John Hampson: A Portrait and A Study
By MANJERI S. ISVARAN
Sandown,
off Sterling Road, in Nungambakkam, in the outskirts of Madras, will always be
dear to me, for it was here that I first met John Hampson in the flesh. I
already knew him by some of his penetrating reviews of modern English, American
and European novels in the columns of The Spectator; an odd story or
two, for instance, ‘Good Food’; and that elaborate article entitled ‘Movements
in the Underground’ in which, as Elizabeth Bowen observed, ‘He used his
incomparably wide knowledge of contemporary fiction to examine what
present-day writers are making of the shadier side of life and society.’ We met
by appointment, it was a Thursday morning, April 8, 1948; and
this meeting was destined to ripen into a close friendship between us, of
mutual inner discovery and enrichment, of dreams and ideas snared, through
interchange of letters extending over seven years, till the day of his death on
December 26, 1955 in a hospital in Solihull, Warwickshire, away from his home
at Four Ashes near Birmingham. To those who knew him and his unique gift for
friendship, it will be sad to contemplate, his rather sudden exit into the
Unknown; to me, in my world, it has cast a cold shadow which has settled there
since; to me, divided from him in race, creed and colour, the warmth he gave
was as gracious as a benediction, such as I have rarely experienced from my own
people; its constancy, its almost feminine tenderness, wrought the man himself.
Perhaps
it is as well that I begin with an extract from a Spectator review of
his. Hampson wrote:
‘Among
the habitual readers of fiction there must be many like myself who, long before
they ever made a first timid venture abroad, fell under the spell of India. My
own enchantment lies in remote nursery days when, heralding the return of a
soldier relative, large heavily sealed and corded packages arrived at the
house. The rich, spicy, unfamiliar smells crept everywhere, and when at last,
the treasures were spilt in prodigal splendour all over the floor and furniture
of a staid English drawing-room, my innocent rapture was complete and India a
word of magic.’
It
was all there in him still–the childhood Wonder and enchantment and rapture,
when he came out to this country in his middle years, though not its the role
of the imaginative writer he had grown into. His visit to the South was more of
a practical nature, made in response to the invitation of the Madras Government
in connection with the study of juvenile delinquency, enquiry into which was
then being conducted by Lieut. Colonel Ford Thomson, M. D., Ch. B., I. M. S.
(Retd.), Adviser to the Government in Child Psychology (his work was later
brought into a book, Ask the Children, published by Cassell in 1950).
Hampson who had been doing research for over a year and a half, before his
arrival here, into the problem of England’s anti-social children on behalf of
the British Broadcasting Corporation, visited various Certified Schools
in the Province, observing the reforms in progress for the forging of a new
Madras Children’s Act. ‘Subsequently he broadcast his view
of the subject on the training of the child at home, in a series of talks under
the title ‘The Child is Rarely Wrong’ from the Madras station of
All-India Radio.
Now
let me return to that bright summer’s morning, eight years ago, when I met him
at Sandown, where on the first floor flat he stayed as Colonel Thomson’s guest,
during his six months’ sojourn in the City. I recall my initial impression of
him, vivid to this day: a figure of medium height, with a broad brow, very
little hair on the head and that thinning and grey, piercing alert eyes behind
horn-rimmed glasses, wearing white trousers, white
sleeveless shirt, and white plimsoils, remarkably neat, and English in every
fibre of his being as I found the very moment he started talking to me, my mind
registering what Don Salvador de Madariaga said about the national traits of
the Englishman–‘his whole body emitting vitalised thought as if the thinking
function in him were not concentrated in the brain, but spread uniformly all
over his nervous system,’ but, in Hampson, controlled attractively to a gentle
earnestness. Our conversation, I remember, centred round the writer’s situation
in general, and at its end, aware of the purport of his Madras journey, I drew
his attention to a note I had come across in John O’London’s Weekly1
for May 17, 1946, which stated that John Arlott, who was for a time a
police-sergeant in a South London division, and he, were collaborating on a
work with juvenile delinquency as theme, illustrating its different aspects
through the medium of the long-short story. No, he said, the plan had fallen
through. Then I asked him, would he be interested to see some of my stories
already collected in volumes, and, if he would and liked them, care to write an
introduction to a new collection which, in MS, was awaiting publication? Yes,
he would very much; and he did indeed, a masterly analysis of the short story
as an art form, and of some of its greatest practitioners, past and present.
