Bagnold's Beauty

After the war, its social revolution, and the austerities that followed its success, the British aristocracy seemed certain to die out, New Jerusalem replacing ancient Arcadia as the country’s mythic capital. Enid Bagnold takes us inside the resistance…The Loved and Envied.

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The world holds no cares for a beautiful woman. Beauty is freedom. It is insouciance. All seek to serve; the whims, the demands, the freedoms of its desires, they beguile us and we turn courtier; the perfect shape our queen, her delicate smile, an exquisite complexion, the vivacity of a clever, amusing eye: it is the lively monarch that attracts not her dull statue.1 We want this beauty! its wonder an electricity, making us fizz and glow. And Ruby can rely on her court. No need think about the self. Others will not worry or disturb. When Ruby Maclean dresses in her bedroom she is surrounded by acquaintances of both sexes, her innocence removing all taboos. Only an outsider, a peasant - it is the duchess’ maid - is shocked by such behaviour, unaware of all the restraints - invisible to the common eye - that abound here. For an admirer the codes of conventional behaviour do not apply; beauty a form of grace that transforms all actions; blasphemy barred from Heaven, smut has no place in a princess’ boudoir.

We first see Ruby from a distance - from the stalls in a theatre. Rose, an old actress who has lost her looks, stares enviously up at a woman whose beauty appears eternal. Has her man ever loved Ruby, she muses; yes, she thinks, and is jealous.

At a distance Ruby Maclean’s power looks supreme. Who wouldn’t sacrifice themselves for her regard? Rudi does. Losing his head he gives a speech from his own box; a theatrical faux pas that will increase the critics’ hostility, already openly expressed.

Close up we see the effects of beauty’s might. Miranda, who refuses to compete with her mother, knowing she always loses, leads a dull retiring life, her lack of self-worth exacerbated by plain looks. A withdrawn and sullen personality she is vulnerable: the first real contact with a male and Miranda falls in love. He is a poor character, the marriage a bad one. The glories of one epoch produces the wretchedness of the next.2 Ugliness follows in beauty’s wake.

Cora is also envious; even though she has created her own life, become a success, is now a famous painter. Cora, the embodiment of will and metamorphosis, of a conscious independence, is the axle around which the meaning of this novel revolves. An ugly woman married to a mediocre playwright, who treats her like a servant, Cora gradually builds up a resistance to his tyranny. Then one day she has a revelation, when an actress lays a hand on her thigh… A fixed world of settled values is broken. She picks up a kaleidoscope and sees new thoughts, new possibilities, a completely new view of life come into focus. Radically different kinds of existence are there for the asking, none depending upon the past or one’s own biology. We are not fixed to a destiny. We don’t need beauty to be free. Men are not the only sexual partners. Cora leaves Rudi to become an artist and a bohemian. But beauty remains. Art cannot compete with Ruby Maclean.

They walked back together through the large bedroom which had once been the drawing-room of the old house. The further wall was covered with a mirror, to reflect the garden. Over the bed was thrown a white fur rug and on one corner slept a yellowing pekinese which, like the rug, looked as if it had been to the cleaners too often. A quiet parrot hung in a cage. This was the home that suited its mistress, which certainly nothing would make her leave.

“Have you ever thought,” said Cora, as they halted together at the looking-glass, “what a film it would make if an ugly woman could make a bargain with the devil? I would sell my soul, like Faust, if I could walk out now into the street and look as you do.”

“You’re absurd. Make your pact at least for what I used to be.”

“The devil’s about!” said Cora. She went nearer to the glass. “He’s heard me! The terrible black, I see for the first time, has a thread of white, and I may become a blonde at last. Who knows whether old age, after what I’ve gone through, won’t be more like beauty? Devil - give me a break! Ugly women can have love but what I want to feel is admiration. I should go mad with pleasure to make a conquest of a sheer stranger. It’s why I like to be with you. I could watch you for ever and your effect on other people. I’m not a sad old Lesbian by nature so much as from envy. I’m forced to make my meal off women who have better luck. Write, won’t you, to Rudi for me. I really can’t be bothered. Tell him I never lunch out when I’m painting. I can’t waste the light.”

Envy is no bad thing. It can be productive. Here channelled through art it fabricates a fulfilled life. For sure Cora cannot get all she wants - beauty has a quality that not even art can equal - but she has power, which, with the growing years, may overcome her friend’s soon to be ageing looks; her brushes will last longer than lipstick and mascara. Talent can make you attractive; Rudi, after yet another critical mauling, attempts to win Cora back, after decades of separation. Oh dear no. Talent and success create independence. Cora will not give up her lifestyle. Instead she paints his portrait, for which he must be patient, silent and passive, a mute and subservient model. She is the master now; the active, superior, dominant male.

