Sincerity and Prolixity
My Dear Timothy. By Victor Gollancz. (Gollancz. 12s. 6d.) ". . . there's more enterprise In walking naked."
He has strained with an almost obsessive meticulousness to analyse and describe his past and present selves—in theory for his grandson, in fact for us, urbi et orbi. He is trying to strip himself bare, parading indefatigably before a mirror of words in which he peers to glimpse the truth about himself.
It may be that some things are held back; there is, for example, perhaps too much about his volitions and heart-searchings and Weltschmerz and, too little about the earthy qualities of practicality and sheer buliness acumen which one assumes to be present in so successful a nblisher. But every autobiographer ignores, despises or is blind to some of his characteristics. Of most of his Mr. Gollancz is vividly aware, the weaknesses as well as the strengths. They are set out here with such precision of detail that the reader might easily feel himself something of a voyeur. But Mr. Gollancz neutralises that reaction by his energy and his sincerity. His account, for example, of the long movement of mind that carried him away from the intense Judaic orthodoxy of his upbringing into an engulfing preoccupation with the reality of Christ, and yet never led him to cut the cord binding him to the traditions of his race, is a passage it will not be easy to forget. His description of the imperfect, sympathies between himself and his father is frank and uncom- promising without loss of propriety or indeed tenderness. His father used to say to him, "The boy's meshuggah," which Mr. Gollancz translates, simply, as "cracked." But just before he died he was heard muttering to himself, "I never knew I had such a wonderful son." When Mr. Gollancz has completed his letter, there will certainly be no lack of evidence on which to judge where, between those poles, the truth he seeks to know about himself really ONLY on the principle that there is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion could this book, the first portion of an autobiographical Epistle to Timothy composed by Mr. Gollancz for his grandson, be judged an aesthetic success. He himself speaks in one place of "my strange Chinese box of a chapter." Certainly, it is a remarkable testament. By its bulk alone the complete work will challenge the proper piety of a descendant, for, in spite of many a leap-frog into the present over the intervening years, Mr. Gollancz has only contrived, at end of his first volume, to carry his autobiography up to 1914. More—a great deal more—is to come, and many a grandchild might well feel this to be a damnosa hereditas.
Sincerity and prolixity make a dangerous amalgam. "One of the things I've retained from my boyhood is intellectual passion," Mr. Gollancz notes," and one of the things I've retained from my remote ancestors . . . is proselytising fury," Elsewhere he quotes a letter from one of his Oxford contemporaries, sent to him from the front during the First World War, in which his friend describes how "I imagined for a moment that I was back in Oxford, listening to you declaiming in faultless English with your back to my mantel- piece." Such is the image this book projects—an Ancient Mariner of the intelligentsia, a man with the rather fey, rather over-heated look of the proselyte, rapt by an unquenchable intellectual energy and ready like Coleridge to stand for ever and a day spouting about the intricacies of his own nature and the reformation of the world.
Mr. Gollancz has a bad fairy, Nimiety—too-muchness. The sincerity of his purpose cannot be questioned; the range, the depth of his self-knowledge and self-criticism are quite exceptional; but sufflaminandus erat. One cadenza treads on the heels of another (some two dozen pages are even devoted to a summary of a book by Margaret Mead), and the higgledy-piggledy mixture of his present views with those he held as a schoolboy or undergraduate is ultimately . bemusing. Tracts for the times have got entangled with pages of reminiscence. The whole deck needs a re-shuffle, and some of it ought to go into discard, for the bees buzzing in the author's bonnet now may well look, to another generation, very dusty and very dead.
Criticism comes first because the memoirs of a phenomenon like "V.G." were bound to be, and are, fascinating, and it is impossible not to regret the absence of that self-control, that ordonnance, that gift of concision which might have shaped them into a book whose distinction of form matched the quality of its content. When that is said, the fact remains that Mr. Gollancz has laid the groundwork of a remarkable self-portrait. He might have taken for his title- page the lines of Yeats :
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