2 A week or so before, he had lectured in the City under the auspices of
the Madras International Fellowship at the residence of Mr. T. R. Venkatarama
Sastri, C. I. E., a liberal in politics, of the Gladstone-Morley tradition, who
was one of the topmost in the legal profession.
It
was, I think, in late March that Hampson gave his talk to a crowded audience;
the subject was ‘Social Trends in the English Novel.’ Here, at Mr. Sastri’s, he
met a few writers. Then to reach a wider audience–happy chance–with his
opinions on the art and craft of writing, Hampson followed up his International
Fellowship lecture with an A. I. R. broadcast, headed ‘The Author in His Works’3
which proved to be of special value to the Indian writer.
After
our first promising meeting at Sandown Hampson and I kept up our contact:
exchanging little letters delivered by post and bearer, calling to see one
another at our places off and on, getting to one of the finest restaurants in
town to tea occasionally, going about the local museum looking at paintings and
sculptures, seeing a new film sometimes, walking the seashore of evenings–the
beach at Madras is most beautiful–and then, to crown all, one lovely day, when
the weather was uncommonly generous for midsummer, driving to Mahabalipuram to
sightsee the rock-cut temples and caves and carvings. The English poet Louis
Mac-Neice has written a moving poem on Mahabalipuram from which I cannot resist
quoting the concluding lines:
A
monochrome world that has all the indulgence of colour,
A
still world whose every harmonic is audible,
Largesse
of spirit and stone;
Created
things for once and for all featured in full while for once and never
The
creator who is destroyer stands at the last point of land
Featureless;
in a dark cell, a phallus of granite, as abstract
As
the North Pole; as alone.
But
the visitor must move on and the waves assault the temple,
Living
granite against dead water, and time with its weathering action
Make
phrase and feature blurred;
Still
from today we know what an avatar is, we have seen
God
take shape and dwell among shapes, we have felt
Our
ageing limbs respond to those ageless limbs in the rock
Reliefs.
Relief is the word.
It was an exciting day
in our time together, this visit to Mahabalipuram, and all too soon the
exciting time came to an end. On the morning of July 11, 1948 Hampson left for
England, with a couple of days’ stop at Bombay, the first stage of his journey
back home by ’plane. About five months after his departure I read MacNeice’s
poem. It filled me with nostalgia for my friend’s company again at Seven
Pagodas to watch the scudding seawaves break and throw their spume on the Shore
Temple and listen to the whistling of the casuarinas from the plantation above
the margin of the sea...
While
at Madras, Hampson had presented me with two or his books: one, a copy of his
first novel, Saturday Night at the Greyhound–a Penguin edition,
and the other, The English at Table–that lively account of the
fine art of English cuisine, a non-fiction work delightfully parergal to his
main occupation as a novelist–inscribing it with the words: “A taste of strange
dishes, but salted with affection.” Once in England, he began sending me, one
after another, the rest of his novels: 0 Providence, Strip Jack Naked,
Family Curse, The Larches (with L. A. Pavey) Care of ‘The Grand’ and
The Sight of Blood, ‘the first short story I wrote that came anywhere
near my aim: it marked a definite step in my progress as a writer’ (he says in
the course of a brier Prefatory note)–a limited edition copy. In the
innumerable talks we had, about my writings, his, and those of other authors–E.
