Reflections on the death of the Dowager Marchioness of Anglesey, died 21st Jan 2017

For four decades I have been a devoted follower of Vera Brittain, as earlier posts in this blog will testify. 

Yesterday, I happened upon the wonderful free archive called Soundcloud, on which is to be found a 90 minute discussion held at The London School of Economics.  The two guests were Vera Brittain's biographer, and her daughter, Baroness Shirley Williams.

Shirley Williams is now 86 years old, (born July 1930), and speaks as forcefully and lucidly as she ever did.  The discussion was wide-ranging, and, as might be expected in a lecture programme which is named after the controversial Marxist philosopher Ralph Miliband (father of David and Ed),  drew some biting questions, the most critical of which had nothing to do with Vera Brittain.  Shirley replied astutely, calmly, and politely to all questions asked of her.

Shirley, now a member of the House of Lords in her own right, was educated at St Paul's Girls' School, then, as now, an elite private institution, and at Oxford.  This was a privileged education, notwithstanding that her father, George Catlin, stood in the 1920's and 1930's again and again as a prospective Labour Member of Parliament, and is acknowledged by Shirley as a greater influence on her political thinking than was her mother.

I find it quite taxing to ponder this question of elites.  Another female who has served the public in many roles and would appear, on the face of it, to be a member of an elite, has died recently.

Today, in The Times, (which unfortunately is behind a paywall), I read the obituary of the Dowager Marchioness of Anglesey. 

Picture credit The Womens' Institute

 

There are many links between these two women. 

Both were christened Shirley.  Vera Brittain wrote that she called her daughter after Charlotte Bronte's "gallant little cavalier". Lady Anglesey was also, according to her obituary, named after CB's heroine.  Both were born to parents who had been deeply, and tragically, involved in the First World War.  Shirley Williams is daughter to the writer of the seminal "Testament of Youth".  Lady Anglesey was the daughter of the novelist Charles Morgan.

I have written extensively about Charles Morgan, and his links with Vera Brittain here.

Both Charles Morgan and Vera Brittain came from solidly middle-class backgrounds.  Charles's father was a President of the Institution of Civil Engineers, Vera's a successful manufacturer.  It was their middle-class success that paid for their children's educations, and the confidence of such a background led to first-generation success in letters and public life, and second-generation public honours.  Shirley Williams is a Baroness in her own right.   Lady Anglesey gained her title by marrying into the aristocracy, but was awarded CBE and DBE.  (Her Times obituary claims she was offered a peerage in her own right by all three political parties but turned it down).

So an elite education was a springboard to success.  And also, perhaps less controversially, it seems to have nurtured a devotion to duty, and to public service and to clarity of thinking.  These things are positive attributes which might be found in any member of the population, of course.

However, it is much harder to achieve a position where such attributes may be recognized if your parents and grandparents are from the lower levels of society. One of Baroness Williams' first points in the LSE lecture was about how the whole of the First World War, in the way it was staffed and the way officers and men were selected, was absolutely rigidly controlled by the class structure of the time.  She pointed out, this was far less so in the Second World War and subsequent wars. 

Aside from the Army,  it is still true that if your parents and grandparents were from the working classes, even today you have to really struggle to make a mark in the world.  And if you don't make your mark, your habits of thought will not develop robustly in public debate.  And your contributions will not be used in public debate.  And they need to be. The more people who are thinking clearly and debating rationally, the better.

Lady Anglesey's obituary remarks that her "characteristic acumen, backed by charm, curiosity and assertiveness" soon brought her a number of public appointments, where her devotion to duty and to serving the public eventually brought the honours referred to above.  That's good, and the nation has undoubtedly benefitted.  It could benefit  more. 

Others may have exactly the same personal qualities, but will never be heard of in public life. For example, my cleaning lady, who retired two years ago, held these same qualities but will never be asked to contribute to public debate. Nor would she ever have the confidence to embark on a career in local government, or volunteering, which are ways to start in public service.

There must have been, and still be, many hundreds of thousands of such people who are never heard.

This is why my thinking is conflicted on the subject of elites.  One can only regret the continued disproportionate influence of a privileged education. However, the existence of at least a few people possessed of robust common sense, a sense of right,  a concept of public duty, and an ability to make themselves heard, are better than none at all. 

Charles Morgan and his contemporaries

After discovering an interesting link to the period of the mid-1920's, a literary epoch which has long fascinated me, I post the following.

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The Fountain, by Charles Morgan

This is a really peculiar book. It won the Hawthornden Prize in 1932.


Charles Morgan was more famous during his lifetime than after his demise. You can find a very brief biography on Wikipedia.

You may well ask, why did you read this book?

The connection derives from my interest in Vera Brittain. Charles Morgan was born in January 1894, a bare month after Vera, and is of the same generation in more ways than by mere accident of birthdate. Like Vera, he was a survivor of the First World War, and like Vera, permanently marked thereby.

