John Hampson:

John Hampson: A Portrait and A Study

Sandown, off Sterling Road, in Nungambakkam, in the outskirts of Madras, will always be dear to me, for it was here that I first met John Hampson in the flesh. I already knew him by some of his penetrating reviews of modern English, American and European novels in the columns of The Spectator; an odd story or two, for instance, ‘Good Food’; and that elaborate article entitled ‘Movements in the Underground’ in which, as Elizabeth Bowen observed, ‘He used his incomparably wide knowledge of contemporary fiction to examine what present-day writers are making of the shadier side of life and society.’ We met by appointment, it was a Thursday morning, April 8, 1948; and this meeting was destined to ripen into a close friendship between us, of mutual inner discovery and enrichment, of dreams and ideas snared, through interchange of letters extending over seven years, till the day of his death on December 26, 1955 in a hospital in Solihull, Warwickshire, away from his home at Four Ashes near Birmingham. To those who knew him and his unique gift for friendship, it will be sad to contemplate, his rather sudden exit into the Unknown; to me, in my world, it has cast a cold shadow which has settled there since; to me, divided from him in race, creed and colour, the warmth he gave was as gracious as a benediction, such as I have rarely experienced from my own people; its constancy, its almost feminine tenderness, wrought the man himself.

II

Perhaps it is as well that I begin with an extract from a Spectator review of his. Hampson wrote:

‘Among the habitual readers of fiction there must be many like myself who, long before they ever made a first timid venture abroad, fell under the spell of India. My own enchantment lies in remote nursery days when, heralding the return of a soldier relative, large heavily sealed and corded packages arrived at the house. The rich, spicy, unfamiliar smells crept everywhere, and when at last, the treasures were spilt in prodigal splendour all over the floor and furniture of a staid English drawing-room, my innocent rapture was complete and India a word of magic.’

It was all there in him still–the childhood Wonder and enchantment and rapture, when he came out to this country in his middle years, though not its the role of the imaginative writer he had grown into. His visit to the South was more of a practical nature, made in response to the invitation of the Madras Government in connection with the study of juvenile delinquency, enquiry into which was then being conducted by Lieut. Colonel Ford Thomson, M. D., Ch. B., I. M. S. (Retd.), Adviser to the Government in Child Psychology (his work was later brought into a book, Ask the Children, published by Cassell in 1950). Hampson who had been doing research for over a year and a half, before his arrival here, into the problem of England’s anti-social children on behalf of the British Broadcasting Corporation, visited various Certified Schools in the Province, observing the reforms in progress for the forging of a new Madras Children’s Act. ‘Subsequently he broadcast his view of the subject on the training of the child at home, in a series of talks under the title‘The Child is Rarely Wrong’from the Madras station of All-India Radio.

III

Now let me return to that bright summer’s morning, eight years ago, when I met him at Sandown, where on the first floor flat he stayed as Colonel Thomson’s guest, during his six months’ sojourn in the City. I recall my initial impression of him, vivid to this day: a figure of medium height, with a broad brow, very little hair on the head and that thinning and grey, piercing alert eyes behind horn-rimmed glasses, wearing white trousers, white sleeveless shirt, and white plimsoils, remarkably neat, and English in every fibre of his being as I found the very moment he started talking to me, my mind registering what Don Salvador de Madariaga said about the national traits of the Englishman–‘his whole body emitting vitalised thought as if the thinking function in him were not concentrated in the brain, but spread uniformly all over his nervous system,’ but, in Hampson, controlled attractively to a gentle earnestness. Our conversation, I remember, centred round the writer’s situation in general, and at its end, aware of the purport of his Madras journey, I drew his attention to a note I had come across in John O’London’s Weekly¹ for May 17, 1946, which stated that John Arlott, who was for a time a police-sergeant in a South London division, and he, were collaborating on a work with juvenile delinquency as theme, illustrating its different aspects through the medium of the long-short story. No, he said, the plan had fallen through. Then I asked him, would he be interested to see some of my stories already collected in volumes, and, if he would and liked them, care to write an introduction to a new collection which, in MS, was awaiting publication? Yes, he would very much; and he did indeed, a masterly analysis of the short story as an art form, and of some of its greatest practitioners, past and present. ² A week or so before, he had lectured in the City under the auspices of the Madras International Fellowship at the residence of Mr. T. R. Venkatarama Sastri, C. I. E., a liberal in politics, of the Gladstone-Morley tradition, who was one of the topmost in the legal profession.

It was, I think, in late March that Hampson gave his talk to a crowded audience; the subject was ‘Social Trends in the English Novel.’ Here, at Mr. Sastri’s, he met a few writers. Then to reach a wider audience–happy chance–with his opinions on the art and craft of writing, Hampson followed up his International Fellowship lecture with an A. I. R. broadcast, headed ‘The Author in His Works’³ which proved to be of special value to the Indian writer.

