A Sea-Grape Tree
The Swan in the Evening is a curiously
divided book. Its first half is a
highly sensitive account of childhood; which captures it evocatively. Rosamond Lehmann’s acute sensibility
recreating the texture of a child’s egocentric life; its absorption in their
immediate surroundings, capturing her intense sensitivity; her almost supernatural
awareness; it is a time of ripe vividness where everything has significance;
and when particular things, pieces of furniture and the odd plant, are full of
portent. It is a world where so
much is seen for the first time; new things creating explosions of new
excitement; and there is much we misunderstand – our ignorance is our
mystery. It is a time when every
day is a new day (and is made just for us!); and yet always there is the fear
of getting lost – in strange woods or amongst the incomprehensible sentences of
our parents.[i]
Lehmann’s description of that world closes with one
incident, which at first seems out of place, but later proves to be prophetic:
she has a vision. It is an odd
experience for the reader, and initially very confusing, for it appears in an
excellent, but nevertheless conventional, autobiographical fragment. It is as if we came across George Eliot
in the parlour suddenly speaking like William Blake…
Once upon a time, but when, in actual time, I have no
idea, a sudden searching convulsion of my whole ground of being overtakes me in
the garden. I am mooching alone
along the gravel path that runs between the lawn and Lover’s Walk. It is autumn, and the sun has dropped. I am not Amaranth Aurora or Beryl
Diamond, or that obsessive spell-maker, murmuring as I stroll or crawl around
OM MANI PADME HUM. I am almost no
one, kicking up amber drifts of chestnut leaves, aware of the dark green
thickets of laurel on my left, and on my right of the hoary expanse of lawn,
ringed by blue deodars and cedars and already crisping with frost and sparkling
in the opalescent haze of dusk. I
look up and see the moon quite high in the sky, a moon nearly at the full,
singular in its lucence. I stop to
stare at it. Then something
extraordinary happens…. A flash…
as if an invisible finger had pressed a master switch and floodlit my whole
field of vision. At the same time
the world starts spinning, and I am caught up in the spin, lifted,
whirled. A voice splits the sky,
splits my head…. And yet there is
absolutely not a sound in the garden, not a barking dog, not a shunting train,
not even a late robin; and although the detonation is within me it is also
immeasurably distant, as far beyond the moon as I in the spinning garden am
immeasurably below it. It is the
Voice of God, of this I am certain.
He has addressed me, he has pierced me with a word, an arrow with my
name on it, imperative…
All over in a second. I am put down again; dropped out. I hurry back into the house, hoping not
to be seen because I must look different.
I dash upstairs and seek the mirror in my bedroom; scrutinize my poorly
lit reflection…. Not changed.
God has pointed at me. He has not touched me.
The second half of the book is dominated by the sudden lost
of the author’s daughter; and her own absorption in spiritualism, as she seeks
to commune with her. She believes
absolutely, as we later read in the afterword to A
Sea-Grape Tree, where she writes as if
telepathy is as natural as the telephone – they are simply different lines
connecting to different realms.
This is what confuses the reader: the extraordinary is placed amongst
the ordinary, and treated as if there are no differences between them. So talking with her dead daughter in
the bedroom is as natural as conversing with the lollypop man on a zebra
crossing. Both occupy the natural
world, she believes, although a slight oddity sets her views apart from their
surroundings; a source of ridicule, blamed on others’ ignorance. The sceptic
thus finds herself sitting in the first row of a fundamentalist sermon; and
listens to what she assumes is either nonsense or symbol spoken as if they
were matters of plain fact. Nor is
it just the eccentric content of the belief that puzzles us; even more
disorientating is the believer’s reactions to that belief. There is nothing fragile or doubtful
about it. So certain are they!
behaving as if there is nothing unusual about what they think; the ideas simple
and tangible as a cup of tea.
