Paperback: £13.99 / $19.95
add to cart
2007, 234mm x 156mm / 9.25in x 6in, 272pp
ISBN: 978-1-84310-564-0, BIC 2: VFJD
JM
MQC
Australasia, North America (including Canada), South America, Europe (East and West), Africa and the UK
Chapter 1: John
"I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip. And the highest enjoyment of timelessness - in a landscape selected at random - is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern - to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humouring a lucky mortal."
Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory:An Autobiography Revisited
I am studying a photograph of John taken in 1927 or 1928 when he was four or five. It's one I've always liked and kept where I could glance at it from time to time. These days I examine it more closely, searching for clues to the way he is now. I know John at the other end of his life as well as one person can know another. But I want more. I want to know what it is like to be John.
It is high summer in an English garden. John has been persuaded to settle on a rug on the lawn with his two older sisters, Joan and Polly. Polly, the tallest child, is sitting with a large Pekinese sprawled on her lap. Joan, the eldest, has been shelling peas into a colander, which she has set aside for the photograph. The two girls are laughing for the camera. John is not laughing. He is quietly amused, inquisitive, no doubt planning some adventure; possibly already a bit of a ham? He is perched neatly on his heels, wearing shorts and a cotton shirt buttoned up to his neck, hands resting palm to palm between his bare thighs, self-contained, ready to go. He is a very pretty little boy, his thick hair dappled with patches of reflected sunlight. The hair, although you can't see it in the black-and-white photograph, is a colour which John later described to me (not altogether ironically) as a ravishing shade of burnished copper. When it was first cut his mother wrapped a lock of it in tissue paper and preserved it in an envelope, labelled with purple ink in her flamboyant handwriting: 'First cut of my darling John's hair aged 1 year 8 months.' Below this inscription there is another note, in purple ink: 'Another cutting taken on Sept 6, aged 9. Colour hasn't changed. Like two tongues of fire.'
John's father was a country doctor who knew all the music-hall songs and charged his patients what they could afford to pay. Some expressed their gratitude with gifts of family heirlooms - bits of antique porcelain or cut glass; the maple-framed samplers which now hang in our kitchen. He was the kind of doctor who visited the sick at any time of day or night, and he died, possibly of overwork, when John was fifteen.
John's mother was a nurse but she retired when John was born to devote herself to her only son. Her other interests were amateur theatricals, spiritualism and the philosophy of Rudolph Steiner. But it was John who was the centre of his mother's mildly eccentric universe. And her unconditional adoration of the late, unexpected golden boy seems to have been shared by Polly and Joan, already eight and ten when John was born, as well as by all the aunts, uncles and family servants who peopled the stories about his childhood that John was to tell his children at bedtime and after lunch on rainy Saturday afternoons. Some of the stories were surreal, some mock-spooky; many involved elaborate practical jokes. The stories always ended happily with the family comfortably reunited over a delicious tea in the large, safe house in Kent, surrounded by cherry and apple orchards that even a charitable doctor could afford during the depression.
It was in this gentle, bourgeois environment that John developed his compulsion to write. Judging from the prodigious volume of his juvenilia, which his mother returned to him shortly before she died, John, from the age of eight, must have spent many hours of each day writing. He wrote poems, plays, stories, accounts of extraordinary and ordinary days in his life. He wrote a poem about his appendix operation; several stories about his uncle's false nose (the real one having been shot off in the trenches), which was kept in place by an elastic band around his head. He wrote about his favourite puddings (trifle and spotted dick) and about the colours and shapes which were projected on his inner eyelids when he closed them. His letters home from school tended to be either in verse, or to be plays starring 'our lissom, auburn-haired hero, John'. His notes about butterflies and birds, their habits, eggs and calls, are accompanied by rough, expressive sketches, with arrows pointing to those he says he wishes he could draw better.