IV

After our first promising meeting at Sandown Hampson and I kept up our contact: exchanging little letters delivered by post and bearer, calling to see one another at our places off and on, getting to one of the finest restaurants in town to tea occasionally, going about the local museum looking at paintings and sculptures, seeing a new film sometimes, walking the seashore of evenings–the beach at Madras is most beautiful–and then, to crown all, one lovely day, when the weather was uncommonly generous for midsummer, driving to Mahabalipuram to sightsee the rock-cut temples and caves and carvings. The English poet Louis Mac-Neice has written a moving poem on Mahabalipuram from which I cannot resist quoting the concluding lines:

A monochrome world that has all the indulgence of colour,
A still world whose every harmonic is audible,
Largesse of spirit and stone;
Created things for once and for all featured in full while for once and never
The creator who is destroyer stands at the last point of land
Featureless; in a dark cell, a phallus of granite, as abstract
As the North Pole; as alone.
But the visitor must move on and the waves assault the temple,
Living granite against dead water, and time with its weathering action
Make phrase and feature blurred;
Still from today we know what an avatar is, we have seen
God take shape and dwell among shapes, we have felt
Our ageing limbs respond to those ageless limbs in the rock
Reliefs. Relief is the word.

It was an exciting day in our time together, this visit to Mahabalipuram, and all too soon the exciting time came to an end. On the morning of July 11, 1948 Hampson left for England, with a couple of days’ stop at Bombay, the first stage of his journey home by ’plane. About five months after his departure I read MacNeice’s poem. It filled me with nostalgia for my friend’s company again at Seven Pagodas to watch the scudding seawaves break and throw their spume on the Shore Temple and listen to the whistling of the casuarinas from the plantation above the margin of the sea...

V

While at Madras, Hampson had presented me with two or his books: one, a copy of his first novel, Saturday Night at the Greyhound–aPenguin edition, and the other, The English at Table–thatlively account of the fine art of English cuisine, a non-fiction work delightfully parergal to his main occupation as a novelist–inscribing it with the words: “A taste of strange dishes, but salted with affection.” Once in England, he began sending me, one after another, the rest of his novels: 0 Providence, Strip Jack Naked, Family Curse, The Larches (with L. A. Pavey) Care of ‘The Grand’ and The Sight of Blood, ‘the first short story I wrote that came anywhere near my aim: it marked a definite step in my progress as a writer’ (he says in the course of a brier Prefatory note)–a limited edition copy. In the innumerable talks we had, about my writings, his, and those of other authors–E. M. Forster, Andre Gide, Somerset Maugham, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, William Plomer, Ernest Hemingway, William Saroyan, Elizabeth Bowen, Ivy Compton-Burnett, and Virginia Woolf being the important ones (and when he talked of Virginia Woolf, the word ‘immaculate’ tumbled immediately, adoringly from his lips)–he had let me into the ‘biography’ of this story: how as a result of the interest Leonard and Virginia Woolf had taken in it, it was published in Life and Letters by Desmond Mac-Carthy. It is a simple yet subtle, narrative of a ‘delicate’ boy who swoons of a sudden during a haircut and awakens to a sense of his own importance; the cloth of the barber’s shop into which is woven a tale of woe is a triumph in both form and content. I have not read Hampson’s Two Stories issued in the series of handprinted Blue Moon Octavos by E. Lehr: ‘The Mare’s Nest’ and ‘The Long Shadow’, though I happened on a notice of thesein The Times Literary Supplement (January 28, 1932); of Man about the House, I only know the title. It is the common fortune of limited editions to become Connectors’ items.

But this is hardly the place for any critical appraisal of his novels and short stories; I would refer the reader to the excellent introduction written by William Plomer to the Century Library re-print (Eyre and Spottiswoode) of Saturday Night at the Greyhound published in 1950. Mr. Plomer sums up thus:

‘The general flavour of his work is what may be called very English, because of its subject matter, its sobriety and directness, and its discovery of deep and unsentimental tenderness; it is also very personal, not because of any intrusiveness on the part of the author, but because nobody has written about the same themes in the same way.’

Sobriety and directness–these are the fundamental qualities which mark all Hampson’s work, set off by an adamantine integrity and a prose so unaffected that its rhythms seem to be a magic of the mind speaking in undertones, its tautness a sheer sleight of the hand. Acknowledging personal relationships and their reactions at every conceivable level–beautiful tender, sordid, ugly, mean, vain, stupid–he is an adept at characterisation.

There was a hiatus of thirteen years since the publication of Care of ‘The Grand’ before Hampson brought out another novel. It was A Bag of Stones published by Derek Verschoyle in 1952.

