The Pursuit of Laughter (8 page)

There is a biographical chapter by Sebastian Yorke, Henry’s son. He describes his father’s delight in minor disasters and how amused he was when things went wrong. He may have looked upon life itself as one long sick joke. Yet for his friends he was one of
the most delightful men of his talented generation.

Surviving
, ed. Yorke, M.
Evening Standard
(1994)

‘Dearest Maud, dearest Primavera! I do not know what primavera means, or if I have spelt it sufficiently for you to recognize the word. It means Spring, doesn’t it? It means joy, the joy of green leaves with the flutter of wings among the leaves. And you, dearest, mean all these things to me, for you are not, I am convinced, a mere passing woman but an
incarnation
of an idea… You are at once the poet and the poem, and you create yourself not with silks and pearls, though these things are beautiful upon you, but by your intense desire of beauty and life.’

‘I gave you all the love I was capable of. I never cease to think of you…’

The first passage quoted above was written by George Moore when he was 52 and had been in love with Lady [Emerald] Cunard for ten years. The second he wrote twenty five years later. His love for her lasted from their first meeting until his death forty years after. She destroyed most of his letters; all that remain are in this volume.

Lady Cunard was a great admirer of George Moore’s books; he was a fervent admirer of her astonishing personality. ‘To Maud Cunard,’ he wrote, ‘a woman of genius. Her genius is manifest in her conversation, and like Jesus and Socrates, she has refrained from the other arts.’

The audience for this marvellous, intelligent, inconsequent conversation was formed by her luncheon and dinner guests, and although she invited clever men to her house some of the company was not as amusing as it was fashionable. ‘There are people about that are of no interest to me, as little intelligent they seem as squeaking dolls,’ complained George Moore.

None of Lady Cunard’s letters to her faithful admirer have been found, yet her
portrait
is clearly seen in his to her, from her marble eyes and gold hair, to her worldliness, her love of music, her brilliance. She would descend unexpectedly upon the old writer in Ebury Street, like a bright humming-bird, then rush away leaving a purple orchid for him to treasure.

She was everything that he could never be, and as he sat year after year writing and rewriting and revising his books, there is no doubt that she brought him something uniquely precious. He was, naturally, a little bit jealous. ‘I was glad to see you brightening as usual the lives of dull people,’ he once wrote, with a nip of sarcasm.

Letters to Lady Cunard 1895-1933,
Moore, G. (1957)

If Mary Pickford was the world’s sweetheart, Greta Garbo was the world’s goddess. She had perfect beauty and a rare acting talent, and unlike any other actress before or since she hated publicity in private life, refused to be photographed and evaded fans, autograph hunters and the Press.

Cecil Beaton was in every way her opposite. He loved and courted publicity, made his fortune from it, and kept endless scrapbooks into which he pasted every passing reference to himself in the English or American papers. He longed to meet Garbo, and having met her he longed to marry her. It would have been the all-time publicity coup.

Years later, he proposed. She wisely refused; both were homosexual, and in any case she would have loathed his social life, climbing (in his own opinion) ever higher, loving the lighted candle, luxury, success, people. She stayed with him in Wiltshire and told him he was hag-ridden; the hags were his mother, too fond of the bottle, and his lesbian secretary Maud Nelson. He noted in his diary every detail of their friendship and their intimacies, and finally betrayed her by publishing it in her lifetime. It was a dreadful thing to do by any standards, and strangely enough he realized this himself, but his desire to be known to the world as lover of the most beautiful woman in the world was too strong to be
resisted
. Diana Souhami describes how as publication drew near he suffered a sort of agony; at that very moment, absurdly enough, he was given a knighthood, and the pleasure he got from being a Sir was blighted by his apprehension about Garbo and his diary.

Some years previously Greta Garbo’s lesbian friend Mercedes de Acosta had similarly betrayed the star. Badly needing money, she wrote memoirs and described a mountain
holiday
she had with Greta, six weeks when nobody knew where they were, the address a secret. It was this episode which sold the book and made Mercedes de Acosta a little money. She was never forgiven. Even when she was dying, in hospital, Greta Garbo refused to visit her.

