For the Time Being (31 page)

The task that Penrose set himself was daunting: to reassemble scraps of yellowing papers into a whole, and to edit not only the
photographs themselves, but
details
from a negative, so that a look of joy, of grief, of agony, explodes timelessly on to the page. With the disaster of Bosnia and Serbia now upon us, it is all hideously contemporary.

Lee Miller's stubbornness, her skill, observation and compassion, her simple, yet passionate use of words which she sent to her admirable editor, Audrey Withers, constantly astonish and hold one. Remember, these items were stuck between advertisements for lipsticks and face creams. They still hit between the eyes. From photographing gilded creatures in chiffon and taffeta it seems to have been a simple thing for Miller to move to truckloads of huddled dead at Dachau, a mayor's family sprawled in suicide in his parlour in Leipzig, or the first explosion of a napalm bomb on Saint-Malo. She was in it up to the hilt.

Not all was grief and destruction. Joy was there too, in the extraordinary liberation of Paris. I was there that amazing weekend in August 1945, and she has caught it exactly. A gaudy butterfly of joyous hysteria, precisely pinned down for all time:

Paris has gone mad. The long, graceful, dignified avenues were crowded with flags and filled with screaming, cheering, pretty people. Girls, bicycles, kisses and wine, and round the corner sniping, a bursting grenade and a burning tank. The bullet holes in the windows were like jewels, the barbed wire in the boulevards a new decoration …

And so it was. Exactly. She was able to find ‘lost' friends from that glittering circle, denied her by four desperate years. Here again was Picasso, chattering, laughing, shocked only by Dali's collaborationist behaviour in Spain; here were Aragon, Dora Maar, Eluard, secure, damaged but alive; above all, Colette, still in her cluttered room in the Palais Royal, fit, gruff, amused, curious for news, dazzling with vibrant life even though confined to her couch.

Perhaps for Lee Miller, certainly for me as the reader, Colette perfectly symbolizes the ultimate triumph of the Liberation and the now certain ending of the war, and victory. Miller caught the image in the form of an ageing French woman of letters, alone, eyes
hooded in private thought, holding fast to her pen. Caught it as surely and as clearly as she had fixed the deaths, the brutalities, the destruction and the supreme image of victory.

Daily Telegraph,
25 July 1992

Rituals of Dinner
by Margaret Visser (Viking)

Margaret Visser has written a fascinating book on a fairly ordinary – or so I thought – subject. She starts 6,000 years ago, when we were chomping our way delightedly through the bones of our neighbours; cracked skulls and sucked marrow-bones testify to that.

The early Spanish conquerors had a fearful time when they became caught up with the Aztecs, who ate their enemies with gusto: ‘The flesh was cooked with peppers and tomatoes, served up upon bowls of maize …' The thighs were the particularly delicious joints. Montezuma was offered one from each corpse. Waste not, want not. I know that in South-East Asia, during the War, the Japanese served crisp little appetizers with the drinks in the Officers' Mess. Cubes of American pilots' buttocks. So what is new?

But, all that aside, this is a study of the ritual of eating, of how and why we eat. It considers not only the etiquette of the table – pretty useless in this day of Deep-Frozen and Take-Away – but also why we sit at one, why the rules were made. It is full of very exciting little ‘did you know?'s

I mean, did you know that the phrase ‘licking into shape' was coined because mother bears, seen at a distance cleaning their newborn cubs with their tongues, were thought to be, literally, licking them into the shape of a bear?

Did you know that paintings of
The Last Supper,
with everyone sitting on stools at a long table, are absolutely wrong for the period? Jews normally sat on the floor around trays of food: a banquet, which the Last Supper probably was, was taken lying down in the Roman fashion. That would have made a very different composition.

If this sort of stuff amuses you, you are in for a treat. Mrs Visser has done her research quite brilliantly. She describes exuberantly the gigantic feasts of the Romans, the Chinese and our own Edwardians. Manners, naturally, like our appetites, have altered. We no longer wipe our greasy fingers in the hair of the waiter (slave) who attends us. We may be tempted, but napkins are now provided. Their use is explored here too. One leaves them on the table at the end. Never on the chair or seat. That implies you will not return to the table.

