The umpire's tale

Andrew Robinson

The Haunted Mind Hallam Tennyson (Andre Deutsch £12.95) "This intriguing, courageous auto- ". biography was conceived under threat. Towards its end, one reads of how, in a dismal flat in London, the maddest of the many men in the author's life was beating him up and seemed near to killing him. During this 'there floated before my eyes the image of great spirits — Gandhi and Beethoven, Mozart, Rilke and Canon Fitz, Saul Bellow, Wordsworth and Engels. How could I, who have loved such people, end in such humiliation and despair? .. I vowed if I survived I would try to find out .. I would tell the whole story as honestly as I could. The idea elated me and gave me courage. 1 would write this book.'

Hallam Tennyson, a great-grandson of the poet, is a self-confessed 'oddball' — 'perhaps the only person who has been guest of honour at a Rotary Club luncheon the night after sleeping as a dosser in a Salvation Army Hostel'. He is an Old Eton- ian Marxist, married for over 25 years with children, yet openly bisexual, a Quaker who was almost received into the Catholic Chur- ch and who is also deeply sympathetic to Hinduism, a substantial author with a distinguished record as a BBC radio pro- ducer, and also a passionate tennis-player who is a long-serving umpire at Wimbledon. Now in his mid-sixties, he has led a life riddled with contradictions which are laid out under his honest, sometimes painful and usually entertaining scrutiny.

Compelling themes constantly recur: 'the reconciliation of sensuality with the life of the spirit; of powerful sexual urges with decent human relations; of socialism with the need to earn money in an ac- quisitive society; of Englishness with a feel- ing of being a citizen of the world; of homosexuality with a passionate affection for women; of solitude with an acute sen- sitivity to social pressure; of classlessness with a whole range of ineradicable middle- class attitudes.' The mixture is a heady, uni- quely personal one.

Tennyson's relationship with his remarkable but reticent father was, until late in his life, quite distant, but with his mother it was close and difficult; indeed, her first words he recalls, spoken to admir- ing guests at her bridge table, seem highly significant to him: 'Yes. He's just like a daughter to me!' She clearly had enormous vitality but a growing sense of loss that eventually engulfed her, the result of a miserable childhood in which her father abandoned his young family and her mother later emigrated under a cloud. Some years of penury followed until her in-

volvement with the Liberal Party through the Free Trade Union movement. She became much sought after, and had a platonic affair with the married Bertrand Russell, who prevaricated. They did not meet but saw each other from the tops of omnibuses. According to Russell, she 'looked sad but wore a nice hat'.

After deadening, quite brutal experiences at a prep school, where Tennyson admits he learnt the worth of successful cheating and was the butt of a classics master's sarcasm as 'the descendant of a third-rate Victorian versifier', Tennyson escaped to Eton, where he was generally happy. His cosy, low- falutin' memories of those years are. testimony to Eton's tolerant diversity, fostered partly by such eccentrics as Tenny- son's 'm'dame' with 'the crinkly skin of a crocodile and a sort of dry crocodile laugh as well'. Favoured older boys were invited to sherry, and the influence of this was once rumoured to have persuaded 'm'dame' that her wig was on the wrong way round. 'She promptly switched it so that her ginger bun and jade hairpin projected from her forehead like a miner's lamp.'

Eton, for Tennyson and, it seems, many other boys, was also 'humming with sexual activity', which provided him with the revelation of his own homosexuality. A score sheet was kept in the 'library', the senior house common room. "1" meant a glance returned, "2" a word exchanged, "3" was left to the imagination.' The housemaster, peering at it myopically one day, was told it was a ping-pong rota, leading him to ask mildly: 'Why aren't you on the list, Tennyson, I thought you were keen on table-tennis?'

Tennyson left Eton early, and went up to Balliol in the autumn war broke out. At the same time, he also wrote a play which Terence Rattigan pronounced to be the best first play he had ever read. He cut short his degree after the fall of France in 1940 but without the slightest intention of enlisting. A number of people, interestingly mostly women, advised him he would miss the ex- perience of service comradeship, but his divided personality would have been alien to military hierarchies. 'All my masculine training equips me to operate vertically from master to servant, officer to men, chairman to secretary, but my feminine in- stinct insists that I am more comfortable with a confused network of horizontal links.'

The war years — spent mainly in the ser- vice of the Friends Ambulance Unit — in fact provided a confused welter of ex- periences in Britain, Egypt and Italy, in the course of which he kept up affairs with men and an involved, at times high-falutin', sex- ually frank correspondence with the Jewish refugee girl he married of the intellectual interest provoked

Si np e el i 9 a4t 5o r. 2 s June e l ici984ea by that period may be gathered from the fact that' along with map-reading and truck"

of lo have vanished f Serbian, knowledge

Egyptian hieroglyphs, Arabic and modern Greek. Of the many cultures Tennyson has known well, those of Italy and Bengal ha,_v,e, made the deepest impression. He and n" wife spent nearly two years in relief work in the heart of rural Bengal, straddling thie time of Indian independence. The well; springs of this 'profound harmonY thought, feeling and activity', hardly runt' ed by his sexual demands, are movingl.Y evoked and analysed, since Tennyson Is acutely aware of the impossibility of his complete identification with rural povertY. The expressions of an ancient culture hei observed in the everyday are both IoYft.ij,, and melancholy to him, particularly trustfulness of children and adult gentleness " towards them. 'They represented this ari cient beauty in its most uncorrupted fora for they were not subject to the fear, et'vYf and despair provoked by later awareness 0. r dispossession and by the failing of tilet.1,. culture to withstand the onslaught of t0; twentieth century.' When Tennyson Me,. Gandhi, about whom he was later to bruau cast and write with rare insight, there was. a l s 'shock of recognition' of the same qualite,, of sweetness and humour essential to th7 village, 'magnified to the nth degreeh. Nevertheless he strongly disagreed viit Gandhi's views on sex.

The alienating effect of Western in-

The society on people preoccuPiei: Tennyson. As a landlord in run-down nort London, he draws sharp portraits, art, ingly sympathetic to some of the hurrt:(; disaster stories in which he was obligeu to take part. While recognising the failure.os Labour's politics of welfare, he tern.allea convinced that Communism is a `gocici tat gone wrong'. Surprisingly, he asserts 'unquestioning reverence for monarchY, lune g hereditary titles, for caste, class and c°„s ventional privilege are as prevalent todaY t°ry they were in my childhood'; his own s appears to suggest otherwise. Tennyson's years of creative fulfilnietillte and periodic organisational antipathY at the and produce a rich crop of anecdote aihis reflections on public broadcasting, but real concerns are with his troubled sear`i, for poise. He finds himself drawing e he to his great-grandfather, whose

poetrY largely disregarded for most of his life, 'and returning to his favourite poet, Rilke, Orpheus:

the potency of the last of his Sonnets lu Be in this night's unfathomable blue Where senses cross, the magic forc

that's freed has

has Byimthpeliireds.trange contact. Be all it And if things earthly have forgotten you Tospteheedealth's still centre say: I And to the whirling waters: I abide.