks after David’s death, watching me throw a rolled-up sock over the banister for the ever-scuttling dog. Circe, retrieving it, dropped the soggy toy at Jane’s feet with an abrupt bark that indicated it was her, Jane’s, turn. Jane picked it up, pulled a face registering mild disgust, and said, ‘Next time I come, I’ll bring you some socks that won’t end up like this.’ She slung the sock away from her, and it was quickly brought back, in an even soggier state.

Jane kept her promise. She arrived bearing gifts, as was her generous custom – Yarg, a delicious new cheese from Cornwall; green figs, just about to ripen; a bottle of balsamic vinegar. And then she produced the treat for Circe, who was smiling at her, tail wagging. From out of her bag came two pairs of her husband’s socks, one red, one blue. They were sturdy, countryman’s socks, of the kind that go with stout shoes or boots. They had been lovingly darned, I saw. It would take an excess of salivating to make them limp.

‘There are more where those came from.’

And there were. Geoffrey Grigson’s chilblain-proof socks became Circe’s household toys. They were a mouthful for her. Guests were invited to share in her untiring fun. Some visitors, it has to be noted, were happier with this diversion than others. Circe was perplexed when the proffered sock was ignored, her bewilderment giving way to irritation. She barked and barked, and had to be banished from the kitchen with a stern ‘Enough’. I would put the sock out of sight and out of reach and she would sulk in the front room until it was time to play again.

In the summer of 1975, I wrote a review for the
New Statesman
of a book by Geoffrey Grigson called
Britain Observed
. The literary editor allotted me 1,200 words, which meant that I had the long-coveted opportunity of being able to put his career into some kind of balanced perspective. It was an honour and duty to do so since Geoffrey had the reputation then – as, alas, he has now – of being little more than a scurrilous and intemperate critic. People remembered his dislike and disapproval of Edith Sitwell, Dylan Thomas and a host of tin-eared academics, whilst forgetting or overlooking the substantial fact that in his thirties and forties he ‘rescued’ those extraordinary English geniuses John Clare, Samuel Palmer, William Barnes and George Crabbe from near-oblivion. He published the early poems of W. H. Auden in his pioneering magazine
New Verse
, and discovered the very young Gavin Ewart, whose ‘Phallus in Wonderland’ and ‘Miss Twye’ he was delighted to print.
Britain Observed
proved ideal as a vehicle for expressing my considered opinion that Geoffrey Grigson, with whom I was unacquainted, is essentially a celebrator, for in its pages he praises not only Cézanne and Pissarro – ‘the greatest and humblest of landscape painters’ – but such modest, and genuine, talents as Walter Greaves, who painted views of the Thames at Chelsea, the tragic William James Blacklock, dead at forty-two, whose beautiful
Catbells and Causey Pike
is reproduced, and Wenceslas Hollar, represented by his marvellous etching of the East Side of London in 1647, simple in essence yet vividly suggestive of overcrowded city life. The book is subtitled
The Landscape Through Artists’ Eyes
, and it’s typical of Grigson’s eclecticism and respect for the undervalued that of those sixty-odd artists a good third of them are still unknown to the public at large.

The received, or safe, opinion was anathema to him. He was always his own man with his own mind. It seemed appropriate that I should come to praise him in the
New Statesman
, because it was in that educative journal that I first encountered his criticism, along with that of V. S. Pritchett and D. J. Enright, in the late 1950s. The back half of the
Statesman
was required reading in the 1960s, when Grigson was a regular reviewer. He flourished under the editorship of Karl Miller, just as he had flourished under that of J. R. Ackerley on the
Listener
– both men earning his lasting regard for allowing him to write ‘without fear or favour’ (the words are Ackerley’s.) It was from those idiosyncratic reviews – elegantly phrased and pithily argued – that I learned about Edwin Arlington Robinson’s exquisite poems of everyday madness and despair in small-town America and the
Icelandic Journals
of William Morris, which makes even the bleakest landscape interesting. Grigson was one of my educators, at a time in my life when I was attempting to free myself of the burden of wanting to succeed as a classical actor. I read his criticism, and then the works he praised. And every so often, I glanced at those books that he alone held up to ridicule, such as Iris Murdoch’s novel
The Unicorn
, in which characters ‘cast roguish glances’ at each other, ‘converse’ rather than talk, and say things like ‘I’ll be bound!’ and ‘Effingham, she is destroyed’. His review of the inescapable Anthony Burgess’s collection
Urgent Copy
:
Literary Studies
caused its author lasting resentment. Grigson began his accurate and funny piece by quoting Burgess to the effect that writing books ‘engenders tobacco addiction, an over-reliance on caffeine and dexedrine, piles, dyspepsia, chronic anxiety, sexual impotence’. Grigson’s comment on this boast in disguise was, simply, ‘Not in everyone. And not all of them, I hope, in Mr Burgess.’

Grigson pounced on the vainglorious observation ‘I was in Russia when Ernest Hemingway died’ and went on:

Well, if he was, the fact doesn’t in any real way affect what little Mr Burgess goes on to tell us about the art of Hemingway. He might as well have begun that he was paying his rates at the council offices or catching crayfish at Piddletrenthide or declaiming Yeats over pints of Guinness above the waves of the Bournemouth sewage outfall, when Hemingway died. In short I can never quite believe Mr Burgess, in this book (I know nothing of his novels). ‘Old yokels in Adderbury, my former Oxfordshire home, talk of the Earl of Rochester as though he only died yesterday.’ Really? And as they talk of him in their smock-frocks do they quote with an Oxfordshire – not Oxford – accent ‘Drudging in fair Aurelia’s womb’ or ‘Ancient Person of my Heart’?