If Saturday Night at the Greyhound was deservedly famous outside England, A Bag of Stones was bound to achieve even greater reputation. Coming as it did four years after its author’s visit to India where he had been on a special purpose–to give his suggestions for the reformation of delinquent youth in this country, with his expert knowledge of British Child Guidance Clinics and Borstal Institutions–the novel has great validity both as a psychological documentary and as a work of art. Slender is its story but inexorable in the gradual unfolding of a most hideous antagonism between father and son–cool contempt of the father versus the impotent fury of the son–and how different and farouche from- the motif of The Larches, ‘that pathetic novel,’ as Sean O’Faolin remarked, ‘whose silences of thought go echoing through the mind like a cock-crow, with something of the wistfulness and melancholy of that hour before sun-up, and its pastel colouring.’ The novel opens with a premonition of dread for all the sunlit happiness of mother and son; slowly but surely, as night follows twilight, the tragic gloom deepens, wrapping the reader in its black pall, till, finally, pity purges him to a sound and pristine health. There is no kind of any sickly hangover; Hampson applies the catharsis with the compassion of a healer of things. From the day Albert Hadden returns from the war till the hour of his gruesome death, the scenes build of themselves in tune with the tension created, through emotion and environment, emphasis and exaggeration which are veridical: Joe’s schooldays, his fugitive happiness when he stayed with Archie, Aunt Susan, and Uncle Ted; Albert’s worming himself into the secret of his wife’s bank book and his appropriation of the money she had so fondly accumulated for Joe, Elizabeth’s death and funeral and the un-ashamed disposal of her clothes before she was hardly cold in her grave; Joe’s marriage and the final struggle between Albert Hadden and his daughter-in-law whose spirit refuses to be cowed even in the most squalid and terrifying circumstances. The tragic ending is inevitable, although one sees Joe ‘very near a triumph’ when Ruth tells him that she is with child, and all his misery lifts as if by magic.

The dedication of A Bag Of Stones to Ford and Virginia Thomson is significant. They were Hampson’s hosts during his stay in Madras, and Madras knows Colonel Thomson’s splendid work in this province for the anti-social child.

VI

My task as critic is done, I must now call him by his Christian name. How much India meant to John, and our friendship to both of us, is borne out by his letters to me written over a septennate. As man and writer he was quite serious–the essential side to his character and easily discerned. But this is not what I need to remember; it is his quirks of sportiveness  which had a childlike charm and broke like sunbeams, rarely, through his seriousness that I shall remember forever. He talked as he wrote, with straightness and simplicity. He was soft-spoken, his voice was instinct with a strange urgency, a subdued fervour that sprang from a heart which was in its right place. Not once during the days that drew us closer to one another when he was in the City did I hear him complain of the Indian heat nor see him weary or fretful. All his creative writing, he told me, he did in the early morning, which he had always been doing–a fact which I find John Lehmann mention in his Autobiography I: The Whispering Gallery while alluding to John. ‘It has always seemed to me,’ Mr. Lehmann writes, ‘that this was an excellent solution to the everlasting problem of how an author without private resources should earn his basic living, with only two draws: one, the necessity of waking with the lark, and two, the inability to move about, travel abroad, renew the store of impressions and experiences that a writer should never allow to become exhausted if he cannot–and who but the most exceptional genius can?–rely entirely upon the memories of childhood and early youth.’ John, as is known, had his responsibilities to the Wilson family with whom he lived, which perhaps necessitated his seclusion; it is known too that in the character of young Justin Stonetun, in 0 Providence, he put something of himself; but formy part, having read all his novels with minute attention to details of the English milien he dealt with–though there might be subtleties and allusions which must remain obscure to any but an English born–I remain strong in my conviction that John gave of himself profoundly and in such tiny bits as would satisfy the needs of artistic creation, and that there was no depletion in the store of his material garnered fromthe periods of his childhood and youth. Yet he was avid for adventure and experience; even as a boy India had enchanted him and it was a benevolent Providence that brought him to this country forwhatever enrichment he sought for himself: ‘India opened all sorts of doors for me’, he said, in utter gratitude of the heart.

Of all modern writers–and two of these are of an older generation: E. M. Forster and Somerset Maugham who have been holding the English literary stage successfully for half a century now–there has been no wider traveller than Maugham who went almost all over the globe between the two world wars. Here is what he said to Cyril Connolly when Mr. Connolly edited Horizon, the subject of their talk being the opportunities for new writers and ‘where they should go to find themselves.’