The copy of T. A. Coward's classic The Birds of the British Isles and their Eggs1 which John won at his school in 1934 as first prize in natural history is, with the photograph in the sunlit garden, one of the talismans I keep on my desk, as though it might act as a passport to the mind of the man I know so well but not well enough. Although T. A. Coward is admired even today by ornithologists for his scientific methods of observation, he could not refrain from anthropomorphic moral judgements, directed particularly against bullies and cowards - two classes of people John has always scorned. The golden eagle, for example, 'in romance is fierce, terrible, and a robber of infants; in reality it is a large, powerful, magnificent bird with a cowardly vulturine character'.
The illustrations in John's 1933 edition are sparse and feeble. You have to peer very hard at the black-and-white photograph of a tree trunk to distinguish the tiny black-and-white tree sparrow 'at nest' on a hole in the bark. But T. A. Coward's descriptive power does the work that colour photographs and television have now made unnecessary. I turn to the section on the peregrine falcon, Falco peregrinus Turnstall, 'the largest and most common of our resident falcons . . . commoner, especially around our rocky coasts, than is usually supposed'. The gripping description that covers the following pages is written in a prose that must have influenced John's own mature style:
"There is a dash, neatness and finish in the flight of the Peregrine which is purely its own. The wings move rapidly, beating the air for a few moments, and are then held steady in a bow whilst the bird glides forward, sometimes rolling slightly from side to side . . . Near the eyrie the birds have look-outs, some jutting rocks or pinnacles on the cliff face . . . On the cliff-top, near the eyrie, are the shambles, scattered litter of blood-stained feathers and the rejected remnants of many a victim . . . Immediately after giving the fatal blow with the hind claw the destroyer shoots upward, descending later to enjoy its meal. The rush of a swooping Peregrine when heard at close quarters is like the sound of a rocket ... No nest is made; the two to four richly coloured orange-red or deep brown eggs are placed in a rough hollow scraped on some ledge of a steep crag or cliff."
In the summer of 1937 when John was thirteen he volunteered to take part in a Royal Air Force mission to subvert the mating activities of peregrine falcons on the cliffs of Wales where they were endangering national security by disturbing radar signals. It was John's job to remove the eggs from their ledges and crags. He was lowered by rope down the cliff face, equipped with a soft bag in which he placed, one at a time, the richly coloured eggs so they could be transported to a safe but less intrusive hatching ground.
When John and I met twenty-seven years later, he often talked about his peregrine summer. And two months before our son JJ (John Justin) was born he took me to Wales on a walking tour of the cliffs and made love to me on the one he remembered as the site of his egg-rescuing adventures. Oddly, there is no evidence that he wrote at the time about the experience he was to remember so vividly for the rest of his life. His letters home from school that autumn are mostly about rugby, which he played as scrum half. Everything else is going 'pretty well', but it is rugger that makes the prose light up. Then he is in the school infirmary having hurt his knee in a rugger game.
The bruise developed into osteomyelitis, a bone-wasting infection that is still serious, even now when it can be treated with antibiotics. Doctors have told me that osteomyelitis is so painful that they are sometimes prepared to relieve it with potentially addictive amounts of morphine, which can lead to an extended period in hospital while the patient dries out. John was in a wheelchair for eighteen months. He nearly lost the leg, at least according to Polly, who believes she may have saved it with her powers as a faith healer. The school doctor gave him nothing stronger than aspirin. Perhaps his father would have been more indulgent; but he was far away, bedridden by what proved to be his last illness. Polly says that their mother, who took a flat near the school, was often hysterical - more, it seems, about John than her husband - but that everyone else, especially John, bore his suffering bravely: gritted teeth, no crying.
Many years later, when I touched the scar, in bed with John for the first time, he told me about how much he had enjoyed reading Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle in his wheelchair, and about the fun of watching the leeches suck the pus from his infected knee. He didn't mention pain or frustration, and I didn't think to ask. At forty-one, fifteen years older than me, his auburn hair now streaked with silver as though by a good hairdresser, he seemed to me impossibly glamorous, and impossibly invulnerable.
