An Awful Lot of Books (14 page)

The visit to Don Otavio, which occupies many months, occurs after a frightful journey (all their journeys seems to have been a nightmare, with a total uncertainty about arrival the only reliable factor), when they were met by three mules, an Edwardian tea-basket and a remarkable letter from their host. Don Otavio has been ruined for thirty years and has seventeen servants (as Mrs. Bedford says, the dirty work is done by so many for so few that it has ceased to be dirty), he is infinitely kind, gentle, innocent and eccentric - a perfect host: the apricot house built in the eighteenth century and set facing the immense lake in a garden brimming with scents and colours and quivering with bees, humming-birds, dragon flies, etc., is a small paradise, and one wonder how the visitors could tear themselves away for periodical sorties to other parts of the country - possibly to prove that they are not quite caught in this isolated amber of content. But when one finally leaves Mrs. Bedford on the point of departure, it is with the double regret of leaving Mexico and her company, and one cannot say very much more than that.

October 1960

Success says this author, equates with money - it need have nothing to do with happiness or specific talent: so we all know where we are - or aren’t - on page ten. Every man has success-potential, and this is the Age of Success: those who do not question their success or seek it are not of this age. For those who do, there is this Machiavellian manual, which, adopting a kind of hectoring wheedle, takes you all the way from F(ailure) to S(uccess). The writing has that urbane, ingenious villainy which reminds me of Laclos’
Dangerous Acquaintances
: it glitters with devastating remarks about behaviour which makes one start at their precision and suspect an S in any old patch of grass in one’s life; and there is no escaping the fact that very, very nearly all of us in varying degrees have lapsed from S potential to S practice.

The questions which this civilised and fiendish indictment provokes are much more pressing and effective than the results of somebody angrily decrying the present situation because they aren’t getting the best of it. Mark Caine is a pseudonym for somebody whom the jacket of this book blandly assures us ‘has become a successful novelist’, and one can only suppose that the trick up this author’s sleeve has been to embody the man of talent and the S man in one person (in this book he implies that they are disparate). Anyway, spoil yourself - read it!

December 1960

M. Mauriac is now an old man: one who has been a practising artist and a Catholic for many attentive years, and this book is almost entirely composed of his reflections and experiences of these two forces which are illuminated by sharp, sunlit patches of his childhood, and his memory of how certain books - sometimes written for his contemporaries - first impressed him. Although, as the title suggests, it contains almost nothing about his external life, it discovers a great deal of what he holds most dear, or most real about himself. He re-reads books now, he says, in order to seek the truth about the author: writing of Emily Brontë, for example: ‘I know the precise places in
Wuthering Heights
where it is she who is speaking and making a direct confession. I recognise her voice: a moment more, and I shall be pressing her hot and feverish hand.’

On the whole, he says that he no longer wants to read either novels or poetry - although the desire to read poetry persisted longer in him - that now he contains such an accumulation of impressions and echoes that he needs no more: it is music and silence that sustain him. ‘A book is delivered into our hands, and with the book, its author. In the case of music, however, it is we who are delivered. The music enters into us and acts upon us like a developing fluid and “brings out” all that is most secret in ourselves, but without any sense of heartbreak, or, if heartbreak there is, it is sweet.’

M. Mauriac’s methods of discourse are both simply personal and deliberate oblique, and his writing has a kind of profound accuracy which is seldom achieved and can never be contrived. Primarily, perhaps a book for those who write or are interested in the processes of literature, this work is also for those who are unable to agree with Sartre that ‘no man is ever anything but a swindle’, exposing this pernicious and narrow-hearted attack upon the uses and possibilities of life as not only general and direct, but partial and untrue.

December 1960

This author - often known as Baroness Blixen - is a Dane who writes the most beautiful English, and if you have never read her, this small book would make an excellent introduction. It consists of four episodes of her life in Kenya before the First World War and is chiefly remarkable for the wonderfully live, comprehending pictures of her relationships with her Somali servant, Farah, with the Kikuyu Masai and other tribes of this country which she loved so much. There is an extraordinary - and now rather sad - innocence about these accounts: of the mutual friendship and kindness, the distinctions plainly acknowledged but a matter of dignity which existed between the lady and her servants, farmers and neighbours, who all treated one another as individual, particular people, with the most astonishing consequence of reciprocal affection and respect.

There is one story which illustrates this most clearly. She had been treating a young Kikuyo boy for bad burns on his leg, but before the treatment was completed, he went back to his village. When she went to see how he was, she discovered his leg plastered with cow dung, and feeling her own failure with sudden bitterness, she stood weeping in his hut and rode slowly home with many of the villagers having watched her tears. The next morning there was a great crowd silent round her house, and for a wild moment she thought that perhaps they had come to kill her. But they had each one cut or burned himself superficially, and each one said that she must heal them - she had been tried too hard and must now be indulged. They had made a fool of her, but with such delicate generosity that she must laugh, and they, who knew how to laugh, laughed with her. But this book is altogether worth reading for its beautiful, sharp recollections of entrancing country and people.

