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The Pram in the Hall – Enid Bagnold Writer and Mother

gaudier-brzeskaA talk I gave recently at the October Gallery – The annual Persephone Lecture

I have never thought it a particular advantage to know the person you are writing about. You will have known them at a particular time or in a particular role. Above all, for a child to write about a parent seems to me a recipe for disaster – unless you state from the outset this is a very one sided memoir. Children are often the least useful witnesses a biographer can find. Yet, try as we might to be objective, I think biographers too should plead guilty to subjectivity, to seeing their subject through a particular prism. Perhaps they lived in the same village, studied at the same college but in particular I believe that what we really cannot shed is the age we are at time of writing. However much I think I can imagine a particular emotion, or I am sure that I know what a particular experience must have felt like, I want to take this opportunity – openly and unequivocally – to admit my failure. Only now, having hit 60 myself and living through an age-obsessed time when the secret of eternal youth is promised from many quarters, do I really understand what Enid Bagnold – not exactly a vain woman but one who cared about her looks – meant when she wrote that one of the few counterbalancing factors for the pain of growing old was that, thanks to fading eyesight, she couldn’t really see all those wrinkles and grey hairs that worried her so much in anticipation – (although true to her novelist’s calling, exaggerating to make her point – she is not being wholly truthful even here as of course magnifying mirrors were around in the 1980’s.) But I can now at least understand why she wanted to have a face lift (and how radical was that in the 1970’s) and I admire her honesty and truthfulness about discussing this far more today than I could possibly have 30 years ago.

And here she is as Gaudier Brzeska saw her on the eve of WW One

So, I am immensely grateful to Persephone for giving me this second chance to look at Bagnold thirty years on. And of course to Faber Finds for republishing my biography. I’m relieved to say I haven’t found a different person or a different story. But the focus, if I were writing the book today, might be slightly sharper here or hazier there. The emphasis on different aspects of her life might be weightier here and pruned there. Actually I don’t think it would be a better book (I would say that wouldn’t I?) But I now understand in a wholly empathetic way why, in her 60’s and 70’s, she was still burning with ambition to write a successful play. I remember, with shame, a feeling in my 20’s that when I reached 60 I’d be happy to stay at home quietly knitting whereas in fact my desire to travel, to meet people, to achieve and to experience life is not only unabated it is in some ways greater as I am acutely aware of the limited time left and…and I can see why it risks appearing frankly unbecoming in someone of my years just as it did for Enid.

No, I think, or at least hope, that writing the biography of EB in my late 20’s gave me a youthful enthusiasm which suited my subject and gave me a perspective on her young days and early married life I might not have had now. I was rooting for her when the boyfriend didn’t work out (after all it wasn#39;t so far away for me that I could still remember those rejections, sharp longings and early fumblings) but most of all I deeply identified…and I say this fully aware of strictures by that great biographer Richard Holmes that self-identity with one’s subject is the first crime of a biographer…with her passionate desire to have babies and having had them to have more of them and then to be the best mother there had ever been. I understood the passionate and oh so unexpected flood of love when her first golden-haired child arrived – love neither she, nor I, knew we possessed. And then she found it a second time for her equally beautiful son – just as I was to do. My pigeon pair as I learned. The Squire, her truly great novel not just about motherhood but about what she believed it meant to be a woman, springs from that deep well of unconditional love. Enid wanted to go on and on, bringing up such treasures.

The Clifford Sisters for Femail Writer Enid Bagnold picturedSo let’s go back a bit. Who was Enid Bagnold? In her own sparkling and idiosyncratic autobiography (entitled I am tempted to say with no artifice but of course there was artifice aplenty) ‘Enid Bagnold’s autobiography’, published in 1969, she writes that she was driven to explore family history because of her fascination that “sperm had been shot across two centuries to arrive at me”. Such an earthy – and original – simile was typical of her writing (she once described her own prose as ‘beautiful vomit’) but what she is also revealing is an intense fascination with herself. Not unusual for ‘a born writer!’ as she called herself. When I came to research her biography I found all her notebooks and scrapbooks were embellished with directions/ guidance for a putative biographer – me! Pictures of the Franco-Romanian princes, Antoine and Emmanuel Bibesco, for example, princes who had been close friends of Proust, were annotated with helpful comments like ‘this is the brother who committed suicide’ or ‘here we are visiting a church together’!