Ruby is a free-spirit. Doing what she likes, she is careless with her looks; although every morning she spends hours with her cosmetics. It is Ruby’s charm and vivacity that attracts; detached from everything and everyone she floats free from life’s moorings, its banalities, its uglinesses; not a care to be had. We all want this quality! Some are lucky. Like Jesus Ruby has her disciples, who need to be close, to touch the magic. Others, like Miranda, are defeated by it. Miranda, undone by beauty’s uncanny power, is curious to understand its secrets, hoping, no doubt, to acquire some for herself; alas, charisma is not a craft to be learned or a trait that can be copied. You have it. You don’t. The audience feels its effects: we clap, we cheer, we stamp stamp stamp… Hurrah! Ruby Maclean never disappoints. Always she comes back for the encore.

Ruby has many admirers. A permissive character - she breaks the social taboos - she is, however, no tart; married young, she has remained faithful to Gynt; her beauty protecting her from the lewd and the licentious. Her connoisseurs - it is the precise, the perfect, adjective, there is the refined Alberti - respect her married state, the marriage taboo making her easier to love; sex would taint Ruby; exquisite as a work of art she would be flawed as a sexual gymnast, a shag, its sweat, its bestial groaning, taking away her poise, soiling her innocence. It is her beauty and liveliness that attracts adoration; sex would spoil all of that; a chivalric Knight needs to respect his Lady’s aura, he must not penetrate the mystery, which has to stay intact.

Rose is Ruby’s contrast. After the play she and her lover come back to the apartment, whose cosy familiarity, plus alluring nightgown, stimulates their desire; soon they are on the bed naked, entwined; oil-soaked pistons rubbing back and forth, puffing, pumping… Ah! Ah! Yes! Yes! Ohhhhh…. No grace here. Age and decay umbilically linked to domesticity and sex. The mechanical and the animal.

Ruby does not surrender to desire. Sex has gone from her life, Gynt sleeping in a separate bedroom. Described as more masculine than feminine this captures her special quality - she is aloof from the ordinary lusts, the normal weaknesses, the sentimentalities of womankind. There is something hard in beauty. It has an ascetic quality, which is inspirational, others encouraged to behave in the same saint-like way. The beautiful is a church where believers, who come to worship, themselves become holy, anointed by Ruby’s vivacious looks, her godly figure, its supernatural presence. The wonderful scene in a cemetery - it is told from a variety of viewpoints - shows us how she makes life brilliant; but also intoxicatingly odd: Ruby looks at, and forces us to see, the world in her own unique way. They fall at her feet. We all do. This vision on a page.

Ruby is fifty three. There are some small signs of age. It is a turning point in her life. Always she has lived effortlessly, society and its people at her whim and her command-less command. This will change. To maintain a carefree existence is going to require conscious effort and a little artifice, Ruby forced to exert the will. Some day soon she going to have think about her audience, consider her own performance; she will have to act like a free spirit; that hour with the looking glass is, we surmise, a recent innovation, but it augurs the future. A complete way of life is fading away, ending.

This play is Rudi’s last. He is a failure, and knows it.

Gynt has spiritually left this marriage. Turned inward he seeks god.

Edouard, a cherished neighbour and friend, dies.

Alberti, approaching death, marries his housekeeper.

A young man makes love to Ruby Maclean.

Ruby refuses James, saying I am old. Straight to her dotage, is her wish, to avoid the enervating struggle, that rearguard action, against the enemies of age across the borderlands of one’s late fifties and sixties; long hard battles in a losing war. Better to give up immediately. We’re insouciant when we’re past it. Conscious effort is what Ruby wants to avoid, with its knowingness and instrumentality; it is the aristocrat’s distaste for calculating, organising, planning, where a safe and predictable future replaces the spontaneous present. To exercise the will is a defeat. Not to work at life. Not to feel life’s resistance, its effort. Not to lose innocence, the pleasure of just to be. Basic requirements each one, these. An aristocrat needs the grace of leisure.

James is an inconvenience. He disturbs the smooth flow of Ruby’s existence. His proposal, paradoxically, suggesting her waning powers: beautiful enough to attract this young man, she is no longer so beautiful to keep him at distance; true beauty being unapproachable. No one dreams of bedding God.

At that moment the hearse arrived, but Ruby overcame the undertaker’s objections and two men began to undo the lid with their screwdrivers. Madam de Lison, breathing hard, took a step forward and another till she reached the door. When the lid was lifted Rose, pale at last, appeared again among the legendary white ruchings.

“But she’s OLD!” cried Edouard’s sister in a loud voice of disbelief across the coffin to Ruby.

Madam de Lison has been jealous of a woman she never knew - her brother’s life is divided into sealed compartments. Such jealousy is akin to love; an idealised object created out of a passion and the obsessions it engenders. The coffin lid removed the beautiful fantasy vanishes, leaving an ugly fiction…

Rose’s pretty face is a ruin of time. But her love for Edouard never diminished; her fidelity captivates Ruby, who visited Rose just before she died. Love, like talent, can be the equal of beauty; it shares the same metaphysical atmosphere, it too has that air of purity, that innocence, the saintly devotion.

