Old Maids and Mistresses
COLIN WILSON
'How could she? An enigma! An enigma!' exclaimed the Right Rev Campbell Hone, Bishop of Wakefield, wondering how a quiet, sweet, timid woman like his sister-in-law, Harriet, could publish a book like Ulysses. The authors of this biography of Harriet Weaver have provided many clues, but they have not succeeded in answering that baffling question. For Harriet was an extremely Vic- torian girl, pathologically shy, terrified of people who drank (they didn't have to be drunkards—half a glass of wine was enough to frighten her), formal even with close friends. On her first visit to Paris (at the age of forty-eight) she was persuaded to take a small glass of wine with her dinner. Ezra Pound strolled in on the party and said jok- ingly: 'Why, Harriet, this is the first time I've ever seen you drunk'. Poor Miss Weaver was so shattered that she had to be rushed back to her hotel in a state of prostration. The authors of this book remark primly that there is one obvious error in the anecdote: Pound, even when drunk, would never address Miss Weaver as Harriet. She wasn't that kind of a girl.
And she wasn't. The book is fascinating because it is a reminder of how quickly things have changed in three-quarters of a century. Miss Weaver was born in a small country town; her father was a doctor, her grandfather a cotton millionaire. There was plenty of religion, including prayers twice a day. Her father had been obsessed by a sense of sin., up to the age of twenty—pre- sumably due to sexual desires—and one day suddenly realised 'Jesus was a sacrifice for sin', and became an enthusiastic church- man. (Low church, though—he couldn't abide Newman and his Oxford lot.) Harriet' wanted to go to university, and her sister Annie wanted to become a doctor, but such things were out of the question for Victorian Young ladies. So Annie became a dispenser, and Harriet went in for social work, growing towards old-maidenhood with a gentle resig- nation. (There was never even a boyfriend, although, as far as one can tell from the text, she had no lesbian tendencies.) In her thirties, she became involved with a suffragette magazine, The Freewoman, Which was eventually renamed The Egoist. It paid its contributors almost nothing and seems to have had little more circulation than a parish magazine. But Ezra Pound used it as an outlet, and in 1914, he sub- mitted a 'statement' from his friend James Joyce, describing Joyce's endless frustrations in getting Dubliners into print. This seems to have touched some quixotic or romantic sonog in Harriet Weaver, she always felt guilty about her largish income, which came Dear Mi,55 Weaver: Harriet Shaw Weaver, 1876-1961 Jane Lidderdale and Mary Nichol- son (Faber 90s) Carrin gton: Letters and Extracts from her 14Irks edited by David Garnett (Cape LS) from 'usury' (i.e. interest). Joyce's Portrait of the Artist began to appear in The Egoist, and the endless trouble with printers began. And when no publisher would undertake to do it as a book, Harriet decided to publish it her- self. The early episodes of Ulysses caused even more trouble, and publication as a serial had to be abandoned at an early stage. But the prim, shy Miss Weaver worked on with incredible persistence, and finally succeeded in bringing out the first English edition. It is impossible to understand why she was not shattered by the language of the Nighttown scene or Mrs Bloom's monologue, for she was certainly shattered when she heard that Joyce drank wine every evening. (She assured him that a half-bottle of wine per evening is all that even the most active and powerful man can drink without harm to his system.) The larger part of this large book is taken up with her relationship with Joyce, upon whom she settled considerable sums of money. The relationship began to sour when she failed to enthuse about Work in Progress. (It is interesting to realise that the intran- sigent loner, Joyce, was highly dependent on the opinions of his friends, and went into depressive states when, he met with incom- prehension, or even mild discouragement.) She did her best to help with Joyce's daughter Lucia, who slowly went insane, but her at- tempts to be helpful went wrong as often as not. The handouts continued while Joyce, with tynical author's ingratitude, described her as avaricious.
The same problems beset her relationship with Dora Marsden, another protégé, whose books on philosophy sound (from the text) at least as interesting as anything Joyce wrote. She seems to have died of sheer frus- tration. And Harriet, bereft of both lame ducks, went back to her first love, social work, and ended by joining the Communist party, to which she remained faithful until her death in 1961. The final impression of her is that she was endlessly generous. but lacked self-confidence almost as she might have lacked an important vitamin. Her character was oddly Chekhovian. and because the authors convey this so well, their bio- graphy is something of a work of art. I found it unexpectedly moving.
Dora Carrington, the mistress and last companion of Lytton Strachey, was equally interesting, but in a more chaotic and super- ficial way. Michael Holroyd, in his biography of Strachey, seems to catch her essence when he says: 'she was alive at every point, con- sumed by the most vivid feelings about people, places, even things'. Her 'strange and enchanting vivacity' comes bubbling through in this selection of her letters and journals. Aldous Huxley, one of her many lovers, por- trayed her as Mary in Crome Yellow, and Wyndham Lewis has an acidic sketch of her (and Strachey) in The Apes of God. But these portraits fail to catch her dislike of being a woman (she preferred to be called 'Carring- ton') and her self-mocking humour. There is a farcical description of a night with Huxley when the door had to be secured with two nails and a watch chain, and Huxley got upset about her thick and scratchy pyjamas. which she declined to remove. (They also made love on the roof at Garsington, which must have been a dizzying experience.)
Strachey was, of course, homosexual, but he liked her boyish figure, and unexpectedly kissed her when they were on a country walk. She crept into his bedroom the follow- ing morning with nail scissors, intending to commit malpractice on his heard; but when he woke up and stared at her, she decided she was in love with him. They lived to- gether, on and off, for the next sixteen years, although she continued to have affairs with other men, and he continued to have affairs with other . .. men. They seem to have been totally frank with one another, and she even tells him about an attempt to douche herself, after intercourse, with a teapot, a tube of macaroni and a bottle of lysol.
When Strachey lay dying, she attempted suicide, but was interrupted; a few months later, she was more successful with a shot- gun.
The total effect of these diaries is strangely muted, neither comic nor tragic. In a way, she is the epitome of Bloomsbury: intelli- gent. vital, amusing, talented (she was an excellent painter), promiscuous (even Mr Garnett was on 'casually intimate' terms with her) and self-divided. One feels that the real cause of her death was not grief about Strachey. It was frustration, failure to find an adequate outlet for her vitality among intelligent—but, in the last analysis, rather trivial—people.
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