Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Christopher Isherwood
List of Illustrations
Dedication
Title Page
Introduction
Foreword
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Picture Section
Afterword
Copyright
This is the story of Christopher Isherwood’s parents – their meeting in 1895, marriage in 1903, after his father had returned from the Boer War, and his father’s death in an assault on Ypres in 1915, which left his mother a widow until her own death in 1960. As well as a family memoir, it is a social history of a pivotal time, and a portrait of a world which Isherwood was both shaped by, and rejected.
Christopher Isherwood was born in Cheshire in 1904. He began to write at university and later moved to Berlin, where he gave English lessons to support himself. He witnessed first hand the rise to power of Hitler and the Nazi party in Germany and some of his best works, such as Mr Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin, draw on these experiences. He created the character of Sally Bowles, later made famous as the heroine of the musical Cabaret. Isherwood travelled with W. H. Auden to China in the late 1930s before going with him to America in 1939, which became his home for the rest of his life. He died on 4 January 1986.
All the Conspirators
The Memorial
Mr Norris Changes Trains
Lions and Shadows
Goodbye to Berlin
Prater Violet
The Condor and the Cows
The World in the Evening
Down There on a Visit
A Single Man
A Meeting by the River
Christopher and his Kind
My Guru and his Disciple
With Don Bachardy
October
With W. H. Auden
The Dog Beneath the Skin
The Ascent of F6
On the Frontier
Journey to a War
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Copyright © Christopher Isherwood 1971
Introduction copyright © Katherine Bucknell 2013
First published in Great Britain by Methuen and Co. in 1971
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9780099561194
TO KATHLEEN AND FRANK AND RICHARD
Christopher Isherwood is celebrated for writing from the cusp of the future – Berlin as Hitler rose to power; southern California as it brewed the psychedelia and mysticism that became sixties counter-culture; the hidden lair of the monster homosexual whose anger burst out in the hedonism and joy of gay liberation. Kathleen and Frank embraces the past. Kathleen was Christopher Isherwood’s mother, Kathleen Machell Smith, and Frank was his father, Francis Bradshaw Isherwood; both were born halfway through the reign of Queen Victoria at the height of the British Empire. This book tells how they met, fell in love, married and had two sons, and how their happily-ever-after was destroyed by the Great War.
Isherwood pieces together their story from a trove of family papers hoarded by his mother and his younger brother – letters, diaries, photographs, scrapbooks – so that we are immersed in the material details of their daily lives and drawn into the inner world of each character. The marriage crossed a class divide so subtle as to seem almost imperceptible today, and the key events crossed an historical divide so dramatic as to seem an abyss in time: the Great War. The Machell Smiths and the Bradshaw Isherwoods broadly exemplify certain types of their period and class, yet their personalities range from romantic and eccentric to neurotic and bizarre, and the more we find out about them, the more vividly individual they become and the more fully we comprehend the underlying dynamic of their intimate relationships. They speak in their own voices from the documents they made with their own hands; Isherwood comments, interprets, even supplements with personal recollection and additional historical research, always reminding us of the later time and place from which he writes. For this book is also his attempt to dig out, like an archaeologist, the foundation from which he grew, and to understand how he came to be who he was. It is a project of self-analysis, an unravelling of myths that he had made about himself in earlier work, in order to disclose a new set of truths. He might have entitled the book Kathleen and Frank and Christopher, since he, too, is a main character in it.
Kathleen was the lovely and intriguing only child of a successful wine merchant from Bury St Edmunds who retired in London as a gentleman of leisure. She was well educated, clever, dutiful, but also spoilt, and so closely involved with her emotionally demanding and supremely manipulative mother and father that she might, like many a Victorian daughter, have spent her whole life as their handmaid and pet. Isherwood tells, with a mixture of awe and mockery, how Kathleen’s mother, Emily, a passionate theatregoer who dressed like Sarah Bernhardt, controlled the intense little family of three with her health:
Emily was forced, for want of any other outlet, to express her temperament through the medium of illness. Her sudden prostrations and equally sudden recoveries were the bewilderment of her doctors. She was no imaginary invalid, but a great psychosomatic virtuoso who could produce high fevers, large swellings and mysterious rashes within the hour; her ailments were roles into which she threw herself with abandon. And if she hadn’t possessed an unusually strong constitution they would have finished her off in her prime.
Frank was the second son of the squire of Marple Hall, near High Lane, Cheshire, a member of the landowning classes, but descended from the republican-minded Puritan judge who signed the death warrant of King Charles I. He was educated by the army, at Sandhurst, and was commissioned as an officer in his father’s regiment, the York and Lancasters, in 1892, when he was twenty-three years old. His older brother Henry, heir to the estate, was a flamboyant gay bachelor enamoured of the dining and drinking life that was available to him in London and abroad and attracted to all things ceremonial, including the Roman Catholic Church, to which he converted. Henry married an heiress late in life, coupling Marple with her local estate and threatening to produce an heir who might displace Christopher in the family succession; with hilarious pomposity, he added the name of his bride, Muriel Bagshawe, to his own, so that they became Henry and Muriel Bradshaw Bagshawe Isherwood. There was a third son, a lawyer, and two daughters – one who married a clergyman and one who remained a spinster. Frank’s father and mother, hulled-out and almost gaga by the time Christopher knew them, exuded passive but genuine benevolence.
