An Awful Lot of Books (10 page)

The following March she lay dying - her own death and the great deaths she had played: Marguerite Gautier, and L’Aiglon - and asked for many flowers; she must have been given more flowers than anyone else in the world, but, as someone remarked, they never ceased to delight her, and afterwards, the flowers poured in, in quantities great enough even for her royal nature, and in keeping with the homage paid to her during her rich life. Her effect is incalculable, but Miss Richardson has given us a nice selection of what the people who knew her, wrote for her, watched her, lived with her, and worked with her, experienced. She had her critics; Shaw is quoted among them, but one feels that being faced with any mystery or excellence that he could not personally account for rendered him peevish; and for the rest it is clear that she gave her less good, better and best performances, but they were so numerous that it must have been perfectly possible to see the best.

There are two other interesting points arising out of this book which I should like to mention. The first is the climate which produces a Bernhardt; she came a little after Rachel, was contemporary with Duse and Réjane (who were, of course, younger), with Irving, Terry, Mrs Patrick Campbell, Cocquelin and Lucien Guitry and many others. Patti gave a benefit performance in aid of a very young Bernhardt whose possessions had all been burnt in a fire. The demand for good theatre, and the standard of the demand was perhaps higher than it had ever been; the poets and playwrights had artists to write for: of course there was plenty of room for mediocrity, but much more important, there was a place for the best: it is then that the best may occur, but there has to be some preparation for it.

The second arises from an account of Bernhardt rehearsing - very quiet, the whole thing small but perfectly pitched to scale. This is interesting, because rehearsals in the straight theatre today are generally conducted at full pitch: with Bernhardt it would seem that she was virtuoso and could therefore give her full attention to the feeling of who she was being and leave her vocal technique to be used only when necessary - i.e. in a large theatre with an audience.

In conclusion, she was once asked her theory of life and said: ‘We ought to hate very rarely, forgive often, and never forget.’

June 1959

This book is a wonderfully gentle piece of work by a young American who seems to be blessed with a mind as tranquil as her nature is alert - who manages to be serene about adventure, simple about beauty and direct about human experience. She is writing about the Bushmen of the Kalahari desert - the earliest living inhabitants of South Africa - and as she has the time and took the trouble to learn a great deal about them and they are an interesting people, the book is the most harmonious success.

The author visited and lived with four of the language groups into which the Bushmen are divided, but this is mostly about the Gikwe who inhabit the eastern part of the desert, and the Kung whose territory is the south-west. The Kalahari is subject to drought for nine months of the year; in the summer the temperature rises to 120ºF; in the winter it varies from 80ºF to an arctic frost at night. Hunting is difficult, it is too dry for crops of any kind, and so these people are nomadic within their own territories, and although they manage to survive in country which would kill any civilised man in a few days, it is not unusual for a Bushman to die of thirst. They have been driven back into this country by the Bantu and by Europeans, whose relative ‘progress’ in civilisation has made them more aggressive and grasping than the simple and submissive Bushman, who is afraid - with reason - of being kidnapped for slave labour, of the family units being broken up and leaving a disastrous preponderance of old people and young children who cannot hunt for themselves. They are not fighters or farmers, but the finest trackers in Africa, and all their other skills are stamped with the (nowadays peculiar) charm of necessity.

In appearance they are small - about five feet tall - almost naked, delicately built, and handsome because of the extreme grace with which they move, which as the author says, is not a beauty of the flesh, and therefore exists in everyone who is not infant or stiff with age. They have long slender arms and legs and the men are built for running: they love music and speak softly. They wear leather and ostrich eggshell beads, and the women are sometimes decorated with a row of blue scars on the forehead and the thighs to imitate the beauty of zebras. They hunt with arrows poisoned from a grub which they dig from the roots of certain trees, and when they kill everything is shared out of the animal by a rigid system of rules, the formal ownership of every part mattering to the Bushmen, although in the end no person eats more than any other. Because they are envious, they are afraid of being envied, and everything is always carefully divided, but they are also very honest - they neither lie nor steal, nor do they kill one another, have many curious and interesting beliefs, and are altogether worth reading about.

