Brave lives
PETER VANSITTART
From a Biography of Myself Robert Hen- riques (Seeker and Warburg 50s) Journey from the North Storm Jameson (Collins-Harvill 45s) Through Dooms of LOIT Dorothy Burnham (Chatto and Windus 30s) The Vanished World H. E. Bates (Michael Joseph 50s) Kontakion for the Departed Alan Paton (Cape 25s) The Thanksgiving Visitor Truman Capote (Hamish Hamilton 21s) One theme shared by this clutch of auto- biographies is that of courage, at work against poverty, sickness, prejudice, self- mistrust or bad luck. Outwardly, the late Colonel Henriques, sportsman, farmer, author, radio star, much decorated soldier who helped plan the Second Front, seemed part of a golden, fastidious John Buchan elite. His posthumous, unfinished autobio- graphy (edited by his daughter Veronica, herself a novelist of distinction) shows that, entwined like dark colours in a brilliant marble, were obsessions of cowardice and isolation burnt into him by humiliating schooldays. Incredibly he fell ill at affluent Rugby from near-starvation. Insecure, pas- sionate, 'wanting to be like everyone else but more so', loathing inefficiency and com- placency in himself and in others, he sought perfection like a grail. He kept a colder anger for unimaginative, bloody-minded official- dom, never as much at bay as it should be.
His story, not the work of a born writer but of one driven to ransack himself, some- times desperately or clumsily, for self-expres- sion and beyond, is sometimes funny, some- times horrifying. It led him to swashbuck- ling private enterprise during the Casablanca landings, and encounters with Patton, Mountbatten, Churchill, in a career of radical smacks against normalcy, within a frame- work richly conservative.
Daughter of a rough Yorkshire sea-cap- tain, Storm Jameson, too, was scarred with doubts though, from hardships and thrash- ing, moorland beauties and unpredictable kindnesses, she was to emerge a public figure with an indignant international social con- science and the tart vision, not of some glum or pretentious guru, but of a workaday cam- paigner. 'Hell,' says Sartre, 'is the others'— which is nonsense: nonsense prompted by a metaphysical vanity. Hell is five or six memories which are able occasionally to enter the intestines through the mind and tear them. Such lacerations induced a dis- like of domesticity: a need for generosity of living, not only her own living.
Journey from the North takes her from Whitby to London, through two marriages, early novels, glimpses of Prague, Budapest and Berlin between the wars. It traces the growth not of genius but of a sensitivity at once patient anct re‘tless, both appalled and fascinated by wliat Must be destroyed. 'What I do not know, and cannot even hope to understand before I die, is why human beings are wilfully, coldly, matter-of-factly cruel to each other.' A sensitivity that, for example, comes to regard James Joyce's work as unconsciously helping towards Auschwitz and the cutting of children's throats. Sir, you're hurting me. This is scarcely fashion- able, and occasionally Miss Jameson seems bitterly convinced that she is still being rejected, yet she challenges, with her view of humanity damning itself not from lack of masterpieces but lack of good people.
While Miss Jameson was suffering her first literary parties ('You know Peter Quen- nell, of course?'), Dorothy Burnham was one of seven, hungry in a small verminous room, without water and with a mural of bugs' blood. Her child's-eye view of London poverty conveys, better than most sociolo- gists, how this can twist basic human decencies into spite, fear, crime. Once she was dragged to court by her stepmother for stealing a few strawberries from their own home. Threats abounded : 'My mum says you have a lovely face but you won't live to grow up.' Yet her book is not sour but lively. The street was a lucky dip: you turned up the ageing seducer or the muffin man ; adults who mistrusted happiness, considered educa- tion as 'getting above one's station', spoke ominously or mysteriously of no-man's-land or Foxe's Martyrs, or showed futures in the fire and tossed a penny for five children rapturously to share. Here, too, no petty recriminations, but honest anger at so much human excellence condemned to waste.
H. E. Bates's father, a Midland shoemaker, was offered a teaching post at thirteen. His grandfather worked a backbreaking twenty- hour day without losing dignity or zest. Bates himself left school at sixteen for hack- journalism, clerking, the dole queue, while acquiring a more definite urge to write from such models as Stephen Crane. An Edwardian countryside is gracefully evoked, a reverie of harvest-dinners, wagonettes lumbering between resplendent hedgerows, of droning chapels, gas-lit street games, great houses, craftsmen dogged by hunger and tuber- culosis. Few writers have a more exact feel for texture—of a flower, a face, a silence— and it is this that has value, rather than the cavalier judgments on modern life and other writers. Condescending to War and Peace, Mr Bates finds Henry James 'an elephantine bore', The Tempest 'the last messy infirmity of a noble mind', Women in Love 'almost beyond dispute the worst novel ever written by a writer of international repute', who lacked the imagination 'even to invent Mickey Mouse'.
In a simply written requiem for his wife, Mr Paton relives their marriage and their work for South African racial justice. To discuss, without sentimentality, love and goodness is a fair test of writing, and one which Paton, for all his honourably earned humanitarian reputation, too often fails, particularly in the passages addressed directly to the dead woman, which tend to read like sermons. Far better are straightforward accounts of his liberalising reforms in the tough Diepkloof Reformatory, and work for the unhappily defunct South African Liberal party. If only fine feelings of themselves pro- duced fine books. Sentimentality, insufficiently redeemed by irony, also invades Mr Capote's fragment, The Thanksgiving Visitor, which is both a window into his remote Alabama childhood and an affectionate tribute to goodness in the form of an elderly woman cousin 'ho invites the school bully to a family feast. True to form, he commits a minor theft, though it is the outraged narrator who is made to feel small. 'You must be a special lady, Miss Sook, to fib for me like that', observes the delinquent—a line and situation suitable for any parish magazine. Doubtless accurate, it is not quite enough.
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