Peter Vansittart; Influential figure in English literary life who brought an air of seriousness to the historical novel (GREAT)
Hyfler/Rosner
life who brought an air of seriousness to the historical
novel
Thursday, 9 October 2008
By the time of his death, Peter Vansittart belonged to a
practically exclusive literary category: the defiantly
highbrow novelist who, sustained by a private income and
supportive publishers, writes more or less to please
himself. Such qualifications are usually a guarantee of
direst obscurity. Certainly, none of Vansittart's 40-odd
books sold more than a few thousand copies or even went into
paperback. At the same time, in a career that spanned six
and a half decades, he remained an influential figure on the
margins of English literary life: not the least of his
achievements was the virtual reinvention of the post-war
historical novel.
He was born in 1920 in Bedford, although the family -
consisting of mother, son and step-father - soon removed to
the South Coast. Vansittart distrusted his step-father and
never got on particularly well with his mother: the
formative influence on his early life was an enterprising
governess, Miss Ida Howe, whom he credited with teaching him
to read.
The loneliness he experienced as a child was compounded by
his parents' decision to set sail for the Gulf, where his
step-father had taken a job in the oil industry. Henceforth,
term time was spent at boarding schools and holidays in the
West Country with the family of a naturalist doctor. In
rural Devon, for the first time in his life, Vansittart
believed that he experienced "real freedom".
Denied a place at the Royal Naval College at Dartford on the
grounds of bad eyesight, he proceeded instead to Haileybury,
the Hertfordshire public school. Here his contemporaries
included his lifelong friend the poet and editor Alan Ross.
Much influenced by the charismatic left-wing historian John
Hampden Jackson, later director of extra-mural studies at
Cambridge University, he won a major scholarship to
Worcester College, Oxford.
By this stage his parents had returned to England and
settled in Hampstead. Browsing in a local shop named
Booklover's Corner during the school holidays, the teenage
Vansittart met "a tall, thin, abrupt" assistant who tried to
sell him a copy of Trader Horn in Madagascar rather than the
P.G. Wodehouse novel that his customer preferred. The
assistant, Vansittart later discovered, was George Orwell.
Vansittart dated his literary leanings to childhood, when he
wrote and declaimed plays in an empty house. I Am The World
(1942), his first novel, was written during a brief,
year-long stint at Oxford and in a subsequent period in
Blitz-era London spent working in the Fire Service.
Vansittart declined to make the changes that its editorial
sponsor, V.S. Pritchett at Chatto & Windus, had suggested
and the novel was poorly received: "I can without hesitation
say that this is the worst book ever published," one critic
wrote. Undeterred by this rebuff, Vansittart became a
familiar figure on the wartime Fitzrovian scene, meeting
such luminaries of the milieu as Julian Maclaren-Ross and
being given reviewing work by Orwell, in the latter's
capacity as literary editor of the left-wing weekly Tribune.
Out drinking with his editor near Tribune's offices in the
Strand, Vansittart had several opportunities to monitor
Orwell's guilt-ridden, class-conscious personality in
action. On one occasion Orwell told his younger friend that
"with an accent like that and a tie like that you will never
be accepted by the working classes". The effect of this
bracing homily was rather spoiled by the barman, who
immediately addressed Vansittart by his Christian name and
Orwell as "Sir". On another occasion, Vansittart was waiting
in Orwell's office when the novelist L.H. Myers invited them
both to have dinner with him at the fashionable restaurant
that he co-owned. Orwell's reply, made without reference to
Vansittart, was "Oh no, Leo, we're not going to come and eat
your black-market food".
Surviving on low-level literary work and poorly paid
teaching, Vansittart was frequently hard up. Shortly after
the war's end, urged on by the Sinhalese writer Alagu
Subramaniam, he came up with the ingenious idea of writing
what was, in effect, a begging letter to his fellow
Haileyburian, the then Prime Minister, Clement Attlee.
Extraordinarily, Attlee produced a one-off payment of £150
from an obscure charitable fund known as the Royal Bounty.
However, Vansittart continued to make the greater part of
his income from the classroom. Between 1947 and 1959 he was
director of Burgess Hill School in Hampstead, an
independent, co-educational establishment run on liberal
lines. There was a brief marriage to a fellow teacher,
Jacqueline Goldsmith, by which he acquired a stepdaughter.
