Autobiography as Criticism || Disrobing in the Vestry: Autobiographical Writing in the Thirties

Disrobing in the Vestry: Autobiographical Writing in the ThirtiesAuthor(s): Gerard BarrettSource: The Irish Review (1986-), No. 13, Autobiography as Criticism (Winter, 1992/1993), pp.22-30Published by: Cork University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/29735675 .

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Disrobing in the Vestry: Autobiographical Writing in the Thirties

GERARD BARRETT

There can be few decades in literary history as abundant in autobio?

graphical writing as the nineteen-thirties. It is almost an anomaly, in

the decade of Marxism, the Left Book Club, and the Spanish Civil War, that such an individualistic, self-reflexive genre should flourish as it

did. It is a discrepancy George Orwell may have been aware of when

he used a fictional autobiography, Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer

(1934), as the cornerstone of his acerbic swipe at the political commit?

ment of the decade's writers. Orwell hailed Miller as "a voice from the

cesspool ... from the crowd, from the third-class carriage, from the

ordinary, non-political, non-moral, passive man" advocating a quiet? ism in the face of history, a condition which he likened to being a

willing Jonah secure in the belly of a whale:

There you are, in the dark cushioned space that exactly fits you, with

yards of blubber between yourself and reality, able to keep up an

attitude of the completest indifference, no matter what happens. A

storm that would sink all the battle-ships in the world would barely reach you as an echo.

Miller's attraction to the Visceral prison' of the whale's belly touches

on what Orwell considered to be a very widespread fantasy. It was a

fantasy so appealing to contemporary autobiographers that one could

easily associate it with the genre itself and define autobiography as an

attempt to escape from the meta-narrative of events, a refuge from

history. When Cyril Connolly described the autobiographical impulse as a desire "to step down from the pulpit and disrobe in the vestry" he

encapsulated the almost sacred regard in which the private world was

held by a generation which feared it would soon be swamped by the

flood of historical events. Like the whale's belly, the vestry is an inner

sanctum, one of those womb-like enclosures that many writers of the

time, even left-wing authors like Isherwood, longed to curl up in. But

the motivations that lie behind this kind of writing are complex and

paradoxical and few writers can resist the temptation to deck out the

personal in vestments that admit it into social, political and historical

spheres.

22



AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL writing in the THIRITIES 23

In her contribution to The Old School, a collection of autobiographi? cal essays on public, elementary, grammar, convent and co-educa?

tional schools edited by Graham Greene in 1934, Elizabeth Bowen wrote:

I first went to this school in September 1914. The school must have re?

assembled with an elating sense of emergency, but as I was new I was

not conscious of this. Everything seemed so odd that the war was

dwarfed, and though one had been made to feel that one was now

living in history, one's own biography was naturally more interesting.

That one should find one's own self more absorbing than a world war

is hardly surprising when the perspective is that of adolescence. But in

all autobiography the moment of writing is as important as the past

being recaptured and it is remarkable how many writers of Bowen's

generation retained that lopsided world-view well into their thirties.

Christopher Isherwood, wary no doubt of being labelled a bour?

geois individualist, excused his autobiographical excursion by deny?

ing that his Lions and Shadows (1938) was an autobiography at all.

"Read it as a novel", he exhorts the reader in his preface, but the sheer

artlessness of the book makes this impossible. It is not just that through its pages, thinly disguised, move a host of recognisable figures like

Upward, Auden and Spender. What makes much of Lions and Shadows

almost unbearably dull to read is its author's absolute conviction in

the sacrosanct validity of his private world. Because of who he is, who

he has known and where he has been (public school, Cambridge, a

walking tour in the French Alps) he presumes that whatever he has to

tell cannot be anything less than fascinating. Plots from abandoned

novels, samples of automatic writing, endless descriptions of

'Mortmere' (a "private world Chalmers and I had deliberately created

for ourselves"); all are served up. It is only when Isherwood writes of the effect which the first world

war had on him that Lions and Shadows begins to demonstrate how the

public or historical can be internalised by an individual psyche and

then shut away and ignored. Though suppressed "by the strictest

possible censorship", the war continued to insinuate itself into his

mind in a disguised form.

Rather than admit the war into his first novel, Isherwood had to

search for a symbol that would adequately represent it and what he

came up with was 'Rugtonstead', an English public school. The hero, Leonard Merrows, is struck down with rheumatic fever just as he is

about to enter 'Rugtonstead' in 1919. His almost hysterical disap



24 GERARD BARRETT

pointment at having to stay at home symbolises the sense of shame

that Isherwood believed his generation had at not being old enough to take part in World War I. And this is where the fun starts:

I myself had been to a public school. I knew or had known, while I was

there, that public-school life wasn't in my heroic sense a "test" ... I had

known all this: did I know it now?

