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Strategy for survival
Secrets of a Woman’s Heart: The Later Life of Ivy Compton-Burnett HILARY SPURLING
‘I AM ILL AT ease with people whose lives are an open book’ – so says Felix (aptly and most deliberately named) in More Women Than Men (1933). Ivy Compton-Burnett’s happiest, wisest and most uncharitably perspicacious characters are all convinced of the virtue of concealment. As, famously, was their creator, who was apt in her later years to regale learned and inquiring fans with tea, toast, Gentleman’s Relish and advice on (say) how to mend holes in rugs. Her ‘inner’ life – the obsessive family scenarios that fed her fiction – seemed to belong, like her clothes and hairstyle, to a period before the First World War, locked away in the past.
Hilary Spurling, in her splendid biography of 10 years ago, Ivy When Young, rather shared this carefully fostered impression. The tragic passions she unravelled in the lives of the Compton-Burnetts seemed more than sufficient to account for an after-life spent, as it were, writing them up. However, as she says, there turned out to be another story to tell, with its own rather different fascination: the story of how, when ‘family life was in ruins, her last link with the only world she knew had been snapped by the death of her brother Noel on the Somme in 1916, and she herself had nearly died in the great influenza episode of 1918’, Ivy reinvented herself as a woman and as a novelist.
The title Mrs Spurling has chosen – Secrets of a Woman’s Heart – has a teasing irony about it, since what she’s doing this time is exploring secretiveness itself as a strategy for survival. It is, as she shows, by evolving ‘layer by layer the extraordinary protective armour’ that Ivy became so subtle and radical a writer.
The relationship with Margaret Jourdain which sustained her, and which ended only with Margaret’s death in 1951, seems to have held no ‘secrets’ of the sexual sort (they adopted each other, they weren’t lovers). Only, shockingly, it was based on the assumption that living in any ambitious or indeed ‘normal’ way was hideously dangerous. To start with, Ivy played the invalid – there were ‘months, even years, when she lay about the flat eating sweets, reading Wilkie Collins and silently watching Margaret’s callers’ before producing Pastors and Masters in 1925. They perfected what one might call, travestying F. R. Leavis, an irreverent closedness before life. Not in the social sense (their tea parties, like the Mad Hatter’s, were never-ending) but in the sense of an offensive neutrality (‘we are neuters’) in the midst of the permanent state of hostilities represented by marriage and the family.
Like Ivy, Margaret Jourdain was a veteran of that battlefield. Her vicarage family was large, proud, almost penniless and wretchedly quarrelsome, though full of energy and talent. Three elder sisters were teachers (Eleanor eventually became Principal of St Hugh’s College, Oxford), Margaret herself became an eminent historian of furniture and the domestic arts, brother Frank was a founding father of British ornithology, and Philip was a distinguished mathematician though afflicted, like the youngest sister, Milly, with multiple sclerosis, thought to be hereditary.
Mrs Spurling, who is especially good on this kind of thing, traces their histories in some detail: Margaret’s early poetical leanings, suppressed in favour of furniture; the family’s disgust at Philip’s marriage; Eleanor’s intrigues and forced retirement; Milly’s lucid poems on her own decay. The final score is daunting:
Margaret died, like her four sisters, unmarried, and though the five brothers each took a wife … only Frank had children: they were born before the disease affecting Philip and Milly had declared itself fully, and all three died … without issue, so that by the middle of the century it was clear that the Jourdains like the Compton-Burnetts – families of 10 and 13 children respectively – drew the line at reproducing themselves.