The author, who never writes about herself, emerges as the most remarkable young woman. She crossed the Kalahari three times in the course of her expeditions and endured the climate: she learned something of the extremely difficult languages, and her affection for the people with whom she lived is implicit, throughout the book, but she is never sentimental, patronising or dull as she describes them - their marriage customs, their hunting, their children, their dancing, their music, their magic and their endearing behaviour to her Viz: ‘…all the Bushmen who knew us threw their gentle arms around us, touching us so lightly that it was like being embraced by moths.’ An excellent and delightful book.

July 1959

Most people, I think, have only the haziest idea of what an editor of a magazine actually does; they have flickering pictures, gleaned mostly from tough, slick, usually American films, of characters - smart or rugged according to sex - who shout down telephones, frighten contributors, depend powerfully upon their secretaries, and, like the wilder and more rare species of animal, are extremely difficult to see, but if asked what editors were actually for, they would be hard put to it for a practical answer.

All this would seem true of Harold Ross, who was editor of
The New Yorker
from its beginning in 1925 until his death in 1951. Mr Thurber’s book is filled with ruthless affection, years of dramatic experience and his own merciful capacities for remembrance and the understanding of his subject, and is such a thorough portrait of this eccentric, brilliant, stormy man, that one does begin to see what an editor of this calibre means. He did shout down telephones; he was extremely difficult to see; he fought his contributors tooth and nail with every sort of consequence; he suffered from hours of gigantic gloom and anxiety which he furiously communicated to everyone round him. Yet the facts are that he founded and developed the most remarkable magazine which collected and made a staggering number and quality of writers and artists.

He spent two years trying to get the magazine started at all, and when he did, its first year was a sensational flop - a printing of fifteen thousand in February had dropped to twenty-seven hundred by August - staff was cut to a minimum and there is the melancholy story of Ross running into Dorothy Parker and saying: ‘I thought you were coming into the office to write a piece last week - what happened?’ Mrs. Parker turned upon him the eloquent magic of her dark and lovely eyes. ‘Somebody was using the pencil,’ she explained sorrowfully.

However, E.B. White (whose collected works from
The New Yorker
entitled
The Second Tree From the Corner
are delicious reading) joined the staff in 1926 and Thurber the following year: there were also casual contributions from a galaxy of writers that would make any contemporary editor’s mouth water; they didn’t get paid much, and they didn’t help often, and when somebody said to Ross at the time that ‘the part time help of wits is no better than the full time help of half wits’, Ross was able to retort with gloomy triumph that he had both …

When Thurber told him at their first meeting that he wanted to write, Ross snarled: ‘writers are a dime a dozen, Thurber, what I want is an editor.’ When Thurber, who had drawn from the age of seven ‘mostly what seemed to be dogs’, had coveted all the available copy paper in the office so that nobody could find a blank sheet to write a note, White suggested that some of the drawings should be used for the magazine, and started sending them in to Ross, who scowled: ‘How the hell did you get the idea that you could draw?’ Neither Ross nor Thurber were in the least disturbed by these preliminary skirmishes, and in fact Thurber both wrote and drew for Ross for the next twenty-five years, and when Thurber’s sight finally failed him, it was Ross who devised endless schemes for reprinting Thurber’s drawings.

Ross never let up on the smallest details - his private and very personal concept of perfection urged him far beyond the ordinary structure of what is called taste or policy to a meticulous obsessive care of every aspect of his beloved magazine. Copy, layout, artwork, captions, punctuation, even poetry - about which he said he knew nothing - had all run the gamut of his furious instinct, which somehow, in spite of his often disastrous administration of people, all seemed in the end to benefit by his frantic perpetual concern.

