‘England, My England’
Sir, – Bernard Bergonzi has written a clear account of D. H. Lawrence’s moral
obtuseness in publishing “England, My England” about the Meynell family who
had helped him in wartime (Commentary, October 16). It is also likely that
the publication of this story shows a lack of political awareness on his
part. The violent excess of the ending of the original 1915 version went
beyond current fictional norms (“The German cut and mutilated the face of
the dead man as if he must obliterate it. He slashed it across, as if it
must not be a face any more; it must be removed”), and Lawrence wrote to
Pinker, his agent: “I send you a story, which England will not publish, I am
afraid, but America may”.
The tale was, however, accepted by the English Review, which had printed
Lawrence’s poems back in the day when it was an avant-garde journal edited
by Ford Madox Hueffer. The new editor, Austin Harrison (brought in to mend
things after Ford’s mismanagement) had not turned his back entirely on
advanced literature, and had published Lawrence’s “The Prussian Officer” in
1914, but the magazine’s emphasis became far more political. Harrison was
fiercely anti-German, and author of The Pan-Germanic Doctrine (1904), an
exposé of the Kaiser’s territorial greed. He used the wartime English Review
to criticize Asquith’s government for a lack of severity towards the
Germans. In the same volume of the magazine as “England My England”, there
are attacks on Lord Haldane for his Germanophilia, and an article insisting
that even naturalized Germans should be treated as hostile. Above all,
Asquith’s ministers are presented as ineffective dilettantes countering
aggression with “sweet reasonableness”. This context gives a strongly
political meaning to Lawrence’s story, with its image of an unrestrained
German savagely mutilating the dead.
Lawrence’s critique of the impractical Evelyn would almost certainly have
appealed to Harrison as a diagnosis of English amateurism, and for the
readers of the English Review Lawrence’s story would have fitted in well as
part of the attack on Asquith and his ministers. The fact that, as Professor
Bergonzi mentions, Lawrence recommended the story to Cynthia Asquith may
suggest that he was not very aware of how his story might be read in 1915.
GEORGE SIMMERS
1 Easthill Close, Brackley.
Beards
Sir, – It is by no means certain, as Gabriele Bernhard Jackson asserts
(Letters, October 9), that the Paul’s Boys did not use false beards onstage.
Two plays written by John Marston specifically for the Paul’s Boys and
played by them “sundry times” suggest that they did. Mellida tells
Mazzagente: “My thoughts are as black as your beard” (Antonio and Mellida,
Act Two), a sentence which would be meaningless if Mazzagente were
beardless. Balurdo enters with his beard half off and half on in Antonio’s
Revenge (Act Two, scene i).
Detailed stage directions attached to Arabia Sitiens, or A Dream of a Drye
Yeare by William Percy, do suggest that facial hair was not to be used in a
possible adaptation of this play for children. It had probably been staged
by one of the adult companies: alterations included provision for a
numerically smaller cast and the coarse language was softened, but there is
no evidence that the children performed this play or that these stage
directions were put into use.
It is clear that false beards were envisaged in the two Marston plays cited
above. The Chapel Royal Children must have used them in The Dutch Courtezan,
another play by John Marston, in which Mulligrub is shaved onstage by
Cocledemoy, disguised as a barber.
ANTONIA SOUTHERN
Yew Trees House, Bratton, Westbury, Wiltshire.
‘Pavane’
Sir, – Kingsley Amis may indeed have failed to improve on Keith Roberts’s
Pavane as a portrayal of an un-Reformed Britain (see Mark Valentine’s
letter, October 9). However, he pays graceful tribute to his predecessor:
one of the works banned under the Catholic hegemony imagined in The
Alteration is “Galliard”, by a certain Keith Roberts.
BERNARD BESSERGLIK
21 rue Eugène et ML Cornet, Pantin, 93500 France.
Potocki
Sir, – David Skene-Melvin helpfully points out (Letters, October 16) that
anglophone readers curious about Jan Potocki’s novel Manuscrit trouvé à
Saragosse can consult the translation by Elisabeth Abbott from 1960.
However, since this version is long out of print, those interested will be
pleased to know that there is a Penguin Classics edition currently
available, translated by Ian Maclean. Anyone intrigued by Potocki’s text
will also be richly rewarded by a viewing of the hallucinatory
Polish-language film adaptation from 1965: a restored subtitled print,
released in 2001, was funded by Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola and
Jerry Garcia.
BENJAMIN FRIEDMAN
7 Rivington Street, New York 10002.
Cambridge poets
Sir, – We were deeply gratified that you took up a place alongside J. H.
Prynne “looking in” on the Cambridge Literary Review, albeit from a safe
distance (NB, October 9). There you pondered, as we had, the pseudonymous
possibilities of the mysterious and brilliant poet Ray Crump, and on that
front we have good news, thanks perhaps to your notable pages. No fewer than
three of Crump’s acquaintances from his time at Kent University in the 1960s
have been in touch with wonderful and moving stories of this most
charismatic and talented individual. Sadly, Crump himself has not contacted
us; however, more poems and a couple of photographs have come to light.
Suspicions were also raised about the “difficulty” of the poetry we printed.
On this count, we were somewhat alarmed that none of the 150 or so pages of
essays devoted to unpicking the topic had convinced your commentator that
the poems had anything going for them apart from difficulty. We had hoped
that Raymond Geuss’s words would tempt readers away from such a hasty
interpretation: “valuable obscurity”, he wrote, would not be “something one
could with any hope of success intentionally strive for, but something that
will result only from a process of aiming at something else”.
With this in mind, we turn to Keston Sutherland’s “impenetrable” poem “Stress
Position”, of which an extract was printed in the Review. The poem, we would
argue, deals with subjects that frankly require Sutherland’s fractured and,
yes, difficult idiom. The result seems to us to demonstrate conclusively
that the transcription of doubt and intense reflexivity employed by
Sutherland is at least as valid as the other techniques available to those
who would take up such topics as warfare and torture.
BORIS JARDINE AND LYDIA WILSON
Trinity Hall, Cambridge.
Gottfried Benn
Sir, – Michael Hofmann does a great job bringing Gottfried Benn to the
attention of the English-speaking world (October 9). However, to write of
Benn being “born in East Prussia, near the Baltic coast of Germany” is
incorrect. Benn was born in Mansfeld, near Pritzwalk in north-west
Brandenburg, which is about 100 km from the sea. When Benn was only six
months old his father, a pastor, was moved to Sellin in the Neumark, the
part of Brandenburg east of the Oder river, which today belongs to Poland.
He grew up there.
HANS-JÜRGEN WAGENER
Diedersdorfer Straße 2, D–15306 Friedersdorf, Germany.
Madresfield
Sir, – Another book on Madresfield (Mad World by Paula Byrne, reviewed by
Peter Parker, October 16), and another skimming the Waugh-bedazzled surface
of that dubious institution. I look at these books in the hope that the
story of the underside of the great house will be told; not what the butlers
saw, but what was seen by the War Orphans.
Lady Beauchamp was famous for her War Orphans, to whom she gave, in her piety,
both home and training. That was the story. On Sundays, visitors who
attended the chapel could see the Orphans, trailed out for their
appreciation. The rest of the week, these girls, aged between twelve and
sixteen, attended to the laundry of the house, in their overalls and clogs:
at the washtub and scrubbing board half the week; running between a
succession of hot irons and ironing boards for the other half. “Training as
laundresses” was the excuse. They were allowed no reading matter except the
Bible. They had no holidays, on the grounds that there was nowhere for them
to go. They lived on a diet of thin porridge, soup and bread. My mother Anne
Martin was one such. When she left Madresfield, she was so undernourished
that she could have been mistaken for a child of twelve.
The Duke’s shenanigans (everyone, even the Orphans, knew about the footmen,
and the way they clunked their jewellery under My Lady’s nose during meals)
she compared unfavourably to her own father’s sacrifice of his life in the
First World War. She took from Madresfield just one thing of value: a copy
of Keats’s poems, salvaged from a waste paper basket.
This, too, is the history of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead.
STELLA DAVIS
24 East Street, West Coker, Somerset.
Aversion to genius
Sir, – I enjoyed Karl Miller’s enthusiastic reappraisal of Joyce Cary’s novels
(October 9); but Miller could have quoted a more striking summing-up of
Philip Larkin’s attitude to The Horse’s Mouth than he does from Larkin’s
Selected Letters. On April 11, 1945, Larkin wrote to J. B. Sutton: “I
regarded Jimson in rather a different way, seeing him as the artist in
general, utterly disregardful of courageous fortune and social carefulness.
I liked the idea of the mad old bastard going to gaol and stealing
snuffboxes and all the rest of it, and painting away on that garage wall
while the Council demolish it. I think it was meant as a portrait of the
artist rather than of the painter. You are right when you say it lacks ‘the
serenity of great art’, but I think it has the vigour of great art, or
perhaps just art. At any rate, it gave me a feeling of courage”. Not much
sign there of what Miller calls “aversion to demonstrative genius”.
ANTHONY THWAITE
The Mill House, Low Tharston, Norfolk.
Already done
Sir, – David Crystal looks forward to someone making “an index supplement” to
A. P. Cowie’s Oxford History of English Lexicography (October 9). It has
already been done: Google Books is giving away the index on its website and
there Crystal can find out just where Cowie covers “the redoubtable Moore,
Meech and Whitehall” and the American Samuel Johnson, who wrote a schools
dictionary in the late eighteenth century.
GABRIEL EGAN
Department of English and Drama, Loughborough University.
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