The World in the Evening by Christopher Isherwood

Author:Christopher Isherwood
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781446468982
Publisher: Random House

5

AS BIRDS DO, Mother was published in the spring of 1928. Elizabeth and I were in Paris at the time; we had travelled up there specially from Rome, so as to be able to talk to her publisher more easily on the telephone and get the reviews more quickly by airmail. ‘You see,’ Elizabeth wrote to Cecilia, ‘I wanted to hover near the nest, but at a safe distance. I simply couldn’t face London and my own publisher’s party. I’ve been to too many of them already, for other people, and seen the miserable author standing there like a garlanded victim amidst all those hidden daggers. He may be somebody you know quite well, but on that fatal afternoon he’s the ritual victim, set apart, ready for the knife. He’s so utterly vulnerable that you can’t bear to look into his eyes. You know you’ve got to go up and say something to him, and you rack your brains to think what, because you probably hated his book or, even worse, found it just completely ordinary and uninteresting. Finally you nerve yourself to deliver your false flattering little stab, and the poor creature thanks you and winces, ever so slightly. Towards the end of the ceremony, he has usually drunk enough sherry to dull the pain, and then he’s like a wretched wounded animal, bleary and stupid and helpless. No thank you. Je m’excuse beaucoup. Let them find another scapegoat.’

As it turned out, the reviews of As Birds Do, Mother were nearly all favourable. The critics decided that it showed a great advance on Elizabeth’s first novel, The Faded Carpet (which she had written when she was twenty-three), and they treated it most respectfully. ‘Miss Rydal,’ said one of them, ‘is a writer in a class by herself. She sets her own standards and defines her own limitations, and she must be judged by them.’ But this was exactly the sort of praise that Elizabeth didn’t want. ‘Oh yes,’ she told Cecilia. ‘I see I’m to be handled with kid gloves, from now on. I’m to have a “rare talent”—something exquisite and delicate and subtle. And if I behave myself and promise not to write too much—not more than six books at the most—then I’ll be tolerated until the day I die, and perhaps five minutes after. Oh, Cecilia, is this why I became a writer? To be “in a class by myself”, like one of those guaranteed genuine little treasures in a Bond Street shop-window that people look at and say: “Yes, I’m sure it’s terribly rare, but who on earth would want it?” Ah, how I wish, I wish I could scribble off dozens of huge shapeless impulsive novels full of contradictory opinions and warmth and energy and silliness and life, like—yes, God forgive me—like Wells!’

During the next eighteen months, Elizabeth was at work on A Garden with Animals. She had begun planning it even before As Birds Do, Mother was published, and she sent long letters to Cecilia discussing the problems of its construction.

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