Just over halfway through her scrupulous and sympathetic account of Frances
Partridge’s long life, Anne Chisholm quotes from “Cocky Olly”, a short story
by V. S. Pritchett, in which Frances appears, seen through the eyes of an
adolescent girl, as the well-intentioned but offhand “Mrs Short”. She is
shown doing a jigsaw puzzle:
a small woman with small, brown, brilliant eyes . . . wearing a plain but
pretty dress, chattering and eagerly questioning herself, as she stands
before the large puzzle . . . . “How beastly they are to put so much water
in these things. It’s cheating. What a bore. Ah, now – here, do you think?”
The oblique glimpse is disconcerting, for it shows from the outside the person
whose emotional tangles and intellectual quests we have been close to for
more than 200 pages. The many photographs in Chisholm’s book have a similar
effect, for a blithe appearance in a summer frock or a bathing dress is
often at odds with what we know about the inner torments. In writing this
biography Chisholm had the benefit of conversations with her subject in the
last five years of her life as well as the use of her personal papers,
diaries, memoirs and letters; she has also been given the abundant memoirs
and letters of her friends – rich material, fixing a vanished tone of voice
and providing access to what people were thinking and feeling, as they posed
for the camera in the sunshine on the grass.
The Pritchetts were neighbours of the Partridges after the Second World War,
and “Cocky Olly” catches Frances in the prime of her life in the late 1940s,
married – after many obstacles – to Ralph and the late mother of an only
child, the troubled, precocious Burgo. They were living in the country,
having survived the war, and their lives at this stage are described in the
diaries Frances edited for publication. In six volumes they cover the period
from 1939 to 1975, from marriage and motherhood at Ham Spray after the death
of Lytton Strachey and the suicide of Dora Carrington, continuing up to the
years when, after the deaths of her husband and son, she lived alone in a
flat in West Halkin Street, Belgravia, the last remaining associate of the
Bloomsbury Group.
The pre-diary life can seem at times to be no more than a prelude to that
wartime household, which was the subject of the memoir A Pacifist’s War
(1978), recording the moment when Partridge seems to have come into her own.
The sixth and last child of a well-connected couple, Frances Marshall was
brought up in Bedford Square and in the house her architect father built in
Hindhead, educated at the progressive boarding school Bedales and then at
Newnham College, Cambridge. She was introduced to the Bloomsbury Group
through her job at Birrell and Garnett’s bookshop, where in 1923 she met her
future husband, Ralph Partridge, who was assistant to Leonard and Virginia
Woolf at the Hogarth Press. Chisholm chronicles this privileged background
using an unpublished memoir written by Frances’s mother, Frances’s own
published Memories and her informal recollections.
Another prelude to maturity was the sexual, marital and inheritance dramas
centred on the triangle of Lytton Strachey, who loved Ralph, who was married
to Dora Carrington, who loved Lytton, all of them at times loving others.
There were many emotional upheavals surrounding Ralph’s marriage to
Carrington and Frances’s painful efforts to be accepted by the
Strachey–Carrington–Partridge ménage, first at Tidmarsh Mill then at Ham
Spray House; Chisholm quotes from a letter from Lytton to Ralph which gives
a flavour of the intrigue: “My dearest, I am writing this without telling
Carrington, and perhaps you may think it best not to show it to Frances. But
of course you must do just as you like. I have felt for some time rather
uneasy about F – but have been unable to bring myself to say anything”. The
domestic arrangements of these literary and artistic characters caused a
stir when Michael Holroyd published his biography of Strachey in the late
1960s and they became – to Frances’s irritation – the subject of several
plays and films which continued to trouble her. One can sympathize with her
dislike of the treatment of this part of her life and understand her wish to
set the record straight about her husband, to record his warmth and kindness
and common sense in the face of others’ portraits of the “beefy” major –
“physically attractive but dull”. “I would like you to get Ralph right”, she
told her biographer.
Chisholm tells the story of Ralph’s life before marriage, his bravery in the
First World War and his captivating personality. Nevertheless, even in her
judicious account, he still appears bullish – keen on nude bathing and with
a taste for “pure smut”, his behaviour displaying the least attractive
aspect of sexual openness. In a letter to his friend Gerald Brenan,
Carrington’s lover, Ralph argues that “it was intolerable . . . to share
Carrington because her sexual appetite was so much weaker than his”, and he
writes of the birth of his son, Burgo, that a Caesarean would have the
advantage of “no laceration of female genitals with consequent frigidity”.
Ralph’s affairs after marriage were discussed with his wife; in 1933, after
a passing passion for a woman he had identified with the dead Carrington, he
confesses “I’ve done with Barbara for good”, and bursts into tears at the
breakfast table; Frances records: “I was for some reason only very slightly
jealous and we talked over every single thing”.
