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- Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
Reissue of one of the twentieth century's finest literary memoirs: the sweeping, candidly told story of a life in writing and politics by the writer Storm Jameson, with an introduction by Vivian Gornick __________ 'When Storm Jameson set out to write a memoir, the door of her safe opened wide, and she found literary gold in it' Vivian Gornick 'Has the total honesty of the best autobiography' Guardian 'Stops you in your tracks. I would like to persuade everyone to read it' Sunday Times __________ Towards the end of her life, the writer Storm Jameson began her memoir by asking, 'can I make sense of my life?' This question propelled her through an extraordinary reckoning with how she had lived: her early years in Whitby, shadowed by her tempestuous, dissatisfied mother; an early, unhappy marriage and repeated flights from settled domesticity; a tenaciously pursued literary career, always dogged by a lack of money; and her lifelong political activism, including as the first female president of English PEN, helping refugees escape Nazi Germany. In a richly ironic, conversational voice, Jameson tells also of the great figures she knew and events she witnessed: encounters with H.G. Wells and Rose Macaulay, travels in Europe as fascism was rising and a 1945 trip to recently liberated Warsaw. Throughout, she casts an unsparing eye on her own motivations and psychology, providing a rigorously candid and lively portrait of her life and times.
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III
Journey from the North: A Memoir
Storm Jameson
With an introduction by Vivian Gornick
PUSHKIN PRESSIV
V
Written for my judges the forgotten men and women who made me
VI
VII
If a man has the temerity to write the story of his life, he should have a double aim: first, to show it and his little ego in relation to the time and place in which he lived his life, to the procession of historical events, even to the absurd metaphysics of the universe; secondly, to describe as simply and clearly as he can, his personal life, his relation, not to history and the universe, but to persons and himself, his record in the trivial, difficult, fascinating art of living from day to day, hour to hour, minute to minute.
leonard woolf: Downhill All the WayVIII
Contents
‘If Only I Could Begin Again!’
The mystery of a writer’s métier
Vivian Gornick
My mother, a high school graduate with no recourse to a critical vocabulary, was a romantic reader, mainly of novels. Whenever I asked her how she was liking the book in her hand, she’d narrow her eyes, look steadily at me, and say, ‘Powerful. Really powerful.’ Or, conversely, ‘Not powerful, not at all powerful.’ One day I gave her Journey from the North, a two-volume autobiography written by Storm Jameson, a prolific English novelist at work throughout the first half of the twentieth century. A week later I walked into her apartment and there she was, lying on the couch, reading the first volume. I said, ‘How are you liking that book, Ma?’ She sat up, swung her legs over the side of the couch, and narrowed her eyes, as always, but this time she said, ‘I feel as though she’s just in the room with me.’ And then she said, ‘I’m going to be lonely when I finish this book.’ I remember thinking, What more could any writer ask of a reader?
Ten days after she had finished Journey from the North, I gave my mother one of Jameson’s many (forty-five, to be exact) novels to read. Her eyes lit up and she accepted the book eagerly. But a week later, I saw that it had been tucked into a small shelf above the telephone table and I had the distinct impression that it had been laid aside. Yes, my mother confirmed, it had been. ‘I don’t know why,’ she said, ‘but this book is nothing like that other one.’ And then she said, ‘Not powerful, not at all powerful.’
I nodded my head at her. You’re not alone, Ma, I thought. Over the years, a few thousand other readers have been faced with the same discrepant feelings about Jameson’s autobiography on the one hand, and her fiction on the other. For that matter, they have felt the same when puzzling over other writers of fiction or poetry whose significant work turns out to reside in a memoir. There is Edmund Gosse, for instance, a mediocre Victorian XIIpoet who secured a place in English letters only with the publication, in late middle age, of his masterly memoir, Father and Son; then there is the colorful journalist Thomas De Quincey, whose fame rests entirely on the unforgettable Confessions of an English Opium-Eater; and, of course, our own James Baldwin, who wrote novels, plays, and poems but will be remembered chiefly for the sublime personal essays that are, in effect, his memoir.
I myself have something of a vested interest in this mysterious matter of a writer’s natural métier. When I was young, everyone under the sun was writing a novel because the novel was the form of imaginative writing respected by high- and low-minded alike. Only through the novel, it was felt, could one achieve a work of literary art. So I, of course, like every other young person who dreamed of becoming a writer, labored intensively from earliest youth at writing one. By the time I was in my late twenties, I had to face the fact that while I was forever telling stories to friends, colleagues, relatives, nearly all of whom would crow at me, ‘That’s a novel, write it down!’—and here I was, writing it down, somehow, within the framework of a fiction—‘it’ refused to come to life.
It slowly dawned on me that I could tell stories effectively only when I was composing them in my own storytelling voice, out of my own lived experience, not in the voice of an invented narrator settled in a made-up situation. I was well into my thirties before I understood that I was born for the memoir. One can only wonder what Storm Jameson would have produced had she come earlier to the genre in which she wrote most naturally.
Margaret Ethel Jameson was born in 1891 in the northern English port town of Whitby. The family included a number of sea captains—one of whom was Margaret’s father—and they had lived there for generations on both sides. They were a people of ingrown endurance, pragmatic to the bone, and possessed of the brusque, no-nonsense speech laced with sardonic irony for which Yorkshire men and women are still famous. In Jameson’s time especially, a dread of emotional exposure seemed to haunt the entire population. To be seen caring about anyone or anything in Whitby was to put yourself at risk; you were made to feel vulnerable in a world that, once your guard was down, would show no mercy. Thus, an isolated, weather-beaten town carved into an irregularity on a rugged coast bred, as Jameson wrote in her autobiography, ‘a crop of eccentrics, harmless fools, misers, house devils, XIIIdespots, male and some female, who behaved toward their families with a severity’ that the normally socialized rarely allowed themselves.
