Grief, Memory, Three O'Clock in the Morning

Ex Libris Mavis Gallant: Gardening in Happy Lands, 1.

Max Beerbohm’s caricature of Oscar Wilde

The writer and caricaturist Max Beerbohm was just shy of forty when he and his wife, the actress Florence Kahn, moved from London to Rapallo, nearby Genoa. That was in 1910. They returned to England for extended stays in 1914 and 1939, the better to wait out the two World Wars; otherwise, when they were at home to friends they were on the Italian Riviera.

Lady Beerbohm died in 1951, Max in 1956, on May 20. He might, therefore, have seen himself mentioned, or been told of his naming, in Mavis Gallant’s (MG) short story, “In Italy,” published in The New Yorker, February 25, 1956. She was then living a couple of hours up the coast, in a rented house in the border town of Menton; she would move into her Paris apartment, 14 rue Jean-Ferrandi, on Christmas Eve, 1960.

Eustace Tilley, February 25, 1956: the 31st anniversary issue of the magazine.

“In Italy” — it was eventually anthologized in In Transit — is one of the stories in which MG archly anatomizes the largely English colony of ex-pats who, in the waning days of the Empire, sought refuge from the weather (inclement!) or the taxes (larcenous!) or the politics (ever more socialist!) of the motherland.

Stella, 26, a new mother, is married to Henry, a man more than twice her age. They live in a crumbling villa — peeling paint, creeping damp, inadequate heat — on the Italian Riviera. When Henry’s daughter Peggy — she’s Stella’s age — comes to visit, along with her husband and their child, she asks, “Doesn’t Max Beerbohm live near here?”

Stella can’t say. She’s never heard of him.

“In Italy” is kin to such Côte d’Azur set-pieces as “By the Sea,” “Travellers Must Be Content,” “An Unmarried Man’s Summer,” “Acceptance of their Ways,” “The Remission,” “The Four Seasons,” “The Moabitess,” and “The Moslem Wife.” It speaks just as distinctly to “The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street,” “Virus X,” “The Statues Taken Down,” and, most particularly, “The Other Paris,” in that it’s about the disappointment visited on foreign nationals who come to France — whether to the capital or the provinces — and who are led to understand that the myth of the place doesn’t withstand hard scrutiny. Exposed to sunlight and air, the romance crumbles.

In “In Italy,” one of Stella’s chief disappointments is with the garden. A lynchpin of her “lady-of-the-manor / donna-del-castello” idyll had been the vision she’d conjured of herself as the Gertrude Jekyll of the Ligurian coast. She’d imagined herself in a sunhat, in gloves, a wicker basket in one hand, secateurs in the other, gathering fragrant English roses with resolutely English names. Instead, she found herself stuck with a sandy courtyard where prospered only gnarly palms in which nested Gargantuan rats who night after night launched assaults on the roof of the villa; stubborn trees that resisted removal and that would be nearly impossible to dispose of even if they could be cut down or uprooted. They wouldn’t burn. They resisted pulping. They wouldn’t sink if disposed of in the sea.

The pesky palms of the Italian Riviera

Stella found inspiration for her fragrant fantasy in the pages (deceptive, as it turns out) of a book called Gardening in Sunny Lands. I was disappointed, a little, but not so very surprised, to discover that this was MG’s invention. She was herself, in Menton, an avid gardener, and probably had in her library a tome that was similarly intended, meant to give a leg-up to Anglo green-thumbs transplanted to the south. Gardening in Sunny Lands is such a felicitous title, though, and were I twenty years younger, and not myself decaying like an Italian villa in the post-Mussolini era, I might take it upon myself to hang some chapters on it. There’s no danger, now, of that happening; but that imagined book made me start paying attention to actual and authentic titles that come up in MG’s fiction, also her journalism. Some titles I recognize, others not; I’ve made it a habit to check out the authenticity of the titles as they come up. Most, as it turns out, are genuine, and I thought I’d let MG guide my reading for a while; that I would write about what she recommends or, at least, what I take to be recommendations, if only by the implication of inclusion.

As with Max Beerbohm in “In Italy,” “The Moslem Wife” (1976) opens with an allusion to literary proximity; we’re told in the first sentence that The Hotel Prince Albert and Albion (could there be a more emblematic name?) is situated “quite near to the house were Katherine Mansfield (who no one in this hotel had ever heard of ) was writing ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel…’” There’s a reading room in the hotel —it’s managed by Netta and her husband, Jack; they’re cousins — from which one of the long-term, elderly guests, Mr. Cordier, borrows volumes and jots on the inside cover his estimation of how many words the book contains.

Probably it’s from this same private library that Jack takes one of the several books MG names in this story. We read of how he “sat in the bar drinking black coffee and reading a travel book of Evelyn Waugh’s called Labels. Netta, who looked far more untidy and under slept, wondered if Jack wished he might leave now, and sail from Monte Carlo on the Stella Polaris.”