No ... I was rapidly forgetting the inconveniently prosaic truth about

my old school ... gradually, in the utmost secrecy, I began to evolve a

cult of the public-school system. I built up the daydream of an heroic

school career in which the central figure, the dream I, was an austere

young prefect, called upon unexpectedly to captain a "bad" house, surrounded by sneering critics and open enemies, fighting slackness,

moral rottenness, grimly repressing his own romantic feelings towards

a younger boy, and finally triumphing over all obstacles, passing the

test, emerging -

a Man.

This intersection of fiction and history in an autobiographical context

reveals how Isherwood's need of a refuge from history led him to a

kind of autobiographical revisionism whereby the past was perceived to be more noble than it was. It provides a possible explanation for a

trait common to autobiographers of the thirties, who sometimes in?

vest the personal with a political-historical importance which it can?

not possibly support. Here is an experiment:

The best reason I have for opposing Fascism is that at school I lived in a

Fascist state. Highworth's father was a general, Meynell's father a

colonel, mine a major. We became rulers of the chamber in which

Godfrey Meynell was the Hitler, Highworth the Goering, and I the

Goebbels, forming a gestapo who bullied everyone we could and con?

fiscated their property. I wonder how, at this period, I should have

reacted to the preaching of an English Fascist leader clever enough to

serve up his "message" in a suitably disguised and palatable form? He

would have converted me, I think, inside half an hour - I believe the

whole system of government in Germany is founded on that evolved

through centuries at the greater British public schools.

This passage is formed by adding to a sentence from Auden's contri?

bution to The Old School two sentences from Cyril Connolly's Enemies

of Promise (1938). Add a sentence and a half from Lions and Shadows a

sentence from Henry Green's Pack my Bag (1940) and there you have it: the most outrageous piece of hyperbole to come out of the collective

memory of the thirties generation, or any other generation for that

matter.



AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL WRITING IN THE THIRITIES 25

The idea that life at an English public school, five years of football and foppery, can be paralled with one of the most hideous and shame?

ful regimes in human history became so prevalent that by 1939 it had

got, literally, beyond a joke. By the time you reach the passage in Pack

My Bag about its author's first experience of mass nudity, "when after

football he made us take off our clothes and step into a trough sunk in

the floor", you have almost to pause and brace yourself for an on?

slaught of comparisons to Jewish children being lead en masse into

the gas chambers of Dachau. Fortunately, no such comparison is

made, though Green's public school, Eton, is later described as "a

humane concentration camp". Nazi Germany was not the only era deemed to be as harrowing as

an English schooling. Anthony Powell had such a distaste for his prep school and its headmaster that "sometimes on icy football fields and

during shifts of slave-labour when we chopped wood in his garden, I

was almost inclined to doubt his often-repeated assertion that life was

worse in the trenches". While Graham Greene, attacking the tradition

of 'Honour' whereby a whole house was punished if an offender did

not 'own up', could declare, without a trace of irony, "I cannot see any moral distinction between a rope for a negro and a knotted towel for a

boy."

When the attempt to exorcise the demons of history results in

excesses of this kind, it comes as a relief to find that the preferred

option was to flee them and huddle in some bunker, hoping they would eventually leave you alone. The first thing that going to Eton

meant to Powell was a room of his own, "a scarcely credible haven of

privacy after the communal life to which I had been accustomed."

That private haven is a motif which continually recurs in various

forms throughout the decade. It was partly a reaction to a system which mistrusted any form of solitude. Lamenting the lack of locks on

lavatory doors at Berkhamstead, Graham Greene had to concede: "I

suppose after reading Mr Verschoyle's account of Malvern we should

have been grateful for doors."

The wish to disassociate the self from what Seamus Deane has

defined as the other, "persons, events or places, that have helped to

give the self definition", produced countless images of enclosure in

these autobiographies. Elizabeth Bowen's school Downe House, had

"an attic-loft over the bedroom ceilings in the main buildings, with

sacks and a cistern in it, where an enterprising person could go and

weep." This kind of refuge became increasingly useful as the first

world war continued and Bowen's world view was gradually in?

verted:



26 GERARD BARRETT

The moral stress was appalling. We grew up under the intolerable

obligation of being fought for, and could not fall short in character

without recollecting that men were dying for us ... The war dwarfed us

and made us morally uncomfortable, and we could see no reason why it

should ever stop.