Kathleen and Frank first met in mid July 1895, at an army camp in Colchester, Essex; Frank was in his general’s quarters, singing songs with a married girlfriend of Kathleen and probably accompanying on the piano (he was good at both). When the music stopped, he and Kathleen were introduced on the doorstep. Kathleen, who had been told by her own mother, ‘you can never be only friends, you naturally flirt and can’t be content without personal admiration … I fear you are too fascinating ever for men’, was preoccupied just then with two other relationships, including one that unhappily obsessed her because, evidently, she had flippantly turned down a proposal of marriage and could not elicit it a second time. She and Frank met again seven months later and danced a single quadrille.
The romantic clock of the period moved agonisingly slowly, encrusted as it was with late Victorian propriety, chaperones, long journey times and a general style of indirection, caution and restraint. It took Kathleen and Frank little time to realise that they both loved books, paintings, beautiful buildings and amateur theatricals; they were both talented watercolourists too, and when Kathleen took up the new craze for bicycling, they rode off together to sketch outdoors and picnic. Kathleen found Frank amusing and entertaining right from the start, and he found it easy to make her laugh when he was onstage dressed as a girl. But he grew a little stiff and shy when he began to get more seriously interested in her, and it seems that she may have fallen for his family house before she fell for him. It was to be four years before they thought of one another as sweethearts; Frank proposed on 19 August 1899; Kathleen took three weeks to make up her mind.
Isherwood is fascinated by the drama of their courtship. Frank was fastidious, abhorred sexual bravado and show, yet had an intense relationship with an older woman, a writer, who made Kathleen jealous. Though she may have longed for it in fantasy, anyone more thrilling than Frank would probably have sent Kathleen running; she liked to feel she was in control. And so did her father. His demands on Frank to show that he could provide for Kathleen were heavy-handed, obstinate and, like trench warfare, seemingly reluctant to achieve any outcome; when her father got what he wanted, he asked for something else. As the negotiations reached their climax, late in 1899, Frank left for South Africa to fight the Boers. He caught typhoid, recovered and served a second tour. Kathleen waited anxiously, and voluminous, fascinating letters shuttled back and forth. Obstacles ultimately heightened the sense of romance. When they finally married in 1903, Kathleen was already thirty-five years old. But there was enough electricity in the match to produce a son, Christopher, almost immediately, in 1904. After that it was seven years before the arrival of his brother.
Kathleen and Frank settled first in a farmhouse on the Marple estate, where they seemed to be blissfully happy. When Frank rejoined his regiment, Kathleen was forced to become a camp follower in small garrison towns that offered little to interest her – Strensall, near York; Frimley, near Aldershot; and finally, in 1912, Limerick in Ireland. She took Christopher, his nanny (tiny in stature, but a giant in the household) and the new baby. A year and a half later, when war with Germany was declared, Frank was sent almost immediately to the front line. Kathleen saw him twice more, in November 1914 and again in January 1915, when he was allowed home on leave. In February he was mentioned in dispatches ‘for gallant and distinguished service in the field’, and in the King’s list of honours he was made a brevet lieutenant colonel. In late May, Frank was reported wounded at the second battle of Ypres in Flanders. Kathleen searched for him tirelessly, sending telegrams and writing letters, visiting the War Office as often as twice a day, preparing her passport in readiness to travel to Europe, filing enquiries, questioning wounded fellow officers and men in hospital, calling upon friends and strangers for information and advice, and beseeching relatives who had connections in the war government. On 24 June she received a letter from the British Red Cross and Order of St John saying that a disc bearing Frank’s details had been found on a dead soldier near Frezenberg in early May. ‘[A]nd so passes hope and life,’ she wrote in her diary. Isherwood was later able to establish that his father was probably killed between 8 p.m. and midnight on 8 May.
Kathleen dyed a skirt and coat black until she could have new ones made up (her mother also put on mourning). She received ‘heaps’ of letters expressing sympathy and regret, some horrified her, some suggested Frank might still be alive. The King and Queen sent her a telegram of condolence. By September she found: ‘I miss him more every day and life seems harder and harder.’ She had news that his mare, Kitty, was unharmed, and then his suitcase was returned. It was missing only two items that he must have used on his last dark night: ‘Unpacked My Dear’s things, unspeakably sad to see the dear familiar things and the green valise Bell and I made at Limerick, nearly everything has come back except his watch and a luminous torch. His sword Cope still has.’ (Bell, Frank’s soldier-servant, had been captured by the Germans earlier in the war; he died a prisoner. Cope evidently replaced him.)