‘A man,' it is said, ‘may pass muster by dressing well … sustain himself tolerably in conversation, but if he is not perfectly
au fait,
dinner will betray him.' Think on that the next time you spoon cold baked beans from a tin over the sink.

Mrs Visser writes with the greatest elegance about the annoying human problems which can beset us at table, from ‘snot' to ‘vomiting and even to ‘farting'. She scorns nothing.

It is impossible not to be charmed by a writer who can say of Erasmus that ‘he firmly condemns people who, in the name of courtesy, demand that involuntary misdemeanours of the body should be stifled'. Her book is chock-a-block with such delights.

Daily Telegraph,
5 September 1992

Sin: A Novel
by Josephine Hart (Chatto)

One person emerges with honour from this soggy, breathy, chubby little book, heavy with fey undertones. The designer has managed to arrange thirty chapters into 160 pages, set it in Bembo and given it a glossy little
Harpers & Queen
cover. It measures 7½ins, by 5 ins, by ½in thick (minus the cardboard covers) and is yours for
£
11.95. It is as plump as a bookie's wallet stuffed with IOUs.

Amateur Night in Dixie. The script is strictly a 'John and Marcia' deal. Each character calls the others by name at every exchange. Married for thirty years, rolling about in a bed, just sitting by the fire. It makes no difference: it is ‘John and Marcia' every time. They talk ‘laughingly', they ‘smile back' at each other; one waits for one of them to ‘dimple'. They do not. Thank goodness. But their eyes ‘beat' people down.

The story? There is one, of a sort. Imagine Mrs Danvers with a saintly cousin Elizabeth whom she hates and longs to destroy. We are never absolutely sure why. Mrs Danvers is called ‘Ruth' and she is dark (natch), the saintly cousin is blond. Of course, Ruth is voluptuous, with eyebrows which ‘wing themselves across her brow'. Elizabeth paints skies eternally and smiles ‘gently' at everyone in sight. They have adolescent sons, one with asthma. The family house is called Lexington, it has a lake. We get that info on page 17, so watch out, they
swim
! Plot thickens.

No chapter will stretch you: Chapter One has thirty lines, Chapter 22 is composed of school reports, so the author is saved the business of describing the adolescents. You even get a facsimile signature of the Headmaster. I do not know why. The narrator is not very good at describing anyone but herself with her wing-like eyebrows; very good at clothes – flowing skirts and silken shifts, etc. Oblique on
sex ‘As the nakedness moved towards me I remembered the choreography.' Wow. This is her pallid husband in the marriage bed. Not a hairy stoker in the boiler-room. She has a habit of anguished despair: ‘Silently, I screamed around the room.' Can one? Or, nibbling away at sex again: ‘I went to the bathroom to prepare for my husband's return.' Golly. What
were
they about to do? Anyway, Ruth is out to get Elizabeth with ‘A small silver hammer of exquisite design'. Why not any old hammer?

Very recently a highly considered writer packed three quarters of her entire life, plus lovers, husband and son, into a detailed description of high tea in Edinburgh. The details we must await until ‘next time'. It seems to be a fashion to write less for more. However
Sin
has the grace to finish thus:

These questions long engage me. Do you have answers? Please. Please answer me, as I leave you now.

As I leave you.

As I leave.

Well, dear, you won't quite do, frankly. This is utter tosh. Sorry.

Daily Telegraph,
19 September 1992

Miranda Seymour's magnificent biography,
Ottoline Morrell: Life on the Grand Scale
(Hodder), carefully, and with affection, unravels the tangled skeins of lies, rumours, gossip and sneers which have been woven into a cruel tapestry by the chirruping, bantering, buns-and-cocoa set of Bloomsbury, to reveal in exquisite detail a generous, loving, funny eccentric, and an amazingly brilliant woman. You have not read a better biography for years.

Daily Telegraph,
25 November 1992

Sacheverell Sitwell: Splendours and Miseries
by Sarah Bradford (Sinclair-Stevenson)

The first time I saw John Singer Sargent's family portrait of the Sitwells in the drawing-room at the family seat, Renishaw (1900), I was stunned. The facts that I was, at the time, a callow youth and that Sargent even then was considered to be a mere theatrical painter not remotely in the class of Gainsborough, Rubens, Reynolds, or even Vigée-Lebrun, fit only to paint the most glittering portraits of the rich and famous, did not trouble me at all. I was enraptured by the splendour and magnificence of this group who for me epitomized the grace, elegance, serenity, grandeur and power of Edwardian Society.