They do not recognise how bizarre they appear, to us, the liberal and
sophisticated, who read their views as a sign of mental decline; and which
frustrates us, and which we find hard to accept, as for years they have seemed
just like you and me; though better and more profound - Rosamond Lehmann the
great novelist, with unusual insight into our emotions… Yet now we know she converses with dead
bodies. It is the moment when an
illusion is punctured; and we lose that homely faith that we can fully
understand another person; even our friends or colleagues who we believe
differ little from ourselves, even when dyeing their hair in a melange of pink,
orange and purple. [ii]
As
I have written before, it seems the very sensitivity of this writer leaves
her open to a faith like spiritualism; the crisis of her daughter’s death shifting
her focus away from the natural world to her own inner space. So although we are confused, and
sometimes angry,[iii] frustrated
at a person who refuses to recognise what we regard as something obvious –
there are no fairies at the bottom of the garden, dear -, we receive an insight
into the peculiar workings of a mind whose mental universe predominates over
empirical fact: a place where mental images compete on equal terms with mundane
reality. It is a sort of art, but
whose source material is within the mind itself; although Rosamond Lehmann
would not accept this: for her the spirit world is a real place; jostling
somewhere in the interstices of the material universe.
To understand A Sea-Grape Tree properly the earlier autobiography has to be read. Only then do we pick up its resonances;
and properly appreciate a reality we could so easily mistake for metaphor and
symbol. This novel, her last, is
soaked in the themes that dominate the latter half of her autobiography;
fashioning them into an art that is not altogether successful. For Lehmann is too much the believer,
too enclosed within her own mental space, her mysticism, to adequately evoke a
new world for us to see.[iv] She doesn’t give us enough material; is
not prepared to compromise with our own doubts and scepticism, is incapable of
clearly seeing her world from outside of herself; and thus we must either
accept or reject her vision wholesale.
Inevitably there is a touch of unreality about it; for unless we share
the faith we will not believe in all the pictures she creates.[v] There are moments of her usual
brilliance, but too often she appears unable to remove herself from her own
life; her own stultifying consciousness.
This book is thus not a success, but it does help us to see her
greatness; it helps us clarify why critics have tended to misrepresent, and
perhaps diminish, her: she is much much more than a writer who writes about
love.
Although in a narrow sense there is much truth to this
view. Rosamond Lehmann does write
about love; and nearly all the time!
In this book Rebecca says she is consumed by it – this West Indian island
is a brief retreat from the cataclysmic end of an affair. And this emotion, in all its variety,
is a thick seam that runs through the other main characters; particularly Ellie
Cunningham, Johnny, and Sibyl Jardine.
It also appears the animating source for the actions of other
personalities we hardly see: Johnny’s wife Jackie, Mr de Pas… Love then is
everywhere, although it vibrates at different intensities.
When we first see Rebecca she is in a mental crisis. Her mind fractured, she lives an inner
life that is separated from the island’s population by an almost reflexive
surface – so unstable and so unfixed is her sense of self she is reluctant to
give out her identity; and keeps her responses to questions and group repartee
to a minimum. Her hosts call her
Anonyma when she refuses to give her name. Already we feel echoes of Lehmann’s own loss, and her own
mental crisis over the sudden death of her daughter. Already the book feels too close to life, and we are
uncomfortable with it; uneasy with the confessional elements, which also
distract us, directing us to the real life of the author, as we scan the
sentences for signs of her own personality, instead of exploring a created
world through her characters’ consciousness. When Mrs Jardine appears it feels as if life has invaded
art, and conquered it; Sibyl really Sally, speaking once more from the
dead… It feels too forced, too
contrived; too self-conscious; the author lacking the energy to properly turn
all this material into art; and so it feels more like a book than a work of
life – a strange paradox. This may
be the reason she recapitulates old themes: they are like old, obsessional,
memories we try constantly to resolve to one’s present satisfaction; although
the only satisfactory solution is forget them; letting them fade out through
lack of thought. One consequence
is that love overwhelms this book; whereas the previous ones both evoked and
analysed the complex shifts of emotions that underlie it. Before, when in her prime, Rosamond
Lehmann had the detachment to get below the governing ego, to evoke the forces
(the Will?)[vi] that gives it texture and often shapes and controls it. Love, on the other hand, is too
entangled with our conscious selves, it includes too much me, and thus is a
danger to the most profound art; which requires a touch of impersonality.[vii] Love is much too much, it is the most
selfish of the emotions because the most personal. With a falling off of her talent she cannot get beyond these
particular feelings and so conforms to conventional opinion; losing her
brilliance she seems to justify what others have written…[viii]
…there is “emotion evident in the situation”, an emotion which attaches
itself naturally to the events there described. But it is not this emotion,
common to all human begins confronted with like situations, that turns Dante’s
account to poetry. The quality which is peculiarly “poetic” is
something arriving automatically, independent of the poet’s will, and finding its
place in the poem’s “complexity of detail”, in particular “phrases” and
“images”. This “detail” is thrust up from below the levels of consciousness.