Christopher had turned eleven that August. His boyish grief was evidently swamped by Kathleen’s, and for the next decade he did his manly best to comfort her, to offer companionship, understanding and even advice. But gradually he grew to resent the heavy emotional burden and what he regarded as Kathleen’s cult of the Past. He turned against her, against the conventional notions of class privilege and duty to family and empire for which he felt she stood, and against all her hopes for his future. He ran from his fate as heir to Marple, dropped out of Cambridge, where she hoped he might become a history don, and, determined to be a novelist, moved away from England altogether, first to Berlin, where he fell in love with street boys and lived happily in the slums, and eventually to California, where he sought a new way of life as a pacifist, a Hindu and a screenwriter.
His working title for Kathleen and Frank was Hero Father, Demon Mother, because he felt that he had been forced in adolescence to think of his father as someone of whom he must prove himself worthy. But as he worked through the family papers, especially his mother’s diaries, he realised that he didn’t know either parent as well as he thought, and that the fictions he had created about them in his youth – the unresolvable conflict between old and young presented in All the Conspirators, the damage visited upon his generation by those who had fought and sacrificed during the war, presented in The Memorial – fulfilled certain emotional needs he had had at the time. Now, in his successful sixties, immersed with his partner Don Bachardy in the kind of long and happy relationship that had been denied his mother and father, he relented towards his mother with heart-rending compassion. He regretted not having read her diaries, ‘the little volumes of her masterpiece’, while she was still alive to take pleasure in it. And he seemed to understand at last what his mother had looked for and found in her husband, and what she had lost and lacked when Frank died. Here’s what he wrote about twenty-two year-old Kathleen, the woman with whom he had been at odds from his own twenties until her death in 1960:
… she is extremely attractive, slender and lively, with a delightful laugh, pretty brown hair, fresh coloring, full red lips and beautiful grey eyes. Her eyes have a hint of sadness in them, and her liveliness has a hint of reserve behind it. She is unexpectedly well-educated and artistically gifted, but she doesn’t show off. She tries to be what she will later call ‘responsive,’ making a real effort to share in the interests and pleasures of others. But she is temperamental, too, and can suddenly turn difficult and ill-humoured. Altogether, she is a girl who is destined to be popular but misunderstood. She needs an unusual man – one who will never take her for granted, who will be fascinated by her contradictions, who will patiently explore her to the depths.
Apart from a few physical details, he might have been describing Bachardy, who possesses a personality as mercurial and fascinating as Kathleen’s, and to whom Isherwood was both lover and father.
Kathleen and Frank is the first of his own books in which Isherwood referred to himself openly and unambiguously as a homosexual, something for which the culture around him now seemed ready. Although Frank had forced himself into the mould of professional soldier and fully played his role as a real man among real men, this was not necessarily what he wanted for his son. He recognised in a very young Christopher something that was not suited to institutional life, a kind of difference that should be valued and nourished rather than crushed. He and Kathleen sent Christopher to boarding school at eight, but the month before he died, on 9 April 1915, Frank wrote to her:
I am glad C is going on well. I don’t much agree with the Dr about boarding schools … in Christopher’s case I shouldn’t object at all to sending him as a day boy if it were possible. The whole point of sending him to school was to flatten him out, so to speak, and to make him like other boys and, when all is said and done, I don’t know that it is at all desirable or necessary, and I for one would much rather have him as he is.
This family memoir proved to be the first of three autobiographical books. Homosexuality was to become a main theme of Christopher and His Kind, and Hinduism a main theme of My Guru and His Disciple. Isherwood never wrote another novel.
Katherine Bucknell, 2013
Without my brother Richard’s constant cooperation and exact memory for detail, this book could hardly have been put together. Don Bachardy, always a much valued critic, has been more than usually helpful; as an American, he was able to read this very English story with the eyes of an outsider and tell me when additional explanations were needed. The late judge J. A. Reid (referred to as ‘Jack Reid’ in the text) showed great kindness in answering my questions about Frank’s army life in Ireland and in copying out extracts from military books in his library. He also put me in touch with Major J. H. Mott, who generously lent me a rare copy of Kearsey’s history of Frank’s regiment during the Boer War. Since Judge Reid’s death, his son John Reid has taken a lot of trouble on my behalf. So has Robert Collison, of the Research Library at the University of California, Los Angeles. My best thanks to them both.
Quotations from the following books are gratefully acknowledged:
War Record of the York and Lancaster Regiment 1900–1902, from Regimental and Private Sources by A.H.C. Kearsey, D.S.O.
A Coffin for King Charles (called The Trial of Charles I in the British edition) by C. V. Wedgwood.
The Roly-Poly Pudding by Beatrix Potter.
Around Theatres by Max Beerbohm.
My Years of Indiscretion by Cyril Scott.
The York and Lancaster Regiment 1758–1919 by Colonel H. C. Wylly, C.B.
C.I. May 1971.
At the beginning of 1883, Kathleen started her first diary, probably because she had just fallen in love. But she didn’t persevere with it. By the end of July, some days are being missed each week; December is a total blank. Then, for seven years, she didn’t keep a diary at all—which makes it the more astonishing that she began one again when she was twenty-two and kept it regularly for almost seventy years.
