An Awful Lot of Books (9 page)

March 1959

Here, among other differences, is an absolute contrast of early childhood. Within minutes of Paul’s birth he was removed on a purple velvet cushion by his great aunt the Empress Elizabeth, who had planned that he should inherit the throne direct from her. Paul saw his mother twice every three months, but never alone, and grew up terrified of her. He was brought up ‘in rooms much too hot’ by nurses who ruined his indigestion and fed him on backstairs gossip of a peculiarly horrifying kind - the ‘nameless prisoner’, Ivan IV, kept in a dungeon from the age of six months, unaware of his identity and with the vocabulary of a child, etc. - so that by the time Elizabeth was dead, Paul’s father had abdicated and his mother was Catherine the Great, his relationship with her was a complex of fear and bitterness which the assassinations of his father and the ‘nameless prisoner’ did nothing to alleviate.

He suffered from appalling nightmares, a deeply affectionate nature which after the removal of his nurses was starved, and constant terror about his own future. The inexorable pattern of violence repeats through his life when after his second marriage (his first wife died in childbirth) his mother removes the first two sons exactly as he had been removed from her. The inference is clear - that Catherine may appoint either of his sons to reign after her death and he may be killed.

This unnatural strain continues until his mother dies, when at the age of forty-two he ascends the throne - by then so unbalanced and dangerous that during his reign of five years he tries to turn his Empire into an eighteenth-century concentration camp. His reign ends as the nightmare of his earliest years comes true with his brutal and clumsy murder.

And yet this man enjoyed the whole-hearted devotion of two women. His second wife, the Grand Duchess Marie, when she was betrothed at seventeen wrote to him: ‘Most solemnly do I vow to love and worship you. Nothing in the world would ever change me’. Nothing ever did. Throughout their marriage, their ten children, the agonising difficulties with her mother-in-law, the increasing strain of Paul’s depressions and temper which bordered on madness, his frenzied passion for Prussian military order, his real and imagined wrongs and the final misery of his furiously maladministered reign, she never stopped loving him, ‘believing in his true self’ and serving his interest with a loyalty utterly unshakeable - even enduring and making friends with his mistress whose love for Paul matched hers.

Miss Almedingen handles her understanding of this period of Russian history with a skill which conceals her formidable knowledge: her writing is beautifully clear, easy and simple, and out of a terrible story of the short cycle of violence emerges a moving portrait of this desperate and damaged man.

March 1959

A THIRD childhood… This book completes all that we are likely to know of Anne Frank. Her diary and the play made from it contain her account of the twenty-five months spent shut up in hiding in the Amsterdam office until her family were betrayed and sent to Auschwitz. Mr. Schnabel has carefully collected evidence from forty-two people - including her father - who knew her before, during and after her imprisonment. He follows the trail to Belsen where she dies a few days after her sister.

Anne Frank may have become a symbol of the millions of Jews who met her fate, but what emerges from this book is the extraordinary quality of Anne herself. The diaries showed her to be gifted, observant, touching, lively and unusually honest with herself: these accounts show the nature of her spirit to the very end. As one witness remarks: ‘she knew who she was’. Thus in one of the round-ups when selections were being made for the gas chamber, Anne, naked, her head shaved, walked into the glare of light encouraging her older sister and stood looking at her mother, still and straight with her unclouded face before she was moved on.

She never lost her compassion for others: she never, as one witness describes it, ‘lost her face’. She endured the misery and horror without either indifference or despair: as her teacher had earlier said; ‘she was able to experience more than other children, if you know what I mean’. She was sixteen when she died, and both the nature of her experience and the way in which she received it, makes this book worthy of record.

April 1959

Miss Williams must first be congratulated upon her choice of subject. As she points out in her preface, Bess of Hardwick has been harshly dealt with by a number of historians (even I, who cannot claim to have thought very often of her, have never thought kindly) and this book, apart from its interest, certainly gives one a chance of admiring this formidable lady. For those who have never thought of her at all, here are some brief facts of her life.

She was born in 1520 at Hardwick Hall (then merely a substantial farmhouse) of a respectable, but poor, Derbyshire landowning family. When Bess was twelve she was given the opportunity of going to London and it was there that she met and married her first husband, young Robert Barlow, who loved her, and who settled all his estates upon her before he died, less than a year after the marriage.

She was married thrice more, to Sir William Cavendish, by whom she had nine children - six surviving - and with whom she was extremely happy until he died; to Sir William St. Loe, a fretful and delicate man much older than herself, who only lasted six years; and finally to George Talbot, sixth Earl of Shrewsbury. She lived to be eighty-seven and survived five reigns (six, if Jane Grey be counted), and she built Hardwick Hall as it stands today and the original Chatsworth. With Shrewsbury she also endured fifteen and a half years of exhausting and expensive custodianship of Mary Queen of Scots - who must have been one of the most slippery and dangerous prisoners ever to be guarded in a succession of country houses.

Bess was a woman of boundless energy, unswerving loyalty, and fierce ambition for her children. Apart from founding Chatsworth for her Cavendish family, she married two of them to Shrewsbury’s children by a previous marriage and for the last third of her life made a serious and prolonged effort to get her grand-daughter, Arabella Stewart, named as successor to Queen Elizabeth; but here the temperaments of Mary Queen of Scots, Queen Elizabeth and Arabella all combined and fate was against her. In appearance she had much in common with her royal namesake, including red hair and beautiful hands; she also had the sharp tongue, the keen mind, and the intelligence and courage to foresee and sometimes to avert the recurrent catastrophe of royal displeasures - she was twice sent to the Tower.

