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For The Critic

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For The Critic

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For The Critic

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For The Critic

— The Nelson Evening Mail, Saturday, November 17 1906
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Podcasts will soon be like porn.

The first three volumes of TS Eliot’s letters have been remaindered.

Confidence travels.

The door is a jar.

Roken is dodelijk.

Humans’ rubbish is the filthiest stuff there is.

The workmen’s compensation court is a small building.

Firemen and violinists have soup for supper.

A pack of veggie snacks weighs the same as one standard British Army rifle round.

Pink isn’t a very good colour for a football shirt.

Turkish dictionaries are half the size of Ottoman ones.

It is possible to commit mass murder and still die peacefully in one’s old age.

For elephants, follow the A4108.
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I am given to understand that this is the 6th day of Feb. but for the life of me I don’t know what day of the week it is. Anyhow it doesn’t make any difference here. Excuse the dirt. A.A.¹ has just spilt some tea on my pad.

The journey from the forest² to these parts was long and trying but most interesting. The first day lava and then desert. My car buried its rear portion in the sand and while we were waiting for some assistance Cyril Cochran came up, had a good laugh and took a photo which I hope to be able to send you in due course. Camels, dried white bones, and mirages cause the most fantastically beautiful marine illusions. Sometimes the dunes were converted into rocky promontories with the sea below them – just like some of those places we photographed round Cape Point – a solitary goat in the distance looks like someone bathing.

Camped for the night in the sand dunes and moved north again before dawn. Camped again in a rocky dusty area near the frontier and rested for 36 hours. Then began the most remarkable journey of my life – the advance onto our first objective through many miles of dense bush and undulating lava hills. The armoured cars went ahead and made clearings in the thorn bush and the troop carriers followed. In the early afternoon we came on open ground and got into battle formation and soon after this the fun started and by 5 p.m. we had occupied the Italian position. I rushed round with my company on the left flank to head off the fugitives but they were too quick for us. It was an extraordinary advance and we got great praise for it. The Itos were taken by surprise and no wonder because no one would have ever dreamt of a motorised force advancing through such country.

The next day, Sunday, Jimmy’s crowd (a nephew of Gerald Fayle’s) did a stunt with my company in reserve, so we saw some more fun. The fort was occupied before dark and here we are on the qui vive and having a rest. I didn’t see Jimmy but he is O.K. His unit captured some weapons and stores . . . . . . . . For some days I had attached to me two Abyssinian rebels – i.e. whom the Italians haven’t yet captured or subdued. They told the same story, the desire for revenge has become fanatical. On one occasion while we were guarding some prisoners these two birds were all for cutting the throats etc of the wounded and had to be restrained. These rebels are very much on our side. They carry Italian rifles and plenty of ammunition. They are a mixture, I think, of Arab and negro and the former strain gives them a rather noble but desperately cruel look.

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¹ Allan Arnott
² Marsabit

–oOo–

Tuesday(?) 11.2.41

The hiatus is due to a sudden move with little warning. Another long advance and another successful action.  “A” Company (Gerald’s¹) bumped it first and we had an anxious time for a while when we walked into something that looked innocent enough but was in fact a rather clever trap. But the Italians spoilt things for themselves by not withholding their fire long enough. It is fortunate that we were entering a fort at the time so we were able to take cover and give the other side something to go on with. When I say “we” I mean Micky Williamson with an armoured car, myself, and one platoon. We were cut off temporarily from the others. But thanks to somebody’s prayers and bad shooting on the part of the Italians you’ve nothing to worry about. Anyhow our “chance” was to come. Mickey and I spotted a lot of enemy troops crossing a ridge so we let them have it good and plenty. Yesterday I went up to the spot to have a look and they certainly left in a hurry taking their casualties with them. Allan came on their dressing station and saw the evidence. Where we opened fire on this particular formation the ground was littered with red fezes, clothing, food and ammunition. I have acquired a very nice Ito aluminium water carrier, double lined and holding about 2 gallons. It was originally a vacuum container but it became loosened and the air has got in between the linings. I have put a rubber washer on the opening and it’s grand.

The troops we are up against are Italian Somalis – not Abyssinians – with European officers. The p.c. I sent Gerald² gives a good idea. Please frame this for the boys. It was taken from a prisoner. The different Italian Colonial Infantry Regts. wear different coloured woollen waist bands like scarves. I have two, one black and white (17th Col. Inf) and one yellow (9th Col. Inf). If these ever arrive wash them (I haven’t enough water) and keep them for fun. The family group photo was discarded by some Italian Somali on the run. Just had a bit of a clean up. Had no wash or shave for four days, so I was pretty grubby . . . . . . . . There is no shortage of medals in the Ito army.