Childhood for the Jamesons was an extremity of delight (unearned) and punishment (undeserved). On the delight side, there was Whitby itself and the sea, a world of natural beauty in which to experience the sheer bliss of being alive:
Endless days on the shore in summer, from nine in the morning until six or seven at night… three children on the edge of an infinity of sand and water—enclosed in a boundless blue world, steeped in light, in a radiance of sun and salt.
On the punishment side, they had a father who was away at sea for months at a time and very nearly mute when at home, and a hot-tempered mother, a shockingly bored romantic who hated her husband, beat her children, and lashed out regularly at the bitter disappointment of life. This mother—whose thwarted spirit made Jameson’s heart ache—became dramatically imprinted on an impressionable young psyche, and was responsible for locking the girl into a personality as angry, defensive, and yearning as her own. Not a single person in Jameson’s long, eventful life was ever to supplant her mother’s emotional influence; nor was any other place in the world to eclipse the memory of Whitby’s piercing loveliness as she experienced it in her youth.
In all probability, Jameson would have married a Whitby man, had half a dozen children, and lived out her mother’s life if, in 1908, she had not won a scholarship to the newly created University of Leeds. The school, at that time, was filled with the children of northern England’s working class—people like herself whose eyes were being opened to the excitement and promise of a life they could not have previously imagined. It was there that Jameson began to see herself as a woman with a literary gift and as a person stigmatized by a class system that placed her very close to the bottom. She found both discoveries exhilarating; in no time she was writing stories and had become a red-hot socialist determined on a political as well as a literary life.
The heady self-assurance that Jameson and her university friends felt while still at school became both a shield and a sword. ‘In those early years,’ she wrote, XIV
I had no consciousness of being shabby, I thought I could go anywhere, into any company… We emerged from our three starveling years with a lighthearted confidence that we were conquerors.
But a few years out of school and the corrections of worldly judgment caused a penetrating self-doubt to set in. At university, Jameson had been considered a brain and a talent and nobody noticed what she wore. In London, she learned that she was seen as an intellectual provincial and that she dressed badly: ‘It was only later that I began to covet an elegance I had discovered I lacked.’ There and then, the alternating influences of incredible brashness and equally incredible insecurity stamped her personality for good and all.
The affliction of urban sophistication, however, was hardly Jameson’s first experience beyond student life to reveal itself as formative. While still in school, she had fallen desperately in love with a ne’er-do-well, slept with him, and in 1913, at the age of twenty-one, was forced to marry. Then, before she knew where on earth she was, she had a baby—not they had a baby, she had a baby—and that, as it was with most women, might have been that, except that Margaret Jameson wasn’t most women.
For a good five years, she and her husband, imagining themselves free spirits in a new world, lived marginally, wandering from pillar to post, always up north (Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds), vaguely seeking and finding jobs that led nowhere. She didn’t mind this gypsy existence, but as time wore on she came to realize that she was unhappy with her husband, that she loved the baby but hadn’t bonded with him, and that she hated, hated, hated domestic life. Within herself she began to drift and soon thought she would die if she didn’t get out of the house. It was only then,
at a time when I was tempted to knock my own head against the wall, [that I understood] the fits of rage in which [my mother] jerked the venetian blinds in her room up and down, up and down, for the relief of hearing the crash.
She had to find a real job, she said; had to make a living, she said; had to help save the marriage, she also said. So in 1918 she stashed the baby in Whitby, said a ‘temporary’ goodbye to the husband, and fled to London, XVwhere, with remarkable speed, she found work as a journalist by day and began writing a novel at night.
Two important things now happened: she adopted Storm Jameson as her professional name, and she established a style of life that came to resemble permanent vagabondage. From those first London years on, Jameson proved incapable of making a conventional home either for herself alone, or with the child she said she adored, or with the second husband (the historian Guy Chapman) whom she did indeed love dearly. For pretty much the rest of her life, she moved continually from one house or flat or squat to another, usually but not always in or around London, and later in life, when she had some money, found happiness only when wandering about in foreign places.
It was writing and political activism that grounded her. Throughout the Sturm und Drang produced by her lifelong compulsion to get up and go, Jameson wrote at least one novel a year, plus stories, essays, articles, and political journalism by the yard. At the same time—no matter where she was or what other responsibilities she had—she worked tirelessly as an activist, first campaigning for women’s suffrage, then promoting social justice for the working class (otherwise known as naked hatred of capitalism), and then, in the Thirties and Forties, out of an impassioned opposition to fascism, becoming active in refugee rescue operations. By the beginning of the Second World War, she was president of the English branch of the writers’ organization PEN (she served between 1938 and 1944) and in a position to work herself sick on behalf of the many European writers, artists, and intellectuals she helped escape the Nazis.
Jameson saw herself neither as a bohemian nor as an artist, only as an industrious scribbler driven by a restlessness whose origins she herself could not easily grasp. All she knew was that each time she pulled up stakes, she felt as though she was beginning anew; throughout her life she was hungry to begin anew. Whatever that concept meant to her, it inevitably included what she described as the ‘forbidden’ thrill of starting a novel. Within the first thirty pages of Journey from the North, she writes that in beginning a novel she always felt ‘the indescribable excitement a woman is said to feel when her unborn child moves for the first time.’ ‘Forbidden’ and ‘said to feel’: she could use these words descriptively but never insightfully; and at that, she used them only when she was close to eighty. Until then she spoke XVIrepeatedly—in her sardonic Yorkshire voice—of writing novels because they put food on the table and a roof over her head. This was the lifelong disclaimer with which she defended herself against the feared charge that, as she strongly suspected, she was only delivering a heap of middlebrow problem novels, easily consumed, easily forgotten. And she was right to fear this charge. If, at the age of seventy, Jameson had not sat down to write Journey from the North, she would surely have gone down into literary oblivion.
A reader’s report on her first novel declares: ‘It is loosely constructed; starts nowhere; ends nowhere; characters many and ill-defined. They do not live; they are vehicles for the author’s theories and the expounding of his theme.’ Nevertheless, the reader concludes (never imagining that Storm could be a woman’s name), ‘the man can write and is worth watching.’
