Woman of Letters

Frances Partridge: The Biography, by Anne Chisholm; Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2009, $59.95.

Anne Chisholm has called this book “The biography”. No other has been written, or is likely to be, because Frances Partridge wrote no big books, and she is known mainly for being a friend of a number of people, most of whom were a generation older than herself, who lived in and around Bloomsbury in the years before the Second World War. But she is the author of diaries, which she kept most of her life. She published, during the 1980s and 1990s, edited diaries covering the years 1932 to 1975. I came upon one of these volumes by chance, and soon wanted to read more. Her attitude to her friends was deeply interested and affectionate, and she could describe them and their doings both objectively and sympathetically.

Anne Chisholm’s book has the same qualities. She saw her subject regularly for about ten years, and clearly was as taken with her personality, wit and charm, as I was when I met her in the late 1990s. I had written her a fan letter, on the strength of the one volume of the diaries I had read. She replied most graciously, and soon we were corresponding. She invited me to visit her if I were ever to come to England. Of course I did, and I used to see her more than once on every visit. That she could be interested, and bothered to create a friendship with someone of the next generation, from the other side of the world, shows her outlook was ageless. She was born in 1900, so she was in her mid-nineties when I began to know her.

She was exemplary in another way too. She suffered dreadful bereavements: her husband, to whom she was devoted, died after an illness which should have been investigated rather than worried about, when she was sixty. Three years later, their only son, Burgo, twenty-eight, who had married Henrietta Garnett less than a year before, died of a heart attack entirely without warning whilst talking on the telephone. Their baby, Sophie, was less than a month old.

Frances’s descriptions of her feelings at this time are deeply moving and totally without histrionics. Her methods of dealing with loss and loneliness were simple and practical: take note of and enjoy every detail of every day; involve yourself in the lives of others, and never refuse an invitation. Other people have discovered these useful ideas too, but her published diaries brought a fan, living in Sydney, a psychologist, who wrote that Frances’s methods of dealing with her distress were so productive that she used them in her therapeutic work. Frances was so modest that she mentioned this to me incredulously.

She grew up, largely in the country, the youngest of six children of a successful architect. At fifteen she went to Bedales, an unconventional school, but which had rigid customs of its own. On leaving school she spent the summer of 1918 working on the land, at Castle Howard, but lodging with a young farmer and his wife. The food was “superb”, but taken in complete silence. At this time she began to keep a diary.

At Cambridge she lived in Newnham College, in Cambridge proper, and cycled to lectures. She pitied “the Girton girls—coming in by ’bus from their gloomy fastness”.

She read philosophy, and after three years left without a degree, only because not being a man, she was unable to be admitted to that status. Philosophy remained a keen interest throughout her life. She went on reading, and making notes, well into old age. The earlier generation, who had shaped “Bloomsbury”, were devout followers of G.E. Moore, but she never got it. Russell and Ayer were more her stuff, and she knew and was impressed by Wittgenstein.

Frances left Cambridge soon after her father died. Her mother left the house in the country and moved to Brunswick Square, Bloomsbury, where she set up a communal house: bed-sitting rooms for her daughters, and the minimum of servants. David Garnett and Francis Birrell had opened a bookshop, on the ground floor of another such house, and Frances went to work for them.

All the now famous names bought their books there—the “Woolves”, the Bells, Duncan Grant, Maynard Keynes, the Stracheys, and many other literary and artistic figures. In the bookshop Frances met Ralph Partridge, and there followed years of trouble.

Ralph was married to Dora Carrington, a painter, who lived in the country with Lytton Strachey. Carrington adored Strachey, but their union was limited because Strachey was homosexual. Strachey in turn fell in love with Ralph Partridge, a decorated major in the First World War, but later a committed pacifist. He was strong, handsome, desirable and a good friend and companion. Also, he was very useful for physical jobs around the place. The household depended on him. But he was heterosexual, He fell in love with Carrington, who agreed to marry him, largely to keep the household intact and prevent Lytton from leaving her. Clear?

So Ralph’s falling in love with Frances was a resented distraction. However, with good will and good manners they managed to continue for many years, until Lytton died of undiagnosed stomach cancer. He had made the house Ralph’s, so when Carrington killed herself soon after Lytton’s death, the way was clear for Frances and Ralph to marry, and they lived in the house, Ham Spray, in Wiltshire, for the rest of Ralph’s life.

