A Dog's Life(22)

‘There are more where those came from.’

And there were. Geoffrey Grigson’s chilblain-proof socks became Circe’s household toys. They were a mouthful for her. Guests were invited to share in her untiring fun. Some visitors, it has to be noted, were happier with this diversion than others. Circe was perplexed when the proffered sock was ignored, her bewilderment giving way to irritation. She barked and barked, and had to be banished from the kitchen with a stern ‘Enough’. I would put the sock out of sight and out of reach and she would sulk in the front room until it was time to play again.





In the summer of 1975, I wrote a review for the New Statesman of a book by Geoffrey Grigson called Britain Observed. The literary editor allotted me 1,200 words, which meant that I had the long-coveted opportunity of being able to put his career into some kind of balanced perspective. It was an honour and duty to do so since Geoffrey had the reputation then – as, alas, he has now – of being little more than a scurrilous and intemperate critic. People remembered his dislike and disapproval of Edith Sitwell, Dylan Thomas and a host of tin-eared academics, whilst forgetting or overlooking the substantial fact that in his thirties and forties he ‘rescued’ those extraordinary English geniuses John Clare, Samuel Palmer, William Barnes and George Crabbe from near-oblivion. He published the early poems of W. H. Auden in his pioneering magazine New Verse, and discovered the very young Gavin Ewart, whose ‘Phallus in Wonderland’ and ‘Miss Twye’ he was delighted to print. Britain Observed proved ideal as a vehicle for expressing my considered opinion that Geoffrey Grigson, with whom I was unacquainted, is essentially a celebrator, for in its pages he praises not only Cézanne and Pissarro – ‘the greatest and humblest of landscape painters’ – but such modest, and genuine, talents as Walter Greaves, who painted views of the Thames at Chelsea, the tragic William James Blacklock, dead at forty-two, whose beautiful Catbells and Causey Pike is reproduced, and Wenceslas Hollar, represented by his marvellous etching of the East Side of London in 1647, simple in essence yet vividly suggestive of overcrowded city life. The book is subtitled The Landscape Through Artists’ Eyes, and it’s typical of Grigson’s eclecticism and respect for the undervalued that of those sixty-odd artists a good third of them are still unknown to the public at large.

The received, or safe, opinion was anathema to him. He was always his own man with his own mind. It seemed appropriate that I should come to praise him in the New Statesman, because it was in that educative journal that I first encountered his criticism, along with that of V. S. Pritchett and D. J. Enright, in the late 1950s. The back half of the Statesman was required reading in the 1960s, when Grigson was a regular reviewer. He flourished under the editorship of Karl Miller, just as he had flourished under that of J. R. Ackerley on the Listener – both men earning his lasting regard for allowing him to write ‘without fear or favour’ (the words are Ackerley’s.) It was from those idiosyncratic reviews – elegantly phrased and pithily argued – that I learned about Edwin Arlington Robinson’s exquisite poems of everyday madness and despair in small-town America and the Icelandic Journals of William Morris, which makes even the bleakest landscape interesting. Grigson was one of my educators, at a time in my life when I was attempting to free myself of the burden of wanting to succeed as a classical actor. I read his criticism, and then the works he praised. And every so often, I glanced at those books that he alone held up to ridicule, such as Iris Murdoch’s novel The Unicorn, in which characters ‘cast roguish glances’ at each other, ‘converse’ rather than talk, and say things like ‘I’ll be bound!’ and ‘Effingham, she is destroyed’. His review of the inescapable Anthony Burgess’s collection Urgent Copy: Literary Studies caused its author lasting resentment. Grigson began his accurate and funny piece by quoting Burgess to the effect that writing books ‘engenders tobacco addiction, an over-reliance on caffeine and dexedrine, piles, dyspepsia, chronic anxiety, sexual impotence’. Grigson’s comment on this boast in disguise was, simply, ‘Not in everyone. And not all of them, I hope, in Mr Burgess.’

Grigson pounced on the vainglorious observation ‘I was in Russia when Ernest Hemingway died’ and went on:


Well, if he was, the fact doesn’t in any real way affect what little Mr Burgess goes on to tell us about the art of Hemingway. He might as well have begun that he was paying his rates at the council offices or catching crayfish at Piddletrenthide or declaiming Yeats over pints of Guinness above the waves of the Bournemouth sewage outfall, when Hemingway died. In short I can never quite believe Mr Burgess, in this book (I know nothing of his novels). ‘Old yokels in Adderbury, my former Oxfordshire home, talk of the Earl of Rochester as though he only died yesterday.’ Really? And as they talk of him in their smock-frocks do they quote with an Oxfordshire – not Oxford – accent ‘Drudging in fair Aurelia’s womb’ or ‘Ancient Person of my Heart’?