On his first visit to Oxford, Cyril Connolly was impressed by the dons but what he saw of the undergraduates made him long to return "to

boyhood, to Charles and Jackie and Nigel and Freddie, my books and

Medici prints, the view from my window of wine dark brick and the

chestnut tree in Weston's Yard." By his mid-thirties, he is still suffer?

ing at being untimely ripped from this womb-world, this "private civilization of reason and love at a temperature warmer than the

world outside":

For a nightmare I have often had has been that of finding myself back; I

am still a boy at Eton, still in Pop, still in my old room in Sixth Form

Passage, but nobody remembers me, nobody tells me where to go. I am

worse than a newboy, I am a new oldboy. I go into Hall and search for a

place to eat, I wander in schoolrooms trying to find a class where I am

expected. When I first used to have this dream I knew most of the boys and the masters and the nightmare then took the form of everyone, after

my place had been filled, my gap closed over, having to pretend they were glad I had returned. As time went on nobody remembered me, and the dream ended with my ejection.

At Cambridge, Isherwood and Edward Upward were shutting them?

selves away into a private world of their own, an enclosure within an

enclosure, "a world which was continually expanding, becoming more

absorbing, more elaborate, sharper and richer in detail and atmos?

phere, to the gradual exclusion of the history school, the Poshocracy, the dons, the rags, the tea-parties, the poker, the playreading; the

whole network, in fact, of personalities, social and moral obligations, codes of behavior and public amusements which formed the outward

structure of our undergraduate lives."

Yet the old school tie could serve as a talisman for Isherwood when

he left London by train for Berlin in 1929 ("some obscure kind of

insularity had caused me to put it on for the first time in years").

II

The desire to escape history was not limited to the English upper classes. Francis Stuart and James Hanley were both, in their different




ways, autobiographers who approached the genre as a turning away from the public into the private sphere while maintaining a studied

indifference to the historical.

Stuart's Things to Live For (1934) is the work of a mystic writing to weave a veil between himself and the world. Stuart's fondest memo?

ries of Rugby were the squash-racket courts:

One could shut oneself into the cement court as into a huge cell away from the world and play until one was exhausted by the fastness of the

game. It is like the feeling I have now about writing. I shut myself into a

room, a little hut in a garden, and writing books is a sort of game that

absorbs me, and far-away outside life goes on without me and I am no

more part of it for a time.

He sees autobiography as a record of adventures but all the adven?

tures he recounts, all the ones he believes to be worthwhile, occur in

enclosed settings.

Though not old enough to have fought during World War I, Stuart was old enough to have fought during the Irish Civil War. His role in

this historical conflict does not seem to be a source of any great pride to him and his account of his incarceration in Maryborough makes it

clear that he did not find his time in prison all that difficult, believing, as he does, that "one can open one's arms to life more widely in a cell

than anywhere else perhaps." Conditions at Maryborough were so

bad that he and the other inmates set fire to the place. After being herded in the compound for twenty-four hours in the rain Stuart

reveals that he was "secretly delighted to get back into a blackened

cell still kept warm from the flames. For the next few weeks we slept on concrete with only one blanket and that infected with lice. But

those days were not unhappy." This delight was more than gratitude for any comfort that will ease dreadful conditions and the eleven days he spent on hunger strike, while politically motivated, were also an

expression of the ascetic personality that emerges from Stuart's self

portrait. For three years Stuart lived alone in a little wooden hut, at one stage,

almost deciding to become a monk;

There was the inner ring where the game was played for the highest stakes ...

big cities and race courses, cars and love-affairs were not

necessarily the places or conditions in which life was at its highest pitch.

Stuart is an extreme example of the autobiographer who has decided

to step outside history; unlike Isherwood, he was not on the run from



28 GERARD BARRETT

it and his desire for a haven from the public had its basis in a philoso?

phy of life, not a neurosis.

At first glance, James Hanley's Broken Water (1937) is a breath of fresh air, a salty sea breeze in this increasingly musty atmosphere.

Hanley, born in Dublin in 1902, left school at an early age to go sea, an

experience which would have done many a thirties writer good if his

description of sea-sickness is to be relied upon:

Everything went overboard. The history of the Plantagenets and the

Tudors, the Battle of Waterloo and Anne Boleyn. Over the side. Draw?

ings of elephants and compound interest, the subject and the predicate, tonic-sal-fa, 'What I would like to be when I grow up', over the side it all

went. It was all useless, it didn't stand a ghost of a chance aboard ship.