Between the Twenties and the Sixties, Jameson achieved a more than respectable reputation as what, then as now, would be called a midlist writer of prodigious output. Her books sold well, she had many fans, publication was always assured, and in London she knew ‘everyone.’ Yet nearly all of Jameson’s novels might well have come in for much the same assessment of that early reader’s report—that they are primarily devoted to creating characters who are set in motion for the sake of exploring a social or political thesis: modern marriage seen from a woman’s disadvantaged perspective, the postwar experience of an embittered generation in the Twenties, liberalism in crisis during the Thirties, fascism at home in the Forties, and, of course, tale after tale of murderously indifferent industrialists with a boot on the neck of disempowered workers, observed or interfered with by various progressive types.
The rise of fascism was especially compelling and, like many other writers on the left, Jameson justified the kind of writing she felt driven to produce in the run-up to the Second World War:
The impulse that turned so many of us into pamphleteers and amateur politicians was neither mean nor trivial. I doubt whether any of us believed that books would be burned in England [or people] tortured and then killed in concentration camps. But all these things were happening abroad and intellectuals who refused to protest were in effect blacklegs. [That is, scabs.] XVII
It wasn’t that she couldn’t write well—she could and did—but, forever in thrall to a thesis, her characters, in the main, not only fail to come alive on the page but hector the reader as well. In Company Parade—a novel based on the experience of the young Storm Jameson in interwar London—the protagonist, a self-styled socialist thrilled to have just published a popular novel, is chastised by another character, a full-blown radical: ‘Don’t you know you haven’t any right to write novels unless you put in’ the city’s slums, capitalism’s treachery, society’s ruthless indifference? ‘Whether you know it or not, you’re being used… You’re persuading [people] that all’s for the best in the best of all possible worlds.’ Imagine this kind of writing sprinkled through or even dominating the narrative of some thirty or forty novels!
Jameson knew her shortcomings. She understood very well what it meant to dig deep into the inner life of a character, and did not cry foul when, halfway through her career, a friend told her bluntly,
You know far too much about human nature and too little about making what you know palatable. You don’t give your imagination room to breathe, you dissect, and you write too many books too quickly.
However, here she stood and she could do no other.
But it hurt just the same. It hurt that she was refused literary recognition by the people who mattered: high-end modernists like the Bloomsberries. It hurt that they saw her only as a decent writer of the middle level; it hurt that, as a result of such ranking, she began, from the Fifties on, to grow morbidly insecure—‘The fingers of one hand would be too many to count the times when I have looked forward to the publication of a novel, seeing too clearly the width of the gap between it and the great novels’—and became vulnerable to a ‘profound sense of failure… that seizes me when I think about my novels… a tormenting sense of dryness, accidie, futility.’ Late in life she felt compelled to destroy reviews, articles, and personal documents because, as she said, she wished she could ‘sink without a trace,’ as the trace she was leaving was of such inconsequence.
Once, deeply unhappy about the progress of the novel at hand, she came close to blaming the commands of commerce for her situation, even though XVIIIshe knew better. The following two paragraphs, here reprinted exactly as they appear in Journey from the North, tell that story:
What is it that drives us to turn out our novel a year like articulate robots, to be praised or damned by critics as unfit as ourselves to talk about novels.
If only I could begin again!
And then, miraculously, she did.
Near the beginning of Journey from the North, Jameson announces her plan to concentrate for once on the inner life of her protagonist:
How far can I hope to give a true account of an animal I know only from the inside? Nothing would have been easier for me than to write one of those charming poetic memoirs which offend no one and leave a pleasant impression of the author. I am trying to do something entirely different. Trying, in short, to eat away a double illusion: the face I show other people, and the illusion I have of myself—by which I live. Can I?
And with that announcement, some unexpected alchemy begins to exert its influence on the pages flying out of Jameson’s typewriter (nearly eight hundred before she’s done). The raw material of the memoir is remarkably similar to that of the novels—nearly all of which originated in Jameson’s own experience—but the writer’s agenda is not the same. It was the altered agenda that was responsible for one genre being abandoned in favor of another; and it was the changed genre that, quite magically, released an imprisoned imagination that betrayed a depth of understanding Jameson had never before felt free to let loose on her readers. Class, sex, social policies—all are to be relegated not to the background but to a supporting role in a developing point of view that is psychologically oriented from the start.
Journey from the North is a generous record of Jameson’s life from earliest childhood up to the moment in advanced age at which she is writing—Whitby; early family life; university; marriage and motherhood; the London XIXyears in their various incarnations; every cause she was ever attached to; every town, city, or countryside she wandered about in; every person of note, talent, or fame she was ever thrown together with. What is important about this rather extraordinary recital is not the information it provides, but the impression it leaves that, beneath the surface of the somewhat overstuffed prose, a writerly concern is at work, directing the narrative and keeping it on track. The speaking voice, throughout the entire performance, has been described in reviews and biographical essays as ruthlessly honest; by which it is meant not that Jameson delivers a tell-all confessional, but rather that the reader can sense her grappling with something recalcitrant in the material that nonetheless draws her on. She realizes, just as we do, that there is much she does not know about this something. But we have no doubt that she is intent on telling us—really telling us—as much as she does know, and that intent is what counts.
Sartre once said that freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you. Journey from the North is a glorious example of the gripping tale that can be fashioned out of the moment when a good writer feels compelled to examine that prophetic piece of wisdom.
In one of her novels, Jameson says of her fictional stand-in: ‘Her mother was at the centre of her life. She rebelled against her… but she was bound to her by a love in which bitter and hurting things were drowned.’ True and not true. Jameson’s mother certainly was at the center of her life, and she did rebel against her but was yet bound to her by an emotion that, if one wishes, could be called love; however, no bitter and hurting thing ever drowned.
It’s the mother who is the figure in Jameson’s carpet; the mother—now brilliantly present, now dimly sighted, now putting in a surprise appearance—who embodies the pull of haunted memory threading itself through the memoir; the mother whose raw need seeps through Jameson’s blood, mingling with her own, creating the kind of psychological embroilment that can not only shape the life of a child who identifies disastrously with a parent of the same sex, but endow it with mythic dimension.