But Antoine Bibesco, the man she always adored, was never going to marry the plump and rather jolly Miss Enid Bagnold, daughter of Colonel Arthur Bagnold, a man who was as much engineer as soldier, and the former Miss Ethel Alger. They were, as her parents regularly reminded her, gentlefolk, and had been for generations. Enid was constantly testing her parents either by her requests to paint nude models when she studied with Sickert (turned down) or her request to visit the old roué journalist Frank Harris, her editor as well as lover, when he was in Brixton prison – agreed to “because people of breeding do not abandon a friend in need,” her father told her. Read More

Confused in Berlin

Train Station memorial

Berlin Gleis 17

A weekend in cold and wet Berlin has left me confused.

Can you (should you) make art out of suffering and if so what is appropriate where and who should pay?

Why do I find tourist maps offering tours of Jewish Berlin, tours of Nazi Berlin, tours of ‘fun time’ Berlin offensive … Are we doing the murdered Jews any favours by offering tours of a destroyed civilisation?

Should there ever be a time when tourists will come to Germany and not think about the holocaust that tried to wipe out the once flourishing Jewish presence there?

Well, actually, I don’t have any answers to these questions but they have all been refusing to lie low these last few days. When I looked vacantly at someone today as she asked how my trip had been I explained: I was still feeling rather churned up after my visit.

Oh Berlin is one of my favourite places, she riposted. The Berliners did so much to try and stop the Nazis you know…the big synagogue survived because a brave Berliner prevented the mob …

Stop, I said. I did not want anyone else telling me what to think. But perhaps she was right.

Were there in fact dozens of good Germans rendered powerless by fear and the need to survive who were merely forced into inaction by a tiny minority?  Some 55,000 Berlin Jews died in concentration camps, but approximately 80,000 escaped.  A visit to the small brush workshop run by Otto Weidt for blind Jewish workers moved me most of all partly because it seemed hardly to have changed. Surviving letters, yellow stars and photographs were in simple display cases the tables for the machines with which he made the brushes needed by the German army were in the places they had always been and the wooden floorboards in the secret room still so creaky that my heart lurched. I came as near as I possibly could in the prosperous 21st century to  imagining what it must have been like to hide in a tiny airless room entirely dependent on the kindness of strangers for a mouthful of food, news, clothes everything. A network verging on a hundred brave people was apparently, sometimes necessary to save one life bearing in mind all the bribes and blackmail and lying involved.

This room in a graffiti-rich, little renovated courtyard in former East Germany was an extraordinary survival with no artifice about it. But was it really: “One of many places in Berlin where non-Jews risked their lives to save their Jewish neighbours,” as one guide book stated?

Germany has for years been the most contrite of nations, admitting its guilt in numerous ways and welcoming Jews back.  Berlin today is a vibrant and growing community with thousands of Jews mostly from Russia and Israel now choosing once again to settle in Germany.

You can’t walk around this city without stumbling on a brass plate in any of the cobbled streets Stolpersteine indicating who once lived there and where they were murdered (yes, murdered no soft talking references to dying here) It is a private initiative paid for by anyone who cares, not the government – local or national. But this too has its opponents …should you be trampling on these souls, as some critics complain or since they have already been killed, what more can you do to harm them? Several of the monuments are on steps and one of the most moving for me was a cartouche of names visible on the upward tread of stairs in a once Jewish quarter indicating names and places of abode.  It is termed an installation, a term which I liked less and less…this can never be art. But alongside the steps and at the top are mirrors acting as an extra reminder. You cannot exit this particular U Bahn station without noticing something.