By 1939 John was up and walking again, well enough to take part in army drills. His attitude to war (which was to be one of his chief interests as a mature historian) was already evident. Marching in the middle of a large company of officer cadets he would occasionally swing the same arm as his leg. The RSM overlooking his body of soldiers was puzzled to see that the symmetry was broken, but could not identify the problem. The young professional schoolmasters had gone off to fight in the war. They were replaced by elderly volunteers who were only too happy to depart from the syllabus and share their particular intellectual passions with John. One introduced him to French and Spanish literature, another to the social theories of Shaw and Ruskin, a third to art history, which was not then a subject formally taught in schools or universities. His battered brown-paper editions of French and Spanish novels, plays, poetry and memoirs, pages all cut, are on the shelves of the library that lines the walls of our tall old house by the river; as is the two-volume edition of the prefaces and complete plays of George Bernard Shaw, which John won as a school essay prize. We once had the Travellers' Edition, Ruskin's own abridged version of The Stones of Venice. That has disappeared, perhaps worn out from too many trips to Venice or loaned to some student.
His favourite reading at sixteen was J. A. Crowe and G. B. Cavalcaselle's History of Painting in Italy. His three-volume 1908 edition edited by Edward Hutton is still in good condition, possibly because nobody, except John in nostalgic moments, has looked at it since. I have to stretch my imagination to guess what it can have been about these formidably dreary-looking books that appealed so strongly to an adolescent boy. The closely printed pages are heavy with detailed descriptions of works of art John had never seen and closely argued attributions, qualified by footnotes, to artists whose names he could never have previously encountered. The mean little black-and-white photographs of works of art are even less inspiring than the birds in T. A. Coward. But they seem to have had a power for John, as for other art-loving members of his generation, that is lacking in the lavish colour reproductions and educational weekend breaks in 'art cities' that are widely available today.
Sometimes I gaze at John gazing at some work of art in a gallery or church. He can easily spend an hour or more standing absolutely still in front of a single work of art. I see a man in a state of self-transcending ecstasy that is achieved only rarely, if ever, by those of us who grew up later, force-fed with clamorous technicolor images of everything from toothpaste to high art. He is old and lame, but, at such moments, I envy him. I am overwhelmed by the recurring desire to share his ecstatic self-forgetfulness. If I interrupt him with questions about the picture that is absorbing him he points, waves his stick, blows kisses at it; and puts his finger over his mouth as though he were listening to something.
He didn't get to see the originals of the Italian paintings in Crowe and Cavalcaselle until 1946 when he made his first pilgrimage to Florence, travelling across war-torn Europe on his motorbike, with a girl on the back. He abandoned her for ever in the Piazza del Duomo when she failed to share his rapturous enthusiasm for the Baptistery. His first major book,2 England and the Italian Renaissance, a pioneering investigation of the history of the English taste for Italy, is an attempt to explain to himself the impact Italy made on him. Its preface begins with an indirect and rather generalized apology to the girl for his 'priggish' behaviour.
Here is a cutting from the 1941 summer issue of the school magazine. John was eighteen, and it was his last term at school.
"On July 12th and 14th, 1941, a small company of performers gave a rendering of the 'comic scenes' from 'Twelfth Night', which will not be quickly or easily forgotten . . . The most difficult part, of course, is that of Feste the Clown. Here, as J. R. Hale convincingly showed, is something very close to Shakespeare's heart. His wit and nonsense were as spontaneous as his agility - his sly glance at Sir Toby, as he sang about the toss-pots' drunken heads, being particularly pleasing - but above all he revealed the sensitive nature of the character in his reactions to the slightest suggestion of reproach."
At the back of the same issue there are brief notes about the achievements of the final-year boys: 'J. R. Hale. School Prefect; Head of House; Margetson English Essay Prize 40; Gillum English Biography Prize 41; Scholarship to Jesus College, Oxford; Editor of the Eastbournian; Chapel Warden; Librarian to Radley Library; Higher Cert.; School Cert.'