Margaret – formidable, mocking, protective – had had other protégés, though none so (eventually), successful as Ivy. Though it’s clearly not the case, as she once confided to a strange man from Gollancz on a bus, that she was the real author (‘I write all her books’), her strength and her acid wit helped stake out Ivy’s special ‘no-man’s-land’. As did her 1920s Country Life set, which included Firbankian figures like Ernest Thesiger, cousin to the Viceroy of India, actor, narcissist and needleman (nothing was more terrible, wrote Beverley Nichols, than to see Ernest ‘sitting under the lamplight doing this embroidery’), or interior decorator Herman Schrijver (whom Margaret referred to as ‘Ivy’s Jewish friend’) who bet Ivy she couldn’t name one heterosexual male among their acquaintance. The bleak, unillusioned tone of the novels was, as Mrs Spurling points out, part forged in this heretical set, for all ‘Ivy’s old-world style’.
In fact, it matched the times increasingly well. As Edward Sackville-West wrote in 1946, ‘Apart from physical violence and starvation, there is no feature of the totalitarian regime which has not its counterpart in the atrocious families depicted in these books.’ Or, as Mrs Spurling more moderately puts it, ‘the moral economy of Ivy’s books had always been organised on a war footing’. After the war her fame burgeoned. People at the tea parties included Angus Wilson, Nathalie Sarraute, Mary McCarthy … and Ivy perfected her techniques of evasion.
She did, however (especially after Margaret’s death), unbend to some of the younger writers who sought her out, like Robert Liddell, Elizabeth Taylor and Kay Dick, who provide evidence of her kindness and generosity as well as her more ‘frightening’ habits, like interspersing conversations with muttered asides to imaginary characters. In 1967, two years before her death, she was made a Dame, which it’s hard not to see as a tribute to her tea-table persona, as much as to her writing. She had kept her counsel; her atrocities were committed in the books. Hilary Spurling’s brilliant and meticulous account – studded with scones, sticky with honey – is a study in secret survivalism.
Honest woman
Selections from George Eliot’s Letters EDITED BY GORDON S. HAIGHT
GEORGE ELIOT’S PERSONAL LIFE is one of the grand anomalies of Victorian culture. She ought to have been an outsider, a Bohemian, a George like George Sand, whereas of course she made her way to the centre of things, to become the lion of her day and its literary conscience.
Boston Brahmin Charles Eliot Norton, nervously contemplating paying a call on her at ‘The Priory’ in 1869, described her position with such comic, twitching refinement that it’s worth quoting the whole passage:
She is an object of great interest and great curiosity to society here. She is not received in general society, and the women who visit her are either so emancipée as not to mind what the world says about them, or have no social position to maintain. Lewes dines out a good deal, and some of the men with whom he dines go without their wives to his house on Sundays. No one whom I have heard speak, speaks in other than terms of respect of Mrs Lewes, but the common feeling is that it will not do.
However, as you can tell from his tone (he protests altogether too much), he managed to transcend ‘common feeling’ and not only go along to one of ‘Mrs Lewes’s Sundays’ but to take Mrs Norton too. George Eliot’s enormous critical prestige and popular success had overborne the old story that years before someone called Mary Ann Evans openly set up house with George Henry Lewes when he couldn’t divorce his wife. But it wasn’t just that: she had a special authority precisely because people came to her on her own terms, as an author, which they wouldn’t have done anything like so much if she had been ‘received in general society’. She was condemned – and freed – to live in a world more concentratedly literary than that of any of her female contemporaries.
In the letters, selected by Gordon S. Haight from his monumental nine-volume edition (1954–78), you can see the effects of this. Instead of (say) Jane Austen’s network of family ties, here there’s a surrogate family of colleagues, peers and (latterly) admirers. She did salvage a few old friends, and she developed a motherly relationship with Lewes’s sons, but for the most part these are personal bonds created around the writing, and the warmth and respect it generated.
She had, as people remarked, a talent for friendship, and apart from a few early, preachy and pretentious letters addressed to school-friends and an ex-teacher from her evangelical days, she’s a generous, concerned, thoroughly unselfish correspondent. She even worries about the egoism of not wanting to seem an egoist: ‘… my anxiety not to appear what I should hate to be … is surely not an ignoble egoistic anxiety …’ And this is the way she hides herself. Or rather, the way she contrives to remain pseudonymous, removed from the mere marketplace of prejudices and opinions and controversy. This must have been part of the secret of her impressive ‘rightness’ – that she questioned conventional rigidities less by what she said than by what she was.