Evelyn Waugh was 27 when Labels was published, in 1930. It was his third book, preceded in 1928 by both Decline and Fall and his critical biography of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Labels is his account of a cruise taken in the winter of 1929 aboard a Norwegian ship, the M / Y Stella Polaris. The Stella was new then, state-of-the-art. It was, I believe, a few years later, the first cruise ship to take tourists to Antarctica; was commandeered for troop transport by the German navy during the Second World War; and wound up as a floating hotel in Japan before sinking, while being hauled by a tug to a new location, in 2006.

At the secret heart of Labels is an absence. On June 27, 1928, Waugh had married the Hon. Evelyn Gardner. It was a small registry office ceremony about which many of their friends were surprised to learn; the news was slow to circulate.

That Evelyn would marry Evelyn was a delightful weirdness much remarked by their circle of bright young things, who were quick to dub them — it was inevitable — “Hevelyn” and “Shevelyn.”

The cruise that became Labels.

In North America, Labels was released as A Bachelor Abroad. That title, if not more apt, exactly, is more representative of the story Waugh tells. He portrays himself as a solo traveler whose intentions and mission are entirely journalistic. In fact, the trip on the Stella Polaris was a belated honeymoon that turned into a death sentence for the marriage. There’s nothing like travel in close quarters to test compatibility, especially when one partner in the firm is seriously ill, as Shevelyn was at the outset of the voyage, and for days to come. Not only on the boat were there heavy seas to contend with. There were unsettling times on-shore, too, including a stop in Greece where the couple were guests of Alistair Graham with whom Waugh had enjoyed (or maybe endured) one of those Oxford affairs. Shevelyn was unsettled at this lifting of the veil from past proclivities, by their mincing, and by hearing her husband speak camp with no trace of an accent. By the time the cruise was done, she’d fallen in love with another man, the writer and future Nazi sympathizer John Heygate. The Evelyns divorced, Waugh immediately went over to Rome, wrote Vile Bodies, and the world wound on.

Evening Standard, Sept. 30, 1930

Shevelyn does, in fact, appear in the Labels narrative, albeit in disguise, and mostly in the wings. Waugh relates how in the train from Paris, en route to Monte Carlo where waits the Stella Polaris, he shares a compartment with “a French businessman – a commercial traveler, I should think - and a rather sweet-looking young English couple – presumably, from the endearments of their conversation and marked solicitude for each other’s comfort, on their honeymoon, or at any rate recently married. The young man was small and pleasantly dressed and wore a slight, curly moustache; he was reading a particularly good detective story with apparent intelligence. His wife was huddled in a fur coat in the corner, clearly far from well. I was to meet this couple again on my travels, so I may as well at once give them the names by which I later learned to call them; they were Geoffrey and Juliet.”

Geoffrey and Juliet are Waugh’s stand-ins for himself and his bride; for Shevelyn and Hevelyn. Juliet is, as Gardner was, very ill, suffering with some unnamed and attenuated malady that leaves her weakened, with a high fever, confined to the stateroom. Geoffrey, then, becomes Evelyn’s more than occasional companion, both on the ship and while exploring the highlights — some more louche than others — of the various Mediterranean ports of call. What it comes down is, Evelyn, cut loose by Evelyn, takes up with Evelyn, rechristened Geoffrey by Evelyn. I’m sure you follow.

I knew none of this when I read Labels — it’s never disclosed — and took Geoffrey and Juliet at face value. The sad truth of the honeymoon voyage that hastened the ending of the short-lived marriage — probably a mercy, as its dissolution was surely inevitable — is described in any of the Waugh biographies, and probably MG knew the whole backstory. She would, I suspect, have appreciated the way Waugh slyly, even maliciously, plays with shadows and doubles, making himself his own best friend. MG’s deployment of Labels in “The Moslem Wife” is passing, incidental, atmospheric. Whether she intended something more totemic by its inclusion I can’t say, but it’s an intriguing authorial choice on her part. Jack happens to be reading Labels at a time when his marriage to Netta is testing its own seams. He’s already planning his own escape from her, and from the hotel, which, with all its batty guests and hangers-on, is its own ship of fools. And I wonder if, in including among her minor characters the Anglo-Swiss twins (always twins and cousins!) Sandy and Sandra MG might have been giving a knowing wink at readers in the know about Evelyn and Evelyn.

Like most speculation, this is idle and fallow. Nothing useful will grow from it. Suffice it to say, I’d never heard of Labels until I saw it mentioned in “The Moslem Wife,” and I’m glad to have been pointed in its direction. Other books mentioned in that one story — not fabricated titles — include Fireman Flower, The Horse’s Mouth, Four Quartets, The Stuff to Give the Troops, Better than a Kick in the Pants, and Put Out More Flags. Some are still easy to find, others obscure. I’ll write about them, and other titles in other stories, as time goes on. If ever there was a project to which no urgency is attached, this would be it.