Imagine a mother whose voice is daily filled with what Jameson in another novel describes as ‘the shrewd, half-sneering, half-envious spite of the North’; a mother who, when a child says she has a headache, replies coldly, ‘Nonsense, children don’t have head-aches’; a mother who rages about XXthe house when depressed and, out of pity for herself, inflicts the injustice of arbitrary beatings. Who could survive such acts of terror without first going numb and dumb inside, and then growing self-protective almost to the point of anomie? Jameson did both:
Beginning young, I have had a great deal of practice not only in hiding my feelings but in hiding from them… Insincerity was one of the lessons I learned early and thoroughly, very early, very thoroughly.
(Ah, how I came to love the rhetoric embedded in ‘early and thoroughly, very early, very thoroughly’; here’s another of its numerous iterations: ‘It would not be true to say that the grief which tore its way through my body was for him [i.e., her first husband]; it was for the past, for what he had been to me; for the failure I, I, had made of our marriage.’ That ‘I, I’!)
The problem was that she could not leave her mother because she had become her mother. In the way of this kind of early damage, as Jameson could not leave behind that which had been done to her, she joined with it. Her mother’s boredom became her boredom, as did the easy scorn, the blind resistance to authority, the deadly fear of emotional openness (a broken friendship is described as ‘another failure of warmth’), beneath which lay her own ransomed life. The worst of it was her failure to take in the reality of her own child, just as her mother had failed to take in hers. (‘Even now, I cannot explain why I was never at ease with the idea that I had a child who was my own, not simply handed to me to cherish and bring up.’) Throughout her years she wept for the unlived life of her mother, only occasionally aware that she was weeping for her own:
I cannot remember a time when I was not aware, and with what helpless pity, that her life had disappointed her…
My terrible anxiety [was always] for her to be happy…
I would have cut my hand off to give her another life.
These sentences, and many more like them running through Journey from the North, are alive to the touch; they color everything the narrative lights on; XXImake vivid the hold that domestic tragedy had on Jameson: ‘Those seeds of guilt and responsibility, sown in me at the beginning, were not able to strangle [my involuntary egotism] but they have given it an atrociously uneasy life.’
Jameson understood well enough that while she saw clearly the how of things, she could not adequately penetrate the why of them. No matter. This was one time she wanted to give the reader the feel of things—the state of affairs one grasps not with the intellect but through the nerve endings—and toward this end she did what she should have been doing with all those novels behind her: she stretched her imagination to the limit.
In Journey from the North, as nowhere else in her work, Jameson’s writing has the very thing she was always faulted for not achieving: the richness of texture necessary to bring a work of literature to fruition. The interesting question is why, when she was ready to dive deep, did Jameson not sit down to write the redemptive novel of her life? Why was it the memoir to which she turned? What was it about writing in her own naked voice that allowed her to make something indelible out of the lived experience that her novels had been exploiting, but not doing justice, all those years?
These questions, of course, are rhetorical. Perhaps the match between the appropriate genre and the release of the writer’s imagination is something akin to the situation of a safecracker listening for just the right sound in the tumblers to make the door of the vault swing open. Clearly (that is, mysteriously), when Storm Jameson set out to write a memoir, the door of her safe opened wide, and she found literary gold in it. If she had died before she was ready to try that safe, she would never have composed the one book that admits her to the company of Gosse, De Quincey, and Baldwin—and I would never have written this appreciation.XXII
Journey from the north, Vol. 1
Part I
AvoidthisSpring
So soon as ever your mazed spirit descends
From daylight into darkness, Man, remember
What you have suffered here in Samothrace
What you have suffered…
Tothelefthandtherebubblesablackspring
Overshadowedwithagreatwhitecypress.
Avoid this spring, which is Forgetfulness;
Though all the common rout rush down to drink,
void this spring!
robert graves4
5
Chapter 1
There are people, there are even writers, whose lives were worth recording because they were passed in strange or exciting ways, or involved famous persons, or could be written as the story of a great mind in search of its beliefs. I have a good but not a great mind; my chances of meeting great men have been few and I have not sought them: the men and women who have come nearest slaking my curiosity about human nature have been obscure as well as alive with humours. The humours of the great are usually too well groomed.
What is a record of my life worth—the life of a writer treated with justice in circles where camaraderie, cette plaie mortelle de la littérature, is the merciful rule?
Perhaps little, except that as a life it spans three distinct ages: the middle class heyday before 1914, the entre deux guerres, and the present; three ages so disparate that to a person who knows only the third the others are unimaginable. Anyone born before 1900 can examine one civilization as if it were done with—as it is, but for noticing that a few of its ideas and traditions are still feebly active. Indeed, I can excavate two finished stages in society, since I remember sharply the one I rebelled against while continuing to live blindly by more than one of its rooted assumptions: that people of my class do not starve, that reticence in speech, and clean linen, are bare necessities, that books exist to be read. I ought to be able to describe them both.
Possibly I lack the coolness to give a dependable account of them to the ignorant. I can try.
That arrogant half-sarcastic phrase, it can be tried, is one I heard so often in my North Riding childhood that it has become an instinct. I seldom know when I am being led astray by it. It was a servant’s saying, but a northern servant.
The span of my life is even longer than it seems, since its roots are twisted round hundreds of lives passed in the same place. Only a life starting from centuries of familiarity with the same few fields and streets is better than 6fragmentary. If there is any tenacity in me, any constancy, if there is an I under all the dissimilar I’s seen by those who know or knew me as daughter, as young woman, undisciplined, confident, absurd, as wife, as friend, the debt is owed to obscure men and women born and dying in the same isolated place during hundreds of years.
All I could do to destroy the pattern, I have done.
What Pascal, writing about Montaigne, called ‘his foolish project of painting his own portrait’ is, after all, a book like any other. If it is dull, it will quickly be forgotten. Or, if it is not readable now, when there are people alive able to compare the portrait with the original and find it distorted or a lie, it may become readable when neither they nor I are here to protest.