From 1891 through 1895 Kathleen used diary-volumes which allowed only two pages to a week. In 1896 she changed permanently to a page-a-day diary, with pages that were about three inches by four and a half. Often she would fill the whole page; sometimes she ran over and had to write less for the next day or two, to catch up with the date. ‘I’m afraid I’m a slave to my diary,’ she told Richard, her younger son. Kathleen did have a compulsive conscience—she thought in terms of things-which-had-to-be-done before some deadline day—but her diary wasn’t merely another duty. She obviously enjoyed writing it, making time for this among her many occupations, and used it to relieve her feelings in moods of sorrow, indignation or bewilderment. Richard remembers how, when she was an elderly woman, she liked to take out her old diaries and read them to herself, saying that they brought back happier days.
For Kathleen the Past was happier, one might almost say, by definition. Even during her admittedly happy marriage she firmly fixed on one period—the years at Wyberslegh Hall—which was henceforth to be recognized as happier than any which could conceivably follow it. She was intensely obstinate in maintaining this attitude. Like every devotee of the Past she could always find reasons why the Present was inferior to it. Frank’s death became her final unanswerable argument.
Kathleen was careful to be exact about names, dates and even times of day, but she did more than record happenings, she tried to evoke places and atmospheres, she wrote with a strong consciousness of personal and national drama, of herself and the England she was living in. She saw her own life as History and its anniversaries as rites to be celebrated. She could invest minor domestic events with an epic quality. She discovered a mystic and sometimes terrible significance in coincidences. One can almost imagine her prefacing some of the more portentous entries in her diary with the Biblical formula, ‘that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet …’
Christopher, her elder son, revolted early and passionately against the cult of the Past. As an adolescent orphan he was subjected to reminders by schoolmasters and other busybodies of his obligations to the memory of Frank, his Hero-Father. So he learnt to hate and fear the Past because it threatened to swallow his future. Later, when this threat had been proved empty and even pathetic, he felt no more than an affectionate exasperation with Kathleen for what seemed to him to be her kind of sulking. He suspected she believed she could actually pressure Fate by it, like a hotel guest who gets better service by refusing ever to admit to the manager that she is satisfied.
Nevertheless, Christopher grew up to become a recorder, too, and so, willy-nilly, a celebrant of the Past; he began to keep a diary and to write autobiographical novels. Today he finds it hard to explain to himself why he never asked Kathleen to let him read her diary while she was alive—perhaps he was still superstitiously afraid of getting entangled in the spider’s web of her memories. His failure to express his interest was unkind, in any case, for Kathleen would surely have enjoyed showing it to him, though she never even hinted at this; she had grown so accustomed to hearing Frank’s talents praised while hers were disregarded that she now thought little of them, herself. The last time they met, she was sincerely surprised that Christopher wanted to take two of her own beautiful watercolours back with him, to hang in his house in California. And there, all the while, in the drawers of her desk, lay the rows of little volumes of her masterpiece … It was only after she was dead that Richard told Christopher how she had once said, ‘perhaps someone will be glad of it, some day’.
The diary of 1883, scrappy though it is, provides plenty of evidence that Kathleen was already very much Kathleen.
When she began it, she was fourteen years old; she had been born on October 7th, 1868. She was living at Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, with her parents, Frederick and Emily Machell Smith. They often signed themselves Machell-Smith with a hyphen—Machell had been the maiden name of Frederick’s mother—but they can’t have had any legal right to do so, for they had their daughter baptized Kathleen Machell, thus making sure that the too-ordinary Smith would never stand alone.
Frederick had a wine business in Bury, which made him a colleague of Emily’s brother Walter Greene, who had a brewery. But Walter was far more prosperous and illustrious than Frederick. He went into politics and in due course became Sir Walter Greene, Bart. In 1883 he already owned a large country house with spacious grounds in the neighbourhood, called Nether Hall. Nether was the scene of continuous hospitality; dances, shoots, hunt breakfasts, house-parties. On January 1st Kathleen writes in her diary, ‘back from Paradise to earth, in other words Nether Hall to Bury’.
January 11. At six thirty Mum, Puppie and I (in cream dress) start for the Thornhills. Mum wears her velvet. Start home at 12.30 after the most charming time possible. Danced and sat out with A.T. Have turkey and jelly for supper. I wonder if it will be a year before I see A.T. again. I know why I enjoy staying at Nether so much, because of A.T.
(After ‘I wonder if it will be a year …’ Kathleen has drawn a line through the rest of the entry, but this isn’t really a deletion since the words are all easily legible; it seems more like a gesture of coyness.)
