For the Time Being (18 page)

It haunts, lingers in the mind and in the mind's eye, long after the covers have been reluctantly closed. A marvel of a book which for me no one has come near to in the whole year – except Molly Keane, with
Loving and Giving
(Deutsch), which, as a sort of delicious ‘chaser', is quite the best she has ever written in a long and victorious career. Can't really leave her out. Not really.

Daily Telegraph,
29 November 1988

Lilly: Reminiscences of Lillian Hellman
by Peter Feibleman (Chatto)

I saw Lillian Hellman only once: across a crowded New York restaurant. She reminded me, forcibly, of a sea elephant in mink. But not as kindly looking as a sea elephant: leathery, small cruel eyes, a gash of spite for a mouth. Not at all attractive. Arrogant, dictatorial, a chain smoker with a voice like iron wheels crushing gravel.

We were not introduced.

But some said that she was brilliant, some that they even liked her (not many on this count, actually). Others praised her wit, fun, generosity, courage. The usual guff that party-people use so glibly. They only told the ‘truth' after her death.

Well, here is a spiffing book by a gentleman who really
does
know rather more about her than anyone else. He had known her since he was ten years old and she some thirty-five. Eventually, as a young man, in spite of the 25-year difference, he fell hopelessly (I use the word advisedly) in love with her and so remained until her death.

To say that she was spiteful, wayward, bombastic, opinionated, vulgar, lewd, oversexed and brutally ugly is not giving you a full picture. She was also a liar, a literary thief, a cheat, often funny, sometimes gentle (according to the author), always jealous and larger, by far, than life. And Peter Feibleman went along with all this, constantly on the verge of mental, physical and moral castration.

A lower-middle-class Jewess, born in New Orleans, Hellman quickly came to terms with her lack of beauty (in the conventional sense) and fought without shame for her place in the sun. She wrote. And she wrote exceedingly well.

In America there aren't, or weren't at that time anyway, many
lady writers of note. Hellman set that to rights. She got three very fine plays out of her guts and on to the stage.
The Children's Hour, The Little Foxes
and
Autumn Gardens
are ‘lasters' that will endure however badly they are played (and they frequently are, alas). But they are plays which she could be, and was, very proud of having written.

She had a respectable bash at some others, but they really haven't held up. She is left with these three as her main output, plus her prose, some of which she shamefully cobbled together from the experiences of others, claiming those experiences as her own. She was found out eventually, of course, and wasn't best pleased. But her arrogance saved her face, if not her reputation.

I used to read the prose avidly. However, something in the style of her writing gave me the vague impression that I was being conned. I can't imagine why: it was a shaky feeling of insecurity, rather like crossing a pond on thin ice, relieved to reach the bank. An odd feeling.

The plays – I saw four actually in my time, in various performances – have always seemed to me to be marvellous theatre, strongly plotted, tough and with superb parts for actors. But I don't think she was the towering force in the theatre which is claimed for her. And I don't think either, as the blurb will have us believe, that she was ‘the wildest and wittiest' woman writer America ever produced.

The great achievement of Mr Feibleman's book is that he has, with intense and intimate knowledge, given us a ‘living portrait' of an extraordinary woman. It is as funny as hell in places; warm, generous, often very moving, and sometimes astonishingly awful. Hellman's cruelty, her vulgarity, her meanness surge forward and almost engulf the reader in repugnance. Almost, because somehow Mr Feibleman never quite lets this happen.

He is a marvellous artist and ‘paints', in bright, viscous, primary colours, the words, the warts and the wit (for there was wit in this wretched woman) and the wrongs. And there were plenty of those, too. If her wit was frequently laced with caustic soda, Mr Feibleman nevertheless loved her. That he loved her equally as a mother-figure is pretty clear also. That he loved her as ‘a chum' comes through
blindingly. He knew the black and the white; he also knew the occasionally stunningly simple, and fearful, woman buried under the rubble of envy, greed, wobbly politics and, above all, unreasoning jealousy. All these things he knew, and puts before us to contemplate. If you don't limit your reading to
The Field,
Jane Austen or Jeffrey Archer, you might just find this a quite fascinating book.

