He told it like it was

Cardinal Newman and James Lees-Milne had these things in common: both were Roman Catholic converts; both were predominantly homosexual; each wrote about himself with brilliance; and both wrote lousy novels. Osbert Sitwell shared three of these attributes, but was not a Catholic convert and teased his boyfriend David Horner for becoming one.

Some will think it heretical, but I am tempted to add to the list of great self- portraitists who wrote indifferent novels, Compton Mackenzie, Anthony Powell and John Fowles. I recently reread Mackenzie’s Sinister Street (1913-14), wondering whether it could be adapted as a Merchant-Ivory type of film. It has fine passages of prose; but the whole thing is so shapeless and meandering that a movie script would be a very tall order. (In 1935, a disastrous film was made of Mackenzie’s novel Sylvia Scarlett: the New Yorker said, ‘It seems to go wrong in a million directions.’ I think that was Mackenzie’s fault, for in 1936 the same studio and producer — RKO and Pandro S. Berman — made the wonderful Astaire/Rogers showcase Swing Time, a revenge comedy which I prefer even to Top Hat.)

Powell was a born autobiographer and diarist; but his novels have always seemed to me like bad opera — set-pieces (‘arias’, if you like) such as the pouring of sugar over Widmerpool’s head, joined together by dreary recitative of the ‘I must go to the bathroom’. ‘Why must you go to the bathroom?’ sort. Fowles’s vivid journals have immediacy, but his novels are laboured and mannered.

How can one account for this odd dichotomy in the cases of these authors? Is it that they were only interested in themselves? No: Lees-Milne, in particular, has ultra-sensitive antennae which begin quivering when he notices somebody in distress. It is more, I think, that they could only record what they had actually seen and experienced themselves, with, in each case, the aid of a phenomenal memory.