How far can I hope to give a true account of an animal I know only from the inside? Nothing would have been easier for me than to write one of those charming poetic memoirs which offend no one and leave a pleasant impression of the author. I am trying to do something entirely different. Trying, in short, to eat away a double illusion: the face I show other people, and the illusion I have of myself—by which I live. Can I?
It is true that what one sees from the inside is the seams, the dark tangled roots of feeling and action, which may be just as misleading, as partial, as the charming poeticized version I am trying to reject. But it is a truth—known only to me.
I feel an ineffaceable repugnance to writing about close friends. Of the few people, men and women, I know intimately, I can bring myself to write down only the least intimate facts. This falsifies the record at once. But what can I do? Nothing.
‘The real story of a life would consist in a recital of the experiences, few or many, in which the whole self was engaged. The greater part of such a book would be very dull, since as often as not our whole self turns its back contemptuously on the so-called great moments and emotions and engages itself in trivialities, the shape of a particular hill, a road known in infancy, the movement of the wind through grass. The things we shall take with us at the last will all be small.’
I wrote this, or something very like it, in a novel published thirty years ago. It is probably true. The pain and ecstasy of youth, the brief happiness, 7the long uncharted decline, can be summed up in the tune of a once popular waltz, of no merit, or the point in a country lane where the violence and hopelessness of a passion suddenly became obvious, or the moment when a word, a gesture, nothing in themselves, gave the most acute sensual pleasure. None of these can be written about.
It will be easy, too, to lose one’s way in an underworld where time is no longer a succession of events, one damned thing after another, but a continuous present in which the dead, and the little I know about them, jostle the ghosts of the living. And where the antique chorus of frogs listened to in March 1935 in Spain is—at the same moment—distending the darkness above a lake in northern New York State fourteen years later.
The first thing I remember is the deck of a ship in sunlight. A lady, her face hidden from me by the parasol in her hand, is there in a low chair. My head, which does not reach above the arm of the chair, aches. I must just have told her so. Without turning her own, she answers, ‘Nonsense. Children don’t have headaches.’
She must have been mistaken. Some indefinite time later I am lying peaceably at the bottom of a crevasse, its walls densely white; two persons, indistinct, are looking over the edge, and one of them says, ‘She’s sinking.’ The ship, I think. That the ship is sinking out there is no business of mine, and doesn’t ruffle me.
My third memory is of a field of marguerites, so long-stemmed, or I at the time so short, that they and I were face to face, eye against incandescent eye. The whiteness seared, dazzled, blinded, a naked seething radiance, whiter than all whiteness, running out of sight.
Since beginning this book—that is, yesterday, Friday, the 11th of August 1961, the day of the new moon—I have realized what most intelligent people doubtless knew already: in any life a few, very few, key images turn up again and again, recognizable even though deformed by the changed light or the angle at which they reappear. This fierce whiteness is one of mine.
Another is the sound, a middling deep note, of the Whitby bell-buoy, ringing a mile off-shore, clearly audible at night or at any time when the wind blew off the sea.
And another sound, made, this one, by the fishermen’s children when I was very young: it was like the screech of gulls—Ahwa-a-ah!—piercing, 8barely human, half summons, half warning. You could believe that every ship in the world was casting off at once. It was years before I knew enough to interpret it as Away!
In due course I shall come on the other two or three of these primitive or underworld images, voices out of sleep, out of a lost harbour, which are mine. They may indeed be the only things I ever, in the positive sense of the word, hear or see.
The voyage on which I so nearly died was one of my earliest, if not the first. It was certainly not my mother’s first: in those days before human existence got out of hand, a sea-captain had the right to take his wife with him on any voyage, even as far as the River Plate or the Far East. She knew one or two older women, childless, who had no shore home; all they possessed, their clothes, family photographs, curling-tongs, shared the captain’s cabin next the chart-room with his clothing and the ship’s papers. She, I believe, envied these freed women while barely approving of them: life in a house of her own often bored her.
So long as she had only one child, she could go away easily, joining the ship in an English port or at Le Havre or Flushing. The first of these departures that I remember was in the early light; I see clearly the half-dark kitchen and taste the end crust of the loaf, soaked in scaldingly hot tea, she had given me: it was yeasty and exquisite. Were we going to Greenock, Harwich for Antwerp, Swansea? Once, in the last port, directed to it by the man in the ticket-office of the dock station, she and I found ourselves in a small hotel, in a bedroom immediately behind the bar, which was full of lascars. It was too late to seek farther, and while I slept in my clothes my mother spent the night sitting on the trunk she had dragged across the door.
The days at sea in a less than 3,000-ton ship were crushingly long and boring—it would not have entered anyone’s head to amuse me—but the ports… ah!
Antwerp: tall yellow-faced houses behind a quay; the Place Verte with its flower-women; the rue de la Meir; the open trams; the zoo gardens at night, a band playing to sedately strolling families, the tall schoolboys in girlish socks and blouses, ridiculously bare-legged; the superb glove shop; the rough knife-edged grass of the ramparts; the open carriage clip-clopping us back to the docks. 9
It was Antwerp that gave me my first notion of an art. In a shop-window of the rue de la Meir there was a large painting of a garden, with two halfembraced figures in the foreground. It seized on my imagination and became for a few weeks my idea of sensual bliss. This had nothing to do with its merits as a painting, which doubtless did not exist.
One day when we came ashore—off the Saxon Prince?—the wharf was strewn with black brittle husks from some outlandish cargo; a man waiting to come aboard told us that Queen Victoria had died, news that made my mother pull a sorrowful face. So far as I knew, I had never heard of the woman, but a sense of her importance and the strange husks underfoot started up in me such a crazy excitement that to this day voyages and death resemble each other in my mind as one harbour is like another in another island.
So many journeys, begun before memory, so many half-obliterated departures, how could they fail to ruin my life?
Its pattern, if the word can be used of such a coil, was set by them at the start.