I don't often laugh aloud when I read, but Mr Feibleman, with his dry American-Jewish humour, his wry wit, his self-awareness and, above all, his absolute understanding of the woman he loved (and at times almost hated), made me on occasion laugh aloud with glee.

When she died she left him her entire estate, plus the house on
Martha's Vineyard where they lived together. She and he were both raving food-nuts, concocting little suppers, picnics, parties, and dinners and lunches with epicurean delight. One day he asked the gardener with what Miss Hellman had nourished the horseradish plants that flourished in incredible lushness in her garden. The reply was that they didn't need anything, they just grew.

‘They are famous plants,' I said. ‘People from all over the world used to write letters asking Miss Hellman for some horseradish.'

‘So I'm told,' Melvin said.

‘One thing I just noticed,' I said. ‘The plants are growing in a perfect circle.'

‘They'd better be,' said Melvin. ‘She planted them round the cesspool.'

That was Lilly, all right.

The book is more a novel than a biography, and all the better for it … Thanks to the use of tape-recordings of conversations one ‘hears' that gravelly voice, laughs or winces according to taste; but what the author does supremely well is to convince the reader, as he closes the covers finally, that somehow, in a strange way, he has ‘seen' Hellman quite clearly and not found her as awful as all that. In fact, that had she ever accepted one (not at all likely), one might have fallen under the spell.

John Marquand Jr said: ‘She was awful and she was worth it.' I think he was right.

Daily Telegraph,
25 February 1989

Willie: The Life of W. Somerset Maugham
by Robert Calder (Heinemann)

I don't know if you have ever done it, but should you stand about two feet away from even the most glorious tapestry in the world for more than a few minutes the whole thing simply becomes a beige blur – even the stitches. And thus it is with this exhaustingly researched, academic and generous book on the wretched W. Somerset Maugham. There is just too much detail to absorb; it's a beige blur.

I say ‘wretched' only because this is yet another in-depth study of the writer, and heaven knows there have already been enough. We have examined the stutter, the lovers, the ‘callous' treatment of the wife and daughter, the writing and the early years in medical school. On it goes.

The present author, Robert Calder, has even had an earlier bash at his subject with
W. Somerset Maugham and the Quest for Freedom
(1972). That title already causes one to tremble.

Clearly Calder's curiosity – perhaps even affection? – is insatiable. He goes at this latest autopsy like an insectologist pulling the eyelashes from a fly. We are spared absolutely nothing.

No book for a fireside chair, for your bedside reading, for a shady tree, this is for a long sea voyage (it is 400 pages long) or the silence of a reading-room in some university.

But we
know
it all: from the short stories to the suspect nonsense written by his nephew Robin Maugham in
Conversations with Willie
and his own volumes on his life,
The Summing Up
and
A Writer's Notebook.
Nothing in this fat book is better than those two.

So why bother to pick and probe and attempt to discover what made him tick? He who has given infinite pleasure and left us a
splendour of writing which will remain for as long as the written English word is permitted to exist (even if at times it may go out of fashion with the grim intellectuals who shuffle through his work as disdainfully as schoolboys crunching through leaves).

Isn't it enough to be grateful for the elegance of the language, the spareness of the descriptions, as vivid and economical as an Impressionist canvas, for the variety of his stories, the elegance of his plays, the profundity of his ‘notebooks'?

Someone said plaintively the other day: ‘Why can't people write biographies about people they
know?
' Potty, of course, but I know the feeling. In a nutshell, so to speak, here is a sort of cigarette-card bio as far as I can sort it from the mass before me:

Born Paris, 25 January 1874. Mother, Edith, whom he adored. Papa, Robert, who seemed dullish but not unkind. Mum dies when Maugham is eight… And from that moment, according to Calder, and it is probably so, from time to time until almost the day he died ‘he wept with the tears pouring down his face'.

That this death was a catastrophe for him is evident. It is suggested that his stammer stemmed from the shock, and that his homosexuality, or the ‘temperament', began to incubate. Well, perhaps it did.

