LECTURE

THE ART OF WRITING BIOGRAPHY: ROSE MACAULAY: THE RISKY TRIP TO THE UNDERWORLD

By Sarah Le Fanu, Director, Bath Literature Festival, on 11 May 2004

One of the difficulties, I have found, of writing biography, is the problem of how you keep the mass of material about your subject's life and work in your head at one time; of how to keep an overview of the pattern of someone's life while at the same time concentrating on the specific details. To give an example from the case of Rose Macaulay, the subject of my most recent biography, who was born in 1881, a late Victorian, and died in 1958, an inhabitant of the post-modern world: when I was thinking about her life and work in London in the 1920s I also had to keep in mind her unusual childhood in Italy and the intense relationships she had there with her siblings, the years of her Edwardian young womanhood when she wrote her first novels, and in the next decade, her changing attitude towards the First World War and war in general.
The problem is that you can't keep everything in the forefront of your mind at the same time, and during the course of writing a biography you find that at different times different aspects or themes are the ones that fill your conscious mind, while others are, one hopes, gently simmering in the unconscious, and that as the work progresses you move from one area of concentration to another. Tonight I'm going to talk about two themes that kept on moving from the simmering pot at the back of my mind to demand my attention during the course of the four or five years that I spent thinking about and writing about the life and work of Rose Macaulay. These themes are: first, the relationship between the life of the heart and the life of the writer, and second, the question of how a subject is shaped, or indeed created, by their biographers. And I'm going to suggest how these two themes may perhaps be linked.
First then, the relationship between the life of the heart and the life of the writer: art doesn't come without a price, but the price paid, the sacrifices a writer makes, can become a part of the writing. By 1918 Rose Macaulay had published eight novels and one collection of poetry. Her novel Non-Combatants and Others was one of the very first anti-war novels to be published, and an extremely powerful one it is. She was an established writer and a public figure, but diffident, shy and still living at home with her mother. She had worked unhappily as a VAD in 1915 - some of that experience feeds into the descriptions of wounded and shell-shocked soldiers in Non-Combatants and Others - and rather more happily as a landgirl, and then had got a clerical job with the War Office.
At the beginning of 1918 Rose was transferred from the War Office to the Ministry of Information, newly set up under Lord Northcliffe, owner of the Times and in charge of all government propaganda. Because of her knowledge of Italian she was posted to the Italian section of the Department of Propaganda in Enemy Countries, which was run by Gerald O'Donovan, who was an Irishman living in exile from his homeland, a novelist, a reformer and an ex-priest.
When Rose met him, Gerald O'Donovan was forty six, and she was thirty six.
O'Donovan became the love of the rest of Rose's life, and he had an influence on all the work that was to come: from the clever, confident, successful novels of the next decade and a half, through to what she wrote in the years after his death in 1942, when she explored in different ways the subjective experience of loss and loneliness and her own perception of change, decay and death.
But Gerald was a married man, and the father of three children. For the sake of Gerald, Rose would sacrifice the Church that had sustained her through periods of grief and despair; she would sacrifice intimacy with her sisters Margaret and Jean; she would sacrifice the public acknowledgment of her beloved partner. But there was a lot that she would gain. After all, she was a novelist and skilled at making things up, and it may have been precisely the need to dissimulate that was part of the appeal of the relationship. And how much did the opinion of the outside world matter? Her childhood years in Italy, when family had provided all that was needed to feed her emotions, her intellect and her imagination, had inculcated in her a disregard for the opinion of the outside world. Now, in adulthood, not only did Rose Macaulay not need to fit in, but she flourished in the position she had chosen for herself on the edge of things. It provided a vantage point for her writing from which she could look at the world obliquely and ironically. There were practical advantages too: by choosing a married lover Rose could have love and companionship, and yet continue to work and to write. She would escape the domestic and emotional drudgery of wifehood and motherhood.
The first decade of their relationship was a fruitful one for Rose's writing. It was a period that she seemed to take great pleasure in writing about.