‘...India (said Maugham)–that is above all the place. Not British India,⁴ but the South, the native states. When I went, I avoided the British; I got letters to the native rajahs and sages and their courts; and I found, the moment people discovered you hadn’t come to sell them anything, such courtesy and desire to help and make you understand, as I’ve never found anywhere. Nothing is so fascinating as the Indian mind and the Indian intelligence once you are admitted to it, and there are quite extraordinary people to be met, absolutely remarkable. We know nothing about them, and we’ve never made (except for E. M. Forster) the real effort to understand.’

I have no doubt that John found himself in India. When Colophon in John O’London’s Weekly for April 14, 1950, wrote about the Midland ‘School’ of writers who came to prominence in the ‘thirties–the late Edward J. O’Brien, connoisseur of the short story hailed them as the ‘Birmingham Group’ which included F. L. Green, Walter Allen, Leslie Halward, Peter Chamberlain–he permitted himself the luxury of an idle speculation: ‘The best known of these Midland writers before the war was John Hampson (Saturday Night at the Greyhound). He seems to have given up writing. John was indignant and replied at once to say:

‘Indeed I’ve not given up writing: have recently finished a book called Madras Adventure, the result of several months’ observation of amazing work done among anti-social children (juvenile delinquents–horrid term!) by Col. Ford Thomson. In addition, my six month’s in India provided me with notes for a travel book and several short stories, one of which The Poet, will appear in the autumn issue of Penguin New Writing. ⁵

It was my good fortune to publish four of his other Indian stories in Swatantra–(ofwhich I was literary editor at that time)–proof of his genuine love and understanding of the real India, not the slick, smart, Anglo-India of British domination, with its clubs and cliques and class snobberies. He had come to a free nation.

I was proudly owning it that I had no regrets in my life. But one has come now; the more heavy for the absence of any before. It was the break in correspondence between John and me for almost a year before his death, though each knew that the other was in his thoughts. In February 1953–the month, I got married–he was involved in a nasty car smash, ⁶ fracturing his jaw badly and had to be in hospital for a week as in-patient and afterwards as an out-patient for several weeks to get it right and healthy again. And then though we had decided to collaborate on a novel with the partition of India as ground, as early as Christmas 1952, we could not make much headway because of family and other responsibilities for me, and certain unforeseen difficulties for him, too.

I stay with my regret. I had looked forward so much to picking up the lost thread of our correspondence and feel once again the warmth of our epistolary communion, till some day we could meet in the body.

And we might have met–a melancholy thought now. I had planned a visit to England during 1951 when an elder brother of mine, M. S. Venkataraman, a Senior Geologist with the Geological Survey, Government of India, was on a two-year stay in London working in the Imperial College of Science and Technology. For purely domestic reasons, I had to abandon the trip. My brother was a guest at Four Ashes; he wrote to me about his wonderful experiences of the exquisite English hospitality he received at the hands of John.

VII

In the touchstone of India John discovered the true purity of his gold. ‘I find myself setting out in a new direction as it were,’ reads his letter to me, of November 9, 1949; ‘it is rather like beginning all over again, and I feel rather like the young bird, with wings uncertain and fluttering; none of this matters very much though, for in spite of a re-orientation I do not doubt my gift, and I enjoy that inner harmony and happiness which rewards the creative person more surely than the foolish world.’

He believed in hard work, he was an exacting critic of himself and of other writers. The steel of his honesty matched the gold of his benevolence. There was an aura of calmness about him that was the very quick of life. ‘He belonged’, in the words of E. M. Forster whom he loved so well, ‘to the aristocracy or the sensitive,’ who ‘are sensitive for others as well as for themselves...considerate without being fussy’–never allowing his inner harmony of which he was certain to be upset by the hurly-burly of literary Caziques who hasten to put the palm into the hands of the less meritorious. He strove to be an integrated being and in that perpetual endeavour lay his tolerance and sympathy for the vulnerability of his fellow Den.

¹ I was a regular reader of this journal for an unbroken period of twenty-one years, from 1933 to 1954 when in September of this year it ceased publication.
² Hampson’s Introduction appeared in my book No Anklet-bells for Her first published in August 1949.
³ Printed in Triveni, Vol. XIX No. 12. July 1948.
⁴ That was before Indian Independence.
⁵  No. 40. September 1950.
⁶ It is quite singular coming to think of it, that a week before John got into this accident, a close friend of mine. M. Chalapati Rau, currently editor, National Herald, Lucknow met with a similar disaster, but had a providential escape. His letter to me dated, January 29. 1953 runs: “I was dumb, first. I was ill, intermittently. On Republic Day (Jan. 26), I and the cream of my staff would have been pulp in a ditch but for a miracle. It was a terrific crash, while going in a pick-up to a village. I have been wondering what was the miracle. Your marriage, I think.” M. C. here was referring to a rash vow I hold taken never to marry. I informed John of this.