As a child, Mark Girouard must have been easy to buy for at Christmas. An ideal gift would have been a puzzle, preferably the sort that looks easy, but is actually fiendish; one you have patiently to tease away at for hours until finally you unlock it, and long to share its cunning solution. This is more or less what Girouard does in several of the essays in this delightful collection.
Girouard is our most distinguished architectural historian and writer on great houses, but here he solves puzzles, and also reveals a rich and diverse literary taste.
He solves puzzles because he is sure there is something more to this or that received version of a story than meets the eye, and wants to dig deeper. Take two well-known facts about the rise and fall of Oscar Wilde. ‘If one looks into it, the success was not as great and the decay not as miserable as he and others have portrayed it.’ Girouard discovers that Wilde acquired his status and position in society by self-promotion and social climbing. Yes, he was a celebrated, admired author. Just not quite as much a one as he wanted people to believe.
Well, that is not an unfamiliar story among ambitious authors. His decline, though, has always seemed heart-rending. It is true that after he left prison and went to Paris he was, because of his own profligacy, sometimes broke and reduced to begging. But Girouard says,
No one, to my knowledge, has added up the total amount of his income in the three and a half years between his coming out of prison in 1897 and his death in Paris in 1900.
He does so himself and discovers that Wilde received roughly (translated into modern equivalent) £70K a year. He was hardly destitute.
Girouard clearly relishes literary detective work. He discovers that the grandfather of poet Alfred Lord Tennyson was not disinherited — a myth repeated as Gospel as late as the 1949 biography. Does it matter? Do facts matter? If nothing else, biographers can learn some sound lessons from Girouard. ‘You know my methods, Watson. Apply them.’
Not being remotely proud, Girouard even details his disappointments. He spends too long attempting to discover the identity of Victorian pornographic writer ‘Walter,’ of My Secret Life and believes he almost has got there. But it’s a dead end:
It was at about this stage that I gave up. I had already wasted more time on Walter than he was worth. It was time to move onto more serious projects, too long delayed.
It is a measure of Girouard’s modesty and good judgment that he allows us to follow the trail that leads nowhere, as well as that with successful outcome. The journey does indeed matter as much as the arrival.
It is a measure of Girouard’s modesty and good judgment that he allows us to follow the trail that leads nowhere…
His literary enthusiasms are wholehearted and discerning, if mainstream. He writes the best piece I have read on why P.G. Wodehouse was a great writer, explaining why his best work forms a small part of a large output, much of which he rightly rates as beta minus or worse.
We all have books which meant more than the sum of their parts to us as children, those which helped to form us. His is John Masefield’s unexpected masterpiece, The Midnight Folk, though he is less enthusiastic than he should be on its sinister successor, The Box of Delights. Never mind. We need to be reminded about both because they are classics.
Girouard is spot on about how Waugh with Brideshead, and Nancy Mitford with The Pursuit of Love, hit upon the formula for turning good books into massive bestsellers. He is intriguing about the mysterious Pepita of Vita Sackville West’s family biography.
His own family also features in the book in a trio of essays about his Solomon ancestors, his grandparents, and finally, Aunt Evie. One’s relatives are very rarely as interesting to others as to oneself, but Girouard’s Aunt Evie is a miraculous exception. She took Girouard and his sister in as young children after their mother was killed. She was 70, a widow living at her beloved Hardwicke and in London, married to a Chatsworth Cavendish, a Victorian in most ways, but generous, intelligent, passionate about conservation of the family houses and artefacts. Doubtless she was a huge influence on Mark Girouard’s future. One would like to have met and talked to Aunt Evie, and though she was not warm, his portrait of her is grateful and affectionate.
This is the perfect bedside book and journey companion and, although a mixed assortment, no rag-bag of warmed-up journalism. I cannot think of a better house-present – or a Christmas one, come to that, even if it is only just October.
Comments