The impulse to go away has disturbed, delighted, mocked me, and is to blame for my failure to settle anywhere. I left one place with anguish, leaving behind half my soul, the less indifferent half: none of the many others I have lived in keep more than a thin paring of it, thinner and less persistent than the shadow I catch sight of in Bordeaux or Antwerp of my mother, pausing to stare in a shop-window at a hat she would buy if she could barely afford it, and were less arrogantly afraid of the foreign saleswoman: in those days she was an elegante—the word is not used now, but it fitted her—coveting finely simple dresses and beautiful gloves. I doubt whether she was content anywhere—any more than I am. I even doubt whether she felt the pleasure I rate higher than any other, that of being in a foreign town for the first time, free of its probably mediocre streets and cafés, its sounds, and the silence which encloses the stranger walking about in it, obliged to no one for her happiness.
The restlessness in my nerves and senses comes to me through her. Where did she get it? From sea-going ancestors, from the North Sea, from the stones themselves of the little port (already able in the seventh century to build a parish church and an Abbey to which the body of St Edwin, first Christian king of Northumbria, was brought at the end of the century: in 10the ninth, the Danes burned both church and Abbey), with its memories of loss, flight, violence?
Restless, adrift from the start, spiritually clumsy and imprudent, can I make sense of my life? Has it a meaning? If I can find the courage to stare coldly at its ghosts (including my own past selves, clumsy ungovernable young idiots), and as coldly at the moments of happiness as at griefs, blunders, sins, humiliating failures, will the meaning, if there is a meaning, emerge?
It can be tried. I am too old to be mortified by a failure.
And in a world so sharply menaced by destruction as ours, there is something friendly in the idea of going on gossiping to the last minute—if it is no more than to call a friend’s attention to the exquisite yellow of a dying leaf or to ask for news of a child, the one who came last year to stay, and tethered an imaginary horse in every room in the house.
Chapter 2
Ihave a trick, when forced to make a speech—a folly I commit as seldom as possible—of repeating mentally: I am the last voice on earth of my grandfather George Gallilee and my mother Hannah Margaret Jameson.
This—call it what you like—this invocation has usually eased the ordeal. Once, on the 14th of December, 1943, it had an odd sequel. I had been speaking to the French Chamber of Commerce, at a luncheon, to please a friend, Pierre Maisonneuve, one of de Gaulle’s Free French. Heaven knows what I talked about, and has mercifully erased the memory, but what happened afterwards is still entirely clear in my mind. An insignificant-looking Frenchman came up to me, smiling, and said: ‘I have been sent to tell you that everything is all right. An old gentleman, very upright, with a great deal of white hair, was standing behind your chair when you spoke, and everything is all right.’
Taken completely aback, I made a stupid and ill-bred reply: ‘That was George Gallilee, my grandfather; he was a severe man, with a bad temper.’
I don’t pretend to explain the incident.
Possibly, when we talk of ourselves as being the only foothold the dead keep, the only channel for their voices, it is not nonsense or a sort of poetry 11(I distrust poetic prose). They insist on living in us. They deflect our voices. They dictate our first choices, those which further or ruin our lives.
My grandfather, my mother’s father, had the reputation of a hard stubborn man, arbitrary, incorruptibly honest, with a violent temper kept, for the most part, under control. I did not know him. How could I? By the time I might have made something of him he had begun his long death, and all I felt for him was the shocking aversion I feel from illness and sickrooms. I suspect him of strong feelings, brutally repressed: an egoist by instinct and training, he could not help regarding women as inferior creatures, mentally and morally. He had a degree of respect for my mother, the only one of his children who was at all like him in looks and temper. He believed with cold ferocity that Lloyd George should be hanged and the lower classes kept in their place: a workman repairing the roof was all but startled into falling off when my grandfather shouted at him from the nearest window to stop whistling or go home.
When I knew him, and until he died, he was handsome in a forbidding way: a head of hair as white as silk, springing strongly back from his forehead and temples, a thick white goatee, the long upper lip of his hard fine mouth clean-shaven, a splendid nose, and the formidably clear cold pale blue eyes he passed on to my mother and she to her last-born. (Not to me: mine are a darker clouded grey-blue: I fit badly into my skull, and while my eyes are taking you in my brain is trying to guess what you are thinking and what will keep you at a safe distance.)
He was bookish and extremely fastidious. He took daily ice-cold baths, dressed formally, and until his stroke held himself as straight as a bolt.
He had been a ship-owner. He sold out of shipping too early in life, and before it began to make money again. He married twice: his second wife was the one I knew as my grandmother: he married her to look after his seven children (seven living, out of I forget how many born) and entertain his friends; she was a middle-aged widow with three sons of her own; a rascally solicitor had bolted to Australia with the money left her by her husband: whenever, in street or church aisle, she saw one of his relatives she would ask loudly: ‘Ha’ ye heard from t’ thief lately?’
It turned out that a fondness for fine old port unfitted her both as stepmother and hostess. My grandfather at once rearranged his life to conceal 12the blunder he had made. He put his children, five girls and two boys, into another house and visited them morning and evening: what social life he had was carried on outside his own house.
All his children were afraid of him, my mother, the youngest but one, less than the others: she had spirit and a hot temper, though at fifteen she was discovered to be ‘in a decline,’ that commonest of Victorian illnesses. The treatment ordered for her was the raw cod-liver oil brought by the whaling boats, and cold baths: she faithfully took both, carrying the cold water up every night to a hipbath in her room, and lived.
Her father was no gentler with her than with the others; she had orders to be practising the piano when he arrived at eight in the morning, and he beat time by clapping his hands loudly within an inch of her ear: in winter, since he refused to allow fires to be lit in the house in daylight, her fingers stiffened immovably on the keys (as mine did at the end of the icy train journey to Scarborough to take a music examination in the Imperial Hotel. In spite of having less music in me than a crow, I passed three of these before my mother resigned herself to the certainty that I should never, being now fourteen, acquire the ghost of an ear). He disapproved of pampering anyone, of any age or sex. During the years when he was only half alive, his youngest unmarried daughter, now in her fifties, dutifully sat with him an hour every day. Even on the bitterest days he refused to allow her near the fire—‘Back, girl, back!’
