P.N. Furbank

We owe a large debt to the famous chapter on Robinson Crusoe in Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel. Watt really made us use our wits about that novel and forced us to relate it to our most serious interests. Reread after twenty years, moreover, the chapter still has all of its intellectual impact and verve. The trouble is, I now find myself wanting to quarrel with almost every sentence in it. The problem is perhaps epitomised by Watt’s dependence on Max Weber, who, I increasingly think, had quite a genius for getting things wrong. Watt, speaking of Crusoe’s methodical book-keeping, quotes Weber on ‘profit-and-loss book-keeping’ being ‘the distinctive technical feature of modern capitalism’. But after all, double-entry book-keeping was a mainstay of commercial prosperity in 15th-century Venice and Genoa (it later became known as ‘the Italian method’). How then can it be ‘distinctive’ of modern capitalism?

It is difficult, yet not impossible, to imagine Bernard Shaw at a loss for words. The thing indeed occurred in 1928 at Thomas Hardy’s funeral, when Shaw and Kipling were paired in the procession of mourners but could find nothing whatever to say to each other. Shaw’s own excuse was that it was absurd to have coupled such a tall man with such a very short one. This is very weak, and actually we find the silence quite natural. It is worth pondering why. No doubt Shaw regarded his companion as a madman, and Kipling regarded his as Mephistopheles, but this in itself need not have been a barrier to conventional civilities. The answer lies elsewhere, I suggest, and in their horrified recognition, at this their first and last encounter, of a ghastly kinship between them, as tutors and wooers of the British public over an identical period and carrying identical weight. What comes in here, also, is that, for good or evil, both were eaten up by ‘views’, were the mere fleshly embodiment of a system of opinions, which is a more imprisoning thing than a philosophy.

Brian Finney speaks of the study of autobiography as a ‘yawning gap’ in British scholarship. It is also, to judge from myself, a yawning gap in one’s own thoughts, which this is a good moment to try to fill. Finney has his own perspective, which is much concerned, first, with the ‘truth’ factor and attendant perceptual problems; secondly with autobiography as psychotherapy; and thirdly with the (large) function assigned to the reader by an autobiography. There is also an educational theme. Finney relates his deconversion as a teacher, but also as a critic and reader, from a ‘New Criticism’ faith, and tells us that as a teacher ‘I found myself quite naturally making increased use of autobiographical texts in courses in order to encourage students to seek a genuine, particularised point of contact between their lives and their experience of reading literature.’ It seems, in practice, though he does not say so, to have been only a partial deconversion. For what he found was that students – and not only students but some critics and scholars too – were in a state of primitive innocence with regard to autobiography such as, since the days of New Criticism, would hardly have been possible for them with regard to the novel. To put it bluntly, they wanted autobiographers to give us a true account of their past life, as well as to be decent and well-behaved citizens. ‘Only within the small circle of critics of the genre is it now a commonplace that an autobiography is likely to throw more light on the normally ageing autobiographer than on the earlier self about whom the book is ostensibly written.’ Finney describes this critical commonplace, very plausibly, as the ‘intrinsic paradox of the genre’, and proportions his praise of autobiographers to the degree to which they show themselves aware of it. His theory of the genre is a coherent one and is followed through with a good deal of resourcefulness and intelligent observation. I think there are certain things wrong with his theory, though not with this bit of it, but his is a valuable book and well worth arguing with.’

We perhaps do not look with enough curiosity at the dramas and rituals which attend the actual act of ‘writing’, the moments when an author is confronting blank sheets of paper waiting to be filled. A vast assortment of conflicts, including some notable heroisms, lie concealed in the unaccommodating phrase ‘writer’s block’. Reading the anguished letters of Joseph Conrad, who was frequently ‘blocked’ during the fruitful years which produced Youth, Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim, you ask yourself why he did not shoot himself, or rather begin to wonder, nervously, whether he may not try to. The laments about a writer’s life, which are the dominating theme of his letters, are quite agonising. To Cunninghame Graham he writes, 16 February 1898: ‘Cher ami, I did not write because I was beastly seedy – nerve trouble – a taste of hell.’ To William Blackwood, 12 April 1900: ‘A dog’s life! this writing out, this endlessness of effort and this endless discontent; with remorse, thrown in, for the massacre of so many good intentions.’ To Edward Garnett, 29 March 1898: ‘I assure you – speaking soberly and on my word of honour – that sometimes it takes all my resolution and power of self control to refrain from butting my head against the wall. I want to howl and foam at the mouth but I daren’t do it for fear of waking that baby and alarming my wife.’’

It is worth stating a few facts about Stephen Tennant, the subject of this excellent biography by Philip Hoare, in case some readers may not have heard of him. He was born in 1906, the son of a rich industrialist, Edward Tennant, who became Lord Glenconner in 1911, and of Pamela Wyndham, one of the Wyndham sisters immortalised by Sargent in his painting The Three Graces. Margot Tennant, who married Asquith, the Liberal prime minister, was his paternal aunt.