…Madam de Lison has never known love. Bereft of feeling’s probing subtleties - she judges only by appearances, those external, mechanical signs - she finds Edouard’s feelings for this woman incomprehensible: only beauty can attract such affection, is the simple-minded belief. Madam de Lison looks down at poor dead old Rose and…experiences the giddiness of existential error; that vertigo, of when looking back, we see our life emptied of meaning; we stare down into a vast void and wobble on top of a towering illusion… Her jealousy has no foundation; a passion without an object, her existence has long been of utter waste and futility, now revealed to her for the first time. Although, the author is clever and truthful, her hatred has produced strange effects: an emotion, so petty and egotistical its ugliness appals, has turned Rose into a fantastic beauty, wrecked only by this graveyard scene.

Love lasts forever. Beauty decays.

Ruby’s life is becoming difficult. When Miranda married eight years ago her own marriage started to decline; Gynt, unhappy with his daughter’s husband, withdrawing into an inner life of mysticism and natural history (he is writing a book about birds). A typical reaction; these characters wary of opposition, its tension, its effort, its conflict, their instinct is to fly. Mentally the couple have long separated. Physically there is distance too: Gynt works in an old mill in the woods, and though he sleeps in the house it is only during the day. This is the history. And now? A number of disasters are telescoped into a short period, creating psychological strain; the breaking point when Miranda chooses a homosexual for a new husband. Life, for the first time, is a burden for Ruby, whose impulse, like Gynt’s, is to run away.

It won’t happen. Ruby is too vital to retire. This beauty will not vanish overnight. Quite the reverse, her bone structure ensures she will keep her looks, at most there will a little fading around the edges. Too active in the lives of others, she cannot suddenly withdraw - they will not let her! Alberti gives Ruby his money, forcing her to engage with the world, by managing his estates, doing good works and running a university whose ethos is moral refinement.3 Ruby will always be Ruby. There will no retreat into a quiet retirement; no losing herself in eastern mysticism; no secluding herself in some country garden, like her friend the Duchess. She will stay in the world. Only now, to remain herself, she’ll have to work at herself a bit.4

Ruby, we assume, will always win.5

Miranda’s life is a series of self-imposed obstacles that once created she finds enormously hard to circumvent. Engaged to Afric it seems certain she will marry him, too stubborn to change her mind when an attractive alternative appears. Nature itself, we gaudily speculate, is rebelling; to make the perfect being was a mistake - Ruby floating free of Nature’s influence does not heed its calls, ignores its demands - a mistake it now tries to rectify by creating someone who actively seeks its help, by tying herself to event and environment, rooting her actions to a destiny. By fighting life Miranda actively encourages its resistance; it defeats her, of course, and she becomes a victim of circumstance. But now James proposes and…Miranda changes her mind! She can exercise her will! Fate falls down and dies.

The old world was a stable place. Secure in a social position, like statue in a niche, the personality became exaggerated, and with its bold features and sharp outlines, its extravagant character, it was able to live solid and inviolable upon its plinth; fixed in her fleetingness Ruby forever the free spirit. Such a society, in rigidifying the personality - its features finely etched and moulded into high relief - encouraged eccentricity, bohemia just one of its forms. This society was bound to die, these characters too idiosyncratic to adapt; while the passivity didn't help,6 they wouldn’t make the effort to stay the same.7 This style of life is going. Alberti marries his housekeeper; Rose visits Ruby’s house; Miranda changes her mind… Existence is coming more fluid, with rapid transformations possible, even likely.

It is an interregnum.8 At first the old life, that pre-war world of aristocratic joie de vivre, seemed sure to disappear. Retirement, and a slow fading away, the inevitable reaction to the culture’s collapse; Miranda’s marriage to Afric symbolising its timeworn sterility. But then, suddenly, there are buds of new life: Miranda marries James! The old class is not dying out, it is mutating, to continue in strange new forms.9 Even the duchess is content, James and his wife to live nearby. The past is not dead. It is reborn.

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1.  The differences within beauty nicely delineated and cruelly satirised in Fanny Burney’s Camilla.

2.  The free-spirited atmosphere of the inter-war period and its later nostalgic aftermath are well-caught in Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water.

3.  Is Meg Eliot the last of this line; her collapse the end of one response to the aristocrat’s post-war displacement? (Angus Wilson’s The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot.)

4.  Compare Ruby with Edward Massine in Christina Stead’s The People with the Dogs.

5.  Enid Bagnold shares Rose Macauley’s optimism for the aristocrat’s future (see my Terrible Liberties).

6.  In the Divided Kingdom Rupert Thomson imagines societies run on dominant traits of personality - the sanguine, the choleric, the phlegmatic and the melancholic. It is not wholly a fiction: how much depends upon the humours of the ruling class?

7.  Tomasi Di Lampedusa’s The Leopard came too late for them to read.

8.  For the series of micro-periods during the 1940s see my pieces on Human Voices, The Heat of the Day, The Girls of Slender Means, One Fine Day and The World My Wilderness.

9.  The story continues in Isabel Colegate’s A Man of Power.