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¹ Fayle’s, presumably (see first letter)
² Gerald Spence Smyth’s son, Gerald Fayle³ Preston Smyth
³ named after Gerald Fayle (see first letter, and fn. above)

–oOo–

21.2.41

. . . . . . . . We’ve all had a pretty gruelling time during the past week and at the moment we are taking things a bit quietly. There is the satisfaction at any rate of knowing that we have achieved a great measure of success in capturing an important Italian position.¹

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¹ Mega fort

–oOo–

2nd letter 21.2.41

Just after my last letter written a week ago we had a busy and trying time. After leaving the place from which I last wrote we began an advance which culminated in a final successful attack. The hardships endured by all concerned from wind, cold and exposure were far greater I think than from enemy action. For three days and two nights we were soaked to the skin without shelter and in most cases without greatcoats or groundsheets in cold and almost continuous rain. How the men stuck it I don’t know but they deserve the highest praise for the way they carried on throughout this trial. The more experienced campaigners (chaps who were in the last war) say they haven’t seen anything like it. It’s a great tribute to the Regt. The Italians greeted us with shell fire at the beginning of the show. This went on most of the time as well as M.G. and small arms fire. We captured a large number of prisoners and guns etc. The prisoners who included some officers were anything but downcast: in fact they seemed decidedly cheery.

By this time you will have heard that Mickey¹ died of wounds. It is one of the saddest and greatest losses we could have had. He was terribly plucky up to the end.

. . . . . . . . We have acquired a fair amount of Ito food, e.g. spaghetti tinned tomato, cheese, flour, meal and a lot of tinned curried meat specially prepared for their Mahomedan troops. This morning for breakfast we had spaghetti cheese tomato and bacon. Very good too. One day all I had to eat was an army biscuit and a piece of biltong. It’s most nutritious and I always have a bit in my pocket.

Just had a most gratifying message from the C.O. to be read out of the Company thanking them for their great effort in the last show.

—
¹ The typescript here says: ‘(not the one of the armoured car).’ This seems an unlikely clarification for GSS to have made to his wife, who – the general tone would otherwise suggest – probably knew all these people, at least socially. Also it seems too casual, given the remarks that follow. My suspicion – as with a couple of other bracketed asides, is that my grandmother added these when typing, for the benefit of whichever secondary reader. There seems no reason to think the amendment is incorrect, though: the man’s name is spelled differently, after all (albeit the typescript, once again, is full of typing errors).

–oOo–

2.2.41¹

Now that the rain has ceased for nearly a week the climate here is delightful. Cold at night and warm and bracing in the day at about 7000ft. My attack of dysentery has completely passed off and I now feel grand. We get excellent bacon from Kenya and wonderful tinned tomatoes from sunny Italy.

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¹ The typescript here says: ‘(so smeared from rain I could hardly read it, it came to-day)’. Either my grandmother’s typescript has these letters in the wrong order, or in the order that they arrived in South Africa (when was ‘to-day’?), or she has misread and/or introduced a typo and the date should actually be 2.3.41. The reference to tomatoes and the rain suggest the last one, as does the altitude.
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Typescript endnote: ‘All these extracts have been passed by the military censors and most of the bits about the war have appeared.’

My great-great-great-aunt, Sarah Purser, portraitist, landscape artist, and leading light (no pun) in the Irish stained glass industry revival, once made a well-known painting of these sisters.

According to John O’Grady’s monograph, The Life and Work of Sarah Purser, this double portrait was commissioned by ‘enlightened resident landlord [and] amateur Arctic explorer’ Sir Henry and his wife Lady Georgina Gore-Booth, of Lissadell, Co. Sligo, in about 1882, when the sisters were roughly 14 (Constance) and 12 (Eva). It is approximately life size, and in its style and setting (a beech grove, apparently) it is thought ‘boldly unconventional’ for the Ireland of the time – and it is credited, writes Elizabeth Coxhead in Daughters of Erin, with being ‘one of the two pictures which put [Purser] on the road to success’.

The original ‘Constance and Eva Gore-Booth’ is displayed at Lissadell House to this day, where it’s available to members of the public in the summer. I must admit I’m not in love with it; if anything, I’d say it’s most remarkable for the fact that it betrays – and fair enough – nothing at all of the hard-line, gun-toting political activist that Constance Gore-Booth/Markievicz was to become. That said, a few years later Constance went to study painting with a friend of Purser’s, and progressed, from there, to the French Académie Julian, where – fatefully? – she met Count Casimir…

No inconsiderable lady in her own right, Sarah Purser (1848-1943) was born into a financially-unstable offshoot of the Guinness-brewing Purser clan. Taking her future in her own hands, she set off to train in Paris (on ‘a pound a week’), and was exhibiting at the Royal Hibernian Academy of Arts by the age of 23. Three years later the Royal Dublin Society awarded her a certificate for still lifes, and before long she was elected an Honorary Academician of the RHA, whose first female full member she eventually became in 1924.

She founded the An Túr Gloine (Tower of Glass) stained glass cooperative in 1903, which she then ran for almost 40 years. She helped establish Dublin’s Municipal Gallery of Modern Art and develop the National Gallery of Ireland, where various of her portraits (and much stained glass produced under her sponsorship) now, quite properly, reside.

