BOOKS

Forgotten Immortal

By WILLIAM GERHARDI

MOST born writers meet with three impedi- ments inimical to productive concentra- tion. Chronic moneylessness. Chronic emotional entanglements. Chronic impact on a sensitive imagination of the simultaneous diversity of life disrupting the passing hour. Three current enemies of work in progress.

The first alone is deadly, productive as it is of nothing but duodenal ulcers. The second may well serve for delayed material. The third lends itself eventually to implementation of Schopen- hauer's idea that art is contemplation of life independently of the will to set to rights.

Hugh Kingsmill fell a fatal victim to the first. Blighted by a puritanical upbringing, he availed himself but furtively of the benefits in reversion of the second. And, in financial plight, his will compounded with the third to drive him on and tragically denude his genius of the poetry of vision luminously airborne by jet-exhilaration of a clairvoyant humour surveying all surface human traffic at a glance.

Rarest and richest of all literary endowments, this, but fully present only in an early pre- duodenal book of fiction with three kindred peerless humorous tragedies in flawless narra- tive, completed in a leisured mood mercifully free from care.

This is The Dawn's Delay—a work unique among all the things he was to write in that it contains in itself the reasons why it is so and not otherwise: which is Coleridge's criterion for a work of ,art permanently pleasing. It is also the genesis of the New Emergent Criticism, operative in Kingsmill as a critic, and operating against Kingsmill in his critic, when the reasons why a certain work cannot permanently please are that the author in it is not 'so,' but rather 'otherwise.'

You will find in Michael Holroyd's entrancing and singularly profound critical biography* every implication of the dislodgement by the New Emer- gent Criticism of the body of limitations which had passed, to Kingsmill's gargantuan incredulity, for serious objective literary study, but has since been increasingly shown bare as temperamental rather than dedicated; dismissive rather than evi- dential; arbitrary rather than scholarly; pedantic rather than principled; prissy sabbatarian rather than moral; cryptically banal rather than meta- Physical; peripheral rather than traditional; un- imaginative rather than selective; humourless rather than acute; puritan rather than stoic; stolid rather than solid in its elucidation of the Obvious, and no better for being borrowed from a better brain; tone-deaf and dismally, altogether hopelessly outside the whole msthetic continuum.

Critics who are not susceptible to tiny rhythms and tones striking the mind's inner lyric ear and releasing in their wake enormous

.* HUGH KINGSMILL A CRITICAL BIOGRAPHY. By Michael Holroyd. With an introduction by Malcolm Muggeridgc. (The Unicorn Press, 30s.)

spiritual forces should leave imaginative litera- ture on this high level alone. They are not really qualified for—if, due to proper overriding safe- guards, democratically entitled to—an opinion. The Dawn's Delay shakes the air it breathes, tangibly, with an unappeasable unearthly yearn- ing: hope and pledge of an ecstatic quivering overwhelming, forgotten yet familiar, angelic joy at hand: 'My friends, be patient.'

Burdened with factual excess-luggage incum- bent on the penal task of furnishing biographies (which unimaginative people consider more serious and publishers more marketable than novels), Kingsmill was constrained to travel by surface transport catalogued as 'General Books.' Yet in the face of all the icefloes, gales and whirlpools of his Odyssey, he landed to our gain and glory a rich cargo before he closed his eyes on a contemporaneity of Nsupercilious naughts deferring to condescending nothings.

It is as absurd to bracket people because they write as it would be to bracket people because they talk. The vulgar nucleus—prestige-value (the cats civet around which the aroma of a reputation clusters)—absent in Hugh Kingsmill, meant that the run of readers passed him by. Of his biographies, Samuel JohnSon and Frank Harris are of the finest vintage. The Poisoned Crown redeems by wit, grace, insight and con- cision a hybrid form of literature—history- never quite a science nor ever quite an art; at best, gratification of curiosity; at worst, stop- press news reviewed at leisure in the light of settled prejudice.

The Return of William Shakespeare brings Shakespeare, who himself expounds his works, back to life. It shows up for what it is the spurious but pusillanimously accepted Shakes- pearean criticism which first sets up a fog of words of the critic's own making, and then elucidates, with success, his own befuddlement.

His copy of The Progress of a Biographer reached• him, with compliments, upon his death- bed. It is an illumination of the spirit—a revelation, after all that mighty matter and preparation of T. S. Eliot, who tells us fully what he does itm mean: to arrive, by slow, successive elimination, eventually at what he does not neces- sarily not mean. And a critic who doesn't smile is like a dog that doesn't wag its tail.

The reading public has but the vaguest notion of the accurdte disposition of msthetic forces. If Lawrence with his German Cleopatra is seen as the blustering Mark Antony, and T. S. Eliot as the circumspect Octavius Qesar, and E. M. Forster as M. kmilius Lepidus. third of the triumvirs (with James Joyce as Sextus Pompeius skulking somewhere on the periphery), then Hugh Kingsmill was Julius Cesar who never crossed the Rubicon. The dons had done him in over his Matthew Arnold for looking in their henhouse for birds of paradise.