The detached stance is typical of her, coming from her reliance on rational
discussion, supported and coloured by her strong pacifist beliefs and
interest in Freud. Her even-toned diaries juxtapose the important and the
mundane; fear and anxiety take their place alongside visitors, trips abroad,
books, flowers and music. Lunch at the Ivy, her mother’s death and Virginia
Woolf’s suicide share the same few pages. During the German advance on
Paris, new tennis racquets arrive from Harrods and their former neighbour
Diana Mosley is arrested; Frances reads Madame du Deffand and listens to
Monteverdi. Worries about Burgo’s fear of death and his constant running
away from school are helped by her joining the Wiltshire Botanical Society.
Burgo’s sudden death from an aortic aneurysm in 1963, like Ralph’s in 1960,
causes a gap in the diary, but for both there was “no funeral, no wake, no
grave”. Chisholm was told by Burgo’s friend, the publisher Anthony Blond,
that the morning after his death Frances had rung the Harrods funeral
department and instructed them to remove her son’s body; Blond “never quite
forgave” her for it, nor for her part in the “chilly Bloomsbury parenting”
he thought Burgo had suffered. Chisholm records this then moves on with her
subject to a holiday in Italy with Raymond Mortimer.
Frances seems to have been emotionally distant from her own family; she did
not attend the funerals of her mother and father; the news of her sister
Ray’s death from cancer was greeted by Ralph with “That’s a very good
thing”, and Frances wrote that she blamed Ray’s husband for not helping his
wife die: “What barbarous cruelty to keep the poor creature alive”. Friends
are more important to her than family. Certain people recur in her life in a
chain of connection – Julia Strachey, her fascinating childhood friend who
grows into a difficult old woman and is the subject of Julia (1983); David
(“Bunny”) Garnett, her first employer, Ray’s husband, who marries Angelica,
the daughter of Vanessa Bell and Garnett’s former lover Duncan Grant; Robert
Kee who marries the Partridges’ young friend and protégée Janetta Woolley,
whom Ralph had tried to seduce when she was eighteen; Henrietta, the
daughter of David and Angelica Garnett, who marries Burgo. Frances enters
into their lives, recording their love affairs, analysing, criticizing,
accepting their frailties and celebrating their cleverness and good looks.
Chisholm follows her lead, evoking a cast of charming, brilliant and beautiful
creatures – “tall for her age but slim as a reed”, “a dark vital young man”,
“strikingly attractive”, and so on. Here as elsewhere, she reports Frances’s
reactions without any undermining commentary or contradiction. Her book is
in some ways a re-creation of the world of richness and beauty that
Frances’s diaries defined: a life lived without television where politics
was of the theoretical rather than the Westminster sort, where music was
serious and books were literature; a world inhabited by creative people
connected through family and university, many of whom never had to work for
a living. Chisholm rarely steps back to comment on the smallness or
specialness of this society, though she does provide an appendix giving the
value of sterling during Frances’s lifetime from which we can calculate that
the £1,500 a year she had to live on after Ralph’s death was the equivalent
of £24,885 in 2007.
If it were not for Frances Partridge’s revelation of herself in her diaries
and memoirs, she might have become no more than a footnote to Bloomsbury.
Her published works are of a secondary nature; she was an indexer,
translator, editor, obituarist, reviewer (of children’s books for the New
Statesman in her early years, essays for the New York Review of Books in
later life; her last review was written for the Spectator in 2000). These
are minor beside the diaries and memoirs, which are her literary
achievement, providing an observant close-up view of recent history. They
also give us the portrait of a whole person, a woman of curiosity and
stoicism, an individual whose long life we can follow to its end.
Her confrontation of old age and death are the triumph of the late diaries, in
which, as well as parties, dinners, private views, a performance of Oh!
Calcutta!, the death of Princess Diana and Tracey Emin’s “Bed”, she notes
with a sharp eye her own increasing physical weakness. “Life suddenly seems
a mere antechamber to the tomb”, she observes at the age of sixty-five, in
one of many premature premonitions that she left in the published edition.
She wrote her final diary entry, Chisholm tells us, on April 10, 2000,
recording “in quavery handwriting”: “Strange as it may be ‘crossing the
bar’, in other words becoming 100 plus, seems to make me feel more my old
self”. It is left to Chisholm to chart the last years of memory loss,
failing eyesight, nurses, hospitals and anxious friends. The book ends with
Frances’s death in February 2004; at her cremation in Mortlake, in a coffin
of plaited reeds, there was the music of Mozart, Schubert and Bach, but
“there was no mention of God”.
Anne Chisholm
FRANCES PARTRIDGE
The biography
402pp. Weidenfeld and Nicolson. £25.
978 0 297 64673 0
Lindsay Duguid is Fiction editor of the TLS.
