Hugh Kingsmill, forgotten writer

 
In my teens and early twenties I read literature not at a university but in the local public library. I read randomly, without guidance, travelling erratically along the open shelves where the authors were obligingly waiting, lined up alphabetically and by genre. I still have embarrassing gaps in my reading, but I also made unexpected discoveries, paramount among which were the writings of Hugh Kingsmill.

In my ignorance I had assumed Kingsmill to be well-known, and was surprised to find he was an almost wholly forgotten figure. But gradually I have come across a scattering of writers who valued his work. In a letter to G. Wilson Knight in 1957, William Empson described Kingsmill as “a forgotten man whose judgement I continue to respect”. This commendation echoed George Orwell’s praise of him a decade earlier. But whereas Empson pointed to The Return of William Shakespeare (1929), the extraordinary wit and insight of which qualified Kingsmill to be regarded as one of the finest Shakespearean commentators, Orwell singled out The Poisoned Crown (1944) as an “outstanding” book that, in the age of Hitler, struck “a telling blow at every form of tyranny, not excluding the ones which it is now fashionable to admire”. Both Empson and Orwell were highly influential writers. So why has Kingsmill remained forgotten?

Perhaps his talent was too widely dispersed. He wrote novels, short stories, travel books, biographies, literary essays and parodies. His best remembered lines are probably from his parody of A. E. Housman’s verses in The Shropshire Lad:

What, still alive at twenty-two,
A clean, upstanding lad like you?
Sure, if your throat ’tis hard to slit,
Slit your girl’s, and swing for it.

These lines are sometimes quoted as coming from Max Beerbohm or even J. Maclaren-Ross, a misattribution which indirectly points to Kingsmill’s fate as an influence on writers who have become better known and better regarded than himself.

There have been several attempts to revive interest in his work, from About Kingsmill (an exchange of letters between Hesketh Pearson and Malcolm Muggeridge published in 1951) to Richard Ingrams’s God’s Apology (1977), a “Chronicle of three friends”, which engagingly describes Kingsmill’s influence on Pearson and Muggeridge. Ingrams saw Kingsmill as a great teacher. What he taught was never a uniform dogma, but something more imaginatively and pragmatically tailored to individual talent.

Pearson, who left an acting career to be one of the best-loved biographers between the two world wars, became a version of Dr Watson in the company of Kingsmill’s Sherlock Holmes. In their conversations, Kingsmill used the example of Samuel Johnson to quell Pearson’s overwhelming admiration for Bernard Shaw and Lytton Strachey. And it was those forthright Johnsonian qualities which Kingsmill implanted – “a plainness, an honesty, a sense of ordinary life going on all the time” – that Graham Greene was later to pick out in Pearson’s Life of Conan Doyle (1943). After Kingsmill’s death in 1949, Pearson was to sketch something of their friendship between the lines in his dual biography Johnson and Boswell (1958).

Kingsmill’s Samuel Johnson (1933) had sought to amend James Boswell’s portrait of an eloquent but bullying autocrat (the wishfulfilment of a failed barrister) by presenting a more complex character: “an essentially imaginative nature clogged by melancholia, a profound thinker limited by inborn and irrational fears, and an intensely loving and compassionate soul hampered in its expression by lifelong disabilities of mind and body”. This portrait, reinforced by his later anthology Johnson Without Boswell (1940), had probably the greatest influence on Pearson of all his books. But for Malcolm Muggeridge, who brings to mind a Sancho Panza in the company of Kingsmill’s Don Quixote, the most influential of his writings was After Puritanism: 1850–1900 (1929), a quartet of literary-biographical essays illustrating his argument that nineteenth-century puritanism was kept alive by artificial stimulants for more than fifty years after its natural death. Recognizing something of his own predicament, Muggeridge was particularly struck by Kingsmill’s portrait of the editor-journalist W. T. Stead, who exemplified “the attempt of a Puritan born too late to simplify the modern world”. Muggeridge’s pessimism, which had been deepened by his reading of D. H. Lawrence and shows itself in the aggressive unhappiness and despair embedded in his early books – his crosspatch biography of Samuel Butler, The Earnest Atheist (1936), and the self-doubting ruminations of In a Valley of This Restless Mind (1938) – began to be replaced by the liberating sense of comedy which was to fill Kingsmill’s two volumes of autobiography.

