BOOKS
Fundamentally careless
Alastair Forbes
A Lonely Business: A Self Portrait of James Pope-Hennessy Edited by Peter Quennell (Weidenfeld pp. 278, £12.50) 'In the nursery' James Pope-Hennessy's older brother has related in the convenient idiom of his family and class, 'one had a typewriter, and it was assumed from the outset that one would write books'; and so, pace Edmund Wilson and his view that most bad writing could be put down to the inven-. tion of the typewriter, it came to pass. In his early twenties James got the Hawthornden Prize for his first book, London Fabric, and for the rest of his all too careless life he stuck, to the remembered satisfaction of his readers, to his resolve that 'one simply cannot take too much trouble about writing'.
In this much like Proust, he coupled that activity with reading as 'the only great pleasure', to which he was to add, after a specially fruitful session in the basement of the London Library, that 'the pleasure of research, and its excitement when rewarded, is one of the most satisfying, if not the most satisfying, next to writing itself, that one can have in life'. But to 'the only three modes of expression' he claimed to possess, he tacked on to speech and writing that of 'sexual excitement'. Of this last —and the wide spectrum of his apparently unceasing experience of it ('as one's work gets better, so does One feel more sexy') we are treated; in this fascinating posthumous selection from some of his obviously hastily composed letters and diaries, to many highly entertaining glimpses; some of them alas throwing a good deal of light on the murky, Marloweish fashion in which death was to come knocking on his Ladbroke Grove door one January day seven years ago and fatally interrupt the regular morning literary disciplines of this dedicated artist, nearly all of whose work cries out for early re-issue.
In one of my faded photograph albums I recently came across a 30-year-old colour photograph of a little group taking tea on a lawn adjoining Windsor Great Park. In it a singularly plain French Ambassador (firmly nicknamed 'Father Frog' by Georgia Sitwell) acts as an ideal repoussoir for James's own handsome head. This, from its earliest Dorian Gray days to the ultimately drastic and most uncosmetic surgery performed upon it by his alcoholic and other excesses, owed its originality in an English setting to a sizeable dose of a grandmother's part Malaysian blood; something that began to beat ever more strongly in his veins when his work took him to Asia, where he felt very much at home with both Chinesse and Japanese as well as 'fellow' Malays, but repulsed and at bay amongst 'dreadful (his italics) Jardine Matheson' Hooray Henrys. He was equally at ease in West Africa, his chee-chee complexion conveniently coinciding with his convictions about the crassitude of British colonialism and its aftermath, against which he ran head-on in Sierra Leone while researching his remarkable Slave Trade study, Sins of the Fathers.
My snapshot shows the hostess in charge Of the tea-pot to be that magically musical beauty Joan Moore (the present Lady Drogheda, to whom some of the most revealingly romantic letters in this volume are addressed) and close by her another of Australia's best exports to the old Continent, a young woman kind enough in those days to be sharing her life with mine who, at James's request, later gave him in a corner of the garden a Tarot card reading that seemed to drag on like a general confession. Never, she told me on the way back to London, had she encountered so tangled a skein of emotional involvement with both men and women in a person's 'fortune', providing a convincing confirmation of what he had shortly before written of himself: 'I am carefully, studiously engaged in making the most complete balls of my immediate existence'.
He had commendably thought that `to stop the whole of Europe going under to that man and thal ideology . . . would be the best thing one could die for' and at the outbreak of war had joined Victor Cazalet's anti-aircraft battery, which Lord Burners wittily but not inaptly christened 'the monstrous regiment of gentlemen'. Much action there did not come his way but he swiftly rose to commissioned rank in Military Intelligence which he served first in Whitehall and then in Washington, later preserving like Muggeridge, Graham Greene and others, his links with that branch far into peacetime, and perhaps also even acquiring a Dribergian immunity to possible prosecution for publicly indiscreet homosexual promiscuity. For part of his London turn of duty he shared a flat with Guy Burgess who, before the midnight flit to Moscow, he had dismissed as 'an old wind-bag, hut! am fond of him, destructive and negative though he be' and to whom, after it, he nevertheless sent a copy of his marvellous official biography of Queen Mary inscribed with 'a loving dedicace', but apparently unacknowledged. His otherwise omnivorous curiosity tended to shy at politics, for, as he wrote, '1 cannot think at all, only feel and distil feeling'.
It was neither from Burgess nor 'a charming little communist sailor-boy called Maurice who is nineteen and borrows my books' that he received a 'sort of concentrated course in communism' but from the real Eastern European MacCoy by name of Mietek, a black-leather-booted captain in the post-war Polish Army who was also a poet and a journalist and who, although he thought him 'neither masculine nor independent', fell heavily for James and was passionately loved in return for some Elinor Glyn-ish weeks on both sides of the Channel; just before Pope-Hennessy's name was to be added to the list of those who have edited the literary pages of the Spectator ('the job is tremendously interesting, exciting even'). The gullibility of Party members amazed him for he wrote 'the theory that two or three generations of communism will change the world seems more wildly optimistic than the Christian belief in Heaven'. Mietek's communism had been learned at his card-carrying mother's knee and James's strict Catholic upbringing had been supervised by Dame Una, his convert mother, who was however fortunately herself a femme de lettres *absolutely without moral prejudice'; a curious confusion arising when both mother and lover are often indifferently referred to in the text as just ,m,.