'The twenties were, as decades go, a good decade,' she wrote later of this period in Life Among the English (1942); 'gay, decorative, intelligent, extravagant, cultured. There were booms in photography, Sunday film and theatre clubs, surrealism, steel furniture, faintly obscure poetry. Proust, James Joyce, dancing, rink skating, large paintings on walls of rooms.'
On the brink of this 'good decade', Rose offered her readers, in a poem from her second collection, Three Days, published in 1919, a characteristically self-mocking self-portrait of the woman she wished to become:
'An earnest, grown-up, working woman,
Writing books and reading news
Thinking thoughts and holding views,
Meeting friends and talking sense …'
Like many grown-ups, and particularly like those who have led an intensely imaginative childhood life, she found it hard to believe that she was indeed an earnest grown-up working woman. Not that she was earnest, but she was certainly a working woman. During the 1920s she became a household name as a successful novelist, journalist and what would come to be called a cultural critic. She grasped the post-war world and satirised it. The seven novels she published in this decade, from Potterism - an attack on the popular press - to Keeping Up Appearances, in which she daringly employs a split personality - the ultimate unreliable narrator - as protagonist, all show a dazzling range of style, structure and tone; they manage to be serious as well as funny, accurate as well as fantastic, as certain in their creation of the absurd as in their representation of the poignant and the painful.
Into the novels of these years Rose Macaulay put the conflicts between the different parts of her own life, exploring both the privileges gained and the sacrifices made. Her novel Dangerous Ages, which won the prestigious Prix Femina-Vie Heureuse in 1921, a prize won a few years later by Virginia Woolf for To the Lighthouse, explores the lives of three sisters: Neville gives up medical training to marry and have children, and when her children are grown and she tries to return to a career, finds that it is too late; Nan, a writer, gives up the possibility of marriage in favour of her married lover, and accepts exile from England as the price she has to pay; Pamela remains single and pursues a successful career: she is given the final word in the novel: 'I certainly don't see quite what all the fuss is about.' Pamela is one of a series of detached, cool, ironic female observers of life in Rose Macaulay's novels; these fictional characters were not unlike the persona that Rose projected of herself through her essays and journalism of that period.
All first person writing involves the creation of a narrating subject, so to say that it was a projected persona is not to say that it was put on in order to deceive, but as Rose's love affair with Gerald O'Donovan became an ever more closely guarded secret, so the persona of unengaged voyeur and chronicler of other people's foibles and passions became an increasingly convenient disguise. In London Rose appeared single and dedicated solely to pursuing the life of a writer, while she and Gerald conducted the course of their life together in countless journeys abroad, meeting up in France or Italy and travelling together for a few days or a week at a time. Gerald was a close reader of her work, a writer himself and her lover: she received emotional and intellectual nourishment from him and turned her own position into material for her own writing. (The relationship between Gerald O'Donovan's work and the private life of the heart is another interesting one. O'Donovan was the author of six novels: the first was a fictionalised autobiography called Father Ralph which dealt with a young priest's disillusionment with the Catholic Church in Ireland and his eventual leaving of the priesthood. His sixth, final, and, in Rose Macaulay's view, and also in mine, his finest novel, The Holy Tree, was published in 1922. Why, after this achievement, did he stop writing? Perhaps he felt he had exhausted Ireland as a topic, and that he had written out his pain and his passion. Or perhaps he had to sacrifice something: and that between Rose Macaulay, his hard-won family life and his writing, it was only his writing that he could do without.)
It was later that Rose paid a heavy price for the secrecy of her relationship with Gerald, and for the projection of herself not just to the reading public but also to her friends and acquaintances in the literary world as single, independent, ironic and invulnerable.