Reviewing Ingrams’s God’s Apology in the late 1970s, I suggested that Muggeridge had responded to the spiritual element in Kingsmill’s teaching, and Pearson to the secular element; and that for both he acted as a necessary catalyst. He appeared to possess a dual nature. The late John Heath-Stubbs, in his autobiography Hindsight (1993), describes Kingsmill as a thoroughly practical, down-to-earth literary editor (“my most important editor”) and an unorthodox religious thinker. “He compared the human condition to that of prisoners confined within a high-walled jail”, Heath-Stubbs wrote. “Every now and then leaves, blossoms and twigs blow over the wall. This proves that there is a world outside the jail, and this should be enough for us.”

Established religions had little place in Kingsmill’s life. He believed that individuals should go about perfecting themselves unobtrusively without forcing on others moral imperatives that were perhaps only suitable to themselves. His own religion, pantheistic and mystical, was a form of poetry arising from instinct rather than a set of supernatural rules. In The High Hill of the Muses (1955), his posthumously published anthology containing passages in English literature (and some translations) for which he held a special affection, he gives most pages (after Shakespeare) to Wordsworth and to Blake. His 15,000-word introduction to this book is a marvellous autobiographical-literary essay in which he surveys a lifetime of reading – he completed it shortly before his death. “‘Nothing,’ said Blake, ‘can withstand the fury of my course among the stars of God and the abysses of the Accuser’”, and the same journey, Kingsmill wrote, “is in Wordsworth’s ‘flight / Of poetic ecstasy / Into the land of mystery’”. In a modified form this was the journey which Kingsmill himself attempted.

Ingrams places him roughly in the tradition of Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton. But I see him as a resolute and solitary figure without a sustained or cohesive literary career, whose imaginative works cannot easily or even usefully be assimilated into any group. He was not part of Bloomsbury or Fitzrovia, or any literary movement or social establishment either within or beyond the walls of academe. He did not belong to the Left or Right Book Club or fight in the Spanish Civil War. He likened his meetings with T. S. Eliot to audiences given by the Pope to an obscure Nonconformist minister on a visit to Rome. Though he acknowledged the inevitable power of Marx and Freud on the thinking of his own times, he was not himself a Marxist or Freudian, steering a course between the extremes of external and internal causes, nurture and nature, in something of the same way as Wordsworth and Blake strove for a marriage between heaven and hell – a transfiguration which must be made on earth.
Kingsmill was perhaps influenced by the Journal intime of the Swiss philosopher Henri Amiel, and came to distrust attempts to incorporate human ideals into collective ideologies and concrete forms – a Church, a country, a State or leader. Such systems, he thought, whatever the philosophy out of which they had grown, “necessarily value truth less then victory over rival systems”. Like a character in The Pilgrim’s Progress, he travelled alone, seeking eventually to break out of his isolation, as if it were a shell, and to be at one with life. “What is divine in man is elusive and impalpable”, he wrote in his essay “The Genealogy of Hitler”. Solitude was therefore a necessary element in the search for an ideal that is planted in us all. But after renunciation comes salvation. “Those who set out for it alone will reach it together, and those who seek it in company will perish by themselves.”

Though Kingsmill never developed a didactic theology, he worked to a recognizable agenda. In his writings he did not describe or exploit contemporary divisions of colour, class and culture, and never estimated his biographical subjects simply by their politics or gender. Turning his back on fashionable measurements of good and evil, he presented a parallel world occupied by two species of human beings: men and women of Will, and men and women of Imagination. Those who were ruled by Will sought unity through force if necessary – and often it was necessary. Those who were guided by Imagination detected a harmony underlying the discord of our lives, and used that as their compass. The great struggle in the modern world, Kingsmill contended, was being waged between these two species of human beings, over the battleground of public opinion. But all of us are composed of Will and Imagination, and all are tempted to externalize the enemy within. This theme enters into many of his books, both fiction and non-fiction.

It seems ironic that this gregarious yet solitary writer should become best known to the reading public for anthologies crowded with other writers’ work, in particular his Invective and Abuse (1929). The success of these collected insults, which soon called for a second volume, More Invective (1930), and eventually a compendium of verbal attacks from both volumes (1944), promoted him in the public imagination as “a sort of Jack the Ripper”, he claimed, “red-eyed and sabre-toothed, scrabbling, year in year out, among old folios for lost jewels of vilification”. To the end of his life he would meet people who assumed this to be his magnum opus – “that thing of yours on abuse”. Apart from these volumes there was, as Rupert Hart-Davis explained to him, “some sort of voodoo on your relations with the publishing trade. No matter how good your books are, some publisher always seems to lose money on them”. The books were often good, but they were also uneven, tending to begin brilliantly and, for lack of money, end hurriedly – a pattern Kingsmill criticized in the work of H. G. Wells.
Kingsmill’s contemporaries valued his writings in differing ways. To Edwin Muir, he appeared “a rich spontaneous genius” whose most accomplished work was his last novel, The Fall (1940). For William Gerhardie, who portrayed him as the ebullient Max Fisher in his novel Pending Heaven (1930), he seems to have been “a man with a marvellously vitalizing effect” whose most stimulating pages appeared in his three novellas collected in The Dawn’s Delay (1924). Evelyn Waugh, however, seems to have preferred his informal travel writing, suggesting that, for the sake of his conversation, the railway companies should compete with one another to advertise him as a travelling companion. Among his literary biographies, no one I think would choose his early Life of Matthew Arnold, an erratic and selfinterrupted study which would nevertheless lend itself amusingly to postmodern reinterpretation. Empson championed his D. H. Lawrence – “the best book about him, I still think”, he told Graham Hough, twenty years after its publication in 1938. But Orwell singled out another of Kingsmill’s biographies, The Sentimental Journey (1934), his Life of Dickens. (Fifteen years after the publication of The Sentimental Journey, on the day after Kingsmill’s death at the age of fifty-nine, the New York Times published Orwell’s praise of that work as being “perhaps the most brilliant book ever written on Dickens”.) Both biographies were cases for the prosecution, and mainly for that reason not popular with the public.

At the beginning of the 1970s I attempted to introduce Kingsmill’s work to a new generation of readers by reprinting a selection from his biographies, his fiction, his parodies, essays and Shakespeare criticism. Like a salesman presenting a sample of his wares, I wrote a somewhat provocative introduction to The Best of Hugh Kingsmill, making high rhetorical claims. “Behind the big names of twentieth-century literature”, I declared, “there stands a shadow cabinet of writers waiting to take over once the Wind of Change has blown. My own vote goes to Hugh Kingsmill as leader of this opposition.” After F. R. Leavis comes Hugh Kingsmill was indeed an empty and incredible boast (even if Scrutiny had been rather favourable to him) and it was not helped by the very second-rate book I had previously published about him in 1964 (my first book, written in my early twenties and turned down by sixteen publishers before being taken up by Martin Secker. Glancing through that book now I wince with embarrassment at its amateurishness and naivety. I wrote as a disciple rather than a student who used Kingsmill’s books as my introduction to English Literature).

The Best of Hugh Kingsmill was met with a mixture of politeness and bewilderment, particularly by sociologists and literary academics. They could not see the point of him. His style was straightforward, unemphatic, succinct and sometimes witty, never convoluted by clever games-playing. But it worked on two levels: the stated and the implied. About Elizabeth I, one of his subjects in The Poisoned Crown, he writes: “Naturally, it is not disputed that benefits of a secondary order may flow from the achievements of able rulers; it was clearly to the advantage of England in the second half of the sixteenth century to be governed by Queen Elizabeth and not by Queen Anne. But, on a much deeper lever of reality, it was not to the advantage either of Elizabeth or of those who served her that she should set herself up as a semi-divine figure, a Virgin Queen exalted high above common humanity”. That deeper level of reality forms a subtext to almost all his writing. It underpins his lucid reconstructions of the
tactics and strategies that support secondary achievements, uniting a historical with a biographical focus, giving the simplicity of his style its gravity and humour.

It is not difficult to see why his biographies are so out of tune with modern “life writing” and “Auto/Biography”. He took the exceptional person, not representative people, as his subjects, and there are no women on his title pages. He did not work from unpublished archives, provided no reference notes (often not even an index), and took a severe critical attitude towards his characters – quite unlike later biographers in the age of Richard Ellmann, who developed a more sympathetic leaning. Kingsmill was an amateur without any obvious professional methodology who wrote cautionary rather than exemplary tales. For all their pages of insight and originality, his books are seldom listed in the bibliographies of more tremendous biographies. His criticism, too, cannot be “placed” within an acknowledged literary context, the context of a syllabus, and his brilliant Shakespeare criticism is encased in a work of fiction that removes it to an inappropriate shelf of the library. Who, you might ask, is he writing for? The answer is himself, and of course everyone and perhaps no one. What his admirers, from Orwell to Muir, mostly had in common was their lack of an academic discipline or status. Empson described Kingsmill’s writings as “a healthy influence” in that they punctured the teasing pomposity of academic criticism, its priestly jargon and beckoning exclusiveness. “If criticism is to be more than an academic diversion,” Kingsmill wrote, “a critic should not be content to play about inside a man’s work as though it was a glass bowl suspended in a vacuum. A man’s work expresses his character and each should be used to illumine the other.” This apophthegm may be read as a plea for the relevance of literary biography to critical thought – one which that arch-enemy of biography, W. H. Auden, eventually acknowledged to be at least half true.

Kingsmill’s writing is deceptively accessible. His aim was to make clear what might otherwise be obscure, but his transparent style often conceals the subtlety of his thought. In a sense his work is done (his speculations about Marguerite’s identity, for example, in his Life of Matthew Arnold – her social status and influence on his poems in the late 1840s – have been verified by the subsequent publication of Arnold’s letters). But never was his biographical work accomplished with such éclat as in his Frank Harris (1932), a brilliant portrait-in-miniature that for once does not end hurriedly (he prepared a revised edition in 1949 for John Lehmann’s Holiday Library series).

In the new Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (where his biographer is named as “Hugh Kingsmith” – all the more unforgivable since Kingsmill is spelt correctly in his own DNB entry), Harris is identified as a “rogue” journalist. It seems incredible today that George Meredith likened Harris to Balzac, that Bernard Shaw compared him to Maupassant, and that John Middleton Murry calculated his achievements as being in some respects superior to those of Coleridge and Goethe. Kingsmill’s re-evaluation, published the year following Harris’s death, illustrated his Johnsonian dictum that no writer “can put more virtue into his words than he practises in his life”. The book is a small masterpiece of sympathetic irony, plotting expectation against actual achievement, daydreams against nightmares, and destroying for ever Harris’s reputation as a great man of letters. In the early pages we are introduced to him as an outcast in the puritan climate of midVictorian society. Growing up determined to re-create himself as a hero whose wishes become reality, he emerges from Kingsmill’s pages as extravagant a fantasist as Thurber’s Walter Mitty. What Kingsmill is showing us is an imaginative dimension of biography where fantasies may play as significant a role in our lives as facts.

Harris’s memoirs, we are told, “touched nothing that he did not adorn”. But Kingsmill uses these memoirs as a guide to “what Harris wished to believe about himself”. He was a chameleon, able to change from a Welshman to an Irishman, a Celt to a Jew, to fit in with any occasion. He was also a man of gargantuan ambitions. He would do such things . . . prove himself an ace gunman among cowboys along the Mexican frontier as well as a fiery radical who, speaking darkly of assassinating Gladstone, was feted by the anarchists in London. Surely he must be destined for great political leadership or at least a powerful career as newspaper editor. But “I’m an artist, not a reporter”, Harris protested. As such he set out to gain “spiritual equality with Shakespeare” and presented himself as someone profiting “by the example of Christ”, who, though admittedly going deeper than Harris did, never managed to embrace so wide a range of experience as himself. He was, Oscar Wilde remarked, “invited to all the great houses in England – once”, for he was no diplomat and too many people suffered from his unintended insults. “Everything was in his favour”, Kingsmill explains, “except himself.”

Harris was small in stature but he walked tall. When he entered a room, Kingsmill tells us, “there was a movement of the air” as if something momentous was about to happen. He knew he was ugly, so he set about mastering “the noble art of seduction”. But of the tragic background to his one real love, Kingsmill writes with sympathy. What, above all, he teaches us in this biography is how to avoid playing the schoolmaster. He does not smother his subject with moral opprobrium, but gives him air to breathe and, without sentimentality, brings him alive in such as way as to make us understand why so many people forgave him. Trying to reconcile two contending accounts Harris gave of his journeys, Kingsmill simply writes: “Harris travelling westward across the Pacific and Harris travelling eastward across the Atlantic met again in Paris”. The irony he uses to make Harris’s foibles reveal themselves is similar to that poignant amiability which is a speciality of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novels, and it shows what a non-fiction narrative may legitimately have in common with fictional storytelling.

Kingsmill’s writing is a model for any biographer tempted to overload his sentences with random information. He had a sharp eye for what is significant – for the significant connections between events. The originality of any biography depends on the relationship between the biographer and his subject. Frank Harris is reminiscent of Johnson’s Life of his friend the rogue poet Richard Savage. Kingsmill had worked for Harris and was able to enrich his narrative with some telling first-hand observations. But while he exposes Harris he is also laughing at his own credulity.

In place of Balzac or Maupassant, Harris emerges as an alarming compound of Jeffrey Archer and Robert Maxwell. A precursor of our popular press barons, always in search of a sponsor in his lust for fame, Harris ended up a bankrupt and pornographer with a sober message for our own culture of celebrity. It is a pity that Hugh Kingsmill’s biography, so relevant to our age, has been so long out of print.
 
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Michael Holroyd's recent books include Mosaic, 2004, and Works on Paper: The craft of biography and autobiography, 2003.