They still do to this day, even though I now know the painting to be a complete fantasy, and, after this immensely detailed and diligently researched book, a distorted vision.

No one on the canvas is exactly what he or she seems to be. The tall, benign father (dressed, rather oddly, for shooting), a protective arm on his scarlet-gowned daughter, was known in the family as ‘Ginger'; feared, disliked, arrogant and parsimonious, he was, to my mind anyway, halfway to madness. The slender, elegant Lady Ida, apparently dressed for an evening gala but wearing an afternoon hat, was equally dotty; so well bred that she was ‘brought up to be professionally helpless', she eventually went to jail for problems with money and loans. She quite liked whisky, too.

The two tumbling children on the floor, with their golden curls, frilly skirts, sailor suits and pug dog, became brilliant men of letters, Osbert and Sacheverell. The slender, adoring, scarlet-clad daughter was Edith. And there you have the holy trinity of poets.

An ancient family, this, who fortuitously had discovered ‘minerals'
beneath their Derbyshire acres. They were rich, but haunted always by the spectre of poverty. Like most very rich people.

The painting is simple, clear, uncluttered. Five elegant figures, a fine commode, a fragment of tapestry. The story is told; one needs no more. However, Sarah Bradford has to go deeper than the canvas to get at the full text.
Sacheverell Sitwell
is an excellent work, living up fully to its subtitle,
Splendours and Miseries,
but it is a colossal clutter of names, places and events, so that it reads like a cross between the
A-to-KDirectory
and ‘Jennifer's Diary'. But what is the biographer to do, dealing, as she has to here, with a brilliant family of aristocrats, poseurs, aesthetes and, often enough, dilettantes, and a family who knew everyone of note in the Arts and Society, were extensively travelled, and had seen everywhere from Bond Street to Budapest? They were copious letter-writers, kept detailed diaries, lived full and complicated lives with utter abandon.

From the group Mrs Bradford chooses ‘Sachie', the youngest, the cleverest and certainly best-looking. To find him, both writer and reader have to rummage about in this gigantic bran-tub, and Bradford has succeeded pretty well, isolating him, almost, in his glittering apparel. However, he appears to me a rather tiresome creature, spoiled, arrogant, vain and quite unaware of ‘ordinary life'. He raced through his own, constantly falling in and out of love with almost anything and anyone who was aesthetic and beautiful or precious. Not for him Mr Marx's masses. He, and his life, were too rarefied and above the mainstream of ordinariness.

For example, wars rather irritated him. When he was caught up in them at all. In 1917 he wrote ‘… if I am meddled & muddled much more … I shall really become a maniac … one is only 20 or 25 once – and one does not forgive these years being spoilt Quite so. However, he did not have long to wait until he and his siblings would startle and amaze London Society with their literary brilliance.

The trio were wildly famous very soon. Sachie's poetry was known worldwide, Osbert wrote beautifully, Edith made the best of the very little beauty she had by turning herself adroitly into a figure of (some said absurd, others admirable) eccentricity, and
they were firmly established for the rest of their lives. No mean achievement.

Sachie married a banker's daughter from Canada; they managed to live together, and love each other, until their deaths. Osbert married well, but finally raced off to Italy with a male love, and Edith discovered the delights of alcohol: in 1961 Sachie found out that her daily tally was ‘a double-brandy for breakfast – about 1 bottle of brandy in all every day; 2 bottles of wine, and several martinis!!!'

Sachie survived well into old age. It is almost impossible to pull him from the bran-tub unencumbered, so deeply was he smothered in the flour of his siblings and disastrous parents. However, Sarah Bradford has dusted him down for us and made us aware that so splendid and civilized a figure could never remotely exist in the Ratner Republic which certain sections of the press today advocate for our future. We will find no Sitwells in that world to embellish our lives with beautiful writing, poetry and grace. Fortunately, we can still read their works to add a little lustre to the shabby-dog days we now inhabit.