A few days later, ‘A.T.’ (Antony Thornhill) goes back to school at Eton and Kathleen’s life becomes sadly provincial and humdrum. There are few available males and none of any interest; ‘have Eddie all the afternoon, what a donkey that boy is’. She plays cards with a girl cousin and ‘a new game called religious conversation’ with Emily, she trims a hat ‘for a poor woman’, cuts out pictures to paper a wall, looks through back numbers of Punch, buys an apron with sunflowers on it, reads Quentin Durward and finds the ending ‘not satisfactory’, paints a black wood fan and finishes her first chalk drawing, kills 250 snails, goes for long walks to watch the foxhounds meet and short strolls with Emily down the lane, ‘lovely sunset but awful smells’. The only real fun seems to have been taking part in theatricals, of various kinds. ‘A ghost entertainment for the servants. I am dressed as a nun and talk very awfully, the room is quite dark except for one lantern. Lil has a brown sheet and appears. We finish by throwing a sheet over them and run away quick.’ Another time, Kathleen dresses up as Dolly Varden in Barnaby Rudge. This was good casting. Dolly is described by Pierce in his Dickens Dictionary as ‘a bright fresh coquettish girl, the very impersonation of good humour and blooming beauty’. When they acted The Sleeping Beauty, another girl played the part, however. Kathleen obviously lacked the necessary languor.
And there were lessons. These included German, taught by a Fräulein. Kathleen hated it and went on hating it for the rest of her life. It was so gross and coarse and ugly, she said. She even disagreed with Frank about this. As for Christopher, he hated French with equal enthusiasm, making fun of its vague weak sounds and declaring that German was beautiful. Actually both of them were rebelling against the ‘in’ language of their generation. German was still ‘in’ when Kathleen was a girl, owing to Victoria’s cult of the dead Prince Consort and her kinship with the German royal houses. But German was soon to be ousted by French. 1883 was, in fact, the very year in which Germany moved into south-west Africa as a colonial power, thus straining Anglo-German relations and beginning to push English public opinion in the direction of the Entente Cordiale.
Antony Thornhill must have spent his Easter holidays elsewhere, for Kathleen doesn’t mention him. In mid-August she reopens her diary after a lapse, to record their next meeting:
August 14. Go to Nether. I wake up to the delightful fact this is the long wished for Tuesday. A thrill of joy runs through me!
August 16. Dull early but clears up nicely before 2 o’clock. Beautiful bright summer’s day after 12. Ethel, Antony and I sat together in Thornhill’s pew for Freda Jones wedding, 11.30. She appears in a stamped cream coloured velvet dress and worked veil. Bridesmaids rather like toilet tables in spotted muslin over salmon pink. After wedding we three go in boat. Then we walk in garden while E. airs Turk. On Tuesday we go home and I shall be simply miserable.
(Note how Kathleen hastens to prepare to mourn over the soon-to-be-past! Ethel is a cousin, Turk presumably a dog.)
August 17. Spend all afternoon in boat. After tea the dear Turk has to be aired, which Ethel does. As we are standing on the bridge looking in the water, Antony said ‘Do you care two pins for me?’ I turned hot and cold and sick and giddy, though why I don’t know for after all I care two pins for most people, so there was nothing in that. He seemed in earnest then but I daresay we shall both soon change. Papa tries Antony’s tricycle and comes to grief but does not hurt himself much.
August 19. Nice day, hot and close. Antony, Ethel and I go to church. After tea we three take a little walk up the harvest fields. After that we walk up to Lodge. Mr Goat the gardener gives us plums and apricots. Somehow we all seem miserable. Grandpapa is much better and walks about. We play Sunday games in evening. Mama to me, ‘you will be glad to hear I like Antony immensely, he was so nice about Grandpapa last night, which is a good test’.
August 25. We start for Nether Hall and stay till 6. Have the first happy hours I have spent since last Wed. E and A don’t seem to have had much fun since I left, I haven’t had one atom. Antony said when he was at Clarke’s there was a basket of photographs and Clarke said he could have anyone he liked and he chose one of me sitting on a log of wood with hat and mantle on.
August 30. Kept awake from 3 to 4 by a cow. We arrive at Nether Hall at 2 o’clock for lunch. Antony is still staying there and Mr Thornhill too. After lunch we go in the boat till 3.30 when we come in. Ethel runs to put the umbrellas in the hall, and to my utter astonishment Antony puts a little case in my hand. On opening it I found a little gold ring with three emeralds and two diamonds. The worst part was telling Mum. She said when I was older it was not proper to receive presents from young men, etc. So it was all right.
This is the last reference to Antony in the 1883 diary. They must have met each other often during those seven years which Kathleen doesn’t record. Did Antony remain ‘in earnest’? Did he want to marry her as they grew older? If he did, Kathleen or her parents must have turned him down. On March 18th, 1891, she was told by Ethel that Antony had become engaged to a Miss Miller; on September 2nd, they were married. Kathleen minded this or at least felt that it was romantic to think of herself as jilted, for she kept in her diary a leaf from a quotation-calendar with the date of the wedding-day: ‘Who seeks and will not take when once ’tis offered, shall never find it more’, Antony and Cleopatra, II, 7.
Frederick and Emily certainly loved their only child and Kathleen was eager to return their love, but her relations with them can’t have been easy. They were both star personalities, demanding complete cooperation from their supporting cast as they played opposite each other with tremendous power and style, in a real-life melodrama about martyrdom.