Frieda. like Cleopatra, on rare days, could own her Antony an emperor of the world. Mr. Eliot's lady of The Portrait foretold the silent transit from Octavius to Augustus: 'You will go on, and when you have prevailed you can say: at this point many a one has failed.' And, indeed, Thomas Stearns in his mini-car has got a long way on very little petrol. In a ddnoue- ment of incuriosity, whatever 'M' in M.

/Emilius Lepidus—or 'E. M.' in E. M. Forster —may respectively stand for, it is just con- ceivable that in a circle of close intimates both Roman and British triumvir may sometimes have also been called emperor. And it is not to be gainsaid that Mr. Forster has worn his em- perors clothes astonishingly well.

Whatever Julius Cmsar may have thought of Cleopatra, Hugh Ciesar, who never crossed the Rubicon, reviewed her autobiography Not I but the Wind with comprehensive brevity under the exhaustive heading—Wind. His riotous book elicited from Mr. Cyril Connolly the comment: 'For the first time the life of Lawrence has been subjected to a critical Johnsonian scrutiny, and with devastating effect.' When, in sharp reaction to Kingsmill's boisterous push, Lawrence was in full swing, more and more of our bureau- crats of letters got on it, and someone else with a bee in his bonnet clambered hastily on top, to appear to lend it initial impetus.

Now, however, that, by sheer dead weight of his own inane reiterations, the swing of Law- rence's prestige is slowly coming to a halt, some of our cannier critics, like the Russian courtiers when at the outbreak of the Revolution the im- perial military train with the abdicated finished Tsar was nearing the capital, are discreetly getting off, to disperse under cover of general confusion in anonymous directions.

Mr. Malcolm Muggeridge, though he speaks with the tongues (in his cheek) more of men than of angels, when, as in his introduction, he speaks about Kingsmill, he yet has charity. Kingsmill's life is set out with genial humour, deep pathos and understanding tenderness and his work appraised with rare acumen, insight and unbribable integrity by a writer and literary critic born, in Mr. Holroyd's impressively authoritative critical and biographical study. It draws us irresistibly into the whole complex of England's intellectual battle royal. What an amazing story, this, and how dexterously told! A resourceful father ministering, in equal measure, to God and Mammon throws off a stranded genius, not foreseeably acknowledged, but for Mr. Holroyd's posthumous attention, even by a competitive posterity of graduates picking dry the once green meadows of Eng. Lit. for one more lingering blade of grass amenable to treatment in a thesis carrying a B.Litt. or Ph.D.

Ignored by his contemporaries for his ad- vanced revaluations of accepted reputations, he was again ignored by readers of anti-hero anti- novel anti-stylist anti-everything (though not, noticeably, anti-fool) commitments, who still believe that, in conclusive evidence that life is bad, it is good to write badly. They find in him little of the Samuel Beckett brand of dedication to nothing in particular which, in prompt dis- proof of being Mistaken for the punctilio of a Louis Quatorze courtier, takes off its sweaty boots and puts them among the tea things next to the buttered scones. In the closing sentence of his last novel, The Fall, he hears at- cockcrow the baffled fowl's wry and dour wakening cry, as though pro- testing—'My heart's in the right place. But I am not.' Artistic merit, in its unequal struggle with battalions of retarded sages swarming ashore, bears no commensurable relation to its earnings. Sometimes he was down to his last half-crown. There were attempts at rescue work. Hesketh Pearson vainly tried to put him up for the vacant librarianship, in succession to Sir Edmund Gosse, at the House of Lords. Lord Beaverbrook opened up on the Sunday Express book column, for a while. But each man bears his own Bonar Law and does not want to carry another's. H. G. Wells shut down on the suggestion of a collaboration. Bernard Shaw reached for his chequebook to a resigned £10. C. P. Snow sounded the corridors of power for a London chair of English literature for my brilliant but 'already dying friend.

The late Rev. Vincent Howson, who conducted the memorial service, volunteered the informa- tion—which, if he were still alive and openly persistent, might have cost him an eventual bishopric—of having seen with the soul's eye standing in the aisle beside my pew Hugh Kings- mill's shade, which indeed he seemed to be addressing in particular. The congregation was sparse, but loving and heartbroken. No fan- faronade on fame's great trumpet had come his way forlorn.

Now is the time. In the savage battles for survival fought with failing strength, what inimitable work of art, what magnum opus may have died unborn, who shall know, who now can speak? What is the purpose of art? Ask as well, what is the purpose of life? The method may differ, the purpose is the same: the mani- festation of light and love, tapped at some unseen fount, through all the mists of adversity. There are, in the unsparing toils of the esthetic ex- perience, in the recoil from all but the authentic lay which alone unlocks the lore, situations that for courage and endurance call across to analogies drawn from the more familiar but as implacable ordeal of dire sacrifice. He fought on the beaches. He fought in the fields. He fought in the streets. He fought in the hills. He never surrendered. And in God's good time a new generation cast in the heroic mould of Michael Holroyd has come up to reclaim a forgotten genius of the old.

In our reading there is no true exhilaration save when it is given to us to commune with an immortal. Hugh Kingsmill, dead at fifty-nine, was one. Michael Holroyd, extant in his twenties, is another. If you read his book between the lines you will know why. But I forget: the book is dedicated to me. Not another word.