A necessity upon me now – as at most times – of wandering about in my own wild way, to think … I hold my inventive capacity on the stern condition that it must master my whole life, often have complete possession of me …
Despite the many-sidedness of his life, this makes sense. His sociability by the end almost looks like a way of keeping people at a distance, while he gets on with the job.
Sleepless Nights ELIZABETH HARDWICK
THIS IS A FICTIONAL autobiography – an autobiography of just such a scrupulous, reticent, cunning kind as one might expect from Elizabeth Hardwick. All her critic’s experience and discrimination, all her scepticism about making life over into stories and people into characters (‘People do not live their biographies’) has been turned on herself. And the result is an impressively personal book that manages to fit none of the formulas.
In looking back over a life that led from Kentucky (religion and racehorses) to literary/artistic New York, and many worlds between, her point of view is dictated by a sense – a conviction, even – of her own present aloneness. This seems to have worked back on the past so that she recalls other people too as fundamentally and vividly alone, their lifelines broken into fragments.
So the book is populated by isolates, people encapsulated in their own settings and idioms from suave literary bachelors to exhausted Irish cleaning ladies, and from Billie Holiday seen in Harlem to careful, saving senior citizens in country retreats. It is a lone person’s life, outlined through friends, acquaintances and neighbours, the outer circle. As for the inner circle, the attempt to cure loneliness with love, or with marriage – that has slipped away. ‘I was then a “we,”’ she writes, referring to her marriage to Robert Lowell, doubly broken by their divorce and his death – as if to say that the ‘we’ could never have written this book, and so can’t really appear in it.
Homes seem to have turned into hotels, people into hotel-dwellers, ‘undomestic, restless, unreliable, changeable, disloyal’. And yet there is a regard, and a generosity, in her portrayal of them that make even the saddest or most brittle seem possibly heroic. Miss Cramer, for instance, once a music teacher, a snob, a genteel traveller, now a derelict in ‘dreadful freedom’, with her ‘dress of printed silk, soiled here and there with a new pattern of damage and no stockings to cover her bruised, discoloured legs’. Or a survivor of another sort, spoiled, desiccated, once-promising Alex who suddenly ‘is radical again and has the beard of a terrorist. The students like him and the faculty does not. He lives in a dreadful house and mows the lawn – starting over, poor, on time as it were.’ The breaks and new directions in people’s lives don’t at all point one way (there’s a very good section on variegated 1940s Marxists trying to cope with this, in their personal histories). Miss Hardwick is scrupulous always to tell other lives, that add up differently.
Thus, New York’s savage divorces are balanced comically (it’s often a very humorous book) with the way they arrange things in Amsterdam:–
There, first husbands and first wives are always at the same dinner parties and birthday celebrations with their second husbands and wives. Divorces and fractured loves mingled together as if the past were a sort of vinegar blending with the oil of the present.
The care she takes with this salad simile is characteristic too. It’s often said, sometimes rightly, that critics write fiction badly, because they’re hopelessly self-conscious. Elizabeth Hardwick, however, has contrived to turn her critic’s virtues – a generous interest in others, a sharp sense of the boundaries between literature and living – into novelistic assets.
There is a sense of strain in Sleepless Nights, of tight-strung, nervous energy, but that’s essential to its effect of individuality and honesty. It’s also, curiously, a hopeful book, because it suggests that aloneness, the absence or loss of intimacy, doesn’t mean the loss of humanity.
An English Madam: The Life and Work of Cynthia Payne PAUL BAILEY
‘MADAME CYN’, SHOUTED THE headlines: ‘luncheon vouchers’, ‘Streatham’. It was somehow obvious from the start that Cynthia Payne’s ‘disorderly house’ was not the usual kind: that it was, on the contrary, bizarrely orderly. As details of Cynthia’s domestic economy emerged the curious subculture of ‘Cranmore’ looked, in fact, so exactly an inversion of the banalities of middle-class existence that legal outrage seemed absurd. It wasn’t just a matter of the 10p and 15p vouchers clutched by the queue of middle-aged-to-elderly clients on the stairs (though these puzzled the police); nor of the clients’ own professions – church, civil service, politics, the bar. As Cynthia’s trial and appeal (plus her recent confessions in the News of the World) have revealed, her Streatham brothel was not a house but a Home, a place where the repressions of everyday life were reflected in a fun-house mirror. And she herself was that most English of institutions, a ‘character’. Hence Paul Bailey’s splendid study, An English Madam, which removes Cynthia (with her willing cooperation) out of the commercial underworld, and installs her in a niche in the Dickensian tradition of social fantasy.
There is after all, Mr Bailey insinuates, a certain similarity between Cynthia’s role and that of, say, Mrs Todgers in Martin Chuzzlewit. She is the landlady as comic genius loci, the ‘hostess’ restored to matronly dignity. Consider the management skills involved: the house, for instance, was cleaned by ‘Philip’, who paid Cynthia a modest sum to stand over him with a switch and complain when he (always accidentally) missed a tiny corner. Roughly the same arrangement, with ‘Rodney’, took care of the large garden. Drinks were served by the ex-Squadron leader, disguised as the butler or (judging from his photograph) Theda Bara as the mood took him. Sometimes a noted political commentator helped out as ‘Tweeny’, and was spanked by Theda Bara for answering back. ‘Gregory’ provided an advice-sheet on the apparatus of domination (‘WIG: as most dominants are blonde, a platinum wig or hairpiece worn to show below the helmet, as stated’). Once, the bank manager, a difficult customer who could never be humiliated enough, was brought to the verge of ecstasy when pelted with the contents of the hoover, which Philip had been warned to fill to bursting. More conventional clients watched blue movies, and ‘went upstairs’ when they felt like it. The party atmosphere was maintained by a system of paying (£25) on entry (hence the famous vouchers), with discounts for pensioners and the impotent. It all sounds like an inspired experiment in energy saving, with Cynthia (‘Lady Domina’ as she was known to the help, though the Squadron Leader, an old friend, called her ‘Madam Baloney’) orchestrating the follies like a benevolent deity.
The carnival spirit however, depended – as carnival spirit tends to – on the conviction, shared by Cynthia and her party-goers, that the world outside Cranmore was an alien, bleak, unaccommodating place. If Mr Bailey’s instincts as a writer led him back to the nineteenth century it must have been partly because Cranmore was a kind of time-machine, a refuge from the present where, for example, second childhoods were catered for (again very Dickensian), and where it was taken for granted that your little ways and wants might be entirely out of sync with the greyish person who’d ‘settled down’ or ‘grown old’. It’s not exactly that the set-up resembles a Victorian comedy of humours: a lot of the time it is one, and the intensity of the illusion is a measure of the futuristic bleakness, to Cranmorians, of the supposedly permissive society. What they wanted was the delirious unfreedom – queueing in their socks, with tickets, poached eggs on toast afterwards – of living in the past, not necessarily their own pasts, though some of the fantasies are very specific, but a collective daydream