Biting the hand . .
30th September 1960 from the Tribune Magazine Archive
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John Middleton Murry, Eric Gill, George Orwell, Rayner Heppenstall, DylanLocations
Four Absentees Rayner Heppenstall (Bowie and Rocklift. 13s. 6d.).
THE AUTHOR of this book encounter Dylan Thomas, George Orwell, Eric Gill and John Middleton Murry in the mid-1930s ; and kept up a tenuous, and sometimes precarious, relationship with them all in the years that followed.
All four are dead. That he knew them, and that they knew each other, is a matter of profound significence to Mr.
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Heppenstall.
"To me," he writes, "the most important fact of all about any of these men was their coexistence with each other and with me." It appears to have been as unsatisfactory a coexistence as that today between the Communist powers and the West.
Mr. Heppenstall tells us several times that Dylan had "fat lips." He. recalls Dylan drunk ; Dylan helping a policeman to twist the helplesslydrunk Heppenstall's arms, Dylan needing a bed for the night and crying aloud, "0 God, I'm so tired of sleeping with women I don't even like," Dylan getting up a manifesto against the war because, declares Heppenstall, he was "in a panic at the thought that he, too, might be called up"; Dylan "disconcertingly fellowtravelling" ; and advances the theory that Dylan when in the States deliberately took an overdose of alcohol in order to commit suicide.
George Orwell, according to the author, had a "painfully snickering laugh" and a "curious mind . . . full of interesting and out-of-the-way information like Tit-Bits, but arid, - colourless, devoid of poetry, derisive, yet darkly obsessed." His girl friends were all unsatisfactory to Mr. Heppenstall — one was "mouse-coloured and bespectacled, with a squint and a stoop" ; another had a figure "too broad in relation to its height" and a third had a "muddy complexion" and a "manner forced and girlish." We are told also of the time when Orwell, annoyed because Heppenstall had arrived back at the flat they were sharing drunk and noisy, locked Heppenstall in his room. When Heppenstall hammered on the door demanding to be let out, Orwell flung it open and attacked him with a shooting stick, his face "a curious blend of fear and sadisticOn exaltation." another occasion, Orwell, convinced that he was "biologically sterile" had to be "rescued from a tart" by Heppenstall, who also passes on an opinion that Orwell was an homosexual.
Having criticised Dylan for his fellow-travelling, Heppen stall reproves Orwell for being contemptuous of fellow-travelling intellectuals. - Orwell's indignation, when both the New Statesman and a celebrated Left-wing publisher refused to publish Orwell's criticisms of the Communists in Spain and his defence of the outlawed, persecuted Left-wing POUM, is dismissed "paranoiac?' Murry's troubled, wayward pilgrimage, as w e 11 a s his domestic misfortunes, are reported coldly, without a trace of sympathy or affection. Eric Gill's excessive interest it the genitals is stressed, and remarks of Gill's quoted appear to be chosen as being those most likely to hurt and offend Gill's friends and admirers.
All four absentees are presented at their worst, in undignified postures and at disadvantage ; there is neither kindness nor balance here—only malice.
The cumulative effect of it all is a most unpleasant one.
Why has Mr. Heppenstall taken time off from decrying the literature of his own country to write this book and attempt to reduce the stature of four absent authors? The answer to this may be found perhaps in the account Mr.
Heppenstall gives of himself during the period he is covering.
For he is at great pains to show that he got as drunk as Dylan is supposed to have got ; that he coughed blood just as Dylan coughed blood ; that at one time he was thought to have TB just like Orwell, and like "two of Murry's wives." He tells us, too, that, like Gill he went in for Roman Catholicism—though he didn't stay with it long — and he tried to follow Murry in some of Murry's political and religious ventures.
It is as though he is trying to say that he was up to all the tricks they were up to ; was as good — or as bad — as they were ; and cannot see why there is all this fuss about them and no fuss at all about him.
How far Mr. Heppenstall's memory can be trusted it is impossible to say. But if his recollections are accurate then it would certainly seem that there is something about him which brings the worst out in people.
Which may explain why Murry described Heppenstall as "a pariah dog that will always bite the hand that feeds it." Why George Orwell, when he struck at Heppenstall with a shooting stick, wore on his face an expression of "sadistic exaltation." Why Dylan, when he gave Heppenstall's arm a "good twist" on the way to the police station, did it with a "horrible chuckle."
REG GROVES