(C.K. Stead discussing and quoting T.S. Eliot. The
New Poetic. My emphasis)[ix]
The levels of personality that Eliot is discussing appear
below not only our consciousness, but below our emotions too; that is why the
great artists can evoke them so clearly and (dare I say) objectively. Their origin a sense of an inner,
pulsating, calm that can push out images and ideas when the mind is properly
tuned in to receiving them. This
requires switching off both our self-consciousness and our emotions – at the
moment of creation. Lehmann in this book can only momentarily
receive these signals; for the storms of her life had still not settled when
she came to write this book.
Her encounters with Mrs Jardine, which occur in dreams,
highlight this book’s weakness when compared to the excellent The
Ballad and the Source. In that book Mrs Jardine is an
extraordinarily powerful and attractive presence.[x] Here that forceful character remains in
the memories of the inhabitants; and through the life of Johnny, an airman
paralysed in a plane crash, who, in her usual way, she idolised and tried to
create in her own image: thus the books he reads and the decorated beach hut in
which he lives.
… a sort of cottage orné, set up
on stilts, with a high-pitched roof of rosy shingles, its walls stuccoed a deep
shade of tawny pink; ornamented with shell encrustations: silvered bronze
shells, pearl, honey-coloured, milky flushed with rose and violet; shells of
all shapes and sizes in convoluted patterns…
Johnny lives inside yet another myth Sibyl Jardine has
created; seeing the hut we remember her house on the hill, and her distinct
tastes, highly feminine, and redolent of the aestheticism of the 1890s. The hut exists under a sea-grape tree… The symbolism seems obvious, but is
nevertheless obscure… is the tree
Sibyl’s shadow?
The island is a sort of exotic hospital for Rebecca; a short
stay that heals her devastated love.
Emotionally febrile Rebecca is susceptible to the attractions of another
man, and she falls for Johnny’s beauty.
The novel becomes an exemplary study of how a woman partially recovers
from an affair by starting a new one: the wilful emotions demand it. However, the symbolism suggests
something else, and gives an odd feel to the book: the affair is also an
expurgation; but not of her faithless lover (whose name we are never given) but
of Mrs Jardine. Sex, which always
take place in the hut, is not only a moment of ecstatic bliss but a victory
over Sibyl’s memory; by clamping the older woman’s protégé between her thighs Rebecca vanquishes her dominating
presence. By competing with Sibyl
on her own territory, and winning, she escapes at last from her influence… Later, we find that Sibyl died shortly
after seeing Johnny canoodling with her granddaughter Maisie; her jealousy
overcame her – for no matter what the age gap there was always a sexual element
to her worship of younger men: she idolised and created them, and desired them
too.
But it is never properly explained why Sibyl should command
such a lasting influence; and why this need to conquer it – this is the
artistic failing of the book; and stems, I surmise, from the author’s own need
to expunge a painful presence; Sybil an analogue for her own daughter. She thus becomes an alien object in the
book; spoiling its artistic integrity.