As Miss Williams remarks, she must be judged against the background of her own times, and they were far simpler, richer, coarser and harder than any other in English history. They were also times when a woman - so far as it is known without an architect - could conceive and build a house like Hardwick. Miss Williams has produced much fascinating contemporary material, of Bess herself, her large family, of the Queens and others, all inveterate letter-writers in language which makes our own today seem watery and dull and not even worth the paper - so inferior to parchment - on which it is written. She has indulged in one or two longish shots of benign supposition, but surely in any biography it is preferable that the subject should be given the benefit of the doubt rather than our being given the doubtful benefit of the author’s malice.

April 1959

This work is written with a kind of graceful affection for her subject which becomes disarming and infectious. La Grande Mademoiselle - first cousin of Louis XIV and the greatest heiress in France - was brought up in circumstances of the utmost luxury and silliness and invites special admiration for the qualities which endured in spite of her environment: her essential honesty, her good heart, her almost noble fidelity and her innocence. Almost everybody betrayed her, her execrable father, Louis, his horrid little brother, Mme de Montespan, Condé, and most disastrously, de Lauzun, but she contrived never to be embittered - although she was possibly partially protected by lack of intellect and an inviolate sense of her position.

In appearance she was far too tall, with an enormous nose and bad teeth, a complexion which improved after smallpox, and ‘beautifully ashen’ hair. She was brought up almost illiterate - any Tudor princess would have regarded her as a savage - and emerged at seventeen as an affectionate hoyden; one cannot help seeing her in the French Court as an extremely well-bred shooting dog perpetually laying her head against some royal knee and knocking over the gambling tables and chocolate cups. Her illiteracy did not stop her writing her memoirs, in which, as Miss Sackville-West remarks, ‘nothing escaped her, except important things’.

She had a violent temper, talked (loudly) and wrote (illegibly) far too much, but her rank and great wealth made her an invaluable marriage bargain, and even Charles II thought twice about marrying her. She had no serious interest in marriage, however, until at the age of forty-three she fell desperately in love with de Lauzun, a Gascon upstart who had worked his way by eccentric bravado into the King’s favour. De Lauzun’s behaviour to her was only equalled by her father’s for sheer treacherous brutality.

After months of anxious enigmatic conversation with de Lauzun, she obtained Louis’ consent to their marriage and spent what she described as the three happiest days of her life, which the boorish and calculating indifference of de Lauzun, the Queen’s sour disapproval and other ominous signs seems not to have clouded; and then Louis retracted his consent, and poor Mademoiselle was plunged into a despairing grief which it is painful even to read about. Most of Paris was laughing at a disappointed old maid weeping day and night, so she was forced back into the Court where her tears violently and unaccountably overcame her, although she clearly struggled incessantly with them, able only to indulge herself in the Queen’s box at the opera, where it was dark, and for four hours she could stare across to de Lauzun’s box and weep in peace.

Her anguish is touching: ‘to understand my state,’ she says, ‘it is necessary to have been in it: this is one of the things one does not know how to describe’. The sequel: de Lauzun’s ten years of imprisonment, her efforts to procure his release, and de Lauzun’s eventual return and their hopeless incompatibility ending in a final parting, is somehow all sadder than a straight tragedy. One does end by saying with the author ‘poor Mademoiselle’ - so rich, so important in her own eyes, playing at soldiers, building houses, dashing to parties, denied perhaps the only thing that she really wanted other than being La Grande Mademoiselle.

This book is admirably written: in spite of Miss Sackville-West’s considerable and intricate knowledge - both of the French language and the period of which she is writing - great care has been taken to be simple and clear for those who know much less of either.

May 1959

Comparatively few people manage to create a myth during their lifetime, and not so many interpretive artists establish tradition of a quality which on their death is born or transformed into inspiration for all those serving their particular art after them: both these achievements are true of Bernhardt, and the second is the greatest gift which any artist can offer - a permanently increased sense of the possibilities, a wider view of beauty, a more exacting idea of what is perfection. It seems to me, therefore, that these rare creatures are well worth reading about, and Miss Richardson’s contribution is both interesting for those who already know something about Bernhardt, and admirable for those who do not.

Sarah Bernhardt was the unwanted child of a Jewish cocotte from Haarlem and a Roman Catholic lawyer from Le Havre who abandoned his career in favour of world travel. The jacket of this book announces that ‘she originally became an actress almost by accident’, but in spite of this one is struck in the early part of the book by exactly the opposite impression - that Sarah’s purpose was certain, her end shaped by a divinity and she rough hewing not at all. Her energy led her in the early days of her career to sculpt, to write criticism of pictures, and to be a hospital nurse, but these activities were all substitutes for continuous work in the theatre which neither the Conservatoire not the Comédie Française recognised her sufficiently to provide.

She grew up into a tall young woman with flaming hair, an enchanting voice and green eyes which changed colour to blue or brown according to her moods - but after that it is difficult to form one picture of her life, and beneath her greatest roles she was playing the continuous part of Sarah - a creature who could excite anything from the passions of adoration, awe, and joy to the affections of desire, respect and loyalty in all who knew her, and thousands who did not. For more than fifty years she dominated the theatre, travelling unbelievable distances for the most gruelling tours - the Americas, Australia, Russia, Canada and much of Europe, playing eight or nine times a week in repertoires that almost make one faint to think of them. Considered to be delicate as a girl, and having enjoyed the effect that could be made from this, she adopted good health with such passionate determination that it served her throughout; her leg was amputated when she was seventy some years after a severe fall in South America due to the carelessness of the stage hands (one cannot help recalling Nijinsky here) - but she continued to tour and to act until 1922: her last performance being in Rostand’s
La Gloire
.