That was written in 1968. Burgess was still smarting from it fourteen years later. In his novel
The End of the World News
, published in 1982, Burgess has a character enter a saloon somewhere in the Midwest of America. There is a poster on the wall bearing the message beneath a mugshot:
WANTED FOR MURDER: DANGEROUS GEOFF GRIGSON
. I phoned Geoffrey, now a dear friend, soon after reading that scene. He laughed heartily at the ‘old bugger’s cheek’. He thought it a good joke.

Burgess wasn’t content with that conceit. In review after review – spanning two decades – he found an excuse, often a very feeble one, to sneak in a reference to his self-appointed enemy. These gratuitous asides must have mystified the average reader, who would have been unaware of the original cause of Burgess’s spleen. They certainly bemused his widow, who regarded them as evidence of pettiness and meanness of spirit. Burgess’s last swipe at Geoffrey, to my knowledge, appeared in the
Observer
in March 1990, while Jane lay in a coma, dying. She would have laughed it off, had she been able to.

Reviewing
Britain Observed
, I concentrated on Grigson the celebrator, the man who judged each individual work – poem or painting – on its own merit. Reputation meant nothing to him. He had seen reputations come and go. What was important to him was freshness of vision, as exemplified by those artists who capture the passing moment, in whatever form, and thus ensure that it will last for ever.

Grigson read my article, and some weeks later I was invited to a contributors’ party at the
New Statesman
’s offices in Great Turnstile in the City. I declined. Then, on the day before the party, I received a call from the literary editor with the message that both the Grigsons, husband and wife, wished to meet me. So I went along, and a friendship developed on the instant. It was as warmly simple as that. Geoffrey was to live another ten years, the much-younger Jane another fifteen. Every visit to Broad Town in Wiltshire, to the old farmhouse in which they lived, was a magical occasion, particularly in summer when we sat in the garden eating the food Jane had prepared with such loving attentiveness. And ‘loving’ is the apt word to account for their marriage – his third, her first and last – for they quite simply glowed in each other’s company.

Geoffrey called Jane his ‘Dutch interior’, and indeed she would have looked – with her generous figure and ruddy complexion – perfectly at home in a painting by Pieter de Hooch or Rembrandt, or in Vermeer’s
A Maid Asleep
in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. In Geoffrey she had found the ‘older man of her dreams’, as the curator and art critic Bryan Robertson, with whom she worked in a Cambridge gallery in the 1950s, shrewdly noted. Jane’s arrival in Geoffrey’s life was one of those everyday miracles that only seem to happen in the pages of sloppy romantic novels, with Mr and Miss Right meeting by chance and declaring undying love in the final chapter. Even so, those chance meetings and heartfelt declarations, for all that they come coated in linguistic glucose, do occur in the real, messy world most of us inhabit. And so it was with Jane and Geoffrey, in their fashion. Jane had admired Geoffrey’s writing from her student days – his pioneering
Samuel Palmer
:
The Visionary Years
of 1947; his remarkable autobiography
The Crest on the Silver
, as well as his criticism – and was determined to meet him someday, somehow. When they did meet, at an exhibition in London, it was a blessing for both of them. Jane was a natural peacemaker, exuding warmth and a disinterested understanding of other people’s problems, and she brought peace to the unhappy Grigson household, as the son and daughters of his first two marriages acknowledged at Jane’s funeral.

Jane became Geoffrey’s happy amanuensis, typing his books and articles and poems. She had no idea, then, of becoming a writer herself, though she had already published a translation of Beccaria’s classic treatise
On Crime and Punishments
, for which she received the John Florio Prize. Her distinguished career, as the true successor to Elizabeth David, whom she admired and subsequently befriended, began in an unusual way. For several weeks each year the Grigsons and their daughter, Sophie, lived in a cave-house in Trôo, in the Bas-Vendômois region of France. One of their cave-dwelling neighbours was Adey Horton, whose book
Child Jesus
had been praised by Kenneth Clark. Horton, a notorious non-deliverer of promised typescripts, had been commissioned by the publisher Michael Joseph to write a cookbook on
charcuterie
and pork cookery in general. When Jane met him, he had hardly begun work on it, despite many reminders by letter and telephone from his editor in London. He invited Jane to be his researcher and secretary. Jane accepted, and worked so diligently and thoroughly and produced such a number of detailed notes for Horton to consult that he suggested she finish the book instead. She took on the challenge with some trepidation.
Charcuterie and French Pork Cookery
appeared in 1967 and was instantly acclaimed, not least by Elizabeth David, who saluted its originality.

The critical success of that first book, which might never have been written if Adey Horton had been more conscientious, encouraged Jane to think ahead and start a new life as a food writer. In 1968, she was offered a job on the
Observer
Colour Magazine, to which she contributed regular articles until within weeks of her death twenty-two years later. Her column was notable for its insistence that good cooking is impossible without the right, fresh ingredients. She wasn’t prudish on the subject, but she did regret the vanishing of the seasons. She travelled throughout Britain and Europe in pursuit of excellence – talking to farmers, suppliers, fruit growers, butchers, fishmongers and her fellow writers. If she chanced on an interesting, and workable, recipe she always named its source, an act of literary politeness not often displayed by others. But then, Jane wasn’t in competition with anyone. ‘I think food, its quality, its origins, its preparation, is something to be studied and thought about in the same way as any other aspect of human existence,’ she declares in the Introduction to
Good Things
, which was published in 1971 and consolidated her ever-rising reputation. The notion is so sensible, so basic, one might say, that it seems amazing now that she felt the need to express it. Were she alive today, she would be insisting that it cannot be repeated often enough.