Frederick had run away from home at the age of seventeen because his father remarried, only a short while after the death of Frederick’s mother. He seems to have been something of a Byronic hero, a handsome athletic brooding youth with an ugly disposition, quick to suffer rejection and take vengeance for betrayal. He shipped out to Australia, where he farmed sheep and served in the mounted police. Perhaps he would have been happier if he had stayed there and lived a rough aggressive outdoor life. But he ungraciously forgave his father and returned to England after a few years, surviving a shipwreck on the way—his last Byronic adventure. Back at home, he changed roles, becoming a tamed and chained but still dangerous Victorian Samson, a martyr-moralist, fettered to his duties as son, husband, father, business man, citizen and Christian. He was also fettered to a hobby, photography. He pursued it with compulsive zeal, to the discomfort of all around him. Everybody was kept waiting while he fussed with his camera. At the beginning of 1883 he was fifty-one years old, still handsome and full of vigour. He often rode to hounds.
Here are some details of a self-portrait:
I am going to try not to scribble so fearfully fast when I write to you as it will get me into bad habits and tend to deteriorate my handwriting for business purposes, besides producing a scrawl which must sometimes tax your eyes and ingenuity to decipher. You must therefore scold me well if I send you any more dreadful scribbles or I may be tempted to relapse into my old ways.
Last Easter Sunday Walter and I received the Sacrament. Though I had you not with me in presence my darling my thoughts were with you and I felt that though separated in the body we were each endeavouring in the spirit to testify our feelings of thankfulness for the great blessing of our risen Saviour. I cannot on looking over the past year feel that I have done much, if anything, in His service. I would feel more earnestness and love but as yet I grieve to say that I have not realized that love for Him as I ought, and knowing that this is the great proof of His abiding in us it makes me feel very anxious to realize more such love as every professing Christian ought to bear in a greater degree according to his advancement on the path of life. You are a good old dear about your boots. I thought for some reason (which I think must have been told me by someone) that ornamental boots were a weakness with you and I did not like to ask before. But when you assured me that you were willing to wear what I liked, I thought it was a good opportunity to suggest an alteration and it is really (to my mind) a shame to put such wonderful decorations on to neat feet which do not require such arrangements to set them off.
We did not think H. P. spoilt at present, he does not seem inclined to be either fast or slangy and I trust he may never be tempted to either; he is very fond of fun, i.e. dancing, shooting, boating, etc etc, none of them dangerous tastes, and seems chatty without being boisterous or noisy but he has much to go through yet.
Her husband was on the whole very amiable, he was slightly heady one evening but did not arrive at the quarrelsome stage. I hope his son will not follow in his steps either as a gourmand or a squabbler, this last is the result of the former.
Will is very keen about photography which Agnes does not altogether relish and does not seem to support him in his enthusiasm. I hear they have made a sort of compromise, viz that Will is only to take dry plates on his wedding tour, as Agnes thinks a tent etc will take up too much time. I don’t know how she wishes to spend it, but I should say, so far as having his society, she would not lose much of that, even if he had a tent.
H. S.’s answer, though ingenious and pretty much what I anticipated, only proves to me what a snake in the grass he must be. Had the accusing letter come from a comparative stranger and a man of his own age, it would have been a widely different thing, but for a man of 50 to enter into a discussion on his conduct with one of 21 is extraordinary under most circumstances and, after all the trouble H. S. has taken, his letter would not bear sifting and analysing piece by piece. Walter’s letter is clear enough but is not gentlemanly and he might have stood upon high ground and attacked H. S. without committing himself by the use of such strong language. I can quite understand, knowing Walter as I do, that he was goaded to it and the impetuosity of his feelings got the better of him.
Will has made great progress and, having larger plates, his works make more show than mine, though I honestly think I can beat him yet. I have ordered a new camera to take 12 by 10, 10 by 8 and 9 by 7 views, it will cost three pound ten and the lens and other things will nearly take the sum I told you, twenty pounds. I shall be very particular about the lens. I will execute your commissions as soon as I can. I conclude you want them pour les domestiques.
The above are extracts from letters written by Frederick to Emily shortly before their marriage in 1864. Emily was nine years his junior; she had been born on October 24th, 1840. Though Frederick was then only in his thirty-third year he playfully called himself her uncle and addressed her as his niece. He was capable of playfulness but never of what would nowadays be called humour. Emily was not a humorist either. She described funny situations as being ‘droll’.
During their engagement, she confessed to him in a letter that she had only just stopped feeling afraid of him. To this he answered:
My darling, I will burn your letter and quite quite forgive your doubts and fears, you must not mind if some day when I have you quietly to myself you receive a little punishment from my lips, but it shall be very soft I promise you and when I have you once more in my arms you will perhaps submit.
It is doubtful if Emily did submit, on this or any other occasion. Martyrs are not submitting to you when they let you tie them to the stake. Emily entered upon marriage in this spirit, but there is no reason to suppose that she and Frederick weren’t happy together, at least to begin with. Neither understood, but each respected and admired the other. They were playing the game according to the same rules, and for keeps. Their marriage was no laughing matter. That was the whole point of it.