The other side of this is that there is always – nearly always – an embargo on intimacy. Only one letter here reveals the passionate and needy self she kept to herself, the woman who found fulfilment with Lewes, and it is, ironically enough, a letter not to him but to that cold fish Herbert Spencer with whom she had fallen horribly in love in pre-Lewes days:
I want to know if you can assure me that you will not forsake me, that you will always be with me as much as you can … I find it impossible to contemplate life under any other conditions … I have struggled – indeed I have – to renounce everything and be entirely unselfish, but I find myself utterly unequal to it … I suppose no other woman ever before wrote such a letter as this – but I am not ashamed.
One is grateful that Spencer was cad enough to preserve this explosive, desperate stuff, because it enables one to measure something of the achievement of the creation of ‘George Eliot,’ the person she became with Lewes. As do, more indirectly, the letters to friends and publishers in which he figures as Muse, critic and go-between, her constant and loving companion.
Their union (too close for letters) is the unspoken theme of the collection, the necessary condition for the warmth and sanity she is able to summon on topics as diverse as women’s suffrage, table-rapping or the Franco-Prussian war. Their mutual solitude, as she knew, was what enabled her range and freedom as a writer. ‘I prefer excommunication,’ she wrote to one of her closest women friends, Barbara Bodichon, who had suggested that perhaps Lewes might be able to get a dubious divorce abroad. ‘I have no earthly thing I care for, to gain by being brought within the pale of people’s personal attention, and I have many things to care for that I should lose – my freedom from petty worldly torments … and that isolation which really keeps my charity warm …
Not that ‘petty wordly torments’ are lacking. The letters are splendidly domestic in their running commentary on the myriad, wracking changes of the weather and touchingly ordinary and wifely – and ominous – in their concern with Lewes’s fragile health. His death (in 1878) is marked by a wordless gap, as though she ceased to exist for weeks on end. When she comes back she seems stunned, and only recovers herself when she can replace him (it’s hard to see it in any other light) with their young friend, her devoted admirer, John Cross.
Their marriage was more shocking, in its way, than the years with Lewes had been. But as Anne Ritchie (Thackeray’s daughter, who had herself married a man 17 years her junior) wrote: ‘She is an honest woman, and goes in with all her might for what she is about.’ It’s this honesty of need, perhaps, that makes her so eloquent an advocate of what she calls, in one letter, the ‘impersonal life’, the life that we identify with the George Eliot of the novels:
I try to delight in the sunshine that will be when I shall never see it any more. And I think it is possible for this sort of impersonal life to attain great intensity – possible for us to gain much more independence, than is usually believed, of the small bundle of facts that make our own personality.
The girl from Mrs Kelly’s
Beloved Emma: The Life of Emma Lady Hamilton FLORA FRASER
EMMA HAMILTON WAS ENDLESSLY gossiped about, in every tone imaginable from awe to contempt. The best quick summing-up seems to have been Lady Elgin’s: ‘She is indeed a Whapper!’ This was in 1799, in Emma’s hour of triumph, when a lifetime’s posing in classical attitudes paid off on the stage of world history, in her affair with Nelson. She was a heroine, larger than life, sublimely improbable and very possibly absurd. Flora Fraser’s biography, which mostly lets Emma and her contemporaries speak for themselves, produces an impression of a generous giantess, a woman constructed from the outside in.
Romney’s portraits of her in her teens already show her as somehow on a different scale from ordinary sitters. As of course she was – she had no social identity to speak of, and could impersonate goddesses partly because she was ‘nobody’, or worse. The first extraordinary thing about her is that she survived at all in the world of three dimensions, that she wasn’t just a vanishing ‘model’ sucked down into poverty and whoredom. It seems (the early years are very murky) that her beauty was so striking, as well as classically fashionable, that she brought out the Pygmalion in people.