In 1941 her flat in central London took a direct hit from a bomb, and she lost everything in it, including all the manuscript notes for a big book she was working on about beasts and birds in literature and mythology. When later that year she was commissioned by Storm Jameson to write a short story about the war, she wrote 'Miss Anstruther's Letters'. This is how it starts:
Miss Anstruther, whose life had been cut in two on the night of May 10th, 1941, so that she now felt herself a ghost, without attachments or habitation, neither of which she any longer desired, sat alone in the bed-sitting-room she had taken, a small room, littered with the grimy, broken and useless objects which she had salvaged from the burnt-out ruin round the corner. It was one of the many burnt-out ruins of that wild night when high explosives and incendiaries had rained on London and the water had run short: it was now a gaunt and roofless tomb, a pile of ashes and rubble and burnt, smashed beams. Where the floors of twelve flats had been there was empty space. Miss Anstruther had for the first few days climbed up to what had been her flat, on what had been the third floor, swarming up pendent fragments of beams and broken girders, searching and scrabbling among ashes and rubble, but not finding what she sought, only here a pot, there a pan, sheltered from destruction by an overhanging slant of ceiling. Her marmalade for May had been there, and a little sugar and tea …
Miss Anstruther is grieving for a lover who is recently dead. When Rose Macaulay wrote the story her own lover, Gerald O'Donovan, was dying of cancer. In the story when the bomb hits the flat, in the moment of panic Miss Anstruther snatches up only trivial things, not what is most important to her. She fails to take with her her lover's letters. When she returns to the ruins of the flat she finds that all that is left of the letters is a mass of burnt ashes, except for one tiny scrap of writing.
Miss Anstruther had not yet re-read her lover's letters because of the rawness of her grief at his recent death. She had been saving them as a solace for when she would be able to read them without unendurable weeping. Rose Macaulay gives to Miss Anstruther's lover handwriting that is like Gerald O'Donovan's, with lines 'running small and close and neat down the page, difficult to decipher, with the o's and a's never closed at the top,' which now have 'run into a flaming void and would never be deciphered more'. The letters were a celebration of the love between Miss Anstruther and her lover and especially of their 'secret stolen travels of twenty years.' 'Miss Anstruther's Letters' is an elegy for the world that Rose Macaulay and Gerald O'Donovan had created together, the world of abroad and elsewhere and being together, just the two of them, outside marriage and friends. But it is also a dark meditation on memory and the mutability of what has been. For the past is destroyed by the scrap of writing that remains, the 'line and a half of close small writing, the o's and the a's open at the top', words which, when Miss Anstruther looks at them, 'seemed to darken and obliterate a little more of the twenty years that had followed them'. The surviving words are fragments of two sentences: 'leave it at that. I know now that you don't care twopence; if you did you would …'
In this story all the years of passion and love become ' a drift of grey ashes that once were fire', and Miss Anstruther is turned into ' a drifting ghost too'.
Very few people were privy to the secret of Rose and Gerald: Rosamund Lehmann was one, Victor Gollancz the publisher and his wife Ruth were two others. But as in the 20s and 30s Rose had kept secret her love for Gerald, so at his death she was obliged to keep secret her grief.
She entered into a dark night of the soul. For the next seven or eight years she wrote no fiction at all; instead she wrote travel and history books. Towards the end of the 1940s she undertook a solitary journey round Spain, and wrote it up in a book called Fabled Shore. It's a book that throngs with the ghosts of the past; she writes about listening to the whispering voices of the Romans and Goths and Carthaginians, the colonisers and the colonised, the soldiers and the merchants and the farmers. And it is as if she has a ghost companion with her; all her travels in France and Italy with Gerald in the 20s and 30s set up echoes in this solitary journey round Spain.
Yet that period of darkness and despair, during which not only was she grieving alone, but was also now bereft of the person who had validated her writing, gives her last books their depth and resonance. Rose's three final books The World my Wilderness, Pleasure of Ruins and The Towers of Trebizond are all concerned with the loss of visible traces of the past, with ruins, with death and decay, and with the reconstruction through language and the imagination of what has been lost. She paid the price in desolation and loneliness, but as she had always done, she turned the price paid into a part of her writing. I'd just like to read you a passage from The World my Wilderness which is set in the bombed-out ruins of the City of London, where the protagonist, 17 year-old Barbary, is most at home.
