Collected Essays (37 page)

‘Milk-white panic’: like the Green Child himself Mr Read has a horror of violence – a horror which preceded the war and did not follow it. The conflict always present in his work is between the fear and the glory – between the ‘milk-white panic’ and the vision which was felt by ‘the solitary little alien in the streets of Leeds’, the uncontrollable ambition which ‘threw into the cloudy future an infinite ray in which there could always be seen, like a silver knight on a white steed, this unreal figure which was myself, riding to quixotic combats, attaining a blinding and indefinable glory’. If art is the resolution of a combat, here surely is the source of Mr Read’s finest work. Very far back – farther than the author can take us – the conflict originated: it was already established when the machine closed, when the small boy felt the excitement of
King Solomon’s Mines
and
Montezuma’s Daughter.
Both sides of the conflict are personified and expressed in his poem
The End of a War
, in which the sense of glory is put first into the mouth of a dying German officer and then into the dialogue between the soul and body of the girl whom the Germans had raped and murdered – the glory of surrender to nationality and to faith, and last the revulsion in the mouth of an English officer waking on the morning of peace and addressing his dead enemy – the revulsion of an ordinary man crushed by the machine who has no sense of glory in martial action or in positive faith, caught up in violence and patiently carrying out of the conflict only the empirical knowledge that he has at least survived.

Because we have detected a conflict between the sense of glory and the fear of violence it mustn’t be thought that we have mistaken the meaning Mr Read has attached to glory: glory, he has written many times, is not merely martial glory, or ambition.

Glory is the radiance in which virtues flourish. The love of glory is the sanction of great deeds; all greatness and magnanimity proceed not from calculation but from an instinctive desire for the quality of glory. Glory is distinguished from fortune, because fortune exacts care; you must connive with your fellows and compromise yourself in a thousand ways to make sure of its fickle favours. Glory is gained directly, if one has the genius to deserve it: glory is sudden.

In that sense glory is always surrender – the English officer also experienced glory in the completeness of his surrender to the machine: the ‘wavering grace’ too is glory. But just as the meaning of glory extends far beyond great deeds, so the fear of violence extends to the same borders. Surrender of any kind seems a betrayal: the milk-white panic is felt at the idea of any self-revelation. The intellect strives to be impersonal, and the conflict becomes as extensive as life – life as the artist describes it today, ‘empty of grace, of faith, of fervour, and magnanimity’.

Glory in that sense cannot be attained by the artist, for glory is the cessation of conflict: it is private like death. The mystic, the soldier, even the politician can attain glory – the artist can only express his distant sense of it. In his novel,
The Green Child
, Mr Read conveyed as he had never done before, even in
The End of a War
, that private sense of glory. We see it working inwards from political glory – from the ideal state which Olivero found in South America back to the source of inspiration, the home of the ‘innocent eye’, back through fantasy to the dream of complete glory – the absolute surrender. Alone in his crystalline grotto, somewhere below the earth’s surface, to which the Green Child led him, sinking through the water at the mill-stream’s source, Olivero awaits death and petrifaction – the sense of sin which came between Wordsworth and his glory has been smoothed out, passion, the fear of death, all the motives of conflict have been eliminated as they had been from the dying German. Desire is limited to the desire of the final surrender, of becoming first rock, then crystal, of reaching permanency – ambition could hardly go farther.

When the hated breath at last left the human body, that body was carried to special caves, and then laid out in troughs filled with petrous water that dripped from roof and walls. There it remained until the body turned white and hard, until the eyes were glazed under the vitreous lids, and the hair of the head became like crisp snail-shells, the beard like a few jagged icicles . . .

It is the same sense of glory that impelled Christian writers to picture the City of God – both are fantasies, both are only expressions, of a sense unattained by the author, both, therefore, are escapes: the solution of conflict can come no other way. The difference, of course, is that the Christian artist believes that his fantasy is somewhere attainable: the agnostic knows that no Green Child will ever really show him the way to absolute glory.

The difference – though for the living suffering man it represents all the difference between hell and purgatory – is not to us important. Christian faith might have borne poorer fruits than this sense of unattainable glory lodged in the child’s brain on a Yorkshire farm forty years ago. Mr Read’s creative production has been small, but I doubt whether any novel, poem, or work of criticism, is more likely to survive the present anarchy than
The Green Child, The End of a War
, and
Wordsworth.
The critic who has hailed so many new fashions in painting and literature has himself supplied the standards of permanence by which these fashions will be condemned.

1941

THE CONSERVATIVE

A
LL
along the wide stony high street of Chipping Campden one is aware of stopped clocks. Time has been strenuously and persistently defied – almost successfully. Even the public telephone box – after a short struggle with the Post Office has been allowed to wear the protective colouring of Cotswold stone. At one time a lady did rebel, painting her seventeenth-century door scarlet, but the slow pressure of well-directed public opinion won in the end. Everything here is preserved – even the smells. So remarkable an attempt to halt the passage of time is of more than local interest: its success can be judged in the late F. L. Griggs’s drawings now published, together with an introduction by Mr Russell Alexander.
*4
As drawings they are not of wide interest, but to anyone who knows Campden they will recall very vividly the geography of this strange experiment in escape – with its stone continuity of building from the fourteenth to the eighteenth century, as if the mind of man here had always taken as his main motto: ‘Conserve.’

No one conserved more passionately than the late F. L. Griggs: he built his own house of solid stone with little medieval rooms, no telephone and no electric light. New bungalows and workmen’s cottages were pushed under his leadership beyond the imaginary walls of what was in effect a dream town – they littered the road to the station and the road to Broadway, which was always to Campden an example of a town that had not sufficiently conserved. Griggs was a Roman Catholic, and so were most of the inhabitants of Campden. He believed in guilds and the love of craftsmanship: he had a mind’s eye picture – which he sometimes engraved – of what an English town had been like before the Reformation, and to this he wanted Campden to conform.

