J.I.M. Stewart

The title page of this book tells us that it is ‘published to commemorate the centenary of Sir Charles Tennyson, the poet’s grandson and biographer, born 8 November 1879, died 22 June 1977’. Charles Tennyson was very far from being the most eccentric of all the Tennysons, but he is the most astonishing of them at least in one regard: that of enhanced, rather than merely sustained, activity in extreme old age. Through Summerfields, Eton and King’s, the Bar, the Office of Works, the Colonial Office, he made his way as a rather diffident if clearly able person. He became secretary to the Dunlop Rubber Company and Chairman of the Board of Trade Utility Furniture Committee; admiring Henry Moore, he was immensely proud ‘of having once helped him through the CIAD’ (Central Institute of Art and Design). He was also something of a literary man, who by the age of 51 had published 140 reviews and miscellaneous pieces; of these just four are in any way connected with his grandfather the Laureate.

It is probable that J.R.R. Tolkien was throughout his life a copious correspondent, but he appears to have been in his midforties before people took to preserving what he had addressed to them. Even so, Humphrey Carpenter has found that ‘an immense number’ of letters survive. In projecting the present selection, he realised that ‘an enormous quantity of material would have to be omitted’ and that ‘only passages of particular interest could be included.’ In the event, he has given priority to those letters in which Tolkien discusses his own books, but he has also worked with ‘an eye to demonstrating the huge range of Tolkien’s mind and interests’.

Joseph Conrad died at the age of 67 on 3 August 1924, the day following the 18th birthday of his younger son, John Conrad, the author of the present book. John’s memories, which reach astonishingly far back into his earliest childhood, begin with his family living in poverty in a tiny cottage, ‘a dark and gloomy place’, at Aldington in Kent. Chance, Conrad’s first immediately popular success, appeared when the boy was seven, and The Shadow-Line Conrad’s last work of unimpaired quality, when he was 11. During his early teens the family’s fortunes were rapidly transformed: the more startlingly so because Conrad was an extravagant as well as a very generous man. At the time of his death he was living in a substantial country-house – rented, it is true – and employing a secretary, a valet/butler, a chauffeur, two housemaids and a cook, occasional ‘extra help from the village’, two gardeners, and eventually (for Mrs Conrad) a living-in nurse. Jessie Conrad, although seriously incapacitated by an injured knee which defied the surgical skill even of the eminent Sir Robert Jones, was still obliged to cook the omelettes, since her husband would accept them from nobody else.

Paul Fussell’s aim in this book, he tells us in a preface, is ‘to suggest what it felt like to be young and clever and literate in the final age of travel’. Or, more precisely, what it thus felt like in Great Britain. ‘Because the most sophisticated travel books of the age are British, I have focused largely on them.’

A good many years ago the late Sir John Masterman, when Provost of Worcester College, had the idea of creating a species of Sherlock Holmes Apocrypha. He wrote two or three short stories which appeared, I think, in an evening newspaper. I myself can recall nothing of them except a little joke. In the course of investigating a case of poisoning. Holmes has occasion to say to his old friend: ‘Alimentary, my dear Watson.’ The project came to a hall when Sir John was gently made aware of the fact that the name and character of the great detective constituted a copyright owned by the Conan Doyle estate. But now fifty years have elapsed since Conan Doyle’s death, and anybody that pleases can have a go at a Holmes story. The present example is perhaps most kindly described as extremely odd. In addition to Holmes and Watson the main characters are Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, A.N. Whitehead. J.M. Keynes and G.E. Moore. Rather in the role of what are coming to be known as ‘guest artists’, room is also found for Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf. All these, together with Annie Besant, turn out to be goodies or near goodies, and over against them, as chief baddy, is Aleister Crowley, variously described as ‘the high priest of post-Edwardian mysticism’ and ‘the wickedest man in England’.