In Thurber and White he encountered what he needed - people who knew what they were writing, drawing or fighting about, who had an immense affection for him, and who, with their great talents, delectable humour, and desirable loyalty, always kept the whole enterprise in proportion.

Mr. Thurber’s book is not a formal biography: he says that he has not attempted to trace Ross’s life steadily from birth to death, but has taken aspects of his career and treated each one as an entity. Thus the book jumps about a good deal in time, but when one has accepted this - and the stories are so funny and fascinating that it is not difficult - the whole effect which Thurber aimed at is achieved: he writes delightfully about a man with whom he had a long and in many ways enviable relationship, and even Ross in his endless search for perfection could not have found anyone to record his achievements better than the unique and endearing Thurber.

July 1959

Nikitina is clearly an extraordinary creature: not only did she enjoy a dazzling career in the Russian Ballet but when her physical health finally made dancing difficult or impossible, she took to opera, and in no time (by operatic standards) she was singing Gilda in the State Opera at Palermo.

Unfortunately, she has not added a third branch of the arts to her laurels - she not only does not write well, she really cannot write at all - and in some strange way this makes her naïve burst of illiterate conceit quite enjoyable - like reading the happy excited vanities of a child who is having a lovely time and being spoiled.

Russian by birth, she left that country as a young girl and her first public appearance as a dancer was in Yugoslavia. She did not join Diaghilev’s company until 1923 by which time as ballet lovers will know or remember, Nijinsky was lost, Massine and Balanchine were the principal choreographers, and Lifar was rising as the next star dancer: it was the Indian Summer of the Diaghilev company.

Nikitina, in spite of a minimum of classical training by Russian standards, rose to the enviable position of ballerina in a company rich with artists to provide the materials and setting for great dancing: Legat and Cecchetti became her masters,
Romeo and Juliet
,
La Chatte
,
Le Train Bleu
and
Les Noces
some of her best-known ballets. Wherever she went she seems to have been a wild, instantaneous success: she was beautiful, delicate, subject to ‘intense sensibility’, and constantly displaying the temperamental extremes. She attracted the protective adoration of a Lord R. who was of course, fascinating and fabulously rich, and kept laying yachts, Rolls Royces and finally his heart at her feet: they went for charming recuperating holidays together whenever she was not dancing…

But in spite of her childish manner of relating all this with the little golden trumpet (doubtless given her by Lord R.) which is constantly on the toot, one senses that a great deal of the applause she relays was really merited, the signs of a serious artist, the discipline, the devotion, and her appraisal of her contemporaries are what makes this little book worthwhile - one does laugh at her, but one admires her too, and it is pleasant to read about somebody who enjoyed such glittering as well as justified desserts.

July 1959

I once had a governess who could remember picking wild roses in London’s Cromwell Road. She seemed to me incomparably old anyway, but this statement further removed her; she became from that moment an historical figure, and if I had a few dates to attach to her, she would have taken her place among the battles and kings on which I was brought up. But it seems to me that during the last twenty-five years a new kind of writing has evolved which will have interesting consequences, both upon what is generally called history, and upon the young host who are conscripted to learn it. There used to be nothing - or very little - between Great Aunt Ethyl’s Mother’s letters written home during the Indian Mutiny, and immense military and statistical accounts of what was going on - often bombastic always one-sided and usually dull, and neither of these categories by themselves gave one a very clear idea of the events which they described. The first was of course frankly subjective: one might glean fascinating information about how ladies with very long hair and very tight stays survived extreme heat, general discomfort and danger - one might even be told what Major so-and-so had said he thought was going to happen, but the view would still be alarmingly partial. The second while purporting to be detached, and admittedly taking a wider view of the situation, was still usually written from a rigid standpoint - such as being white, Christian and right - which would be bound to make certain inroads on the writer’s sense of proportion. Facts from the second category could easily be rendered down into what Mr. Fleming in the foreword to his book, reviewed below, so aptly describes as iron rations of knowledge until they became so meaninglessly dull that time converts them to mere landmarks of ignorance…