John deferred the scholarship to Oxford and went straight from school to train as a radio operator, in preparation for joining the Merchant Navy. The Royal Navy had turned him down on account of his osteomyelitis, which also exempted him from active war service. But he wanted to spend his war at sea, and the Merchant Navy wasn't fussy about the fitness of its men. I don't know if anyone warned him, or his mother, that the Merchant Navy was the most dangerous of the wartime services. Since the crews were mostly working-class career seamen it may not have come out until later that a third of Merchant Navy men died at sea between 1939 and 1945. John's mother in any case loved to show him off in his uniform when he came home on leave.
Here is a photograph of John wearing his dress uniform, standing to attention with his right arm clamping the hat to his side, acting the part, or so I would guess from his expression. His mother was so proud and jealous of him that when he made the mistake of bringing a girlfriend home for tea she chased the girl around the piano with a knife. Her possessiveness may account for the slightly subversive set to John's mouth in the photograph, which I think she must have commissioned.
After the war John wrote The Waves Between, a book about his Merchant Navy years, which he had the good sense not to submit to a publisher. The prose is relentlessly ecstatic: 'Over a slow swell we drove on, lifting a shoulder to each smooth fold, meeting it with a sharp shearing hiss that was succeeded by a quiet rippling till we rolled back to meet the next ... ' Discomfort? We read instead about the joy of being alone under the stars on night watch, looking forward to the rum ration due at dawn. Boredom? In his free time he read and taught himself the languages of the ship's destinations (Teach Yourself Swahili and Teach Yourself Portuguese are on the shelf next to French poetry). Fear? 'Only when a destroyer dashes past flying a black pennant do we follow its movements with care for this means "I am hunting a submarine. Keep clear." Of all the hundreds of charges that explode during the course of a convoy we seldom know whether the result is a U-boat or a good haul of fish.'
Day after day after day the pages of the Oxford pocket diaries he kept for those three years are blank except for the words 'at sea'. It was forbidden to record any other information that might fall into the hands of the Germans. Then suddenly there is the name of a port - Brooklyn, Cape Town, Sydney - followed by a string of female names, operas and ballets. The diary goes on like this, with different girls' names and different operas and ballets, for a few days and then returns to 'at sea'.
Many people had more terrible, or more glamorous, wars; and, when John used to talk to me about his, I'm afraid I listened more in a spirit of conversational give and take than with real interest. It is only now that I want not just to imagine him but to be with him, all those years ago, cooped up, defenceless, tossed around for weeks on end in waters swarming with enemy ships. Then I wonder at his courage and wish I could understand the source of his joyous appetite for life under all circumstances. Whatever it is, it is not passive 'acceptance', that dreary attitude advised by the glib professional 'counsellors' who are forever offering us their services these days. 'Denial', which they suppose to be psychologically unhealthy, may be closer to whatever it was that kept John going then as it does now.
Here is a photograph of John two years after the war, playing the King of Navarre in an Oxford University Dramatic Society production of Love's Labour's Lost, splendid in a costume - scarlet and gold, so he told me - previously worn by Laurence Olivier in the film of Henry V.
Shortly after I met John many years later he recited the opening lines of the play from the bath in which he was lying:
"Let fame, that all hunt after in their lives,
Live registered upon our brazen tombs
And then grace us in the disgrace of death-"
John threw himself into acting and directing plays as soon as he went up to Oxford after the war. Our friend Anthony, an Oxford contemporary who later became a professional opera producer, remembers him off-stage - relaxed, elegant, auburn-haired - and on, playing among many roles another king, Haakon, King of Norway, in Ibsen's The Pretenders, the messenger in Kenneth Tynan's production of Samson Agonistes, and Neptune in a Royal Masque presented to HRH Princess Elizabeth.
John's amateur acting career at Oxford attracted the attention of a film producer who offered him the male lead in The Blue Lagoon opposite Jean Simmons. He turned it down. He was still hoping to join the Royal Navy on the chance it would take him in peacetime despite the osteomyelitis. In the end he decided instead to accept the History Fellowship offered by Jesus College, Oxford.