Everybody agreed that Emily was beautiful. She never ceased to be. Her features were of the cast then approvingly called Grecian; her profile was like an engraving of an empress on a coin. Christopher remembers her only when she was past seventy; she lived to be eighty-four. In his memory he sees her either standing or lying down, never sitting. When she walks it is with a royal air of graciousness and the proud humility of noblesse oblige; she enters a seaside teashop as if she is inspecting a children’s hospital. When he thinks of her reclining on a couch in her brocade gown, musky furs and long gold earrings, speaking very softly with half-closed eyes, he is reminded of Elizabeth Tudor dying, and how she refused to take off her clothes and go to bed.
However, despite appearances, Emily was anything but fragile. If Frederick should perhaps have become an Australian, she should certainly have become an actress. She had the temperament and the stamina for it, as well as the restlessness which welcomes constant changes of scene. She was a passionate theatre-goer whenever she got the opportunity—the lack of it must have made her hate living in Bury. She dressed somewhat in the style of Sarah Bernhardt, whom she adored.
But Emily was forced, for want of any other outlet, to express her temperament through the medium of illness. Her sudden prostrations and equally sudden recoveries were the bewilderment of her doctors. She was no imaginary invalid but a great psychosomatic virtuoso who could produce high fevers, large swellings and mysterious rashes within the hour; her ailments were roles into which she threw herself with abandon. And if she hadn’t possessed an unusually strong constitution they would have finished her off in her prime.
Emily’s one big dramatic scene in Kathleen’s 1883 diary is short but in her best manner. It seems that she had set her heart on going to France that summer and that Frederick had vetoed the trip, saying they couldn’t afford it. Kathleen describes what followed:
July 13. What a bother money is. Mum can’t go to the Ardennes and she was so disappointed, in fact she is getting ill. If she were to go after all it would not be the same. She is calm tonight and I asked her where we should go away to, to make up for the Ardennes, and she said very low (she thought I did not hear) ‘to heaven’. Oh, I cried in the night. If only I had money.
July 14. Have headache after last night.
July 15. We three go to church at St Mary’s. Poor M. not well, weeps in church.
Kathleen’s comment—‘if she were to go after all it would not be the same’—shows how well she already understood her Mother. The diary doesn’t record if they did go anywhere ‘to make up for the Ardennes’, but no doubt Frederick lived to regret his decision. And, less than two years later, Emily won the decisive victory of her marriage. Frederick was compelled to leave Bury and take his Wife and Daughter to live in London because it had been finally established, after goodness knows how many medical showdowns, that Emily’s health couldn’t stand the Suffolk cold.
Kathleen’s new home was a flat in a tall handsome brick building on Gloucester Road, South Kensington, just north of the Old Brompton Road. South of Brompton Road, Gloucester Road becomes Cranley Gardens. Hence, the building was named Cranley Mansion. It still stands, and its ironwork balconies with their chaste floral designs must please any connoisseur of the period who happens to pass by.
When Kathleen reopens her diary in 1891, she has already ‘come out’ and achieved the status of a marriageable young lady of the upper middle class. At twenty-two it is obvious that she hasn’t inherited Emily’s Grecian beauty and regal poise; but she is extremely attractive, slender and lively, with a delightful laugh, pretty brown hair, fresh colouring, full red lips and beautiful grey eyes. Her eyes have a hint of sadness in them and her liveliness has a hint of reserve behind it. She is unexpectedly well educated and artistically gifted, but she doesn’t show off. She tries to be what she will later call ‘responsive’, making a real effort to share in the interests and pleasures of others. But she is temperamental too, and can suddenly turn difficult and ill-humoured. Altogether, she is a girl who is destined to be popular but misunderstood. She needs an unusual man—one who will never take her for granted, who will be fascinated by her contradictions, who will patiently and lovingly explore her to the depths.
In January, Kathleen records that a certain Captain C. ‘says I am very much altered, quite staid and quiet!’ No wonder this amused her, for her social life was energetic and often noisy. At the country houses where she stayed, she played bumps and hunt the slipper and threw cushions at the other young guests. She loved dancing and could keep it up all night. If she was quiet, she would probably be gossiping in whispers with the girls or murmuring archly with the men. An elderly hostess was much nearer the mark than Captain C. when she told Kathleen, ‘your eyes are not made for your soul’s good’. And a woman friend of her own age composed a poem about her which contrives to be frank as well as flattering. After speaking of Kathleen’s ‘dainty airiness and wilful grace’, it concludes:
From petulance to stately calm she’ll pass
Before a fly can settle on a glass
And no madonna could be more serene
Than can appear at times my dear Kathleen.
And here is Emily’s verdict, in a letter written to Kathleen in 1896:
It is stupid of men, that they can’t have girls as friends and there let it rest, but it is very rarely possible and I fear, dear, will never be possible between you and any man until you are fifty or more. I dare say you won’t believe me, but the truth is you can never be only friends, you naturally flirt and can’t be content without personal admiration. Only plain girls or women who are of the angel type (at least men think they are) can have platonic friends. Now you never were and never will be of the angel type, and in this respect you differ from your beloved Mother. I fear you are too fascinating ever for men—
‘To think of you as a star, far in the heaven above
Such as one might gaze upon but would not dare to love.’