M. Forster, Andre Gide, Somerset Maugham, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, William
Plomer, Ernest Hemingway, William Saroyan, Elizabeth Bowen, Ivy
Compton-Burnett, and Virginia Woolf being the important ones (and when he
talked of Virginia Woolf, the word ‘immaculate’ tumbled immediately, adoringly
from his lips)–he had let me into the ‘biography’ of this story: how as a result
of the interest Leonard and Virginia Woolf had taken in it, it was published in
Life and Letters by Desmond Mac-Carthy. It is a simple yet subtle,
narrative of a ‘delicate’ boy who swoons of a sudden during a haircut and
awakens to a sense of his own importance; the backcloth of the barber’s shop
into which is woven a tale of woe is a triumph in both form and content. I have
not read Hampson’s Two Stories issued in the series of handprinted Blue
Moon Octavos by E. Lehr: ‘The Mare’s Nest’ and ‘The Long Shadow’, though I
happened on a notice of these in The Times Literary Supplement
(January 28, 1932); of Man about the House, I only know the title.
It is the common fortune of limited editions to become Connectors’ items.
But
this is hardly the place for any critical appraisal of his novels and short
stories; I would refer the reader to the excellent introduction written by
William Plomer to the Century Library re-print (Eyre and Spottiswoode) of Saturday
Night at the Greyhound published in 1950. Mr. Plomer sums up thus:
‘The
general flavour of his work is what may be called very English, because of its
subject matter, its sobriety and directness, and its discovery of deep and
unsentimental tenderness; it is also very personal, not because of any
intrusiveness on the part of the author, but because nobody has written about
the same themes in the same way.’
Sobriety and
directness–these are the fundamental qualities which mark all Hampson’s
work, set off by an adamantine integrity and a prose so unaffected that its
rhythms seem to be a magic of the mind speaking in undertones, its tautness a
sheer sleight of the hand. Acknowledging personal relationships and their
reactions at every conceivable level–beautiful tender, sordid, ugly, mean,
vain, stupid–he is an adept at characterisation.
There
was a hiatus of thirteen years since the publication of Care of ‘The Grand’ before
Hampson brought out another novel. It was A Bag of Stones published by
Derek Verschoyle in 1952.
If
Saturday Night at the Greyhound was deservedly famous outside England, A
Bag of Stones was bound to achieve even greater reputation. Coming as it
did four years after its author’s visit to India where he had been on a special
purpose–to give his suggestions for the reformation of delinquent youth in this
country, with his expert knowledge of British Child Guidance Clinics and
Borstal Institutions–the novel has great validity both as a psychological
documentary and as a work of art. Slender is its story but inexorable in the
gradual unfolding of a most hideous antagonism between father and son–cool
contempt of the father versus the impotent fury of the son–and how different
and farouche from- the motif of The Larches, ‘that pathetic
novel,’ as Sean O’Faolin remarked, ‘whose silences of thought go echoing
through the mind like a cock-crow, with something of the wistfulness and
melancholy of that hour before sun-up, and its pastel colouring.’ The novel
opens with a premonition of dread for all the sunlit happiness of mother and
son; slowly but surely, as night follows twilight, the tragic gloom deepens,
wrapping the reader in its black pall, till, finally, pity purges him to a
sound and pristine health. There is no kind of any sickly hangover; Hampson
applies the catharsis with the compassion of a healer of things. From the day
Albert Hadden returns from the war till the hour of his gruesome death, the
scenes build of themselves in tune with the tension created, through emotion
and environment, emphasis and exaggeration which are veridical: Joe’s schooldays,
his fugitive happiness when he stayed with Archie, Aunt Susan, and Uncle Ted;
Albert’s worming himself into the secret of his wife’s bank book and his
appropriation of the money she had so fondly accumulated for Joe, Elizabeth’s
death and funeral and the un-ashamed disposal of her clothes before she was
hardly cold in her grave; Joe’s marriage and the final struggle between Albert
Hadden and his daughter-in-law whose spirit refuses to be cowed even in the
most squalid and terrifying circumstances. The tragic ending is inevitable,
although one sees Joe ‘very near a triumph’ when Ruth tells him that she is
with child, and all his misery lifts as if by magic.