`Jamesy's' feelings about religion seem to have been as labile as those he had about London, which, having in 1939 been 'the only place in the world to live', became, in 1950, 'a foul and sordid place .. . I loathe this city and living in it', only to become once more, shortly before it did him in, 'my country. . . I cannot, and I will not, go to live tax-free in Ireland', — something he had briefly tried and in some of these letters brilliantly described. We find him in 1950 rejoicing that he had freed himself from confession `so many, many years ago'. Yet when eight years later he was researching Queen Mary and paying a memorably enjoyable visit to his 'shy heroine's' Wurttemberg relations at Altshausen, he was very happy to receive absolution from Duke Philip's chubby, cheerful and evidently in other respects gay younger brother, Dom Odo OSB, an 'astonishingly wise and clever man, most helpful and sophisticated'. He had reluctantly accepted another priest's view that 'vice was so narrowing, so limiting' but saw conventional Catholicism as 'equally narrowing', a conclusion that may partly have accounted for Archbishop Fisher of Canterbury confiding to him, at the end of a private audience on doctrinal matters, that he had 'quite frankly, derived more comfort from this conversation with you than from any I have had with any member of your hierarchy'. Boredom he had denounced as `no more interesting to write about than to endure' and, just as in conversation he was never dull save when drunk, there is not a boring page in this jig-saw 'Self-Portrait' of surely the most anti-Oblomovian creature imaginable. When he asked the very unpromiscuous Noel Coward (whose authorised and financially promising Life he was engaged upon at the time of his murder and whom a decade earlier he had accurately discerned as 'one of the kindest, as he is without doubt the wittiest, of human beings'; one who incidentally shared with James the rare quality, strongly emerging in this book, of being able to be extremely funny about love and sex, both men having plenty of time for women's beauty and brains if little for their bodies even when androgynous) whether he thought it 'disorderly' of him to be housing a live-in Horseguard at Ladbroke Grove, he was urbanely told; 'You can live with 50 Horseguards, dear, if it helps you to write as you do'. It may have been his libido that first put him on the perpetual look-out for Bronzinos and Botticellis amongst the bisexual Breughels of the proletariat, but it was his real gift of both attracting and returning affectionate friendship, rather than his recurringly feverish and finally fatal fancies for rough trade, that made him rather more loyal to that class than to his own. Melville, he tells somebody, 'is more to my mind and like my mind than any other writer I have ever read' and this recalls that author telling Hawthorne that, whatever his literary success, he feared he would 'die in the gutter'. There were certainly alternating touches of Billy Budd and Claggart in James, who thought that `to be attractive, people must either look dissipated or innocent', he himself somehow contriving both, in character and in appearance, though in a letter not quoted in the book he once said he 'always preferred evil to stupidity'.
But in a year which celebrates that Wedding along with the centenary of Daisy Ashford and her `Mr Salteena who liked fresh air and Royalty', it will undoubtedly be the 70 priceless pages of sketches of some of the personages he interviewed for his Queen Mary that will give most pleasure to many. It is rather nice to discover that as the old Queen turned from her husband's Sandringham deathbed her first words and thought were to send to enquire after 'Ruth Ferrnoy's baby', whom my scholarship infers to be the prospective mother-in-law of her great-grandson, the Prince of Wales; (but Queen Ingrid of Denmark's query 'Why was Aunt May never Princess of Wales?' remains inexplicably unanswered). At Badminton the too little known Duchess of Beaufort gets clearly deserved star treatment as 'an interesting throw-back' (to the 'Old' pre-Coburg Royal Family) 'as well as a perfectly delightful human being', a prime story-teller adoring laughter. The c/ou of one Three-Day Event was old Lord Digby repeatedly eating the dogs' porridge — I wondered at the time what his Sovereign had given him the Garter for. The biographer had perceptively discovered 'the number-one truth .. . it is courtiers who make Royalty frightened and frightening: taken neat . .. they are perfectly alright', and shared Rigoletto's judgment — 'Cortigiani, vii.' razza dannate, though he made exception for the now oldest survivor of that trade union, Sir Alan Lascelles, as a cut above the rest.
For the last decade of his life, as his lovingly grateful letters to her show, James was lucky to have his literary career in the capable hands of pretty Diana Crawfurd ('How I wish I could marry her!' he told me), who one is rather surprised to see allowing these worthwhile glimpses of a specially favoured client to go to press in so slovenly-edited a fashion. 'Amiable but fundamentally antipatico' he called Peter Quennell in one diary entry, and he would surely have been profoundly irritated by the slapdash way in which this experienced literary figure (who contributes a sensitive preface) has allowed so much corrupt and unchecked text to slip past his proof-correcting eye. Few readers will be able, as this reviewer happens to be, to identify the considerable cast of this dazzling anecdotal pageant correctly, in the absence of other than haphazard footnotes. And surely at Weidenfeld's of all publishers, there must be someone, high or low, who can tell the Taunus from Lake Constance, to say nothing of the countless other avoidable howlers in both German, French and English.
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