Here is another, in sepia, which I can't date precisely. He is sitting in a meadow, probably in Oxford, wearing an academic gown, surrounded by a group of friends, three apparently from the cast of a play, all of them laughing.
There is an entire album of photographs commemorating the second-hand motorbike, a BSA, on which he travelled in the summer vacations from Oxford - across the United States, or across Europe on his way to the Middle East or Africa. (The children's top favourite of his bedtime recollections of his motorcycle adventures was the one about the moving meat offered to him one night by a hospitable African tribe who considered maggots a delicacy. Would you eat it? He claimed he had.)
There is a photograph of John taken by himself in the mirror of a bar in New Mexico. The photograph is labelled El Bandito Bianco. You can't actually see that it is of John because the face is masked by curved ski goggles over his spectacles, straw cap worn back to front (the elastic of the goggles is clamping the peak in place), with the mouth and chin covered by a large handkerchief. This arrangement, which protected his face from sun, wind and bugs, attracted the attention of a party of American cops who were chasing a real villain and who enchanted John by actually saying, as they arrested him, 'Reach for the sky.'
There are drawers full of Venice: John, me, our son JJ and various friends in various Venetian settings. We lived in Venice for part of each year after he started working in the Venetian archives and brought his university students with him hoping to share with them his intense, exhausting love of every stone, house, church, monument in that city. In his Who's Who entry he gives 'Venice' as his only hobby.
1972: in the lagoon reconnoitring for locations for a BBC television documentary about Venice that John was commissioned to write and narrate.
1983: John telling me about his first and last attempt to row a one-man gondola, which he foolishly took into the Grand Canal where it spun out of his control.
And many more: with our baby son JJ riding one of the little lions in the Piazzetta; on balconies and bridges, smoking, glamorous in dark glasses; in a friend's garden where his red cardigan stands out nicely against the wisteria.
1974: John is giving a press conference at the National Gallery, of which he is Chairman of the Trustees. He has just negotiated the purchase of an important picture, Drouais's portrait of Madame de Pompadour.
There are so many from the early 1980s that it's hard to choose. It was a busy time. He was a Trustee of the Victoria and Albert Museum, Chairman of the Theatre Museum, member of the Royal Mint Advisory Commission, member of the Museums and Galleries Commission, Chairman of the Advisory Committee on Government Art Collections, President of the British Association of Friends of Museums, Chairman of the Art History section of the British Academy. In 1982 he organized the Genius of Venice exhibition at the Royal Academy. It was the most stupendous collection of sixteenth-century Venetian painting ever to be shown in Britain.
He wrote and appeared in television programmes, delivered lectures about the meaning of quality in the Renaissance to business conferences all over the world (I remember him complaining to his accountant that he had been well paid for these). Meanwhile there were two lengthy study visits to Princeton.
There is one from that period that I cannot find. He was the university's public orator. Yet another unpaid public service on top of the work for museums and galleries, the lectures to impoverished schools and colleges, the extra hours with students. That's how I see it in my sour moods. But John loves this work. He enjoys researching and composing lapidary eulogies to the men and women upon whom the university will bestow honorary degrees. He adores the dressing up and processing, the presence of royalty, all the trappings that turn English ceremonies into camp theatre. But public speaking doesn't come as easily as he makes it seem. He has learned to turn his slight stutter to histrionic advantage. But after all these years of lecturing he is still nervous before a performance.
Summer 1984: John with me and my mother after he was knighted. The Queen was wearing an olive-green wool dress and looked bad-tempered to me. John said she was charming.
Afterwards we had lunch at the Ritz and then went swimming in the river. John innocent and happy as a swimming dog.