They ran it as a farm, during the Second World War a shelter for conscientious objectors, and produced food for the village. They both engaged in literary work. Ralph wrote reviews for the New Statesman, and a book on the Broadmoor asylum for the criminally insane. Frances became an expert maker of indexes, including the works of Freud, another Bloomsbury guru, and she later worked almost continuously translating from the Spanish.

Frances Partridge’s connection with Bloomsbury was also through her son Burgo’s marriage to Henrietta Garnett, who was the daughter of David (Bunny) Garnett and Angelica Bell, the daughter of Vanessa Bell and ostensibly her husband, Clive Bell, but actually of Duncan Grant. Vanessa, like Carrington, adored and gave her life to Grant, who was homosexual, but they united at least once, to produce Angelica.

After Ralph’s death, Frances moved to London and lived in flats in Belgravia, leading a busy and engaged life. She played the violin in an orchestra, and went on innumerable trips abroad with her friends. She was a popular guest at many country houses, and was much sought after as a companion on travels undertaken by many of her friends. Old age did not deter her.

As well as the diaries, published under titles describing her stages of life, she wrote Memories, an account of her childhood and undergraduate days at Cambridge, up until 1932; A Pacifist’s War about life at Ham Spray during the Second World War; Julia, a portrait of her lifelong friend, Julia Strachey.

To read these books is to share the life of a woman who was able to understand and be interested in, and be very fond of, a range of people with complicated lives and adventures. Her warmth comes through strongly, even though she is often critical of her friends. Her remarks are never mean or waspish. This has not prevented reviewers from calling her “chilly” and “emotionally distant”, apparently because she took a detached view of the customary ceremonies observed at a death. She attended the funeral when young of Frank Ramsey, which so appalled her that she vowed never to have anything to do with such rituals again. To a very firm rationalist and atheist, this is perfectly consistent. Today when no holds seem to be barred on these occasions, we see extravagant sentimentality, religious or secular, whereas her stance was laudably devoid of hypocrisy. She loathed sentimentality. While as a reader of Freud she knew that rituals meet a need of the bereaved to adjust to their loss, it is hard not to agree with her that mortal remains are nothing, just nothing, as are the ashes that they are usually reduced to.

Another point which rankles with her critics is the way Burgo was brought up. His father was a tough guy, and expected his son to be the same. Burgo hated boarding school and ran away several times. Frances tried to protect him from his father’s anger, but in vain. That a child raised in a civilised and gentle home found the physical conditions, not to mention the food, in boarding school hideous is a common reaction, much more so in those times than now, but endurance had to be developed. (Actually, it can be quite a useful experience.) Burgo was left for weeks at a time with nannies (who often changed, unsurprisingly) and servants, while the parents went abroad for holidays. We now know this to be very damaging to a young child, but at the time, pre-Bowlby, it was thought by the middle class that as long as a child’s physical needs were met, parental absence was quite harmless. The bleakest part of boarding school is the mere absence of those you love, to take bearings from each day.

A third hurdle for some reviewers is the presence of servants! Replaced in due course by work in factories, in the thirties and early forties (even in Australia) domestic work was easier and less stressful than no work, which should not need to be mentioned. Now we have washing machines, dishwashers, modern means of cooking and heating, casual cleaners, other services which can be hired, which are not cited as detracting from the achievements of creative people. Are they now mentioned in connection with published work? Neither was the presence of servants then.

Frances’s involvement with the people who were core Bloomsbury is overshadowed by her close friendships with other people only on the fringe, or quite separate. “Bloomsbury” was only later called a “group” with its connotations of formality, selectiveness and exclusion. Of course, people who did not share some at least of their attitudes to art, religion, sex and friendship did not become friends, which is generally the case. Chapter Six of Memories describes the people and the atmosphere without adulation or rancour.

Anne Chisholm knew her subject well, and as well as having weekly conversations with her, she was given all the unpublished diaries, letters, photographs. There were many friends still alive to be interviewed. The result is a book as delightful as the diaries, beautifully written, perfectly balanced and paced, which captures the personality of her subject, and is a window to what is often referred to as a vanished world, but whose attitudes to love, sex, devotion to art, are accepted as commonplace today. Their devotion to truth and rejection of self-deception and hypocrisy, however, may not be faring so well.

Ann Dix tutored in philosophy for many years. She lives in Sydney.