Perhaps we would have accepted her presence if the novel could have
recaptured the power of the original character. However, we are given only the voice of Mrs Jardine, and the
sentimental memories of those who knew her. She returns to Rebecca in a dream, and because it is a dream
the encounter between them is much more equal than before. We hear her voice, but she has lost
most of her charisma; and the tensions she was able to create are now easily
resolved: living now only inside Rebecca’s mind she has been domesticated. True to life, no doubt; but such
matter-of-factness weakens even a realist novel; while this one aspires to the
mythic.[xi] The tensions inherent in this work that
aspires to be both real and poetic, empirical fact and metaphysical presence,
are compressed to breaking point with the entry of such a weak Sibyl. She is too mundane for the spirit
world. She needs to be more alive
in this one!
The day ended with a gift to
Anonyma, the first, from Johnny.
Without warning, Johnny turned, as if – as if acknowledging, or
surrendering, and possibly with a touch of irony beneath the look he bent on
her: Johnny turned suddenly and gave her the taste of joy. Pure, piercing, unmistakable,
astounding taste of joy.
What happened? A late swim from Johnny’s boat by
starlight and the light of Louis’ lantern, leaving Ellie to prepare supper in
the hut. He swam far out, away
from where she circled quietly just beyond the lantern’s soft corona. Then back he came, she watched him,
thrusting through the water with powerful strokes, his great shoulders looming
as he came abreast of her and passed her without a word or glance. Then suddenly he turned, swam back,
swept her into his arms, gave her a kiss.
Not smiling. Saying
nothing. A cold, salt kiss. Cheek pressed to cheek they remained;
then broke apart. The boat came
gliding up on silent oars, she swam away to shore, crossed the white sands,
dressed again as usual behind the hut, joined Ellie who, mixing avocado salad,
exclaimed with dismay at sight of her wet hair so recently fortified with egg
and brandy.
So much happening in such a tiny time capsule. The sudden recognition of love, and its
fall into actuality; captured beautifully with the play of colours and the
movement of the boat; with that sudden shift to land. We see it all as one continuous movement, though each bit is
split up into its own bright particularity. Each moment a distinct atoll that will later appear in all its rich
vividness; and on which the obsessive mind will recall again and again and
analyse continuously… as here: Rebecca is looking back over what happened
earlier in the day; which is reflected in the language; initially analytic and
abstract, while vivid and very concrete descriptions then dominate the second
paragraph. The latter is her
experienced memory; the former is how she thinks about it; giving the
experience a heightened value in words that are overwrought and prophetic.
Is her affair with Johnny a brief interlude? A tropical island in an otherwise
conventional life… in her
afterword the author suggests it is: there was to have been a sequel, in which
the affair would not be resumed.
This seems right; the atmosphere of the island, and the strange,
intense, nature of the relationship suggests it is too attached to a particular
time and place to be repeated in a different context. Lehmann’s failure to write a sequel and the long gap between
this book and her masterpiece, The
Echoing Grove, also suggests something
else: this island, and the brief ecstasy of the affair, which removed the agony
of her abandonment, is a symbol of her own creative life. After the death of her daughter, she
could not return to the mainland; and was left scanning the horizons for a
world she could see but not properly describe; for only the initiated could
grasp what she envisioned. [xii]
[ii] Gilbert Ryle, who I discuss in another Lehmann
piece, also makes this mistake.
Except he doesn’t realise what he is doing – he believes all humans are
the same! It is an error that
arises out of his behavourism; the belief that because we are made of matter we
must somehow be almost inert: our minds are a substance to be acted upon (by
various stimuli) rather than something that acts under its own motivation; and
one that creates and thinks independently of the immediate stimulus. (See the discussion in Bryan Magee’s Modern
British Philosophy.)
A
contrary position is Chomsky’s, who argues that language clearly demonstrates
the falsity of such a view: its fundamental structure is independent of the
immediate environment. (See in
particular his Cartesian
Linguistics and On
Language.) Konrad
Lorenz, writing just over a decade later than Ryle, wrote that the internal
working of the body have their own stimulus, and do not need unconditioned or
unconditioned responses. (See his On
Aggression). A discovery that preceded Ryle’s book,
but which he would not have been interested in – because, he would have argued,
he was not a specialist in these areas! Philosophy was all he knew. It is the credo of the specialist taken
to absurdity. A popular view of the time.