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In The Towers of Trebizond the shimmering towers of the Byzantine citadel, which have been ruined for centuries past, are recreated in the narrator's imagination, and with the help of a green potion acquired from a Greek sorcerer who lives amongst the ruins. But the attempt to reclaim the past is a failure; the towers remain unattainable.
In a recent collection of essays called Negotiating with the Dead, the novelist and poet Margaret Atwood suggests that all writing is motivated deep down by a fear of and a fascination with mortality: a desire to make the risky trip to the Underworld, and to bring something, or someone, back from the dead.
I've been talking about the relationship between Rose Macaulay and the material of her writing; between art and life; and now I'm going to move on and talk, more briefly, about the relationship between a biographer and the material of her writing, that is, the subject of the biography. This, as I said, was another matter of constant interest to me, intruding at regular intervals from the background to demand my attention. Biography, too, as much as fiction writing, involves a trip to the Underworld; for biography is, is it not? precisely about bringing someone back from the dead. And when someone returns from the dead, as I think we all know, they are different, transformed by their sojourn in the underworld, and as ghosts they are formed at least partly by the person who has brought them back. In the epilogue to my biography of Rose Macaulay I consider certain aspects of this:
There are enormous difficulties in reconstructing anyone's life, for however copious the evidence of letters, diaries, journals, and eye witness accounts, there is always the problem of interpretation, of the subjectivity of witnesses, and of the basic contradictoriness of the human being. Moods and emotions are volatile, but when recorded on the page are often forced by posterity to carry a much greater weight than was ever intended by their author. In her book on E. M. Forster, Rose Macaulay criticised his unsympathetic response to a letter of Jane Austen's. Jane Austen wrote to her sister Cassandra: 'Mrs Hall was brought to bed yesterday of a dead child, some weeks before she expected, owing to a fright. I suppose she happened unawares to look at her husband.' Forster disliked the unkindness of this, and imagined Jane and Cassandra laughing together over unfortunate Mrs Hall. But Cassandra's reaction might have been very different, Rose pointed out. She might have chided Jane for unkindness. Jane might have repented. We can never know. 'That is the worst of publishing the letters of the dead,' concluded Rose. 'They grin and stare and grimace and scowl at us, expressing for ever, in black ink on paper, moods which were scarcely even moods, so glibly did they run by, run off the pen.'
Rose Macaulay's letters were published after she was dead: three volumes of them, two of which consisted of letters to an Anglican priest in America with whom she corresponded for the last seven years of her life, and who, she believed, had shown her a way back into the church after all her years of estrangement from it. The third volume consisted of a selection (and I emphasise selection) of letters to her younger sister Jean, who had had a successful career in nursing, was resolutely non-literary, and had never wavered in her Christian faith. The Rose Macaulay of these letters was a very partial one, but it became the standard view of Rose, especially when the first biography came out, written by Constance Babington Smith, who had edited the three volumes of letters. I am hugely indebted to Constance Babington Smith for the scrupulous research she did when she was writing her biography, and for all the correspondence that she left, but Constance's Rose Macaulay is very much Constance's Rose: the story of Rose Macaulay's life that we read in her biography is shaped by a Christian narrative pattern of innocence, temptation, sin, remorse and redemption. Rose's ghost borrows its shape from Constance's beliefs. And it's a different ghost from the one I brought back with me on my trip to the Underworld in search of Rose Macaulay. These are the fundamental questions raised by biography: questions about the partial nature of all evidence, about the subjectivity of interpretation and about the final mysterious unknowability of another human being. But that's part of the fascination along with the fear that Margaret Atwood talks about: the fascination not just with the fact of mortality but with the bringing back to life. And when you call a ghost back to life, you send out a part of yourself which the ghost, your subject in other words, comes dressed in.
Sarah Le Fanu
Rose Macaulay by Sarah LeFanu is published by Virago