Except under his eye, it was a lively household: the youngest two, my mother and my aunt Jenny, laughed at everything, at their sisters, at each other, even, under the name of Mr Bultitude, at their terrible father.
My aunt, who was actively pious—she was a deacon of the Congregational Church—with none of my mother’s profound indifference (masked by habit), had the irrepressible laugh of a very young child. I remember an afternoon when they talked about graves. Neither of them can have been less than sixty-five, and my mother was sharply vexed that she had not been able to find out from my father how many people had been buried in the grave belonging to him.
‘I told him, “We can’t expect to stay very much longer,” and he said, “But I will”. I have no patience with him, Jenny! Let me think: his father was lost at sea, but there’s his mother and her father and mother, and a child. I believe 13there will be nine to a grave. So there should be plenty of room for him.’ Her eyes started with anger. ‘I won’t go into his grave, not on any account.’
‘Ours has Mr Bultitude and our mother, and sister Ann and sister Mary, yes, and two children, Emily and Amy—I think they count as one.’
‘And of course there’s you to go in,’ my mother said calmly. She frowned. ‘It would be maddening to have to buy more land at the last minute.’
The absurdity of this conversation struck them both in the same instant and they went off into a fit of laughter; it lasted for minutes and was the gayest sound in the world.
As a very young child, I was mortally afraid of my grandfather. Yet the one time I had anything to do with him then, he behaved with great gentleness. My mother had been thrashing me. Made reckless by my fear of pain, I ran wildly round my bedroom, howling, trying to dodge the cane. Exhausted, she told me, ‘I must bring your grandfather to deal with you.’
She left the house and I waited, in the state of self-induced apathy, a sort of stupor made up of dislike of showing distress, fear of being pitied, and a purely instinctive animal immobility, in which—so far—I have always been able to sink myself at will. Crouched on the landing outside my room, I watched my grandfather between the balusters as he came up the last flight: he halted half way up, stared at me for a moment and, to my great astonishment, said only, ‘You shouldn’t wear your mother out,’ then turned and went down.
In those days it was the custom to thrash children. Few people imagined that they could be trained by any methods except those used on savagely unbroken horses. Whitby may have been backward in this respect (as in some others), still early Victorian, but not, I think, a great deal. My mother herself was impatient, easily bored, and perhaps more determined to bring her children up well than were some few of her contemporaries.
The cruelty of the method lay in its deliberateness. I shall thrash you when we get home had the ring of a death sentence. Any act of carelessness or disobedience outside the house merited it. If other people were present, the offender might get only a terrible glance, a warning what to expect. The pupil of my mother’s eye seemed to send out a flash of light, like the discharge from a gun: I have never seen another such glance. The walk home might be short or long; no delay was long enough to ward off the assault on bared 14flesh and stretched nerves. And the business of forgiveness, which came hours later, was as emotionally racking as the punishment itself.
Only at this moment, as I write, sixty years after the event, I realize that when my grandfather halted and looked up, he saw a desperate little animal behind bars.
His second wife was my father’s mother. The two familes were kept apart. My mother cannot have had even the most short-lived sense that she was marrying a stepbrother. Certainly she never regarded her mother-in-law as a stepmother. She disliked her. One day when she was an old woman herself, she spoke to me about her with all the bitterness of a high-spirited young girl.
‘She was a wicked woman, malicious, a wilful liar, quite unscrupulous, and she had the tongue of a viper. I remember her saying to a servant who had just married, “I hope you’ll ha’ ten bairns and not a bite to put in their mouths.” She was capable of any trick.’
She played evil tricks on her young daughter-in-law, and an amusing one. As a gesture of independence, my mother and her youngest sister had joined the Congregationalists, a sect the second Mrs George Gallilee considered not merely heretical but vulgar: she begged my mother to let me be decently baptized into the Church of England, promising to give ‘the poor innocent bairn’ a handsome christening present. The ceremony over, she presented an egg, a pinch of salt, and the smallest possible piece of silver, a threepenny bit.
I had no feeling for her, hardly even distaste. She handed out port and Christmas cake once a year, and pennies when we were taken to visit her on Sunday morning—‘You’ll ha’ been to t’chapel,’ she would say contemptuously—and occasionally begged one of us off a beating. She was then quince-yellow and shrunken, wearing lace caps over the sparse remains of black hair. In the end she, too, had a stroke and lay in the room next her husband’s, speechless. The stroke paralysed her tongue.
My mother had one word for this. Justice.
Chapter 3
Of the uncounted places I have lived in, for years or months, only one haunts me. Since I left it for good, I have been adrift, and 15shall drift to my death. Yet I cannot go back there—any more than a tree, cut down, could return to its roots left in the ground.
I cannot be sure that everything I remember about a now vanished Whitby is my own memory or my mother’s. The most grotesque memories are probably hers. Isolation—before the opening of a railway line through the valley to Pickering in 1836—bred, in counterweight to its benefits, a crop of eccentrics, harmless fools, misers, house devils, despots, male and some female, who behaved towards their families with a severity even George Gallilee would never have allowed himself.
Talking to me about those obscure Catos, my mother’s tone implied a certain respect. Later, when I came to study the Russian dramatist Ostrovski, I thought I recognized them in his plays of crushed lives and meaningless cruelties inflicted behind the bolted doors of provincial merchants’ houses. Bitter tears must have been shed, decently, in strict secrecy, by the families of well-to-do men (and a few matriarchs), some of them only hard and miserly, some laughable, but all egotistical to the verge of madness, or so rigid with principles that they might as well have been lunatics.
In the early years of my childhood Whitby was still beautiful. It no longer built ships—sailing-ships, whalers, and, later, small steamships which had to be towed to Middlesbrough or Newcastle to fit their engines—but the skeletons of two of the old yards were rotting placidly, weeds thrusting between the stones and iron rings, on the edge of the upper harbour. I have a confused memory of a launching—the last?