[iii] This is reflected in the reviews of The Swan in the
Evening, where some reviewers simply
could not accept why so an intelligent and respectable a writer should believe
such evident nonsense:
“One critic wrote (privately)
with distaste of ‘descriptions of mediumistic séances which you have obviously
come deeply to doubt.’”
Lehmann’s
response is characteristic:
“I
cannot spot anything in my text that might give that impression…”
Other
reviewers tended to tip-toe around the book’s paragraphs, uncomfortable with
their content, but unwilling to openly criticise; afraid of hurting the author.
[iv] In the earlier book, we read:
“Now
that I know that death considered as extinction is an illusory concept based on
the ignorance, or prejudice, or the intellectual arrogance or snobbery, or the
natural dread or not unnatural despair, or the built-in death-wish – the goût
de cendre – of blind humanity; and
that life goes on – relentlessly you might say, whether or no we fancy the
idea, and certainly in accordance with cosmic laws which human reason is
ill-equipped to understand… now
that I know this for certain…” (my emphasis).
At
the very least these are highly controversial statements. And yet the author has no doubts… at
all! This is naturally very
threatening; for it suggests something impenetrable about her; something rigid and
alien; that will not be moved or changed; and thus opposed to the natural
condition for most humans, who are relatively plastic in their interactions
with other people. No doubts! But
given the perplexities and confusions of life it is natural to have doubts
about it; and we would expect intelligent, cultivated and liberal intellectuals
to be particularly acute to the inconsistencies and puzzles the world
constantly displays for our bewilderment.
However, for Lehmann the spirit world is more certain than most of what
goes on in our mundane world, outside, that is, of direct experience; or at least that is how she
must be read.
And
this is perhaps the key to this strange puzzle: outside our direct perceptual
experience all our knowledge of the world is a mental construct; which by its
very nature is uncertain and contains elements of doubt (the external world and
our knowledge about it are two different things, and they overlap imperfectly – see the footnotes in my Dropout
Boogie for more comment). With Lehmann the spirit world has
ceased to be a faith or a mental construct – it is direct experience; but of a
particular kind. For the author it
is direct contact with that world beyond appearances, what Christians call God,
Kant the thing-in-itself, and Schopenhauer the Will. For the more sceptical it is perhaps some direct experience
of the workings of the mind itself; whatever that experience may actually
be… The certainty clearly suggests
so.
[v] And this comes out in strange ways:
“…As
if galvanised by an electric battery her face started to twitch throughout the
layers of rouge and powder caking it.
Next, one eye fell open, winked.
Presently she exhaled a long tremolo of beatitude; murmured:
“‘Ah,
what a treat to drop off after the long day’s toil. A mor-or-ortal treat.
Hark now!’
“Violently
she flung her head up; assumed the look of one intently listening.
“In
truth the throbs, brays, moans of a recorded dance band had began to float from
far across the bay.”
Note
that archaic “Hark now!” Miss Stay
here comes across as a piece of high Victoriana; a sort of music hall (or
Dickensian) automata – the facial features appear as something that happens to
her, of which she is scarcely aware.
The comedy of the scene softens the impact of our first encounter with
Miss Stay’s mediumistic power; out scepticism is assuaged when she mistakes a
phonograph for the voices of the spirit world.
One
can justify the sort of place that attracts this kind of character: an imperial
island where life is cheap and the social conventions more elastic, and where
remnants from previous generations and the eccentric collect to soak up the
last years of their lives; pickled inside their oddity. But here there is something just a
little too archaic, something too stagy, about such a character as Miss Stay
(note the name! and all its implications): not enough life has been put into
her, so she remains too mechanical, falling off the edge of caricature. Too much thought about she is not
adequately felt; and with too little feeling in her she is not a fully created being (or at least not created
enough to come properly alive).
