Diaries 1939-1972
Frances Partridge
Weidenfeld & Nicholson £25, pp715
Buy it at BOL
If youlive to be old enough, your world predeceases you. Frances Partridge's life has comprised the entire length of the twentieth century, though by the time she reached her seventh decade, she felt herself to be a ghost, haunting a world she no longer recognised. The high-minded Bloomsbury bluestocking now had to cope with the rude egalitarianism of Harold Wilson's Britain.
Even the Queen Mother, her exact contemporary, seemed better acclimatised to the new dispensation: in a 1971 diary entry, Partridge sees her 'tittuping along on pig's-trotters shoes', and notes her resemblance to the jowly, socialist bulldog Wilson.
Frances, born in Bedford Square, married into the Bloomsbury Group: she inherited her husband Ralph from the painter Dora Carrington, who had been fatally besotted by Lytton Strachey. Frances and Ralph were not much more than literary hangers-on - he did some reviewing and she was a part-time translator - but they earnestly subscribed to the Bloomsbury creed, which valued personal relationships above ideological commitment and calculated that hedonism, in a world bereft of God, was the only rational response to existence. In 1940, Frances acclaimed her friend Molly MacCarthy as 'the arch-priestess of fun'; she and her intimates, who conscientiously objected to the war, did their best to ignore it, and played records of Monteverdi and Haydn while the bombs fell.
Their preciosity concealed a dismaying defeatism. 'How can we win this war?' Frances asked her diary as the Germans closed in on Paris. 'Oh, if only we could then lose it quickly.'
While others fought, the Partridges chattered. Lolling beneath a beech-tree with Clive Bell in 1941: 'We ranged over the inexhaustible subject of what was of ultimate value.'
Frances herself was a keen philosophical arguer, only equalled as a talker, it seems, by the logorrheal flights of Lord David Cecil. 'Conversations,' she reckoned, 'could take the place of events', a prescription for the kind of novel admired by Bloomsbury, and also a convenient formula for snubbing history.
The conversations mostly happened at country houses, where Frances was, according to the catty Cecil Beaton, 'the most popular guest in England, who has to be booked weeks ahead'. Those houses were also the sacred sites of Bloomsbury fiction: Howard's End, Poyns Hall in Between the Acts, or the holiday home of the Ramseys in To the Lighthouse. The Partridges had their own talking shop in Wiltshire, and when Frances had to sell the house in 1961 after Ralph's death, a friend who'd taken part in blathering weekend marathons there described the place as 'a centre of loving hospitality and enlightenment and the greatest civilised taste in all things', as if it had been the Acropolis.
No wonder that Frances, visiting Athens, saw the haughty sculptured temple maidens of the Erectheion as 'a row of Vanessa Bells'.
The people graded one another like examiners in Oxford Finals. Visiting Duncan Grant at Charleston, Frances validates 'the first-rateness of this Bloomsbury world'. The angelic temper of Sebastian Sprott places him 'in the first class', though a 'curious lack of soaring power in his mental processes' demotes him to an upper second. Such decisions were not left to the drearily professional dons.
When Frances's son, Burgo, frets about his Oxford entrance exam, a family friend encouragingly remarks: 'Oh, I know people who've got into Christ Church who could hardly put a cross against their name.'
The seminars about ultimate value could only proceed if slavish drudges took care of the cooking and cleaning. In 1944, Frances warns Ralph: 'If you want me to remain a human being you must find me a "help".' A nameless skivvy appears a week later, identified only by her cheap dentures. 'What joy, what comfort!' coos Frances, and returns to argufying.
Her friend Julia Strachey volunteers to do some washing-up as if it were war work, and Frances calls her concession 'heroic'. The highly-strung Julia wants to be evacuated from London during the Blitz, but rehousing her proves difficult. 'I can't bear,' she shrills, 'to stay in any rooms that aren't Georgian.'
This doomed class did not survive the war which it so elegantly sat out. In 1945, Frances woke up to 'the horror of servantlessness', then to the realisation that she inhabited a mass society with scant regard for the self-cultivating individual. No one now reads Henry James (who was a friend of Frances's parents); instead, 'the common man', as she calls him, watches what she disdainfully refers to as 'the telly'. To her credit, she challenges the reactionary ire of a crony such as Lord Edward Sackville-West who, fulminating against the Angry Young Men, announces: 'I hate equality.'
David Cecil exposes the mindlessness of his highbrow pretensions when he denounces the idea of the intellectual - which stinks, he says, of redbrick universities - and proudly prefers to call himself a dilettante.
The new culture at least enabled Julia to avoid banal domestic chores: in 1961 she serves Frances 'a frozen Woolworth meal out of foil dishes [no washing-up]'. When Ralph goes into hospital, Frances confronts the 'great emporia' where 'mind, feelings and thoughts are buried under a mass of tubes and switches'. Yet on a trip to Leningrad, she acknowledges that uniformity is 'the price that must be paid for fair shares'. A wrenching deconversion occurs at Covent Garden in 1971, when a titled crone objects that: 'They won't let one leave one's glass on the edge of the box!' She is unimpressed when Frances suggests that this might be a hazard for people sitting below: 'The stalls, I see, are the lower classes!' The opera that night is Le Nozze di Figaro, which rehearses the revolution.
The talkathon winds down, as Frances recognises that conversations are ephemeral sandcastles. At last she is unceremoniously shushed: during the summer of 1964, she's rebuked by a nun at Assisi for loudly prating about the frescoes, then 'ticked off for talking too much by a fanatical pipe-smoking addict' on Centre Court at Wimbledon. After this 700-page monologue, I, too, was grateful for the silence.