Shortly before his 40th birthday, fortified by a modest
inheritance, he settled down to become a full-time writer.
Vansittart's early novels had had contemporary settings. I
Am the World is about a dictator. Broken Canes (1950)
surveys the world of progressive education. As time went on,
his forte became history and legend. Pastimes of a Red
Summer (1969), often thought to be one of his best novels,
is set in Revolutionary France. The declining Roman Empire
gave him the material for Three Six Seven (1983) and The
Wall (1990). Lancelot (1978), The Death of Robin Hood (1981)
and Parsifal (1988) explored his fascination with myth. None
of them could be described as easy reading - Vansittart's
style is often cryptic, his interest lies in symbol and myth
rather than straightforward narrative - but their importance
in bringing a new air of seriousness to a chronically
embarrassed genre should not be underestimated.
In addition to his novels, Vansittart wrote copiously in a
variety of other forms. There were a number of children's
books, some excellent anthologies (Voices from the Great
War, 1981, Voices 1870-1914, 1984), and an anecdotal social
history, In the Fifties (1995). Though it paints an
evocative picture of his childhood, his autobiography Paths
from a White Horse (1985) is more revealing of his literary
enthusiasms than his personal life.
Peter Vansittart was a tall, striking and faintly
aristocratic figure with leonine hair that retained its
colour into old age. Often asked to dilate on the famous
literary names he had known, he maintained an enviable
scrupulousness, only pronouncing personal judgements at the
close of an otherwise objective summing-up: "I didn't like
him, you know." Geographically, he divided his time between
Hampstead and an antique cottage in the Suffolk village of
Kersey. Conditions there were somewhat spartan, exacerbated
by Vansittart's disregard of conventional domestic usage. "I
don't think I've ever bought a pint of milk in my life," he
told a visitor who had suggested a cup of coffee.
Beyond this orbit, he preserved the ability - rather like
the characters in Anthony Powell's novels - to pop up
unexpectedly in all kinds of unusual places. Coming down to
breakfast one morning in the 2000s at a Bloomsbury hostel
patronised by back-packing American students, a younger
friend discovered him eating a plate of bacon and eggs.
"I've just been visiting my girlfriend in Windsor," he
volunteered.
Vansittart's last years were concentrated on his final
novel, Secret Protocols (2006). This, published in his 86th
year, assembled many of his abiding historical interests, in
the story of a son of an English mother and a high-caste
Germanic father who, having grown up in pre-war Estonia,
witnesses many of the great events of the late 20th century.
Dense and allusive, often seeming to be written in a kind of
private code, yet containing passages of startling poetic
beauty, it was acclaimed as one of his finest works.
The odd, subterranean quality that some critics detected in
Secret Protocols was characteristic of Vansittart himself.
He was a courteous but reserved man who believed, as he once
wrote, that life was a series of disappointments made
bearable by the challenges they established. One suspects,
on the evidence of his autobiographical writing, that
Vansittart would have defined "disappointment" as the
failure to connect or otherwise communicate.
His books, on the other hand - again, the obvious comparison
is with Powell - are distinguished by deep reservoirs of
feeling and moral seriousness, however much occluded by the
barriers of style. It is impossible to think that English
literary life will ever throw up anyone quite like him
again.
D.J. Taylor
Peter Vansittart, writer: born Bedford 27 August 1920; OBE
2008; married Jacqueline Goldsmith (marriage dissolved; one
stepdaughter); died Ipswich 4 October 2008.
Hyfler/Rosner
"Hyfler/Rosner" <rel...@rcn.com> wrote in message
news:gcjvdj$22t$1...@reader1.panix.com...
> Peter Vansittart: Influential figure in English literary
> life who brought an air of seriousness to the historical
> novel
>
> Thursday, 9 October 2008
>
>
> Beyond this orbit, he preserved the ability - rather like
> the characters in Anthony Powell's novels - to pop up
> unexpectedly in all kinds of unusual places.
Anyone know if he's a character in Dance...? The reviewer in
"Books Do Furnish a Room?"
Matthew Kruk
news:gcjvdj$22t$1...@reader1.panix.com...
> Peter Vansittart
Van-sit-tart? Must have been teased in school with variations on that.