Sir Harry Fetherstonhaugh plucked her out of Mrs Kelly’s brothel (a ‘nunnery’ in the style of the brothel in Fanny Hill) and passed her on to his friend Charles Greville, a dilettante and collector who set her up in domestic seclusion in the Edgware Road and began the process of educating her into a largeness of spirit that would match her splendid physique. She was a collector’s item, ‘a modern piece of virtu’ as he proclaimed her (‘ridiculous man’ says Ms Fraser with unusual sternness), and he watched over his investment. It was he who introduced her to Romney; it was he who, when his finances became chronically embarrassed, passed her on to a more kindly and civilised collector, his uncle, the British ambassador in Naples, Sir William Hamilton.
This part of the story is always fascinating. Greville seems to have conned Emma into believing that her trip to Naples was part of her education, while to Sir William (recently widowed) he represented it as a mutually beneficial arrangement – he would be free to look for an heiress, his uncle would become the possessor of an enviable objet, who was also pleasantly domesticated and quite likeable in bed.
Greville is here a study in himself, the quintessential dilettante—‘the whole art of going through life tolerably is to keep oneself eager about anything’. He also seems to have been hoping to distract Sir William from a second marriage, since he was his uncle’s heir. In the event (served him right) Sir William became so attached to Emma that he made her Lady Hamilton, and forced English society to acknowledge her, though at the convenient distance of Naples.
Emma’s injured and statuesque innocence throughout the whole episode is (again) extraordinary. For a girl from Mrs Kelly’s she had already come a long way, and now she moved from a heroic passion of resentment against Greville (‘If I was with you, I would murder you and myself boath’) to a fervent attachment to Sir William in the grandest, most unhesitating style.
To the astonishment of her protectors, she took herself seriously: the classical ‘Attitudes’ in which Sir William perfected her (and which she performed for the company after dinner) were reflected in an awesome personal straightforwardness that made people accept her as a brilliant exception, outside the rules. Greville had written to Sir William that she was ‘capable of anything grand, masculine or feminine’; and Sir William, justifying his marriage, described her as ‘an extraordinary being’ – ‘It has often been remarked that a reformed rake makes the best husband, Why not vice versa?’ Visitors to Naples saw in her classical antiquities brought to life. This is Goethe, one of the after-dinner audience:
The spectator … sees what thousands of artists would have liked to express realised before him in movements and surprising transformations … in her [Sir William] has found all the antiquities, all the profiles of Sicilian coins, even the Apollo Belvedere.
And so the stage was set for her apotheosis as Nelson’s consort. Here the sublime teeters on the edge of the ridiculous: he came along only just in time (she was getting dangerously large in her thirties) and few observers could quite take the real life enactment of a passion on the Olympian scale. Spiteful Mrs Trench was only one of many unbelievers – ‘She is bold, forward, coarse, assuming, and vain. Her figure is colossal … Lord Nelson is a little man, without any dignity.’
Suddenly she is a Juno lumbering among sceptics, her grandeur turned to grossness like one of Swift’s simple-minded Brobdingnagians. With Nelson’s death, her claims to heroic stature fell away, and the story leads with a sad inevitability to the boozy death in Calais, embittered further by the clause in Nelson’s will which bequeathed her (as though she were indeed a great work of art) to the nation.
Flora Fraser doesn’t moralise over the ending – not even over the nastiest part of it, Emma’s failure to acknowledge her daughter by Nelson, Horatia, who watched her die, repelled and mystified. ‘Why she should so fascinate is difficult to answer’ is the nearest we get to a conclusion.
Ms Fraser lays out the evidence in a conscientious, noncommittal fashion that reminds one that she’s a third-generation biographer, following in the footsteps of mother, and of grandmother Elizabeth Longford, and so confident (perhaps a touch too confident) that 200-year-old gossip will prove sufficiently riveting. But she has chosen her subject well – deeper speculation, one suspects, would be out of place with a character so entirely public property from the start.
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