I should admit at once that, for me, Yorkshire is Whitby—but not the town you will see if you go there now in search of a happiness which depends on a place.
Since my fortunate infancy, the high-hedged lanes and fields, the bare cliff-tops covered with short springing grass, have been disfigured by a brick rash, the ancient pier intolerably tawdrified, the splendid subscription library thrown away, and heaven knows what other outrage and perversion. Something remains. Impossible—unless there are no limits to insensitivity and contempt for what is only charming and dignified—to spoil the ruined Benedictine Abbey on the East cliff, or the quiet waters of the estuary. Or the Norman church crouched, pressed into the ground by the wind, between abbey and cliff-edge, and reached by a hundred and ninety-nine wide shallow 16stone steps from the harbour. The soul of an old ship inhabits this church and its three-decker pulpit: ships’ carpenters put up the present roof, and the windows under it are so like cabin windows that on the rare Sundays when we occupied my grandfather’s pew in one of the galleries I could only dream of voyages. Outside, the dust of Saxons, Danes, monks, ship-builders, master mariners, lies deep under the rank grass between wrinkled gravestones eaten by the salt.
Standing on the cliff-edge, three hundred or more feet above the sea, and looking north past the mouth of the harbour and the West cliff, you see a gently-curving coast-line, which moves me as music moves people who understand it.
In the narrow streets on both sides of the harbour, you may come on a child with the wiry reddish-gold hair of the Norsemen, harriers of this coast, driving their murderously beaked black boats into the sandy mouths of streams, and landing to kill, burn and, as they did at the mouth of the Esk, settle. (The first name I saw in Norway was Storm, on a doorway in Horten, a small town in the Oslo Fjord.)
Looking back, I seem to see the first step towards an inevitable deterioration in the re-naming—to please an enfeebled taste—of the Saloon. This was—you could not call it a cliff-garden, since there was only grass and paths or steps twisting half way down the West cliff to a theatre and a small reading-room and, built out above the sands some fifty feet below, a broad asphalted walk, with a bandstand in the open air: ticket-holders walked up and down during the concerts (as in Antwerp) or sat about on benches and iron chairs listening to Berlioz, Auber, Rossini, Weber, Strauss, and looking at the sea. It was re-named the Spa. Then the end of the walk was glassed in, to shelter orchestra and audience from the often cold sea wind; then… but why go on?
Or, perhaps, mark the beginning of the end by the humblest of graves—that of the last of the old fishwives who came round singing vessel(wassail)-cups in December. They carried a box lined with evergreens, holding a little cheap doll, and sang in quavering voices, as harsh as gulls,
God a-rest you, merry merry gentlemen… 17
The oldest of them died well before 1914.
Before 1914, too, the pier and the narrow street under the East cliff had superb jet-shops. If you own one of the elaborate necklaces cut by Whitby jet-workers, cherish it; there will be no more: a craft started in the Bronze Age no longer pays.
Not a great way beyond the upper harbour, the hills begin to fold in; a few miles inland they rise to a wide stretch of moor, by turns fox-red, purple, bone-grey, seamed by runnels of peaty water and narrow valleys filled with foxgloves, gorse, dog-roses, thyme, bracken, and a few self-possessed villages. In my childhood the moor road from Pickering to Whitby said all there is to say about the instinct for solitude, sharper than the impulse to herd: peewits, seagulls, a few grouse and, at a certain point, the first sight, piercing the heart, of the church and the Abbey clinging to the East cliff.
Eleven years ago, an unexpected glimpse of them from a lonely road running east brought tears to my eyes before I could check them, and I had to turn away to hide from my two companions my ridiculous anguish.
If I think of anything at the end of my life it will probably be the sea, the North Sea: the milky blue of summer, harmless ripples caressing the ankles of trippers and drawing slowly out to an air of Rossini’s; the savagery of winter, waves rearing thirty feet to break against the pier lighthouse; suave, icy, gentle, enticing, treacherous, charging the air with splinters of light and the houses with exotic junk, shells from Vera Cruz, enormous dried seeds like the shrunken trophies of head-hunters, boxes and silk screens from Japan, eggshell china, elaborate French clocks, an African necklace, ostrich eggs on which I copied in oil-paint the birds and flowers from a great book of foreign birds.
Bringing in, too, a fever, a bacillus of restlessness and violence to creep into the veins. Not all veins; only those liable to catch the fever.
Chapter 4
There is a sense in which it is true that we only live in one house, one street, one town, all our lives. I have no memory of the first house I lived in, though I ought to be able to remember an afternoon in my sixth 18month when I began climbing its dangerously steep staircase on hands and knees: I set off six times, and was fetched back and whipped six times.
Have I been doing anything ever since except setting off again up those infernal stairs?
The first departure I remember was from our next house.
Whether reflected from the sea, or filtered as it crosses the moors, the light on this strip of the north-east coast has an unusual clarity. It may be this light—it could be flattered by the hand like a young horse—which sets 5 Park Terrace apart from the unnumbered houses I have lived in since. It was a terrace of Victorian houses, facing another on a lower level; from its end a very steep road, North Bank, dropped to Esk Terrace which faced, across a slope of rank grass, the upper harbour. Of what other house can I recall the satin-striped wallpaper in the upper sitting-room, the textures of its saddlebag chairs, the exact shape of the horsehair sofa in the dining-room, and the position, relative to each other, of bedrooms and attics? There was no bathroom: a wide hip-bath was filled for us in front of the kitchen range; I should be glad to forget a horrible night when I upset it.
At the farther end of the terrace, a cul-de-sac of four dull houses, moss and short fine grass pushing between its cobblestones, filled me, however often I entered it, with a voluptuous sense of strangeness—le Pays sans Nom.
This nameless country is now a few narrow streets, a harbour divided into upper and outer by a vanished swing-bridge, a naked cliff-top, the whole small enough to fit into a tiny flaw in my skull.
