Julian Symons

In the beginning there was Cookham, and Pa and Ma and ten other children apart from Stanley, including two who died in childhood. Cookham was Paradise, but Paradise ended with the 1914 War. Afterwards there were years of confusion, then the discovery of sex. And all the while there was religion, and paintings that tried to express religious feeling, latterly including always in various forms the artist and one or other of his two wives. That was the life of Stanley Spencer (1891-1959) who became Sir Stanley, and spoke often of his ‘belief in grandeur and great Art and Religion of the grandest kind ’. The belief was shown through paintings that, if not exactly the grandest, are possibly the biggest and certainly among the oddest done in Britain during the 20th century.

In the lustrum after World War Two the word ‘commitment’ got almost as much work as ‘existential’ in literary magazines. The words represented opposite attitudes to the writer’s stance in relation to the world around him. A literary existentialist owed a little, but not much, to Kierkegaard’s belief in the free and responsible individual discovering his spiritual essence through acts of will. In practice, existentialist writers favoured individual freedom of action against the limits imposed by ‘society’, expressing rebellious feelings outwardly by (according to Mary McCarthy) wearing long dark-belted coats of shaggy material, and in their work by exalting individual values against those of the mass. The work of committed writers, in contrast, was rooted not only in the visible world but also in the rapidly changing pattern of social habits and attitudes. Thoroughgoing existentialists believed in the virtues of irresponsibility, but for others the question of the degree and nature of commitment nagged like an aching tooth.

Volume One of Anthony Burgess’s autobiography, Little Wilson and Big God, left our hero in January 1960 under sentence of death, no more than a few months to live. With one bound, or at least one letter from the Neurological Institute, he is free. ‘The protein content of my spinal liquor had gone down dramatically’: the death sentence is cancelled. Too late: he is already writing at express speed to provide for his widow, and can’t stop. He is not quite the equal of my friend John Creasey, who once told me he tried to keep himself down to writing a dozen crime stories a year but found he wrote 14. The Burgess production rate worked out at five and a half novels in the pseudo-terminal year. And eight years later it was his wife who died.

One day in 1950 I walked down Crown Passage, an alley between King Street and Pall Mall, to call on the Falcon Press in pursuit of money they owed me. The managing director Peter Baker had left letters unanswered and telephone calls unreturned, and sure enough he was out. I saw instead a harassed long-nosed man in a blue suit who said his name was Paul Scott, and that he was the company secretary. Things were in a bit of a muddle, but he would see what could be done. I can’t remember whether I ever got my money, but Scott had good reason to look harassed, ‘with the accounts in front of him and creditors on the telephone’, as one of his friends put it. He wisely left Falcon Press before its collapse and the trial of Peter Baker – Captain Peter Baker, MC, the youngest Tory MP in the 1950 Parliament – for fraud and forgery, at the end of which he received a seven-year prison sentence.’

‘Julia died. I read it in the Times this morning… I never liked her, nor did she like me; strange, then, how we managed to keep up a sort of friendship for so long.’ The first half-dozen lines of Anita Brookner’s novel suggest the tone, straightforwardly realistic, and tell us the principal subject, the relationship between flamboyant upper-middle-class Julia and Fay, whose father was a cinema manager. The opening chapter’s ten pages enlarge on this, sketch Julia’s youthful success as a diseuse and tell us of her solicitor husband Charles’s death, mention Fay’s own glimpse of fame during the War, when she sang ‘on the wireless’ as the serious spot on comedy shows, and her marriage to Owen, a junior partner in Charles’s firm. One has the feeling too much is being given away, but that isn’t so. The framework provided by this opening chapter is essential to the way Fay’s story is told, its placing a small artistic triumph that would have been appreciated by James or Conrad.