Douglas
Blain, Secretary of the Spitalfields Trust with Mark Girouard at
|
Enthusiasms
By MARK
GIROUARD
Reviewed by
Katherine A. Powers / http://bnreview.barnesandnoble.com/t5/A-Reading-Life/Enthusiasms/ba-p/8739
The
prolific architectural historian Mark Girouard is the author of the revelatory,
endlessly entertaining Life in the English Country House, one of the great
works of social and material history. It now emerges that he has another, more
miscellaneous side, and has happily squandered incalculable hours attempting to
winkle out answers to questions over which few people lose sleep. The excellent
fruits of this intellectual wantonness can be found in Enthusiasms, a tidy
little volume of fifteen essays and explorations.
Girouard
begins with the question of when Jane Austen wrote Catherine, or the Bower, the
unfinished novel that is usually considered to be the last of her juvenilia. In
a carefully laid out argument he convincingly plumps for 1795-96 over the
commonly accepted 1792, placing the work not only after Susan but also after
the first version of Pride and Prejudice. This is the sort of revolutionary
declaration that will cause Janeites to reach for their smelling salts.
Nonetheless, it is not nearly so arresting to me as his remarks on the near
absence of servants from Austen's novels, something I have wondered about
myself. "Jane Austen's drafts," writes Girouard, "must have
needed alterations to bring them in line with growing early nineteenth-century
notions of propriety." And an important element in that was the portrayal
-- or non-portrayal -- of servants. Though there is a lively maid in Catherine,
Austen has almost entirely banned these essential creatures from the highly
polished published work, which novels, says Girouard, "it should be
remembered, were published at the time when tunnels were being built in some
country houses so that service and servants could move to and fro without being
seen by the gentry."
In another
reassessment, "Up and down with Oscar Wilde," Girouard displays a
strange animus toward his subject, showing how relentlessly this "Irishman
on the climb in London "
promoted himself. He then tots up how much money the broken aesthete actually
had at his disposal for the last, reputedly impoverished three and a half years
of his life, arriving at "around £70,000 a year in modern value." In
the course of pillorying Wilde as a brown-nosing, jumped-up poetaster who cried
poormouth, Girouard acquaints his readers with some of the arcana attached to
an artist or writer breaking into Society's various bastions at the time, from
the more accessible dinners and receptions to the fastness of the country
houses. Of the last named he observes, "Only a few were given entrée to
those, for reasons not always clear -- Landseer but not Millais, Dickens but
not Thackeray, Lear but not Carroll, Tennyson but not Browning, Barrie and
James, but not Galsworthy or Hardy." And, note to the socially ambitious:
it was "'Saturday to Monday' parties" to which the chosen might be
invited; " 'weekend' was considered a vulgar expression."
Girouard's
appetite for research gets a thorough workout in "Walter wins: a hunt but
no kill," an engagingly unsuccessful investigation into the true identity
of the libidinous "Walter" of My Secret Life, first published in eleven
volumes between 1882 and 1894. (Girouard keeps a three-volume edition of the
work in his bathroom, "very much to hand on the bottom shelf, alongside
the Rev. F. E. Witts's Diary of a Cotswold Parson and Bernard Walke's Twenty
Years at St Hilary.") Claiming to have had sex with over 1,200 women,
Walter was "a compulsive collector and cataloguer" and, as such,
"a dedicated worker and happy in his work." Girouard's account of
searching for Walter -- his fossicking through public records, sleuthing about
in the streets, and visiting possible sites of bygone conquests -- is, to my
mind at least, more thrilling than that priapic hero's adventures.
Throughout
these essays Girouard shows a wry, unillusioned sense of how the historical
record is fashioned. He begins "The myth of Tennyson's
disinheritance," for instance, with this edifying picture:
What is
that gentle sound of rustling, clipping and scratching, that faint smell of
burning, which the sensitive ear and nose can catch as background to the
brassier sounds and smells of the decades around 1900? It is made by the widows
and children of great Victorians at work deleting, cutting out and burning all
the passages in letters, all the unpublished writings of parents or spouses
which could deface the marble perfection of the portraits of greatness which
they or suitably emasculated biographers are preparing for the world. Not
always just the widows, for sometimes the act of purgation goes off while the
great man himself, still magnificently bearded in his ruin, sits benignly in
the background as the good work goes on.
It may be
that you do not count the disinheritance of Tennyson or, rather, of his father,
George, among the great crimes against humanity, but Girouard's debunking of
the legend is nonetheless a wonderful example of how history is shaped by a
combination of special pleading and ignorance or disregard of the usages of the
past. Girouard shows -- in detail that I will leave you to savor -- how the
first official chronicler of Tennyson's life, his son Lionel, took two
indisputable facts, sheared off their historical circumstances, and combined them to produce a venerable,
ahistorical fiction.
In "P.
G. Wodehouse: from hack to genius" Girouard ponders the question of why
and how the great man was able to write such quantities of bilge and yet
produce gold. "It would not much worry me," he tells us, "if…all
his books published before 1922 and after 1949, were to disappear." It is
a judgment he alters somewhat in the course of his consideration of the nature
of Wodehouse's fiction, though he does believe that it was likely that the
author himself, ever alert to sales, couldn't really tell the difference
between his good and bad works. Boiled down, Girouard believes that Wodehouse's
short-story writing sharpened up the novels of the golden period, and that his
exile from Britain
after the war extinguished the spark. He also believes that someone called
"Robert McCrane" wrote a biography of Wodehouse in 2004; it was
Robert McCrum.
Among the
other questions Girouard takes up are how much time John Masefield, who would
have had us believe that he "must go down to the seas again / To the
lonely seas and the sky," spent as a mariner. It was, in fact, four
months, endured when he was in his teens, and, as Girouard puts it, "for
the rest of his long life he made his home as far from the sea as
possible." He sets the record straight on which castle appears in
Charlotte Mews's poem "Ken," arguing for Arundel in Sussex
instead of Carisbrooke on the Isle of Wight ,
and gets caught up in the carryings-on of Vita Sackville-West's grandmother,
Pepita. On the face of it, these are not subjects to drive all other thoughts
from the minds of most people, but Girouard opens them up beyond petty detail,
expanding them with his understanding of historical context, and brings such an
infectious mood of inquiry to them that they become irresistible.
Girouard
finishes with three essays about his family: the Jewish Solomons who, among
other things, pretty much ran St. Helena while Napoleon was there; his
French-Canadian grandfather, Lieutenant (later Sir) E.P.C. Girouard), an
engineer whose exploits included building Kitchener's impossible railroad
connecting Wadi Halfa with Khartoum; and his aunt Evie, who took him and his two
sisters in after his mother was killed in an automobile accident when he was
nine. The last, in particular is an affecting, often funny exercise in
stiff-upper-lippery, as well as a meditation on the habits of the wellborn and
the decline of the servant class.
Girouard
tells us in his brief introduction that he has written these pieces "for
pleasure, not instruction, and one of the pleasures for me has been to escape
from the burden of a professional historian, the need to provide footnotes and
to qualify my judgements." It is that freedom, no doubt, that contributes
to the book's overall tone, a uniquely winning one of easygoing elegance and
scholarliness lightened by jouncing, irrepressible enthusiasm.
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