A Dog's Life(24)

The critical success of that first book, which might never have been written if Adey Horton had been more conscientious, encouraged Jane to think ahead and start a new life as a food writer. In 1968, she was offered a job on the Observer Colour Magazine, to which she contributed regular articles until within weeks of her death twenty-two years later. Her column was notable for its insistence that good cooking is impossible without the right, fresh ingredients. She wasn’t prudish on the subject, but she did regret the vanishing of the seasons. She travelled throughout Britain and Europe in pursuit of excellence – talking to farmers, suppliers, fruit growers, butchers, fishmongers and her fellow writers. If she chanced on an interesting, and workable, recipe she always named its source, an act of literary politeness not often displayed by others. But then, Jane wasn’t in competition with anyone. ‘I think food, its quality, its origins, its preparation, is something to be studied and thought about in the same way as any other aspect of human existence,’ she declares in the Introduction to Good Things, which was published in 1971 and consolidated her ever-rising reputation. The notion is so sensible, so basic, one might say, that it seems amazing now that she felt the need to express it. Were she alive today, she would be insisting that it cannot be repeated often enough.


‘Oh, sod it all’: I first heard Jane utter that mild obscenity not long after Geoffrey’s death in November 1985. She was desolate with grief, and only kept on working out of a sense of duty and responsibility. In his last weeks, Geoffrey was attended to by a professional nurse, whom he shouted at one day in his frustration. He hated being old and hated the idea of dying even more. The nurse answered him back, telling him what a rude and ungrateful so-and-so he was. He was won over instantly, to such an extent that Jane accused him of falling in love with her. Jane and the nurse accompanied him on his final outing to a local church, to listen to a recital of Haydn piano sonatas. Geoffrey wasn’t especially musical, but he adored Haydn’s warm-heartedness and mischief.

There were generous tributes to Geoffrey in the press, the most touching by the poet Peter Reading in The Times Literary Supplement:


I read him on Ben Nicholson and a painter I’d hitherto regarded as a clumsy eccentric – Samuel Palmer (whose pictures have seemed magical to me ever since). I was first and permanently attracted to the poems of William Barnes by Grigson’s enthusiastic commentary on them. His topographical and historical guides had the same quality of pointing out something good one had somehow missed. His accounts of flora and fauna were knowledgeable and not poetically twee. His reviews amused me greatly; exposing humbuggery, spotting talent, valuing sense, zapping bunkum. They were healthy, good fun to read (though the dissected probably didn’t relish them), and the attendant whines of ‘cruelty’ from the anti-vivisection lot were entertaining. In this desultory way many of us learned from Grigson.


The cries of ‘cruelty’ can still be heard, albeit faintly. He merits a couple of snotty references from Ian Hamilton in the posthumously published Against Oblivion, and is glibly and brusquely dismissed as ‘that notorious scourge’ by Selina Hastings in her biography of Rosamond Lehmann. The ‘scourge’ had the temerity to question the poetic talent of Cecil Day-Lewis, and to find it severely wanting. Hastings is content to record that the other critics – none of them named – disagreed.

I shall always regard my friend Geoffrey Grigson as a rescuer and discoverer. You only have to look at his anthologies to be made aware of the depth and range of his reading. He loved to grub in the Bodleian Library or the British Museum in the hope of rescuing some deserving poet (frequently the author of a solitary, deserving poem) from an ill-deserved obscurity.

In his grubbing days, he chanced on William Diaper, George Darley, and Samuel Daniel, who wrote:


O blessed letters that combine in one

All ages past, and make one live with all,

By you do we confer with who are gone,

And the dead living unto councell call:

By you th’unborne shall have communion  

Of what we feele, and what doth us befall…


(Geoffrey shared Coleridge’s admiration for those lines, which he loved to quote.)

For me, Grigson the enthusiast is at his most beguiling in the collection of essays Poems and Poets, in which he celebrates such wonders as Whitman’s ‘Memories of President Lincoln’ and Christopher Smart’s ‘A Song to David’ in language that is finely sensitive to what makes each poem peculiar and wonderful. An observation like the following is a world away from the criticism that is practised by his despised professors of literature. He quotes these lines from the fifty-second stanza of Smart’s masterpiece: