Everyday Mysteries

In the autumn of 2008, in issue no. 19, Slightly Foxed published an essay by Richard Ingrams. He had chosen John Stewart Collis’s book called The Worm Forgives the Plough – a title taken from William Blake’s ‘Proverbs of Hell’. The book had been written (originally in two volumes with different titles) during the Second World War when Collis, then in his forties, had become one of the agricultural labourers who took the place of farmworkers conscripted by the army. This was an inspiring period of his career during which he produced his literary classic – a judgement that was endorsed when in 2009 Vintage added the book to its list of classics with a compelling introduction by Robert Macfarlane.

‘To work as a labourer on the land had been a great desire of mine,’ Collis wrote. This was his adult education. He learnt harrowing and ditching, ploughing and haymaking and harvesting – and finally he cleared the wild entanglement of an ash wood later to be named ‘Collis Piece’. Occasionally he would revisit this wood. ‘Nobody is ever likely to confer upon me Honours or Titles or city freedoms, nor will any Monument be raised to perpetuate and repeat my name,’ he wrote. ‘But this plot of earth will do it, these trees will do it: in the summer they will glitter and shine for me, and in the winter, mourn.’ The danger of being known as the author of a single masterpiece is that your other books may unjustly be neglected. Certainly Collis’s biographies and autobiographies, his ecology and fiction are too original to be forgotten. He was born in Killiney to the south of Dublin where his father worked as a solicitor. He was a younger twin, their mother giving all her love to the elder one. ‘From the hour of my birth she hated me,’ he wrote. ‘Ours was not a united family.’ To escape from such unhappiness his father sent him to England for his education: to Rugby, then to Balliol College, Oxford, to which he claimed to have gained entrance by some judicious cheating in Latin Unseen. ‘I hankered after oratory,’ he wrote, and he practised public speaking in debates with G. K. Chesterton, W. B. Yeats and other visiting writers. While still a schoolboy Collis had seen Bernard Shaw’s political comedy John Bull’s Other Island at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. ‘It was like hearing heavenly music – and I knew that at last I was feeling the real thing.’ His first publication, ‘a new book on an old subject’, written in his early twenties, was simply called Shaw. Collis explains in his one-paragraph preface that

some books are written for the pleasure of the reader and the profit of the writer, some for the profit of the reader and the pleasure of the writer, and some simply insist upon being written in spite of reader and writer . . . [They] are often a great nuisance to the writer as well as to everybody else, but nevertheless they must be written. This is such a book.

There is a sense of necessity in the writing which Shaw could not help liking. Most biographers who wrote about GBS during his lifetime had their pens taken from them while he rewrote many of their pages. But when Collis gave his chapters to Shaw, he replied with letters parts of which he allowed Collis to use as footnotes. They cover all sorts of subjects from vegetarian diets ‘for poets and philosophers’ to critics of Shakespeare from Voltaire to Dr Johnson (both quite different from Shaw’s own criticism of Victorian bardolators such as Henry Irving). One footnote is a single word: ‘Hooray!’ (It would make an amusing test to ask Shavian scholars what they thought Collis could have written to bring forth such a cheer. The sentence was: ‘I fancy he has gained far more from listening to Wagner and Mozart than he has gained from all his reading put together.’) The Shaw who emerges from Collis’s book is a man who conceals his generosity and is more often praised than understood by the public. He makes plenty of mistakes but often learns from them and is a believer in evolution rather than revolution. The book was published in 1925 and was reprinted three times, gaining Collis some money to which he added £150 by selling his letters from Shaw. With this he soon set off abroad. ‘Etna’s volcano being in eruption I decided to go to Sicily at once and climb the mountain up to the crater if possible,’ he later wrote in his autobiography, Bound upon a Course (1971). This book has its strengths and its limitations. There were gaps in his own life which were too painful to revisit at any length – in particular his unhappy childhood and unfortunate first marriage. He had married an American girl whom he had known for just one week. She believed he was a genius and would make a fortune. But he never did and she eventually decided he was a total failure. Meanwhile she became a medical pioneer with an intuitional flair for helping children with cerebral palsy. In the 1950s she herself was struck down with cerebral thrombosis. For six years Collis looked after her day and night – then for another six years she went into a nursing home – and one night she suddenly died. ‘She had been dying slowly before my eyes for years,’ he wrote. ‘My friends thought it would be a release for me as well as for her . . . I did not know my own heart. I did not know when the time came I would not be able to bear her non-existence.’ His marriage led him to study other people’s marriages and produce a new category of Life Writing. ‘Few of us know much about the married life even of our closest friends,’ he wrote. ‘Nothing is guarded so secretly as this matter. We do know something about the marriages of the famous whose lives have been documented by themselves and others. I have often thought that it is the same story as that of undocumented millions; the same story writ large.’ His three dual biographies cover the multiplicity of Strindberg’s wives, the complexity of Tolstoy’s marriage to Sonya and the charming courtship and discordant later life of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle. The originality of these tight, swiftly moving narratives with their ever-increasing drama did not depend upon unpublished documents. He read all the published correspondence, biographies and diaries he could find. Then he reinterpreted what he had read. A good example of his ability to merge comedy with tragedy comes from his reading of Aylmer Maude’s book The Final Struggle with its last photograph of Tolstoy with his wife. It made an extraordinary impact on Collis. This is what he wrote:

September 23rd was the anniversary of their wedding. She was determined that a photograph should be taken of them together as a loving couple. He tried to get out of it, feeling embarrassed and ashamed. But she overruled all objections, and the photograph was taken . . . She was determined to make him turn his face towards her and smile. But he would not. He had often and often been deliberately gentle, with a loving word, or by giving her a pear, or by saying how pleased he was to see her eating pancakes – all duly noted in her diary. But not now. Here was a test (we never quite know when we are being tested) of the depth of his Christianity and the absoluteness of his cheek-turning principles. It would have been easy to have looked in her direction and given her a smile. He would not . . . He looked to the front as hard as a cliff, and as obstinate. And there she stands, in her frightful clothes and her fierce possessive regard, and with a couple of handcuffs she has clapped upon him. And there he stands in the coarse blouse and the leather belt that he always wore . . . a blind but unconquered Samson.

Despite his engaging life of Christopher Columbus (1976), Collis was not a talented traveller. His adventurous journeys were often less dramatic than the strolls he made round London and described in An Irishman’s England (1937). Earlier, when wearing gym shoes and carrying his satchel, he had climbed to the very edge of Etna’s erupting crater, he saw nothing except clouds of sulphurous smoke. But travelling at rush hour by Tube across London he fell – not to the ground but into a crowd of passengers that, as they swept along, held him at an angle of forty-five degrees. ‘I have often wondered at the endurance of the people hanging up there on their straps like dead animals . . . they all insist upon coming home at the same moment, and hundreds who could go back by boat along the Thames in summer refuse to do so.’ There was, he concluded, ‘too little despair in this city . . . Therefore not enough hope. Only endurance.’ The secret of London, he concluded, was the secret of beauty itself which arises, like Love and Truth, ‘out of the agony of the world’. It is not surprising that Robert Macfarlane believed that Collis belonged to the same literary family as another Irish writer, Samuel Beckett. There is the orator’s voice in much of Collis’s writing. His description of travelling to Rotherhithe to buy a chair has something of Beckett’s humour of desolation. After a good deal of waiting, the journey began.

We arrived at Stepney - but not at our destination. We got into a bus: we got out of it. We got into a tram and out of it. We crossed streets and changed into more trams. We stood in the wind . . . It was a cold and bloodless day, and at that hour of the afternoon when all meaning is withdrawn from the universe. And in the midst, our guide . . . a timeless expression on her face. She was coming to help us buy this chair . . . she stood in the tram, waited by the kerb, walked through the alleys – wholly indifferent to the world . . . Her figure assumed a gigantic shape . . . the atlas of injustice.

An Irishman’s England is dotted with short sentences as he reflects on diverse aspects of England between the two world wars. ‘I once met a man walking up Charing Cross Road,’ he wrote, ‘accompanied by a small elephant. ’Yet no one else seems to notice this. One windy day he takes cover and sees a birdlike woman blown ‘in all the plumes of her sophistication, from Upper to Lower Regent Street’. He describes Marble Arch as ‘a gateway leading nowhere’ – perhaps a metaphor for the whole country. In some fifteen books Collis focused on the ‘extraordinary nature of the ordinary’. He was essentially a poet who studied the sciences, discovering the mysteries of what we take for granted. ‘He was sui generis,’ wrote A. N. Wilson who as literary editor of the Spectator was ‘happy to publish anything he wrote’ towards the end of Collis’s life. ‘He survives in his books,’ Wilson adds. But what would bring him alive for a new generation of readers would be an anthology of the best pages from these neglected publications.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 54 © Michael Holroyd 2017