Friend, rival and hopping mad
Brian Masters
BEST OF FRIENDS: THE BRENAN-PARTRIDGE LE 1 1 FRS selected and edited by Xan Fielding Chatto & Windus, f14.95 The earlier part of this correspondence is weirdly fascinating, for it shows the grim manufactured Bloomsbury ethic at work. Ralph Partridge was the conventional member of the threesome which inhabited Ham Spray. He married Dora Carrington, who was in love with Lytton Strachey, and lived with them both in cool defiance of the orthodox emotions which make life such a perilous obstacle race. Down came a visit from his dear friend Gerald Brenan, who promptly fell in love with Carrington and wickedly failed to share the excitement with her injured husband. When Ralph found out later, he discovered that the civilised responses he had striven to adopt did not prevent him from being, frankly, hopping mad.
What then did they do about it? They constructed measured and beautiful sent- ences. Gerald could not understand what all the fuss was about. 'Since you and I are already of our own accord attached to one another,' he wrote to Ralph, 'it ought, if we were sensible and tactful, to increase the happiness of all of us, since more mutual affection can only lead to more happiness.' As for the deceit, well, 'whether this is immoral or not I do not care', it being understood that morality was boring and childish, a concept fit for the intellectually retarded. Besides, when Gerald and Car- rington paused from their rapturous kisseS, they spent most of their time talking about Ralph, and the happiest moment of Gerald's life was when they all three had lunch by the stream and Ralph sang about the frogs.
Ralph appeared unconvinced, though a trifle apologetic for being emotional. Nor was he moved by further expressions of Brenan wisdom which held that it was better to be a hermit than to exercise restraint in society, and that displays of generosity must always be backed by self- interest. Gerald was not contaminated by the competitive mania which bedevilled human relations and was manifestly irri- tated by his friend's weakness in this regard. Ralph tried hard to be adult and responsible. His long letters of careful prose and mature theory include an aston- ishing balance-sheet of advantages and inconveniences that might apply were his wife thenceforth to expect sexual contact with him, and he refers to the exchange of letters with his friend/rival as 'our negotia- tions'. What he should have done was to give the man a good thrashing.
When it is all over, Gerald writes from his home in Spain to describe his loath- some strategy in seducing his maid Juliana and the cold determination with which he makes her pregnant because she is a natural whore. It is an entirely nauseating page, made worse by a tiny footnote some 16 years later when the editor informs us that the daughter who resulted from this liaison was in turn seduced by a middle- aged man with her father's encourage- ment, as a means to advance her sexual education. It is odd now to think that these Bloomsbury values were once thought to be admirable, odder still to reflect how comparatively innocent and sane were the freedoms gained in the now much- maligned Sixties.
When the tepid tornado blew itself out, stable friendship was renewed and corres- pondence maintained for nearly 30 years. It is difficult, however, to discern how the publication of these letters can be justified. They are not replete with sparkle and literary allusion like the marvellously en- tertaining correspondence of George Lyt- telton and Rupert Hart-Davis; nor do they possess historical value as do the intimate letters of Wallis Simpson and Edward VIII. The prose of both writers is polished but stodgy. Brenan is the more interesting character despite his miserable and perma- nent indulgence of self, an original mind blessed with the occasional poetic insight which compels one to read twice. He is also challenging and honest, and one believes him when he says he would like to be invisible, to be reduced to a pen, a note- book and a sensibility. His description of a Californian lady as a 'human geranium' succinctly depicts that kind of lustreless beauty arranged by devotion to the cosme- tic arts.
Partridge is the more controlled writer, less dependent upon the inspired word than on the laboursome jigsaw of subject and predicate. He is at his best when describing an event at length, as in his account of the regrettable trial of Lord Montagu, when the police ganged up to reduce a peer of the realm to the level of an abject criminal. Partridge also ventures a useful distinction between 'vulgar' writers (those who wish to please the public) and the 'precious' kind (who think it deroga- tory to do so). By this definition, both he and Brenan are precious; indeed, they are even precieux in the 17th-century French manner of constructing elaborate phrases to make simple points. Their correspond- ence might have benefited from the injec- tion of some wholly un-Bloomsbury vul- garity. As it is, they give eloquent testi- mony to the false belief that the mess of human relations can be dignified by an air of superior smugness.
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