But by the time I came to Daniel Liebeskind’s Jewish museum I was starting to feel uncomfortable. It is magnificent and clever but it is very definitely art and, what’s more, art subtly manipulating your responses. Why are the objects displayed in a cabinet with a circular glass surround?  The shape of the building is interesting as it traces a path leading to the Stair of Continuity, then up to and through the exhibition spaces of the museum, emphasizing the continuum of history. The second leads out of the building and into the Garden of Exile and Emigration, remembering those who were forced to leave Berlin. The third leads to a dead end — the Holocaust Void.

The Holocaust Void is cold and empty and unpleasant. But I left it of my free will after five minutes.

I think Berlin and those who have planned some of the memorials have on the whole done an impossible job with tact, sensitivity and feeling. I was moved by the small signs of a phone a pet or a loaf of bread placed on posts in the former Jewish quarter to remind inhabitants of the daily torments suffered by their erstwhile neighbours prior to deportation  (After the Nuremberg Laws they were allowed none of these) And surely few can fault the way German history is taught, even to the very young, actively fostering greater understanding in schools, a point movingly made in the TV interview with Judith (When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit) Kerr this week to mark her 90th birthday. Her father was a leading theatre critic and Nazi opponent and her family escaped Berlin swiftly in 1933. Although her parents never fully recovered from the pain of exile she and her brother were resilient, looking on it as something of an adventure. Her book is now a set text in German schools as the film showed. It also filmed her walking along Gleis (platform) 17 of the Grunewald station. Here the memorials are devastatingly plain and simple, the message unadorned. The numbers and dates of Jewish deportees have been carved at the edge of the train tracks where unknowing Jews stood before deportations to Auschwitz, Minsk, Theresienstadt or Sachsenhausen. Fittingly this memorial has been paid for by the train company which profited from the human traffic.

Kerr stood there in 2013 pondering what fate would have unquestioningly befallen her family had they not moved out as fast as they did. All of us who have enjoyed her books owe her brave parents a huge debt.

What Brighton means to me

One of the most powerful images from the Vienna Portraits exhibition currently at the National Gallery is by Egon Schiele of himself and his pregnant wife dying of Spanish ‘flu. He was to succumb to it himself three days later, aged just 28, later described by the Nazis as a ‘degenerate’ artist. I cannot empty my mind of this picture and the thought of all that lost brilliance. Yet in an exhibition where death is continually hovering and suicide ever present,  it’s impossible to know how would he have dealt with all that was to follow after 1918?

Between 50 and 100 million people across the world died of what became known as Spanish ‘flu.  One of the most shocking aspects was the way it could sometimes claim its victims in a day and was especially virulent among the previously healthy young.  After waking up with a shivery twinge, victims might find by lunchtime that their skin had changed colour to a vivid purple and a few hours later they were dead, sometimes choking on thick scarlet jelly that suddenly clogged the lungs. The pandemic has been described as “the greatest medical holocaust in history” and may have killed more people than the Black Death killed in a century.

I have often thought of this pandemic as my own aunt, my father’s older sister, Irene, died aged 12 in 1918. My father’s family had moved to Brighton hoping this would be safer than London because of the new terror of Germany’s doodlebugs. But Brighton, being a port, was in fact more dangerous as the disease was thought to have been carried ashore by travellers. My grandfather, a Lithuanian Jewish immigrant who had been in England less than 20 years, never recovered from the loss of a favourite daughter and gave up on joy and God.  They were buried with my aunt in a Brighton cemetery.

Brighton can never for me be simply a seaside resort.  I have always known that my father was deeply scarred from the loss of the sister he barely knew when he was six and the consequent suffering endured by his family for whom emotions must have been ‘unexploded’ and so I relished a book which looked at the town twenty years later during World War Two.  Alison MacLeod’s  Unexploded is partly about attitudes to Jews and immigrants in Britain at the end of the thirties but it is also a deeply felt examination of repressed emotions waiting to explode as of course they do in the course of the novel. The background history is fascinating, never intrusive, but there is plenty to learn here about politics and history of art. For example Picasso’s Guernica is on show at the Whitechapel Gallery from December 1938 to mid-January 1939, the hero, Otto,  is a ‘degenerate’ artist and Virginia Woolf, whose suicide frames the book, enters to give sparsely attended lectures. I shan’t tell the story but it’s a powerful, often painful, read and Evelyn and her defective husband Geoffrey are utterly believable protagonists.

