More than the sums of his past
David Nokes
SIR JOHN VANBRUGH A BIOGRAPHY by Kerry Downes
Sidgwick & Jackson, f20
Kerry Downes gives the title 'Num- bers' to an early chapter in this new biography of Sir John Vanbrugh. It follows a chapter called 'Exodus' though Downes wisely avoids the hubristic implications of starting the book with 'Genesis'. 'Num- bers' turns out to be a particularly appropriate heading in a work which seems designed to appeal to readers who keep a pocket calculator beside the armchair. Reading through this book my thoughts turned less often to Vanbrugh's plays than to Swift's Laputans, whose judgments were always formed on mathematical or geo- metrical principles. Downes is a kind of latter-day Laputan, a lover of statistics whose pages come to life not when emo- tions are probed, creativity celebrated or political allegiances analysed but when experience can be rendered as a set of complicated sums.
At the age of 24 Vanbrugh was arrested in France and remained imprisoned, first at Calais, later at Paris, for the next four years. Some biographers might concen- trate on the political implications of this arrest which coincided with William III's landing at Torbay. Others might examine the psychological impact of Vanbrugh's prolonged imprisonment in an alien land. Still others might consider the effect of this unwelcome French connection on his later career as a dramatist and architect. Downes gives brief attention to such issues as these. His enthusiasm is reserved for enumerating the dimensions of Vanbrugh's prisons. Of the Bastille, he writes:
Its eight towers, four to the east and four to the west, and the walls connecting them formed a rectangle some 200 by 100 feet in area, and towers and walls alike rose nearly 80 feet high. Besides a number of rooms in the northern half, the eight towers each contained five storeys above the cellars.
Much later Vanbrugh, by now a success- ful dramatist, was appointed licensee of the new Queen's Theatre in the Haymarket. His first season of plays there, in 1705, was something of a flop. More conventional biographers might attribute this lack of success to weaknesses in the plays or performances. But for Downes the real reason lies in the dimensions of the theatre itself:
In an engineer's terms of cubic capacity the auditorium alone was about twice that of Drury Lane, taking the width as 60 feet, depth from the gallery to the pit front as 46, and height from pit to ceiling as 41, against figures at Drury Lane of 51, 33 and 33.
What Downes has produced is less a biography of Vanbrugh than an encyclo- paedia of events loosely linked by the chronology and accidents of Vanbrugh's career. From the Popish Plot to the prosce- nium arch the book bulges with pedagogic explanations, swelling the bulk of back- ground details until Vanbrugh appears as a mere spectator of the mighty engineering of events.
When it comes to Vanbrugh's private life, and to his marriage at the advanced age of 55, Downes is dismissive of psycho- logical 'speculations'. 'One of the more dubious legacies of Sigmund Freud', he remarks, 'has been the doctrine that every- one has a sex life.' This modish notion, he asserts with Laputan confidence, 'is not supported without qualification by the findings of those professionally involved with this sphere of human behaviour'.
Vanbrugh, as Downes presents him, ap- pears as sexually inert as one of his own celebrated obelisks. 'Nobody at the time', Downes assures us, took seriously the lampoons which accused Vanbrugh of homosexuality. What he means by 'no- body' is unclear though, since he notes Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's reference to Vanbrugh's vow to 'lead a sinful life no more'. Rather than risk the murky waters of Freudianism, Downes prefers to rely on the solid arithmetic of Vanbrugh's account book for any hints of his amorous activi- ties. Between 26 June and 3 July 1718 Vanbrugh hired six horses. Just enough time and horses, Downes calculates, to travel to York and back to 'win the lady's consent'. And that, as far as he is con- cerned, is all that needs to be said on the matter.
Downes always appears uneasy when deprived of slide rule and balance sheet.
His treatment of Vanbrugh's plays is awk- ward, except when he can substitute box- office returns for literary analysis. Where the book is most successful is in the treatment of Vanbrugh's architecture. Here at last Downes can fill the pages with the statistics he loves. He gives us all the details we could possibly want of the relative costs of Doric or Ionic, brickwork or stone. He enumerates with loving care the length of galleries and the height of domes. The story of the building of Blenheim is a slapstick saga of rocketing estimates and mouldering materials that will bring a smile to the lips of all who have suffered at the hands of the building trade. And it is salutary to be reminded that the architect of Blenheim Palace and Castle Howard was a self-taught amateur who learnt the job as he went along. Viewing the artistic, professional and social preten- sions of architects, the Duchess of Marl- borough, herself no stranger to social pretensions, observed that such men 'have very high flights, but they must be kept down'. It's a sentiment with which many a tower-block dweller might agree.
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