But one can find an enclosure even at sea, like the "confined space of

the nest" where the young Hanley swaggered about feeling "very much as though it were the bridge of the ship and I its captain. Such

moments had their great thrill and I always remembered them."

Where a note of distinct unease creeps in is almost always in connec?

tion with the war, which started during Hanley's first voyage. Though

Hanley was, to an extent, sailing through history, working on a ship

transporting soldiers, seeing thirty-seven of them killed by a shell

which landed on deck, he cannot involve himself in it at personal level.

The thing that struck me most and which left the most lasting impres? sion on my mind was not the horror of the whole filthy business but the

calm, almost callous acceptance of it. The war, in fact, had ceased to

have any meaning. One carried thousands and tens of thousands of

soldiers. At first it was exciting, it did have meaning, but when days and months grew to years and one was still doing the same thing, it

ceased to be exciting; it became ordinary.

Hanley's story ends where most of the others begin, with the author

back on shore, locked in a room with books and music, enclosed, content. History, for Hanley, was not a privileged discourse -

What were the dangers of the sea, the inconveniences of soldiers, the

waste of life, the meaning and purpose of war, to that magic of return?

ing home?

Ill

Home - a room, a prison-cell, an attic-loft, a hut in a garden or the

warm belly of a whale where you wrap yourself up and remain




oblivious to the echoes of the battleships sinking outside, a bunker, a

haven, a refuge - these are the revered images of autobiographers in

the thirties. But how tenable is that womb-world in the whale's belly? Jonah only lasted three days. It might have been less had the whale not been constipated.

Perhaps the single most dramatic example of autobiography as

flight is provided by Henry Green's Pack My Bag (1940). When Green started working on it in London in 1938 he was only 33 years old. Of course the authors of the decade's numerous self-portraits had all

been young -

Cyril Connolly was 35, James Hanley 35, Christopher Isherwood 34 and Francis Stuart a juvenile 32. But Pack My Bag was

the only one of these books to be written as a direct response to an

impending international crisis. Green's "excuse" for writing his life

story at this stage was "the war that seems to be coming upon us now

and that is a reason to put down what comes to mind before one is

killed, and surely it would be asking much to pretend one had a

chance to live."

When the world starts to collapse around your ears, the place to

turn is back into that private world, to the treasures and menaces of

childhood, to how you fared at school and survived university, your first job. But one of Green's childhood memories stands out above the

rest. It is an example of the way in which an utterly personal trauma

can translate into public and historical terms to encapsulate the trag?

edy of a whole generation. In 1917 the house where Green grew up was turned into an officers'

convalescent home, taking in about twenty at a time. One of these, an

Australian who had been gassed and blown up by a shell committed

suicide after he left the home to go back to France. A few days before

he left he and everyone else thought he was getting better and he took

the twelve year old Green out on a bicycle ride:

He was soon wobbling but he would not get off to rest until when we

got into the drive he could just get off his bike and zigzag into the house

not wishing I suppose that I should see him fall. He was up again in

four days and it did not do him any harm but it damaged me and

somehow, because he never spoke of it again I think he knew because it was not until then I realized by sharing it with him, how hopelessly far

gone he was. We grow up by sharing situations, what we share of

another person's increases us, and my memorial to all of them at that

time in my heart now is my anguish remembered as I saw him stagger in disclosed, wondering perhaps if it were not my fault?

That anguish remembered, all the more poignant for being an anguish shared, is a potent example of what autobiography at its finest can be



30 GERARD BARRETT

- a private sphere emerging out of and sliding into a public chaos.

Towards the end of Pack My Bag Green recounts a number of anec?

dotes which he picked up while working in his father's iron foundry in Birmingham. One of these can be read as a possible reply to Orwell's

exhortation to 'Get inside the whale.' A cow in a field saw a beautiful

buttercup but when she sat down to eat it she found a bee had settled

on it. After an extended argument as to who owns the buttercup, the

cow threatens to eat the bee along with it, prompting the bee to

remark, "If you do I will sting you after."

Then the cow ate the beautiful buttercup and the bee and when the bee was down in the cow's belly he thought it all was so dark so nice and warm he might as well have a nap before he stings the cow. So he drops off for a bit but when he woke up the cow was gone.

Can a more perfect parable of the autobiographer in the thirties be

imagined? The autobiographer's progress is as ineluctable as that

bee's; from the dark, amniotic sea of the personal, 'so nice and warm', to the steaming dung heap of history.



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Autobiography as Criticism || Disrobing in the Vestry: Autobiographical Writing in the Thirties