Winter 1984: John and his daughter Charlotte framed by a Barbara Hepworth sculpture on a freezing day at Princeton. John was working there at the Institute for Advanced Studies on his next big book, Artists and Warfare in the Renaissance. I flew back and forth from London. JJ was in his last year at school and I felt I couldn't leave him alone for long. But John wrote to me every day, long letters describing the snow, the new friends he was making, his trips to New York, what my mother had given him to eat for lunch.
Autumn 1991: in the park opposite our house, in his red cashmere cardigan, which now has leather patches on the elbows, an old tweed jacket flung over one shoulder. It is a very good photograph, taken by a professional to go with a magazine article about John's work with museums and galleries, which are, in his opinion, seriously under-financed by the government. He is standing in a patch of sunlight that has pierced a sky loaded with swollen black clouds. The red cardigan stands out nicely against the white Palladian house in the background. You might think from John's commanding expression that he was lord of this manor.
The truth is that he is worried, impatient to get back to his desk. The final chapters of his latest book, The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance, are not writing themselves in his head the way all his other books have done. I know this only because he has been fuelling his concentration with more smoking than ever. Otherwise I would never have guessed how seriously tired he is.
Summer 1997: in his elder son Matthew's garden, wearing the pale-blue short-sleeved cotton shirt that he specially likes because it has many pockets for stowing his comb (he is still vain about his hair, which has turned a brilliant shade of white), his glasses, and the card with his name and address that I insist he carry with him at all times. John is smiling eagerly as though about to take his turn in a lively conversation. This is my favourite of all the recent photographs of John. I keep it on the kitchen sideboard where it will catch my eye as I come down the stairs. Three or four times a day I pick it up and study it, wondering whether, if I didn't know the truth, it would fool me.
His left hand reaches towards the camera, thumb up, his stick resting on the ring and middle fingers, which are crossed between extended index and little fingers. There's a clue. You see this hand posture in Italian art3 - in Byzantine mosaics in Sicily, in carved pulpits in and around Pisa, on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, very often in Mannerist painting and sculpture. I've seen it on mannequins in the windows of high fashion dress shops. It is an elegant gesture, it draws attention to itself and makes still images seem more life-like. In fact, you rarely see it used by real people in real conversation, because the hand does not fall naturally into that position.
When we are in Paris John likes to pay his respects to Raphael's portrait of Baldassare Castiglione in the Louvre. Castiglione was an Italian scholar and diplomat, famous for The Courtier, a book of etiquette, which was a best seller in sixteenth-century Europe. Castiglione used the word sprezzatura - hard work made to look easy - to describe the behaviour of his ideal Renaissance courtier. The courtier strives to please his Prince, while contributing to the security and welfare of a badly governed Italy with hard-won supremacy in all his attainments. But he never lets the strain show; however hard he labours he never sweats or lets the veins stand out on his arms. John used to tell his students that Castiglione was indirectly responsible for the English Disease: laziness. The first foreign-language translation of The Courtier was in English. But, so John said, the ideal of sprezzatura was gradually misinterpreted by successive English etiquette books, until it came to mean that the hallmark of gentlemanly behaviour was conspicuous indolence.
Musing over the photograph of John looking as though he were engaged in normal conversation, I can, suddenly and quite clearly, hear his voice talking to me about The Courtier. It is one of his favourite books, one of the keys, in his view, to an understanding of the Renaissance ideal of civilization; but, like so much of what he has taught me, I know it only second-hand, through him. Once - I don't remember why, only that we were having lunch in Paris at about the time he was beginning to write The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance - he told me a story from The Courtier about an Italian merchant in Poland who is trying to negotiate terms with some Muscovites on the other side of a frozen river. But it is so cold that their words freeze solid in the air. The two sides can see the words, but they cannot hear or understand them. The Poles, who know how to manage in their extreme climate, light a fire on the river, and gradually the words thaw and the merchants are able to strike a deal. John said it was a popular conceit in the Renaissance to imagine that words - the invisible, ephemeral emanations of breath - were elements that could be transmuted, like water into ice, into substances that were solid, palpable, visible; and then unfrozen by the rays of the sun or the warmth of a fire.