We all function in different ways, but homosexuality is used here like a sledgehammer to drive home the message of his works. One gets numbed. It is the reason for his entire life, his cruelty, his ‘mordant wit', his cynicism and his selfishness.

The fact that he was not at ease with some women is clear, and from what one discovers of his wife, the tiresome Syrie, it is hardly surprising. But it is absurd to suggest that he only wrote ‘masculine' women.

He wrote about women quite marvellously – they were not all ‘monsters' or ‘fellers', and Bette Davis and Joan Crawford didn't get to play them all, whatever the writers may care to say. Sadie Thompson and Rosie in
Cakes and Ale
are two of the most perfectly realized, and understood, women in modern fiction.

Although Calder's book is about as exhausting to read as sawdust is to chew, it does perk up a bit in the last third. We get, naturally,
the male companions, the good and the evil ones, the tales of wife and daughter, the selling of the paintings, the final, agonizing, if ill-judged, howl of fury and pain of his Lear-like rage against his personal Regan and Goneril in his infamous piece ‘Looking Back'.

All is there, and so too is the amazing dedication of the great writer, the fastidious choice of words, the coolness of the prose, the discipline of his work: not for him a couple of hours at the table in a Notting Hill Gate kitchen and then a quick whirl round with the Hoover. Here is the master writer alive and well, until finally senility slammed him as shut as a door.

This is a thoroughly respectable book, but buy his words and
read them – they'll tell you all you want to know. Stand back from the tapestry and take a long cool look. You will be wonderfully rewarded.

Daily Telegraph, I
April 1989

Carrington: A Life of Dora Carrington 1893-1932
by Gretchen Gerzina (Murray)

Well, all right then. If you really do want to know any more about the tiresome Bloomsberries, Gretchen Gerzina's splendidly researched, dry-as-old-bones, fully detailed, unwitty, light-as-a-school-dumpling but scholarly, even loving in a way, book is for you.

Another American academic unearthing the British Eccentrics. But not in the same wretched manner as the writers of the recent Kipling and Maugham books. While not a scrap as good as Ellmann, Gerzina will do to be going on with. She has taken immense pains to set it all down, and even for those of us who know the sorry saga of this exceptionally irritating woman Dora Carrington (and for that matter everyone else in the cast of this peculiar little
pièce du théâtre)
it still has the power to hold the attention.

Carrington (she preferred this name to ‘Dora'; less feminine, more aggressively masculine, which suited her) was born of a severely repressed mother and an ageing father (sixty-one – hardly in full fig, but obviously quite capable, since he sired five children). She loathed her mother, adored Papa, doted on one brother, Teddy – who became a kind of sexual symbol for her in later life – cut off her hair before anyone else of her time, and went off to art school to learn how to paint. Which she did very, very well indeed.

Strangely, Gerzina places her on the fringe of the Bloomsbury set, which is a bit dotty when you realize that the players were leaping all around her and that she was caught in the eye of the storm.

Consider for a moment: the Woolfs, poky-nosed, intellectual, barren sexually, patronizing, successful with their little Hogarth
Press and influential. Then poor, silly Ottoline Morrell, scorned, vilified, used as a cheap (but expensive for the Morrells) haven for safe discussion, wine, food and argument far from the horrors and odours of the war.

There were the rather dreary Garnetts; the Bells painting away like anything every lampshade and mantelshelf in primary colours and ‘simplified forms'; the awful Gerald Brenan, selfish and whining; the hysterical Gertler who really needed a swift kick up the backside, and the rugger-bugger Partridge (plus pacifist chick) all trying to woo, secure, make safe or even merely bed this scatty, breathless, chunky milkmaid-cum-pantry-mouse, Carrington.

She loathed her femininity, hated the ‘lumps of flesh which hang before me' and detested, at least to begin with, any form of sexuality. But goodness, she could paint. Painting provided almost the whole structure for her life, and Gerzina makes this clear without passing a great deal of comment beyond some predictable Freudian suggestions.