The
dedication of A Bag Of Stones to Ford and Virginia Thomson is
significant. They were Hampson’s hosts during his stay in Madras, and Madras
knows Colonel Thomson’s splendid work in this province for the anti-social
child.
My
task as critic is done, I must now call him by his Christian name. How much
India meant to John, and our friendship to both of us, is borne out by his
letters to me written over a septennate. As man and writer he was
quite serious–the essential side to his character and easily discerned. But
this is not what I need to remember; it is his quirks of
sportiveness which had a childlike
charm and broke like sunbeams, rarely, through his seriousness that I shall
remember for ever. He talked as he wrote, with straightness and
simplicity. He was soft-spoken, his voice was instinct with a strange urgency,
a subdued fervour that sprang from a heart which was in its right place. Not
once during the days that drew us closer to one another when he was in the City
did I hear him complain of the Indian heat nor see him weary or fretful. All
his creative writing, he told me, he did in the early morning, which he had
always been doing–a fact which I find John Lehmann mention in his Autobiography
I: The Whispering Gallery while alluding to John. ‘It has always seemed to
me,’ Mr. Lehmann writes, ‘that this was an excellent solution to the everlasting
problem of how an author without private resources should earn his basic
living, with only two drawbacks: one, the necessity of waking with the lark,
and two, the inability to move about, travel abroad, renew the store of
impressions and experiences that a writer should never allow to become
exhausted if he cannot–and who but the most exceptional genius can?–rely
entirely upon the memories of childhood and early youth.’ John, as is known,
had his responsibilities to the Wilson family with whom he lived, which perhaps
necessitated his seclusion; it is known too that in the character of young
Justin Stonetun, in 0 Providence, he put something of himself; but for
my part, having read all his novels with minute attention to details of the
English milien he dealt with–though there might be subtleties and allusions
which must remain obscure to any but an English born–I remain strong in my
conviction that John gave of himself profoundly and in such tiny bits as would
satisfy the needs of artistic creation, and that there was no depletion in
the store of his material garnered from the periods of his childhood and
youth. Yet he was avid for adventure and experience; even
as a boy India had enchanted him and it was a benevolent Providence that
brought him to this country for whatever enrichment he sought for
himself: ‘India opened all sorts of doors for me’, he said, in utter gratitude
of the heart.
Of
all modern writers–and two of these are of an older generation: E. M. Forster
and Somerset Maugham who have been holding the English literary stage
successfully for half a century now–there has been no wider traveller than
Maugham who went almost all over the globe between the two world wars. Here is
what he said to Cyril Connolly when Mr. Connolly edited Horizon, the
subject of their talk being the opportunities for new writers and ‘where they
should go to find themselves.’
‘...India
(said Maugham)–that is above all the place. Not British India,4
but the South, the native states. When I went, I avoided the British; I got
letters to the native rajahs and sages and their courts; and I found, the
moment people discovered you hadn’t come to sell them anything, such courtesy
and desire to help and make you understand, as I’ve never found anywhere.
Nothing is so fascinating as the Indian mind and the Indian intelligence once
you are admitted to it, and there are quite extraordinary people to be met,
absolutely remarkable. We know nothing about them, and we’ve never made (except
for E. M. Forster) the real effort to understand.’
I
have no doubt that John found himself in India. When Colophon in John
O’London’s Weekly for April 14, 1950, wrote about the Midland ‘School’ of
writers who came to prominence in the ‘thirties–the late Edward J. O’Brien,
connoisseur of the short story hailed them as the ‘Birmingham Group’ which
included F. L. Green, Walter Allen, Leslie Halward, Peter Chamberlain–he
permitted himself the luxury of an idle speculation: ‘The best known of these
Midland writers before the war was John Hampson (Saturday Night at the
Greyhound). He seems to have given up writing. John was indignant and
replied at once to say:
‘Indeed
I’ve not given up writing: have recently finished a book called Madras
Adventure, the result of several months’ observation of amazing work done
among anti-social children (juvenile delinquents–horrid term!) by Col. Ford
Thomson. In addition, my six month’s in India provided me with notes for a
travel book and several short stories, one of which The Poet, will
appear in the autumn issue of Penguin New Writing.
