For the past week I have been kept up each
night by a book I could not put down. Tarantula’s
Web, written by one of my oldest friends, John Smart, is a biography of
John Hayward (1905-1965). If you have on your shelves an old Penguin Book of English Verse, or - better
still - the Nonesuch editions of the works of John Donne, or Jonathan Swift or
the Earl of Rochester, you’ll have come across Hayward’s work as anthologist and
editor. And if you’ve read Lyndall
Gordon’s biography, T.S. Eliot – An
Imperfect Life, or Helen Gardner’s still indispensable study of Eliot’s
finest poem, The Composition of Four
Quartets, you’ll know Hayward was one of the most important figures in
Eliot’s life.
As friend, literary executor and
collaborator, editor and mentor, Hayward encouraged, protected, and coped with
Eliot for over thirty years. For eleven of those years, after the Second World
War, they shared a flat together until out of the blue one evening in 1957,
Eliot handed Hayward a letter, announcing he was going to be married in two
days’ time, and walked out of the flat for good. The next day he duly married
his secretary, Valerie, who was thirty-eight years younger than him, and lived
happily ever after. Hayward didn’t.
‘Tarantula’ was what Eliot and his closest
friends called John Hayward, and Hayward himself was happy to play up to the
name. He had, as Tarantula’s Web
reveals, the most extraordinary gift for making friends - and enemies too (F.R
Leavis was one of the most implacable.) He was sometimes called the most
malicious man in London, but others saw him quite differently: Graham Greene
described him as the bravest man he ever knew, and the poet Kathleen Raine
called him ‘that witty brilliant malicious tragic man who so heroically
invented himself’.
Why was he tragic, and why did he have to
set about inventing himself, as he did from a very young age? By the time he
was a teenager, he was already showing signs of muscular dystrophy. But he
always envisaged for himself a life in literature. At Gresham’s School in
Norfolk, where he edited the school magazine, he had the distinction of being
the first person to publish a poem by his younger contemporary W.H. Auden.
By the time he arrived at King’s College,
Cambridge, he was already walking with difficulty and a stick, but this did not
stop him acting, debating and becoming well known to the wider Bloomsbury circle:
Virginia Woolf, Bunny Garnett and Dadie Rylands too. Later, Ottoline Morrell
and Edith Sitwell would become good friends, so would William Empson, Stephen
Spender and, eventually, Dylan Thomas and George Barker. Tarantula’s web drew them all in. But at the
start it was Eliot who helped to launch his professional career by encouraging
him to review for The Criterion.
Reviewing, editing, criticism and
commentary – these became the main sources of Hayward’s income and reputation.
To these he added bibliography, anthologies and literary journalism. For five
years in the 1930s he wrote a fortnightly ‘London Letter’ for the New York Sun. By the start of the Second
World War he was also writing regularly about the London literary scene for
Spanish and Swedish newspapers too. After the war (which he had sat out in frustrating
exile in Cambridge) he became the chief literary advisor to the Festival of
Britain, curating major exhibitions of rare books in London and Paris. He was
afterwards awarded the CBE: some thought he deserved a knighthood.
By this time Hayward had long been confined
to his wheelchair, though he did his best to pretend it made no difference to
his life at all. He was incorrigibly
sociable and flirtatious. Gradually, inevitably, he came to rely more and more
on friends to help him get around: taxi drivers knew him, and he was a familiar
sight in London, even on one occasion being wheeled along by Eliot at the rear
of a circus procession making its way through Chelsea. Hayward called Eliot
‘the Master’ and referred to himself as Eliot’s ‘creating critick’ – a precise
description of his role, because his criticism became an indispensible part of
the creative process enabling Eliot to develop the Four Quartets during the early years of the war.
Recovering, at least outwardly, from the
shock of Eliot’s abrupt departure, Hayward became editor of a journal he had
helped to establish, The Book Collector,
again writing a wide-ranging Commentary at the start of each issue. His pre-war
and post-war journalism, mixing literary gossip, criticism, bibliography and sheer
love of books, was Hayward’s equivalent of writing a regular blog today. His
dispatches from the literary frontline were a discipline and a pleasure. It’s
no exaggeration to say that they were his particular creative achievement. He
had, as it happens, once tried and failed to complete a novel; his poetry was
for the eyes of family and friends only. But in his ‘Letters from London’, in
his Commentaries and in his broadcasts, he declared the value of a life in
literature.
John Hayward was, in the honourable if
old-fashioned sense, a bookman and a man of letters. He believed in books as
objects of historical and cultural significance and in literature as a source
of pleasure and enjoyment. He cared about the literary health of the country. He
admired the creative imagination and courage of the modernists (of Eliot above
all) but he was at heart a traditionalist. As a rationalist who believed in the
public role of literature, he would have been at home in the eighteenth
century: John Smart likens him, justly, to Dr Johnson, surrounded by his circle
of friends and acolytes; to me, however, he resembles most closely Alexander
Pope. For with Pope, (who was also
physically disabled) I think Hayward would have been happy to say
Yes I am proud,
I must be proud to see
Men not afraid
of God afraid of me.
Adrian Barlow
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