That was written in 1968. Burgess was still smarting from it fourteen years later. In his novel The End of the World News, published in 1982, Burgess has a character enter a saloon somewhere in the Midwest of America. There is a poster on the wall bearing the message beneath a mugshot: WANTED FOR MURDER: DANGEROUS GEOFF GRIGSON. I phoned Geoffrey, now a dear friend, soon after reading that scene. He laughed heartily at the ‘old bugger’s cheek’. He thought it a good joke.
Burgess wasn’t content with that conceit. In review after review – spanning two decades – he found an excuse, often a very feeble one, to sneak in a reference to his self-appointed enemy. These gratuitous asides must have mystified the average reader, who would have been unaware of the original cause of Burgess’s spleen. They certainly bemused his widow, who regarded them as evidence of pettiness and meanness of spirit. Burgess’s last swipe at Geoffrey, to my knowledge, appeared in the Observer in March 1990, while Jane lay in a coma, dying. She would have laughed it off, had she been able to.
Reviewing Britain Observed, I concentrated on Grigson the celebrator, the man who judged each individual work – poem or painting – on its own merit. Reputation meant nothing to him. He had seen reputations come and go. What was important to him was freshness of vision, as exemplified by those artists who capture the passing moment, in whatever form, and thus ensure that it will last for ever.
Grigson read my article, and some weeks later I was invited to a contributors’ party at the New Statesman’s offices in Great Turnstile in the City. I declined. Then, on the day before the party, I received a call from the literary editor with the message that both the Grigsons, husband and wife, wished to meet me. So I went along, and a friendship developed on the instant. It was as warmly simple as that. Geoffrey was to live another ten years, the much-younger Jane another fifteen. Every visit to Broad Town in Wiltshire, to the old farmhouse in which they lived, was a magical occasion, particularly in summer when we sat in the garden eating the food Jane had prepared with such loving attentiveness. And ‘loving’ is the apt word to account for their marriage – his third, her first and last – for they quite simply glowed in each other’s company.
Geoffrey called Jane his ‘Dutch interior’, and indeed she would have looked – with her generous figure and ruddy complexion – perfectly at home in a painting by Pieter de Hooch or Rembrandt, or in Vermeer’s A Maid Asleep in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. In Geoffrey she had found the ‘older man of her dreams’, as the curator and art critic Bryan Robertson, with whom she worked in a Cambridge gallery in the 1950s, shrewdly noted. Jane’s arrival in Geoffrey’s life was one of those everyday miracles that only seem to happen in the pages of sloppy romantic novels, with Mr and Miss Right meeting by chance and declaring undying love in the final chapter. Even so, those chance meetings and heartfelt declarations, for all that they come coated in linguistic glucose, do occur in the real, messy world most of us inhabit. And so it was with Jane and Geoffrey, in their fashion. Jane had admired Geoffrey’s writing from her student days – his pioneering Samuel Palmer: The Visionary Years of 1947; his remarkable autobiography The Crest on the Silver, as well as his criticism – and was determined to meet him someday, somehow. When they did meet, at an exhibition in London, it was a blessing for both of them. Jane was a natural peacemaker, exuding warmth and a disinterested understanding of other people’s problems, and she brought peace to the unhappy Grigson household, as the son and daughters of his first two marriages acknowledged at Jane’s funeral.
Jane became Geoffrey’s happy amanuensis, typing his books and articles and poems. She had no idea, then, of becoming a writer herself, though she had already published a translation of Beccaria’s classic treatise On Crime and Punishments, for which she received the John Florio Prize. Her distinguished career, as the true successor to Elizabeth David, whom she admired and subsequently befriended, began in an unusual way. For several weeks each year the Grigsons and their daughter, Sophie, lived in a cave-house in Trôo, in the Bas-Vendômois region of France. One of their cave-dwelling neighbours was Adey Horton, whose book Child Jesus had been praised by Kenneth Clark. Horton, a notorious non-deliverer of promised typescripts, had been commissioned by the publisher Michael Joseph to write a cookbook on charcuterie and pork cookery in general. When Jane met him, he had hardly begun work on it, despite many reminders by letter and telephone from his editor in London. He invited Jane to be his researcher and secretary. Jane accepted, and worked so diligently and thoroughly and produced such a number of detailed notes for Horton to consult that he suggested she finish the book instead. She took on the challenge with some trepidation. Charcuterie and French Pork Cookery appeared in 1967 and was instantly acclaimed, not least by Elizabeth David, who saluted its originality.