Cecil Beaton, on the other hand, she did visit, grown old and bald and half paralysed by a stroke. Made furious by the diary, years had passed, and she went down to Wiltshire to say goodbye to her tiresome old friend. There were probably two reasons for this
somewhat
uncharacteristic behaviour. First, Garbo knew Cecil Beaton so well that she cannot have been surprised by what happened. Where his narcissism was concerned, he had no sensitivity, or even good manners. But secondly (something missing in this fascinating book) Cecil’s redeeming feature was laughter. ‘Give me the bonus of laughter,’ wrote John Betjeman in a poem at the end of his life. It was impossible to be with Cecil for half an hour, let alone half a lifetime, and not be convulsed with laughter. A look came into his face and he would say something in his drawling, braying voice which was inexpressibly funny. It is an important part of the man, who should not be remembered as the rather villainous creature depicted here. Among the illustrations in ‘Greta and Cecil’ Garbo is
seen laughing with Cecil. There cannot have been many of these perfect moments in her Hollywood or her New York life. Perhaps she forgave his disgraceful behaviour because he had amused her so much. The best possible reason.

Greta and Cecil,
Souhami, D.
Evening Standard
(1994)

Gerald Brenan lived to a great age; he was a prolific correspondent to friends and
relations
, who kept his letters. Very tempting to a biographer. Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy has not resisted, his book (although fascinating) is too long.

Many of the letters are full of what Cyril Connolly called Brenan’s ‘naïve sexual boasting’, which embarrassed those who did not realize the agonies of a sensitive man to whom ‘doing what comes naturally’ was a near impossibility. He was often impotent.

Born in 1894, he hated his father and his barbarous boarding schools, and they are blamed for his complexes. At 18 his one idea was to escape, and free himself from his
constricting
background. With a bohemian friend, Hope Johnstone, he planned to walk to China. Telling a few lies, and with a few pounds, he ran off.

He met Hope in Paris, and found happiness, discomfort, hunger and danger. They slept in barns, or inns where the beds were alive with bugs, stole vegetables to eat and could well have died of hunger and cold when winter came. Hope gave up at Venice, but Brenan pressed on, until ‘one dark evening in a snowstorm on a Bosnian mountain, I turned back’.

By letter, he bargained with his father for freedom to live in his own way. The parents were by then longing to compromise; he went home. He was 20 in 1914; he became a brave soldier, and at the front made friends with Ralph Partridge. It was a stormy
friendship
, because the love of Brenan’s life, the painter Dora Carrington, married Partridge. But the most important thing that happened after the war was his long visit to Spain, chosen for its cheapness. All his best books are about Spain,
South From Granada
a classic. He
suffered
from jealousy over Carrington, but she, Lytton Strachey and various writers stayed with him in his primitive cottage in the sierra.

He married an American poet, had endless unsatisfactory affairs with hippies and nymphets, and read enormously. The Spanish civil war and Second World War he spent in England, then back to Spain for the rest of his life, his writing at last beginning to sell. Fortunately his wife Gamel shared his love of discomfort; they had no bath or lavatory and on their travels stayed in flea-ridden inns.

The Spanish Labyrinth
is his great book on Spain, and Gathorne-Hardy’s chapter about it is, next to his account of the walk, the best thing in this enormous biography. There are several harrowing cancer deathbeds, that of Brenan’s wife beyond bearing. All are culled
from frightful descriptions in letters to long-suffering friends.

His own death—when, after a short spell in an English old people’s home, the Spanish claimed him as their own and took him back to Andalusia—was at the age of 92.

When Strachey was dying, in 1932, Carrington seemed intent on suicide, and Ralph Partridge sent for two of her lovers, Gerald Brenan and Tommy Tomlin, hoping in vain they might induce her to live.

Probably not many people now alive knew the brilliant Stephen Tomlin, a sculptor married to Julia Strachey.

Strange that in this ‘stupendous mass of paper’ even his actual name should be omitted. True, he was known as Tommy, but Stephen Tomlin was a considerable artist and
personality
.

The Interior Castle: A Life of Gerald Brenan,
Gathorne-Hardy, J.
Evening Standard
(1992)

Evelyn Waugh, his chief tormentor, called Cyril Connolly ‘a droll old sponge’, and that he certainly was. This excellent biography brings him wonderfully to life. His grotesque appearance, his velvet voice, the successes as a schoolboy that won him all the prizes at Eton, making Oxford drab by comparison, the knockabout turn of his marriages, the sloth and greed which gave him permanent angst but which he lacked the will to curb. It is not a sad life nor a wasted life, even if authorship of a masterpiece eluded him; he will be remembered as a brilliant critic, editor and personality.