Hand in hand

Peter Quennell

Three Literary Friendships John Lehmann (Quartet £8.95)

On 27 May 1816, two English poets, one already an exile, the other an exile to be, met almost by chance beside the Lake of Geneva. In September 1871, a minor French civil servant, who had lately Published a volume of poems, La Bonne Chanson, addressed to his doting young wife, received a letter from an unknown 16-Year-old boy, which enclosed some ex- traordinary manuscripts. On the eve of the First World War, an American and an English writer met at an acquaintance's Country cottage and soon discovered they saw eye to eye.

.Such were the origins of the literary friendships that John Lehmann has made the subject of his interesting, well- documented, often argument-provoking book. His protagonists are Shelley and BYron, Verlaine and Rimbaud, Robert Frost and Edward Thomas; and each of them, besides being a noteworthy poet, was a strange and memorable character. Each, 100, had a lasting effect on his friend; but whereas Frost and Thomas were evidently kindred spirits, between Verlaine and Rim- baud, there was always a dramatic personal conflict that they never quite resolved.

Shelley acknowledged and envied Byron's genius; but Byron's estimate of Shelley's talents, though he appreciated his social charm, seems at no time to have been Particularly high. Most of Shelley's ideas, especially his solemn atheism, the author of bon Juan found either repulsive or ridiculous. On the other hand, having suf- fered a good deal from middle-class fellow writers, who, for all their courage and in- dependence, had an irritating 'Cockney' touch, he recognised in his eccentric, oddly- dressed associate 'as perfect a gentleman as ever crossed a drawing-room'.

Nor was he insensitive to Shelley's vir- tues. The much-abused rebel, he assured John Murray after his friend's death, was 'the best and least selfish man' he had yet encountered; 'I never knew one that was not a beast in comparison'. Byron's moods, however, were notoriously changeable; and when he had reason to suspect that Shelley did not altogether approve of his slightly casual attitude towards his bastard child Allegra, he repeated the scandalous story spread by the Shelleys' servants, who alleg- ed that Claire Clairmont, Mary Shelley's step-sister, had given birth to a second love- child, which Shelley accepted as his own off- spring, yet had abandoned in an or- phanage. At that moment he condemned the entire family. 'It was just like them', he declared; and, across one of Claire's sen- timental and sanctimonious letters, he scribbled 'the moral part ... comes with an excellent grace from the writer now living

with a man and his wife — and having

planted a child in the Fl — Foundling, etc'. About the literary side of Shelley and Byron's relationship John Lehmann has il- luminating things to say. I am not convinc- ed myself that Shelley, as an imaginative poet, had much real influence on Byron's work; but, during his stay in Venice, although he was shocked by the disreputable company he observed at the Palazzo Mocenigo — it included male pro- stitutes, 'wretches who seem almost to have lost the gait and physiognomy of man' -

he was deeply fascinated by Don Juan, a

masterpiece, he said, that fulfilled 'in a cer- tain degree, what I have long preached of producing — something wholly new and relative to the age, and yet surpassingly beautiful.'

Far more difficult and agonisingly com- plex was the association of Rimbaud and Verlaine. Here the link was both intellectual and passionately physical; and they were lovers besides being literary allies. Having

read Le Bateau lyre, Verlaine at once felt

sure that this uncouth, aggressive boy was indeed a poet of rare genius — but not a genius he sought to follow; and, when their liaison eventually broke up, he went his separate poetic way. Meanwhile, they had shared rewarding adventures. For example, their first discovery of London. The house they occupied in Howland Street, behind the Tottenham Court Road (to which our prudish civic authorities at last awarded a commemorative plaque) has now vanished like other historic landmarks. But Verlaine's letters contain vivid descriptions of Victorian music-halls and public-houses, and of lively English street-girls, their pet- ticoats 'brightly streaked with mud and scarred with cigarette-droppings'.

By comparison, the friendship of Frost and Thomas was a staid and respectable af- fair. It was also remarkably productive.

Until their paths crossed, Thomas had been a hard-working, poorly-paid prose-writer, who, to keep his wife and children alive, had published nearly 30 biographies and travel books, all of them conscientious pro- ductions, but none of them markedly distinguished. At 35, he still longed to try his hand at modern verse; while Frost's earliest collection of poems — he was then approaching 40 — had come out in 1913. He despised rhetoric, advocated an ex- pressive simplicity, and began his associa- tion with Thomas by imparting his theory of what he entitled 'sentence-sounds', ex- plaining that a sentence was itself a sound, 'on which other sounds called words could be strung'.

There can be no doubt that this austere doctrine was of immense value to Thomas's poetic education, and that, had he survived the war, he would certainly have taken his place among the most successful and least 'dated' of contemporary Georgian poets. But he was denied the fame that quickly descended on Frost as soon as he returned to the United States, where his second book was enthusiastically received and he developed at length into a somewhat cross and jealous Grand Old Man. Very different was Thomas's fate. In April 1917, while the Battle of Arras was preparing and he com- manded a dangerous observation post, the blast of a German shell, though it failed to wound, 'literally knocked the life out of him'. He was 'the only brother I ever had', said Frost, when he heard of his English friend's death.