Often referred to in the same breath as Markievicz, Maud Gonne, Lady Gregory, and other notable women of the era (and indeed Eire), Purser moved in very much the same cultural circles – minus the Catholicism part; she being of Huguenot descent – and went on to paint all of the aforementioned (including Constance several times again), as well as luminaries like WB Yeats, Roger Casement, Douglas Hyde and Brendan Behan’s mother, Kathleen Kearney (‘The blue hat’. (It was Behan’s grandmother, NB, who famously took her bath ‘every year, whether she was dirty or not’)). Her continued friendship with the Gore-Booths was particularly helpful, work-wise. She once remarked that she “went through the British aristocracy like the measles.”

Now and then, the increasingly ‘indomitable’ Purser was herself sketched and painted, among others by John Butler Yeats, WB and Jack’s father. JB’s somewhat beaky portrait especially seems to reflect not some head-in-the-clouds romantic artiste but a professional arts-and-crafts intellectual whose income, for the most part, came through her quite astute investments – in particular, in Guinness. Her large home, Mespil House, on Dublin’s Grand Canal, became, in John O’Grady’s words, ‘a salon frequented by writers, politicians, visionaries and revolutionaries.’

One contemporary describes this scene as ‘full of bubbling gaiety’, and Coxhead claims that Purser’s later portraits were ‘not done for money, but for love of good talk and good company.’ This may be true; but the family remembers her as something of a fierce old stick (‘not notoriously a cuddly creature’ was, I think, my father’s summary), who once threw out a burglar just by talking at him, and who, aged 89, demanded to be taken up by Oliver Gogarty (Buck Mulligan in Ulysses) in his private plane, to inspect the house roof, then wrote complaining to her landlord – to be informed, rather politely, that her lease had actually expired a decade previous.

Artistically, though, she’d become most definitely someone to be reckoned with. She was wont to give her sitters ‘a few scoldings and home-truths’ along with their likenesses; she objected strongly to Catholic bishops having their official portraits done in Rome, not locally; she once gave Yeats an earful for suggesting one of her artists’ windows was derived from an old German print; and in the last week of her life she wrote in fury to the President of Ireland (a former sitter) to excoriate him for the ‘bad art’ on a recent postage stamp.

With her caustic wit and enthusiasm for ‘discussion’ to the fore, and her personal network of poets, painters, politicians, and the occasional heavyweight boxing champion all around her, on the second Tuesday of every month, regular, she hosted, presided over, held forth, and generally tried to bend all aspects of the Irish national culture to her will. For thirty years her soirées were widely considered to be unmissable – if only in the sense that half the guests came primarily out of fear of what might well be said about them in their absence. It was not for nothing these ‘at homes’ became known to Dublin wags as Sarah Purser’s ‘dies irae’.

Still fuming at the business of the ugly stamp, she died on August 7th, 1943. Her funeral, her friends were not too grieved to note, was on the second Tuesday of the month.

I recently made a joke about my pregnant wife – and found myself receiving several pointers.

‘Have lots of sex before the baby’s born,’ said one.

‘Watch loads of movies,’ said another.

Couldn’t we just watch porn, and kill two birds with one stone?

Yours, &c.

ASH Smyth, by email

NAT. TEL. JESMOND 343.

Imperial Hotel,
Jesmond Road,
Newcastle on Tyne 15th Dec 1907

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My dear Victor,

…………………..It is my good fortune once more to ask you for your congratulations! This time it is on a very fine appointment as Navigating Officer of H.M.S. “Lord Nelson”, a battleship almost completed, and which is one of the finest in our fleet. I am a lucky young divil I know. The ship, which

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is Commanded by a very smart man, is to fly the Flag of the Admiral Commanding the Home Division of the Home Fleet, and my headquarters will therefore revert to the Thames, where I first had the greatest of all good luck — my meeting with the wife! How are things with you all. Accept for yourself and family every sincere good wish which is not

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only called forth by this season. (That sounds minced, but I mean they do on all the time!) I meditated a descent on Dublin at Christmas, but stern duty was asleep with one eye open and has intimated that, as I have to take 16,500 tons of stuff to sea for trials on the 8th January, and as a new ship is as much under control as a young wife, that I had better postpone my visits till a more fitting season. Truth to tell the trials are a big

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responsibility & anxiety in this foggy season, and I shall heave a sigh of relief if, & when, I bring her safely back and have some knowledge and experience to go on with. Perhaps late on I may slip away and I shall look forward to another yarn with you. In the meantime every good wish to you all from

Your affec. brother,

A.H. Smyth

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II

Confidential

Copy
Extract from Letter

×  ×  ×  ×

From  – – –  Admiralty
To      – – –  The Commander-in-chief, Grand Fleet.
No     – – –  M. 08900
Date   – – –  7. December, 1915.

×  ×  ×  ×

‘My Lords concur in your opinion that the interception of the “Kristianfjord” reflects great credit on Commander Adrian H. Smyth, and he is to be so informed.’

—

Commander A.H. Smyth, R.N.
H.M.S. “Teutonic”

For information.

(signed) D.R. De Chair
Rear-Admiral

“Alsatian”
9-12-15.

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For The Spectator