This I was once—this, dear Lamb, you will never be, nor would you care to be if you could.
Kathleen’s reply to these remarks, if any, is not extant; but it can be assumed that they didn’t seriously hurt her feelings. Angels and goddesses were on their way out, slowly but surely; Woman’s fight for equal political rights would render them obsolete. Emily was really offering Kathleen a much more exciting role, that of the mortal modern girl.
What did Kathleen herself expect of life, love and eventual marriage? The only clues in her 1891 diary are these two quotations:
Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart,
’Tis woman’s whole existence Don Juan 1. CXCIV
and
For every created man there is a created woman who stands to him as the only true wife he can have in this life or any other … Those created for each other may not meet or come together in this embodiment, but they assuredly will in another.
Your Forces and How to Use Them.
Neither of these is much use as a guide to conduct. Byron can only advise Woman to watch out, for his intentions are dishonourable. The second author seems to advise caution also, and perhaps patience throughout several lifetimes until the true husband appears. Kathleen was certainly cautious, as will be shown later; her flirting must have been essentially defensive, a kind of skirmishing which was designed to keep the Enemy at a distance rather than challenge him to engage.
From April 30th to May 23rd, Kathleen and Emily went on a tour through France, Switzerland and northern Italy. This is evidently not the first time that Kathleen has been abroad. At Amiens she remarks that they have got the same room in the same hotel as before, and she speaks familiarly of ‘dear Lucerne’.
Kathleen is seldom interesting when she writes about foreign travel: her diary keeps turning into a guidebook. She is an eager, intelligent and sensitive sightseer; she has done her homework and knows at least something about Savonarola, Dante, Diane de Poitiers, William Tell; she really appreciates the paintings and the architecture and the scenery. But there is almost never any personal contact or reaction. ‘Abroad’ is either beautiful or picturesque, as Baedeker has promised it will be, or else it is disappointing, like a restaurant where the food isn’t up to expectations. Only once during this whole trip—it is on the day of their return from Calais to England—does Kathleen describe an emotional woman-to-woman contact with one of the aliens:
Paid our bill, received a Swiss five franc piece in change and when a little later we gave it to the woman downstairs in payment for some chicken etc, she refused to take it and declared she had never given it us. We were angry.
May 26 (back in London). Took my room to pieces, taking down no less than a dozen Japanese fans. Their day is over.
(This is a reminder that the wave of ‘Japonisme’, which Whistler had helped launch upon England from Paris, was now dying down. As for Whistler himself, Kathleen went to see an exhibition of his paintings about a year after this and dismissed them as ‘horrid impressionist school’.)
On January 14th, 1892, the Duke of Clarence, the Prince of Wales’s eldest son, died in his late twenties. At the time, Kathleen was staying near Cheadle, Cheshire, with some close family friends named Sykes whom she often visited. Her first reaction to the news of the young Duke’s death was that it was ‘fearfully sad, he was to have been married to Princess Mary of Teck in February’. Then came an order from Frederick that she was to return home, and Kathleen’s loyal grief turned to bitter disappointment. She had been looking forward to a big ball which was to be held in the neighbourhood on the 27th. Frederick condemned it as ‘dancing on the grave of the dead Prince’. When she got back to London, Frederick made unconvincing attempts to justify himself. ‘Papa says he thought I had been more than three weeks at Cheadle instead of a fortnight, and that I could have stayed. He left it to me to decide, after expressing his opinion strongly against it. I don’t see how I could have gone against him.’ On the evening before the Cheshire ball took place Kathleen was invited to a dance in Kensington and Frederick allowed her to go—thus exposing the hypocrisy of his scruples. The truth was, he didn’t like letting Kathleen out of his sight for long, especially when she was amongst eligible young men.
(On February 6th, 1952, Christopher was over from the United States on a visit and staying with Kathleen at a hotel in London. At breakfast time came the news of the death of King George VI. Kathleen was moved to tears. Christopher, as befitted a citizen of a friendly Power, expressed polite sympathy. Then, after a suitable pause, he added, ‘that means we won’t be going to the Noel Coward matinee today—they’ll close all the theatres, of course’. Kathleen’s expression changed immediately. She said with intense conviction, ‘he would never have wished it!’)
February 19. Anniversary of our exodus from Bury seven years ago. The move was in every way an entirely satisfactory one.
(Was it satisfactory for Frederick? He had probably been much happier in the country, hunting and shooting. His income still came from the Bury wine-business; in London he kept himself occupied by serving voluntarily on the boards of various companies. He was particularly interested in a chain of dairies and rode around town inspecting them on his tricycle. Didn’t he feel humiliated, this rider of the Outback reduced to a milkrun and a three-wheeled mount? Wasn’t a resentment against Emily and Kathleen expressed by his increasingly tyrannical behaviour?)
February 23.