5
It
was my good fortune to publish four of his other Indian stories in Swatantra–(of
which I was literary editor at that time)–proof of his genuine love and
understanding of the real India, not the slick, smart, Anglo-India of British
domination, with its clubs and cliques and class snobberies. He had come to a
free nation.
I
was proudly owning it that I had no regrets in my life. But one has come now;
the more heavy for the absence of any before. It was the
break in correspondence between John and me for almost a year before his death,
though each knew that the other was in his thoughts. In February 1953–the
month, I got married–he was involved in a nasty car smash,
6 fracturing his jaw badly and had to be in
hospital for a week as in-patient and afterwards as an out-patient for several
weeks to get it right and healthy again. And then though we had decided to
collaborate on a novel with the partition of India as background, as early as
Christmas 1952, we could not make much headway because of family and other
responsibilities for me, and certain unforeseen difficulties for him, too.
I
stay with my regret. I had looked forward so much to picking up the lost thread
of our correspondence and feel once again the warmth of our epistolary communion,
till some day we could meet in the body.
And
we might have met–a melancholy thought now. I had planned a visit to England
during 1951 when an elder brother of mine, M. S. Venkataraman, a Senior
Geologist with the Geological Survey, Government of India, was on a
two-year stay in London working in the Imperial College of
Science and Technology. For purely domestic reasons, I had to abandon the trip.
My brother was a guest at Four Ashes; he wrote to me about his wonderful
experiences of the exquisite English hospitality he received at the hands of
John.
In
the touchstone of India John discovered the true purity of his gold. ‘I find
myself setting out in a new direction as it were,’ reads his letter to me, of
November 9, 1949; ‘it is rather like beginning all over again, and I feel
rather like the young bird, with wings uncertain and fluttering; none of this
matters very much though, for in spite of a re-orientation I do not doubt my
gift, and I enjoy that inner harmony and happiness which rewards the creative
person more surely than the foolish world.’
He
believed in hard work, he was an exacting critic of himself and of other
writers. The steel of his honesty matched the gold of his
benevolence. There was an aura of calmness about him that was the very quick of
life. ‘He belonged’, in the words of E. M. Forster whom he loved so well, ‘to
the aristocracy or the sensitive,’ who ‘are sensitive for others as well as for
themselves...considerate without being fussy’–never allowing his inner harmony
of which he was certain to be upset by the hurly-burly of literary Caziques who
hasten to put the palm into the hands of the less meritorious. He strove to be
an integrated being and in that perpetual endeavour lay his tolerance and
sympathy for the vulnerability of his fellow Den.
1 I
was a regular reader of this journal for an unbroken period of twenty-one
years, from 1933 to 1954 when in September of this year
it ceased publication.
2
Hampson’s Introduction appeared in my book No Anklet-bells for Her first
published in August 1949.
3
Printed in Triveni, Vol. XIX No. 12. July 1948.
4 That
was before Indian Independence.
5 No. 40. September
1950.
6
It is quite singular coming to think of it, that a week before John got into
this accident, a close friend of mine. M. Chalapati Rau, currently editor, National
Herald, Lucknow met with a similar disaster, but had a providential escape.
His letter to me dated, January 29. 1953 runs: “I was dumb, first. I was ill,
intermittently. On Republic Day (Jan. 26), I and the cream of my staff would
have been pulp in a ditch but for a miracle. It was a terrific crash, while
going in a pick-up to a village. I have been wondering what was the miracle.
Your marriage, I think.” M. C. here was referring to a rash vow I hold taken
never to marry. I informed John of this.