One other book I have read this week is Robert Harris’s brilliant thriller,  An Officer and a Spy. In this retelling of the Dreyfus affair virulent anti-Semitism in France is overt, barely repressed and with consequences which have shuddered down the ages. Even those of us who thought we knew this tale cannot fail to see it through fresh eyes.

 

 

April 23rd…white roses and free books

April 23rd…white roses and free books

Last Saturday I was sitting in the grounds of London’s Middle Temple. It was a sunny day and I’d arrived early to hear the formidable Madeleine Albright talk about global political changes since her time in office as the US’s first female Secretary of State. There was no one else around, except a lazy gardener pushing his broom to and fro, so I enjoyed the tepid sunshine. But then a group of tourists ambled down some steps to the pond, near my seat, all clutching long-stemmed white roses.

Ah, religious nutters, I assumed, about to lay down their roses and pray? I was about to move away. But the yellow-jacketed gardener moved towards them and suddenly addressed them with an intensity and directness that forced me to look up from my engrossing thriller and listen. Was he deranged too…someone given to clearing rubbish one minute, uttering beautiful poetry to strangers the next? He soon finished, they went on their way and I continued with my book in the sunshine wondering if I’d stumbled upon a meeting of reformed addicts. But addicts of what?

Fifteen minutes later the ‘gardener’ started picking out the litter from his black bag and, bizarrely, spreading it out on the ground, just as another group of rose clutching tourists wandered down the steps. They too got no further than the pond when they were accosted by the man, who swept for a minute or two before declaiming his love poem. They were mesmerised, as was I. When he cleared up the litter for a second time I could not resist asking him, what on earth was going on?

Ah, he said – big surprise this – he wasn’t really a gardener at all! He was an actor from the Globe Theatre taking part in a special project in honour of Shakespeare’s birthday on April 23rd and the tourists were on a ‘Sonnet Walk,’  the brainchild of director Mark Rylance.  After all, Middle Temple Hall was where,  at Candlemas 1602,  Shakespeare’s newly completed ‘Twelfth Night’ was performed for the first time. So, when the white roses were eventually laid at the gates of the Globe Theatre, perhaps it was a form of prayer, giving thanks for the survival of such literary treasures? https://www.shakespearesglobe.com/theatre/whats-on/special-events/sonnet-walks

But actually today is important for another reason. It’s the day when half a million books are given away by 20,000 volunteers to people who would not otherwise read or have access to books https://www.worldbooknight.org/books/2013  Chosen authors waive their royalties, publishers their production costs and Shakespeare, I am sure, would be proud to share his birthday with such an original idea.

Travelling for Work

Travelling to work takes on new meaning when you have to make a day long journey for just an hour of work, the length of a lecture.

Saltaire

Saltaire

Last week I left home before dawn to get down to Cornwall but hit trouble as early as Reading station. Standing in the freezing, snowy cold, trains were constantly cancelled, changed or delayed because of the floods that had hit the West Country the week before.  The force of the water had dislodged several lines that ran close to rivers and so, although the tracks remained, the ballast underneath them had been washed away in many places.  New landslips were being reported as I stood there. The poor beleaguered train staff did their best and in the end advised anyone to take whatever train was on offer if it was going approximately in the right direction. I did and with a coach ride, plus diverted train, plus car arrived eventually at Fowey by about 5 pm. I quickly changed, gave my lecture on behalf of the Fowey Harbour Heritage Society and went to bed. I left at dawn the next day, happy I’d done what I’d been asked but sad I didn’t have longer to enjoy this beautiful part of the world.

This week I went in the other direction, to Saltaire, the model village just outside Bradford built by mill owner and philanthropist Titus Salt in the early 19th century to improve the lives of his workers. Saltaire is now a Unesco World Heritage Site and the vast Salt’s Mills alongside the River Aire are home to a spectacular collection of paintings by David Hockney, the almost local boy who studied at Bradford School of Art before going to London and the Royal College of Art. Read More