December 1960

Kschessinska occupies a unique position in the history of Russian ballet: for twenty years she was
prima ballerina assoluta
of the Imperial Ballet at a time when this company - unrivalled - was at the height of its fame. The youngest daughter of a remarkable Polish dancer, she was admitted to the Imperial School at the age of eight; Petipa, Guerdt, Legat, Johansson and later Cecchetti were among her masters - and partners; she graduated at eighteen with first prize and the Tsarevitch, the future Emperor Nicholas II, in love with her. One has only to come across the smallest reference to her in any book about this period, to catch some echo of the spell she cast: the enchantment peculiar to exceptional artists who are flourishing with work and appreciation. A kind of fever seized the audiences waiting for her appearances, and of them it was said: ‘You would think there had been a sudden influx of light’ and ‘beside her, the word graceful, that we so often use, has absolutely no meaning’. Her most famous ballets were ones that we do not see now, and indeed she danced very little abroad and only twice in this country; with Nijinsky in Diaghilev’s company, and for de Basil at Covent Garden when she was sixty-four.

This book, therefore, in spite of its author being a decided amateur in respect of writing, is a most fascinating record of her career and private life which, put together, read like a fairy-tale or the story of a three-act ballet; but her childhood and early years in St Petersburg are perhaps the most interesting part of the book. After the Tsarevitch marries and she has overcome her despair, she loves his nephew which culminates in a son and eventually in marriage when they emigrate to France after the Revolution. Finally, there is the account of her famous school in Paris where she trained many of the dancers whom we see today. In spite of the fact that she cannot write, one cannot help loving her.

December 1960

By 1856 there were steam-engines, gas lighting and chloroform, and most of the world had been discovered and mapped, but the centre of Africa and its inner mystery, the source of the Nile, remained inexhaustibly secret - any speculation upon either resting in a legend of the first century, when a Greek merchant name Diogenes landed on the east coast of Africa and made a twenty-five-day journey inland to arrive ‘in the vicinity of two great lakes and a snowy range of mountains whence the Nile draws its twin sources’. From this story Ptolemy produced his remarkable map, which was endlessly disputed but never absolutely discredited, as all subsequent expeditions launched upstream from the lower and known reaches of the Nile failed due to rapids, cataracts, swamp, tropical heat, fevers, hostile tribes and other local deterrents.

There were, however, persistent rumours of inland seas and mountains, and in 1856 Richard Burton and John Speke set out to discover these and to determine the source of the White Nile. (The lesser Blue Nile had been accounted for in the eighteenth century.) And that is when this most fascinating and admirable book begins. Mr. Moorehead deals only with the following forty-four years, but this short time is so packed with the exploits, adventures and incredible hardships of the tremendous and often clashing personalities involved, that if his book had been four times as long one would simply have dropped everything else for longer in order to finish it.

The conditions of exploration in the middle of the nineteenth century must here be taken into account: on the one hand expeditions were launched at great leisure - hampers of Fortnum’s best provisions, cases of wine and brandy, scientific books and sealing wax, camp beds, steel boats (in sections - everything had to be carried on the heads of hundreds of porters); on the other hand, these people walked - hundreds of hostile, tropical, fever-ridden miles - unless they were so ill that they had actually to be carried; malaria was a governing factor, and very little was known about it; quinine was used but the doses were guessed at and usually wrong; they were frequently cut off from the outside world for months or even years at a time, and they had to count on being betrayed or deserted by the greater part of their entourage.

Central Africa may seem the largest possible stage, but the characters making history upon it are of such heroic proportions - so much larger than what is commonly thought of as life - that they seem to crowd it. Only the strongest, most ruthlessly enduring could survive, and unfortunately, people of this kind seldom see eye to eye with each other for solitary and nerve-racking months on end. Speke and Burton ended their association at loggerheads, which culminated in Speke’s mysterious death in England from an elementary accident with his own gun: he was thirty-seven, and he had discovered and named the Ripon Falls, but he and Burton had not agreed and more exploration was necessary.

The next expedition was conducted by a most endearing pair called Baker; he, a Victorian gentleman whom Stanley describes as “a magnificent and sensible man”, and his much younger beautiful Hungarian wife, who, with heavy long skirts and long golden hair, accompanies her husband through two years of the most breath-taking and ghastly adventures, and of whom her husband (with possibly the most masterly understatement ever made) says: “She was not a screamer.”

Meanwhile, Livingstone had been sent on what was to be his last journey, and little or nothing had been heard of him for five years, with the result that a reporter on the
New York Herald
had been sent on the following simple assignment: ‘cover the opening of the Suez Canal, and proceed up the Nile, Go to Jerusalem, etc., the Crimea, etc., through Persia as far as India. After that you can start looking for Livingstone.’

Stanley - a man of iron resolution and boundless ambition - as we know, found Livingstone; the eight months’ march to this end merely whetted his appetite for African adventure, and it was his journeys which finally proved Speke’s discoveries, it was he who, after a marathon walk from the mouth of the Congo on the West Coast to Lake Albert, rescued the reluctant Emin Pasha - then Governor of Equatoria - a man whose career had been as strange as his own. (As Mr. Symons says: ‘We often say extremes meet when we mean mediocrities encounter’), but the Welsh orphan and the German doctor really were extremes …

In the north there is the tragic Gordon, whose unique capacities precipitated him into dealings with more and more of a world with which he has lost touch: Mr. Moorehead’s description of the final months of Gordon in Khartoum, the Mahdi encamped in the desert outside, and Wolsey plodding the 1,500 miles to rescue is one of the memorable accounts in this most excellent work, which being easily one of the best books of 1960 deserved better proof reading, and which repays reading with a better map than those provided.

January 1961

It is remarked in the excellent preface to this astonishing book that on one level it is a thriller, with all the excitements of danger, pursuit, suspense, capture and escape - an account of adventures which rip the reader from its first sentence to the end. This is true. It is also a piece of autobiography - written now, by a European - the times being 1949 -1957.