Perfect pitch
8ryan Robertson
The death last week of Colin Maclnnes deprives English literature of a novelist and essayist whose imaginative force, originality Of thought and wide range of intellectual concern have yet to be adequately assessed. Maclnnes was born in London, the son of .11.nes Campbell MacInnes; anbutstanding singer who had studied with de Reszke and for whom several composers of the time Wrote music, and Angela Thirkell, who was the daughter of J. W. Mackail, OM, CH, the classical scholar, by his wife Margaret, daughter of Sir Edward Burne-Jones. Rudyard Kipling and Stanley Baldwin were part of the family through Burne-Jones connections.
With a keen sense of his family's achievements, Maclnnes was e,ntirely his own man as a scholar and writer. His stylistic allegiances and approach to fiction are best understood by reading 'No Novel Reader', a long pamphlet published in 1975; but essentially the pitch, tone and use of themes and language in his fiction came from prolonged study of speech and, above all, his father's art of singing and the lyric structure of songs. His love for music hall and the lives and qualities of performers was summed up in the book Sweet Saturday Night. • The novels are conspicuous for their poetic clarity and perfection of form, whether dealing with London life, disrupted and invigorated by black immigrants and the newly emancipated youth of the 'fifties and early 'sixties, with the tensions of love under a hot Australian sun, or with the energetic humours of life—and mirrors for our own times—in Elizabethan England, or in an eighteenth-century slave society. The London novels, City of Spades, Absolute Beginners, and Mr Love and Justice, gave us a new society struggling against old prejudices and irrelevant concepts. These books were enthusiastically received when first published, though it took time for their abstractly inventive qualities to be fully appreciated: Maclnnes was at first saluted as a resourceful map-maker, a recorder of social documentaries. The confusion was quickly dispersed; but Westward to Laughter (1969), a wickedly bright satire on Stevenson's Treasure Island which is also an ironic account of present-day attitudes to a slave society, somewhat disconcerted English critics who were still type-casting Maclnnes as the intellectual reporter of new twists to the seamier sides of London life. Three Years to Play (1972), perhaps the most imaginatively complex of all the novels, extended the satirical parallels with contemporary issues and personages into rural and metropolitan England at the time of Shakespeare, strolling players, and the writing of As You Like It. This long novel, with its marvellously invented Elizabethan dialogue and spanking narrative pace, was warmly received with long reviews in America, where Maclnnes is highly esteemed, but in England the expanding consistency of his vision was less clearly perceived.
Apart from justifiable pride in the exact scholarship behind Three Years to Play, Maclnnes retained a special affection for an early novel : June in her Spring, which, with the later All Day . Saturday, also set in Australia, has a vivid resonance and poetic economy in language of its own. Here, the themes of young people fighting against the selfish grip of their elders and the sense of youthful spirit, and an Arcadia of the mind as well as of idyllic place, threatened by obsession and neuroses from an older generation, were first set out. Both books have
that disconcerting balance between a dreamlike clarity of time and place activated by character and fatalistic plot that one finds in Chekhov's stories and novels.
As an essayist, Maclnnes showed a continually surprising mobility of interest, well caught by the publication of England, Half English. These essays, on Tommy Steele, drinking clubs, Ella Fitzgerald, black argot, Nikolaus Pevsner—as a remarkable writer, the novels of Ada Leverson and the art of Sydney Nolan, among others, show personal stylistic taste as well as keen insights, but they also seemed to commemorate an era. Since then, a considerable number of essays and reviews have appeared which move steadily into fresh ground. A collection should be published as soon as possible: there has been no more intelligent or. perceptive eye on English attitudes, or on culture in general, since Orwell.
In his critical writing, Maclnnes honoured the daunting injunction of Edmund Wilson, to write 'with force, lucidity and ease', and shared common ground with the American writer's instinctive sense of relating art and literature continually to life: the reverse process, shown in Eliot's critical pieces, for instance, of freezing everything back into literature was anathema to MacInnes who conducted every exploration with life now as both sounding board and point of return. His erudition seemed endless and was never static or complacent.
During the last few painful months of illness, Maclnnes was studying Japanese and Gaelic, with projects in mind which belonged to a tenaciously upheld belief in a possible life ahead. One of his most recent essays was on the grim subject, long pondered over, of the disgraceful treatment by England, historically and in the present, of our soldiers and sailors in terms of financial reward. Nobody but Maclnnes, with his incessant vigilance over public and private behaviour, cultural and moral standards and meanings, would have suggested the theme of this essay and carried it out at a time in his own life when each day was a struggle for survival.
The Spectator published, two weeks ago, MacInnes's last extended essay, on the Burne-Jones revival, which contained also a brief memoir of his much-loved grandmother, the redoubtable Georgiana BurneJones. Characteristically, a lucid and exact breakdown of Islamic history, making important points and bristling with knowledge, appeared in last Sunday's press, on the same page as his obituary. He was working hard right up to the end, a perfectionist and a true artist. In essence, Maclnnes succeeded as a writer in holding on to the clear-headed intransigence of youth, beyond innocence, but consumed by the uncompromising clarity and firmness of -purpose that are usually dispersed by age. He had a high contempt for compromise or easy exits and took none himself, too intent always upon the final truth of any issue. His total vision, perfectly articulated, is acutely relevant to the condition of England.
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