Fat and Fretful

John Bayley

• Foreign Country: The Life of L.P. Hartley by Adrian Wright
  Deutsch, 304 pp, £17.99, March 1996, ISBN 0 233 98976 5

The only time L.P. Hartley met E.M. Forster they did not get on. Too much politeness, and mutual wariness. And what a comedy in contrasting physiques: Forster sharp, quizzical and birdlike; Hartley plump, vacant, moustached and apologetic, half walrus and half melting snowman, pipe in mouth. But underneath they had a great deal in common, and chiefly the mysterious, almost unconscious knowledge of their own powers as natural artists. They knew how to put themselves and what they wanted to say into an artifice that would enhance and dramatise by disguise, to the point where disguise itself became the object of art. Homosexuality may have been at the core of this knowledge, but more important was the instinct to personalise sexuality, so that it referred to themselves alone, a pure individualness in which the disguises of art could rejoice and revel, displaying themselves in their own way and in their own tongue.