Perhaps, like Vera, he would have forever remained a nonentity had it not been for the experiences of the First World War. And that Vera would have, is recorded in her own words, in a letter to her dear friend, Winifred Holtby, in which she decided that, her previous attempts at gaining recognition as a writer having failed, she would give her draft of "Testament of Youth" everything she had. If this failed, she recorded resignedly, "I shall remain silent." Fortunately, the book became an international best-seller, re-read and re-published regularly to this day.

Morgan's book "The Fountain", is not his first novel, but the first to gain important recognition. It draws heavily on his experience of being interned in Holland after capture in the early part of the War. Holland was neutral, and was not invaded, unlike the situation in which it found itself during WWII.

The Fountain does not appear in the book. Perhaps it is an allusion to sex. The book describes a rather spiritual love-affair, but the love-affair is absolutely not the heart of the book. The heart of the book is found in the search of the hero, Lewis Alison, for spiritual fulfilment.

It is impossible to imagine a book even finding a publisher, today, when the opening chapters are replete with such statements as:

"The struggle for some kind of stillness within oneself seems to run right through history........What I want is stillness of spirit....."

The common soldiery, to whom these statements are addressed, would, in today's parlance, be likely to utter imprecations such as "FFS!" if such words were to fall upon their ears.

Whilst shut up in the fortress in which he has been interned, Lewis welcomes the distance from his old life, (running a publishing business forced upon him by the early death of his father, the only means of support of his mother and sister). He looks upon the internment as a holiday, a time of complete peace and freedom from responsibilities, where he can write his book, which is to be "A history of the contemplative life."

After a time, the inmates of the fort are dispersed, and Lewis is placed in a castle, home of a Dutch aristocrat, which happens to be furnished with a magnificant library. The library is a place of seductive power, as well as great beauty, and much of the development of the love affair takes place in this setting.

The love affair itself, is completely incredible. There is no convincing description of how a person who would like most of all to become stiller and stiller until he enters a sort of hypnotic trance of introspection, embarks on a passionate affair. Indeed, as the affair approaches its physical consummation, the lover writes to his beloved a complicated analysis of love which he describes as "hypostasis" and their potential relationship as "a perdurable essence".

The library has a secret stairway to a tower, in which the "princess" sleeps, a tower to which the lover has secret access at night from the library. After a year or so of these nocturnal visitations, the girl's husband, a badly wounded German aristocrat, returns to the castle to convalesce. The affair is suspended, the war ends, the German husband finds out about the affair and dies, Alison is sent away by the girl's mother, to preserve the family honour. The ugly stepsister (who always knew, but found it impossible hitherto to tell about the affair) now finds it possible to tell all, so the girl runs away with a few jewels and a passport to join her lover and the book ends contemplating their embarkation on middle-class married life.

What did the contemporary literay scene find so enthralling, I wonder?

The beautiful girl, who is only 20, married far too young by her mother for social standing and to preserve a way of life, has no voice of her own. She is portrayed through the prism of men who find her beautiful: her stepfather, the Dutch baron, (who buys her jewels as a way of expressing affection) her lover's two interned friends, (who would do anything for her, so besotted are they by her beauty), her dying husband, (a very sympathetically drawn picture of a remnant of a now extinct German social class), who loves her and realizes that his love is not returned. What she saw in Alison is apparently his noble mind, and there is, conveniently, no accidental pregnancy to worry about. None of this is realistic to a full-blooded married woman of the late twentieth century and the new millenium.

I can only conclude that the book is the expression of a dying class system and that the people who read at all in the early thirties, who would have been the remnants of the dying upper middle class before it faced the final onslought of WWII, recognized themselves. And of course, that did not include women, who still had little or no voice in public life at the time. Vera Brittain's book was published the following year, 1933.

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Other writers who were active during this time and all knew each other and referred to each other in their letters and autobiographies include:

Winifred Holtby
Storm Jameson
Phyllis Bentley
May Sinclair
Rose Macaulay


I have books by all these ladies on my shelves.  All were born within the same ten years (1888 to 1898).  All were indelibly marked by the First World War.  Three  of them saw active service in that war (although poor May Sinclair was shipped home from Belgium almost immediately as being completely unsuitable, even as an ambulance driver).

All the five listed above remained single, although Rose Macaulay had in interesting 25-year affair with an unfrocked, married Catholic priest.  All their lives were fascinating.

I will post more in due course.

 

Charles Morgan again

I went to "The River Line" matinee on Saturday.  It was sold out, with hopeful people queuing for returns.  Lovely little theatre, down some steps in Jermyn Street.  A dive, in all senses of the word. It was like being in Ronnie Scott's without all the hype and oversold commercialism.

I started chatting during the interval to a lady in the row behind, and it turned out she was the mother of one of the leading actors!

The play was good, and the foreword in the programme was written by Roger Morgan, the author's son. Since CM died in 1958, this person must be very old now.  I showed my new friend my hard-back copy, which is dedicated to Roger Morgan, and she was very impressed and said she and her husband would look for a copy on Amazon.  They didn't know the story, surprisingly, and felt it would repay reading, to which I agreed.