We
accept such a minor character; and in all their eccentricity. But to also
accept as quite normal her powers as a medium she needs to be more fully
realised; we must grasp a sense of the reality inside her; and it must collide
in some way with the scepticism of the other characters (those substitutes for
ourselves). That is, Rosamond
Lehmann must see Miss Stay both from the inside and the outside, the latter
requiring a double distance: from her own belief and our agnosticism.
In
this scene the strains on the book are beginning to tell… This is reflected in the author’s
afterword, where she describes the novel’s location as a sort of Prospero’s
isle; “part poetic, out of time, part realistic…” This is a hard combination to get right; and odd moments
like these expose the novel’s weaknesses; we see the rust on the chain links
binding these different elements together.
[vii] Lyric poetry may be an exception. But even this is debateable. Perhaps the greatest lyric poet of last
century, Marina Tsvetaeva, who at first glance seems an exception, writes quite
differently about the source of her poetry. Like Rimbaud (I is another) Tsvetaeva writes of the artistic
impulse as something other; impersonal and outside her daytime self:
“Shyness
of the artist before the object.
He forgets that it is not himself writing. Vyacheslav Ivanov
said to me… ‘Just make a start! By
the third page you’ll be convinced there is no freedom’ – meaning I shall find
myself in the power of things, in the power of the demon, merely a humble
servant….
“Not
without reason does each of us say at the end: ‘How marvellously my work has
come out!’ and never: ‘How marvellously I’ve done it!’ And not: It’s come out marvellously’,
but it’s come out by a marvel, always by a miracle; it’s always a blessing,
even if sent not by God.
-
“And the amount of will
in all this?
-
“Oh, enormous. If only not to despair when you wait by
the sea for good weather…
“And
listening is what my will is, not
to tire of listening until something is heard, and not to put down anything
that wasn’t heard. To be afraid
not of the rough-work page (criss-crossed in vain searches), nor of the blank
page, but of one’s own page:
self-willed.
“Creative
Will is patience.” (Eponymous
essay in Art
in the Light of Conscience)
Love
helps to generate the emotions, which provide the energy for creative
work. But art requires more than
emotion. Thus in an earlier essay Tsvetaeva writes about the importance of
judgement of the artist (weaker in the lyric poet, she believes): that sense of
taste, a feeling of just-rightness which indicates when a work is good. Emotion doesn’t have this particular
kind of subtlety; this artistic tact; and to equate art with it is to mistake
the locomotive for the train driver, and both for the hidden engine that powers
them. It is one of the reasons why
people in love write such bad poetry: the page is just one of the outlets, just
one station stop, for all the emotional energy they need to release; but their
talent, which is linked to but separate from those emotions, does not exist for
them to give it proper shape. To
use the poet’s terminology: the willed self overcomes the listener; and the
subterranean currents, that include both the content and form of the art
object, are lost in the surface noise, the purely physical expression of a
particular emotion.
[viii] Conventional opinion being simply an opinion is merely
a simplification of the much richer source material; it is an abstraction from
life. This book is so close to the
stereotype because the artist here is less evident than the person, and so the
latter’s ideas, their conscious mind, which is often merely reflexive, is too
much in the ascendancy.
[ix] See my The
Uncertainty of the Poet and Flowers
are Lovely When You Laugh at Them
for more comment.
[x] Was the author influenced by the impact of Hitler when
she was writing it? The book was
published in 1944.
[xi] See the author’s comments in the afterword.
[xii] As, perhaps, she herself, acknowledges:
“A
Sea-Grape Tree is generally
considered an unsatisfactory work.
It would ill become me to argue for it; but perhaps I might just venture
to say that Anonyma’s conversation with Sibyl Jardine was intended to be a
telepathic one. Telepathy between
the incarnate and the discarnate is much less uncommon than is generally
supposed. Sibyl is made to speak
as she spoke on earth, as in The Ballad and the Source, in a somewhat didactic or mandarin style; but I see
the experiment was rash and courted irritation, head-shaking, even mockery from
a few critics ever willing and never afraid to wound.”
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