Labels is available in a cheap Penguin edition (1995) or if you have deep pockets you can acquire a nice association copy, see above. I won’t say much more about it save that it’s very engaging, and that it fascinates in its by now almost hundred year old depictions of Mediterranean tourist sites. It’s amazing to think of Waugh, so young, absorbing so much, and writing so well. His satirical self is very much present, but he’s not inhumane. Like all good travel writers he brings to each destination an open mind, an awareness (though not as overt and confessional as modern sensibilities would prefer) of his own preconceptions and prejudices, and a novelist’s eye. He’s perceptive, outrageous, and terribly, terribly funny. He understands that what makes a journey memorable is not so much the prescribed list of “must-sees” but the chance meetings with locals or travellers or unexpected waiters or truculent cab drivers and the occurrence of episodes unforeseen and bizarre that enliven the passing scene. In Paris, in the Place Beaveau he sees “… a man of middle age and, to judge by his bowler hat and frock coat, of the official class, and his umbrella had caught alight. I do not know how this can have happened. I passed him in a taxi-cab, and saw him in the centre of a small crowd, grasping it still by the handle and holding it at arm’s length so that the flames should not scorch him. It was a dry day and the umbrella burned flamboyantly. I followed the scene as long as I could from the little window in the back of the car, and saw him finally drop the handle and push it, with his foot, into the gutter. It lay there smoking, and the crowd peered at it curiously before moving off. A London crowd would have thought that the best possible joke, but none of the witnesses laughed, and no one to whom I have told the story in England has believed a word of it.”

Here are a few passages I noted going through. The first is very MG in its sentiments.

The characteristic thing about Paris is not so much the extent – though that is vast – as the overwhelming variety of its reputation. It has become so overlaid with successive plasterings of paste and proclamation that it has come to resemble those rotten old houses one sometimes sees during their demolition, whose crumbling frame of walls is only held together by the solid strata of wall-papers. … The fiction of Paris, conceived by Hollywood and the popular imagination, seems yearly to impose its identity more and more as the real city of Richelieu and Napoleon and Verlaine fades into the distance. This fictitious city expresses itself in dress parades, studios and night clubs.

“One particularly interesting type which abounds on cruising ships is the middle-aged widow of comfortable means… These widows… celibate and susceptible, read the advertisements of steamship companies and travel bureaux and find their just that assembly of phrases – half poetic just perceptibly aphrodisiac – which can produce at will in the unsophisticated a state of mild unreality and glamour. ‘Mystery, History, Leisure, Pleasure,’ one of them begins. There is no directly defined sexual appeal. That rosy sequence of association, desert Moon, pyramids, palms, sphyx, camels, oasis, priest in high minaret chanting the evening prayer, Allah, Hichens, Mrs. Sheridan, all delicately point the way to sheik, rape, and harem — but the happily dilatory mind does not follow them to this forbidding conclusion; it sees the direction and admires the view from afar. The actual idea of abduction is wholly repugnant — what would the bridge club and the needlework guild say when she returned? — but the inclination of other ideas towards it gives them a sweet and wholly legitimate attraction.”

Daily Telegraph, January 3, 1930

When I had made a fairly thorough tour, the little girl lit a candle and beckoned me to a side door, her face, for the first time, alight with genuine enthusiasm. We went down a few steps and turned a corner. It was completely dark except for her candle, and there was a strong smell of putrefaction. Then she stepped aside and held up the light for me to see the object of our descent. Two figures of death stood upright against the wall in rococo coffins, their arms folded across their chests. They were quite naked and dark brown in color. They had some teeth and some hair. At first I thought they were statues of more than usual virtuosity. Then I realized that they were exhumed corpses, partially modified by the aridity of the air, like the corpses at Saint Michan’s in Dublin. They were man and woman. The man's body was slit open, revealing a tangle of dry lungs and digestive organs. The little girl thrust her face into the aperture and inhaled deeply and greedily. She called on me to do the same.

‘Smell good,’ she said. ‘Nice.’

The pyramids were a quarter of a mile away; impressive by sheer bulk and reputation; it felt odd to be living at such close quarters with anything quite so famous – it was like having the Prince of Wales at the next table in the restaurant; one kept pretending not to notice, well all the time glancing furtively to see if they were still there. … The Sphinx is an ill-proportioned composition of inconsiderable aesthetic appeal; and its dramatic value has been considerably diminished since its base was disinterred. The mutilations of its face give it a certain interest. If one had come upon it unexpectedly in some unexplored region, one could be justified in showing mild enthusiasm, but as a piece of sculpture it is hopelessly inadequate to its fame. People from the hotel went out to see it by moonlight and returned very grave and awestruck; which only shows the mesmeric effect of publicity. It is just about as inscrutable and enigmatic as Mr. Aleister Crowley.

Immediately in front of me on our tour of inspection there travelled a very stout, rich lady from America, some of whose conversation I was privileged to overhear. Whatever the guide showed her, china, gold, ivory, diamond or amber, silk or carpet, this fortunate lady was able casually to remark that she had one like that at home. ‘Why,’ she would say, ‘whoever would've thought that that was of any value? I've got three like that, that cousin Sophie left me, bigger, of course, but just the same pattern, put away in one of the store-rooms. I must have them out when I get back. I never looked on them as being anything much.’

But she had to admit her self bitten by the right hand in skull of St. John the Baptist.

Enough. I recommend Evelyn Waugh’s Labels highly. And I thank MG for pointing the way. And I thank you for reading. Cheers, BR, May 31, 2024.

P.S. From the Montreal Gazette, December 27, 1930.