This evening I finished "Sparkenbrooke" and was disappointed.  It went on for far too long at 550 pages, and was so wordy that I could not imagine many people actually reading the whole thing seriously even in 1936, when it was published.

Interestingly, two elderly men coming out of the theatre behind me were complaining that the play was "Very wordy".    Written in 1949, about wartime Resistance in France, the book was faithfully adapted by the author for the stage, and many sentences and passages of dialogue appeared intact in the play.  Only the descriptions were missed out.  There were some  meaty moral passages which I suppose is what struck the complainers.

"Character and Destiny" was a phrase which struck me, but when I looked in the novel on the train home, I couldn't find it.  It was a phrase which appeared in "Sparkenbrooke" though, so clearly a theme close to the author's heart. 

Roger Morgan wrote in his foreword to the programme that "His novels have themes .... if one cannot accept that men may have spiritual lives beyond those of their daily concerns, one will not gladly enter the world with which Morgan is concerned." 

Having said that, wordy and spiritual or not, the play created mounting dramatic atmosphere, and in the last scene, the audience were spell-bound, not a murmur, rustle or cough was heard. 

An afternoon well spent.

Nancy Mitford "The Pursuit of Love"

So after posting about the mysteries of two apparently incompatible people managing to keep a relationship going for over 30 years (hubby and me), I've come across two references to the subject in the last week.

One in a book by a now almost-forgotten author, Charles Morgan, born in 1894, the same year as Phyllis Bentley and J.B. Priestley.  Charles Morgan was interned in Holland during World War 1 (during that war, Holland was a neutral country).  Based on his experience, Morgan wrote his most successful work, "The Fountain" which won the Hawthornden prize.  I wrote a lengthy review of this on my old blog, which is now lost, but I might be able to find the draft in Word and re-post.  This afternoon I am going to London to watch a play called "The River Line", which C Morgan adapted for the Edinburgh Festival of 1952 from his own novel of the same title, which I proudly possess in hardback. 

Another Charles Morgan book I have picked up in hardback is "Sparkenbroke" and this is my train reading of the moment. As I am only half way through this  550 page work, I cannot at the present time categorically conclude what it is actually about.  From evidence so far, I would say it is about love.

Last week I came across the following:

'Once, as they came away from a house where lived together a man and wife seemingly incongruous but deeply in love, she said: " I wonder what it is that holds them to each other," and he began to answer that the woman had been very pretty when she was young and that they had common interests.'  

The male character goes on to follow this up with quotations from Stendhal and Goethe, which would put off the average girl, though not this one.  Finally he sums it up thus: "...though love may have a thousand originating impulses, thrown out almost haphazard like a handful of seed, it doesn't take root or grow into a consuming love unless the two people have the same intuitive direction of their subconscious minds."

I think that pretty well sums up what I have found to be the answer to one of life's perplexing questions.  However, almost no-one now reads this long-forgotten work, so it is not as well known as Nancy Mitford's "The Pursuit of Love".  A book on this theme, accurately forecast in the title,  but far better-known, a success from the moment of publication, which sold 200,000 copies in its first year and has hardly been out of print since. 

Nancy Mitford's work is lightly ironical, terribly witty in an understated sort of way, and much shorter at only 205 pages in the current Penguin paperback edition.  Not surprising that it is more popular.  Chapter Seven begins with the words "What could possibly have induced Linda to marry Anthony Kroesig?  During the nine years of their life together people asked this question with irritating regularity, almost every time their names were mentioned." 

Like many an avid reader who over-identifies with characters in books, I thought, "Yes, people have said that about me!"  Further analysis, however, seemed necessary.

Only two people have intimated over the last 27 years that they did not know why I married my husband.  One of them actually said it out loud.  On the iceberg theory that for every one showing there is nine-tenths more below the water-line, I wonder if about twenty people have asked themselves this about me and hubby.  Not that great a total, after all.

Later in the book, Linda explains what went wrong with the marriage.

"The really important thing, if a marriage is to go well, without much love, is very very great niceness - gentillesse - and wonderful good manners.  I was never gentille with Tony, and often I was hardly polite to him, and very soon after our honeymoon, I became exceedingly disagreeable.  I'm ashamed now to think what I was like.... It was my fault from begnning to end."

This was food for thought.  However, the overwheming thought that went through my mind on reading this advice was, that it didn't apply to us.  When we married, there was enormous love, which lasted really for well over twenty years, much longer than the honeymoon period.  We really did love each other, as far as anyone knows what love is (to misquote the Prince of Wales).  Passion outflanked gentility, but passion leads to stormy arguments and reconciliations.  Gentility took a back seat until much more recently.

Nowadays, being calm and quiet seems to be a strategy for successfully sharing a home together.  Whether this can carry on without passion remains to be seen.  One thing is certain, "It ain't over yet!"