But when you begin to conserve, you conserve more than you ever intend. Griggs had not meant to conserve the puritan spirit, and he certainly had no intention of conserving the slum cottages where women had to sleep in wet weather with a basin on the bed to catch the rain, or the one pump which served a whole hamlet. Some of Griggs’s impressions are given in his friend’s introduction – the qualities of the stillness and the light, the sound of bells and the smoke of jam-making; he tells us of the old names still left: Poppetts Alley and Calf Lane and the Live and Let Live Inn. There are anecdotes of old almspeople – Mrs Beales saying of her husband, Noah, ‘Twere a bit thoughtless of him to die just as the currants wanted picking’, and Mrs Nobbs avoiding an aristocratic festivity in a local park, ‘I didn’t go, for I shouldn’t a knowed nobody, and what with the junketing and the music I should ha’bin fair moictered. So I spended the day in the Churchyard amongst the folks as I knowed, areading of their stwuns.’ It is tempting to believe that by conserving the architecture you conserve such simple, wise, patient people as this – but is it true? In any case you conserve, too, the imprisoning conditions which led, as I can remember, one young married woman to leave home early of a winter morning, walk the three miles to Batsford Park, and break her way through the ice of an artificial lake until she had reached a depth where she could drown.

The ghost of the dancing bear that haunts the pump at the bottom of Mud Lane, the ghost of the great hound on Aston Hill, out of superstitions like these it is easy to construct a dream town where unhappiness has the faded air of history. But to live there you must build the walls, not round the town, but round yourself, excluding any knowledge that the eye doesn’t take in – the strange incestuous relationships of the very poor, the wife starved to death according to country gossip, the agricultural labourers who lived on credit all the
winter
through.

1941

NORMAN DOUGLAS

I
N
those last years you would always find him between six and dinner-time in the Café Vittoria, unfashionably tucked away behind the Piazza. Through the shabby windows one stared across at Naples – one could go only a few steps further without tumbling off the island altogether. Crouched over an aperitif (too often in the last years almost unalcoholic), his fingers knotted with rheumatism, squawking his ‘Giorgio, Giorgio’ to summon the devoted waiter who could hear that voice immediately above all the noises of Capri, snow-white hair stained here and there a kind of butterfly-yellow with nicotine, Norman Douglas sat on the borders of the kingdom he had built house by house, character by character, legend by legend.

One remembers him a few months before he died, handling the typescript of this book,
*5
resorting the loose carbon pages: there wasn’t enough room on the café table what with the drinks, the old blue beret, the snuff-box, the fair copy; the wind would keep on picking up a flimsy carbon leaf and shifting it out of place, but the old ruler was back at the old game of ruling. He wouldn’t have given even the menial task of assembly to another. With a certain fuss of pleasure and a great tacit pride he was handling a new book of his own again. There hadn’t been a new book for – how many years? Sometimes something seemed to be wrong with the typescript: a monologue of exaggerated grumbles marked the misprints – not one of those earlier misprints carefully preserved in proof, to be corrected later in manuscript gratis for a friend and at a price for collectors – ‘Cost him a tenner, my dear’ – and that sudden laugh would break like an explosion in a quarry, over before the noise has reached you.

My generation was brought up on
South Wind
, although I suppose the book was already five years old before we opened it and read the first sentence, ‘The bishop was feeling rather sea-sick’, which seemed to liberate us from all the serious dreary immediate wartime past. Count Caloveglia, Don Francesco, Cornelius van Koppen, Miss Wilberforce, Mme Steynlin, Mr Eames, Saint Dodekanus, the Alpha and Omega Club: Nepenthe had not been Capri, but Capri over half a century has striven with occasional success to be Nepenthe.
South Wind
appeared in 1917, superbly aloof from the catastrophes of the time: it was the age of Galsworthy, Wells, Bennett, Conrad: of a sometimes inflated, of a sometimes rough-and-ready prose. Novelists were dealing with ‘big’ subjects – family panoramas, conflicts of loyalty. How reluctantly we came to the last sentence: ‘For it was obvious to the meanest intelligence that Mr Keith was considerably drunk.’ This wasn’t the world of Lord Jim or the Forsytes or the dreary Old Wives.

South Wind
was to have many inferior successors: a whole Capri school. Douglas was able to convey to others some of his tolerance for human foibles: characters like Mr Parker and Mr Keith were taken up like popular children and spoiled. It became rather easy to write a novel, as the reviewers would say, ‘in the manner of
South Wind’.
None of Douglas’s disciples had learnt to write as he had. Nearly a quarter of a century of clean, scholarly, exact writing, beginning so unrewardingly with a Foreign Office report on the Pumice Stone Industry of the Lipari Islands by the Third Secretary of Her Majesty’s Embassy in St Petersburg, published by the Stationery Office at a halfpenny, went to the creation of Perelli’s Antiquities and ‘the unpublished chronicle of Father Capocchio, a Dominican friar of licorous and even licentious disposition, a hater of Nepenthe . . .’

Douglas died in the middle eighties after a life consistently open, tolerant, unashamed, ‘Ill spent’ it has been called by the kind of judges whose condemnation is the highest form of praise. In a sense he had created Capri: there have been suicides, embezzlements, rapes, thefts, bizarre funerals and odd processions which we feel would not have happened exactly in that way if Douglas had not existed, and some of his tolerance perhaps touched even the authorities when they came to deal with those events.