The Constant Nymph Read online

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Margaret Kennedy

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Introduction

  BOOK ONE

  Sanger’s Circus

  BOOK TWO

  Nymphs and Shepherds

  BOOK THREE

  The Silver Sty

  BOOK FOUR

  Three Meet

  The History of Vintage

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Avant-garde composer Albert Sanger lives in a ramshackle chalet in the Swiss Alps, surrounded by his ‘Circus’ of assorted children, admirers and a slatternly mistress. The family and their home life may be chaotic, but visitors fall into an enchantment, and the claims of respectable life or upbringing fall away.

  When Sanger dies, his Circus must break up and each find a more conventional way of life. But fourteen-year-old Teresa is already deeply in love: for her, the outside world holds nothing but tragedy.

  About the Author

  Margaret Kennedy was born in 1896. Her first novel, The Ladies of Lyndon, was published in 1923. Her second novel, The Constant Nymph, became an international bestseller. She then met and married a barrister, David Davies, with whom she had three children. She went on to write a further fifteen novels, to much critical acclaim. She was also a playwright, adapting two of her novels – Escape Me Never and The Constant Nymph – into successful productions. Three different film versions of The Constant Nymph were made, and featured stars of the time such as Ivor Novello and Joan Fontaine; Kennedy subsequently worked in the film industry for a number of years. She also wrote a biography of Jane Austen and a work of literary criticism, The Outlaws of Parnassus. Margaret Kennedy died in Woodstock, Oxfordshire, in 1967.

  ALSO BY MARGARET KENNEDY

  The Ladies of Lyndon

  Red Sky at Morning

  The Fool of the Family

  Return I Dare Not

  A Long Time Ago

  Together and Apart

  The Midas Touch

  The Feast

  Lucy Carmichael

  Troy Chimneys

  The Oracles

  The Wild Swan

  A Night in Cold Harbour

  The Forgotten Smile

  TO MR AND MRS ROLF BENNETT

  INTRODUCTION

  The years have not been kind to The Constant Nymph. Though the novel in itself has aged notably well, this oddly titled work has suffered from neglect, slipping from public awareness as its author has fallen perilously out of fashion. Nymphs themselves, as a concept, are hardly in vogue.

  Yet The Constant Nymph was a runaway bestseller of the 1920s, shifting one million copies in its first five years, inspiring a play starring Noël Coward and John Gielgud and three films. It was praised by critics from J. M. Barrie to Walter de la Mare and Cyril Connolly. Most importantly, it is a hugely enjoyable novel, both entertaining and psychologically profound.

  Margaret Kennedy was of her time, but in vital respects very much before her time. Published in 1924, The Constant Nymph is startlingly modern in its outlook, the bohemian world it conjures being in many ways more progressive than the society we find ourselves inhabiting almost a century later. Its central theme, however, is more unpalatable today. A girl of just fifteen elopes with a man she has loved throughout her childhood: a suitor twice her age, who is her father’s friend. While the status of the similarly disturbing masterpiece that is Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita remains intact, this is obviously a problematic premise and may have contributed to The Constant Nymph’s fall from grace. Michael Arlen’s The Green Hat and Hervey Allen’s Anthony Adverse, huge bestsellers of the 1920s and ’30s that were also filmed, are now virtually unknown. Tastes change. But then they change again.

  Margaret Kennedy seems to have experienced the type of respectable English life that she observes so objectively. Born in 1896 in Kensington to an upper-middle-class family, her father a barrister, she was brought up in Kent and educated at Cheltenham Ladies’ College followed by Somerville College, Oxford, which produced a rich seam of female novelists: her contemporaries were Vera Brittain, Dorothy L. Sayers and Winifred Holtby. Kennedy’s first publication was a history textbook, then her novel The Ladies of Lyndon, followed by The Constant Nymph in 1924, which made her name. She married a barrister, had three children and worked as a novelist and playwright all her life, dying in Oxfordshire in 1967.

  Her first novel, The Ladies of Lyndon, is a fine piece of work, but only sold in any quantity after the success of her second. In The Constant Nymph Kennedy’s command of her material is apparent from the opening page. With a perfectly distanced irony, reminiscent of Stella Gibbons’s Cold Comfort Farm, she satirises public attitudes towards a composer, neglected in his homeland during his lifetime, but posthumously lauded: ‘his idiom … discovered to be Anglo-Saxon’. British society thus delicately skewered, she moves on to the real story behind the national treasure.

  Albert Sanger has spent most of his life in exile, gathering wives, children and minions with little regard for much, beyond his music, as he travels about, regularly dragging ‘his preposterous family’ to a chalet in the Austrian Tyrol. Having produced at least seven children who are ‘ignorant of obedience, application, self-command or reverence’ by two wives and a mistress, he proceeds to neglect this rabble known as ‘Sanger’s Circus’, while passing on a legacy of chaos, freedom and musical ability.

  The towering character that is Sanger dominates the novel, to the point where it is easy to fail to notice that he doesn’t appear in person for the first fifty pages, and then makes only one further entrance. The ‘scandalous legends which collected round his name’ are colourful enough for us to understand his impact. With barely sufficient room or food for the family, the house attracts a stream of guests and hangers-on who are willing to visit Sanger on an Alp that is accessible only by train, hotel stay, lake and then a considerable climb. It is fascinating and utterly delicious to read about this ramshackle family running free about the mountains, squabbling, singing and disappearing as they wish. Widely thought to be inspired by Augustus John and his family, the bohemian pandemonium seems genuine – neither viciously mocked nor idealised, but presented for what it is. Unmanipulated, all senses fed, the reader can but revel.

  As in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, where the early Transylvanian section remains in the mind although much of the action occurs elsewhere, the most memorable scenes here are those set in the wildness of the Tyrol. As in Dracula, the first section sets the tone for the whole novel, and although Chiswick and its environs are well described later on, and later scenes in Brussels are bathed in drama, it is those chill mountains that one associates for ever with The Constant Nymph. These are joyful chapters, their humour, acute observation and beautiful prose showing Kennedy – who was only twenty-eight when this, her second novel was published – at her very finest. The mountains are evoked with poetry and simplicity: ‘The air of the snowfields, sharp and cool, came in puffs through the warm, heavy smell of chestnut blossoms … the shouts of the herd boys echoed across the clear dark air in the valleys.’ Merely the mention of a cowbell sounding in the distance, cold air lifting the hair, or shadows on the mountains is enough to transport the reader.

  Above all Margaret Kennedy is clear-sighted. She is blind neither to the ‘dreadfulness’ of the household nor to its delights, but refuses to romanticise, despite her achingly romantic setting and love story. One of its most interesting qualities is that this is in many aspects an anti-romantic romance. The protagonists, Lewis Dodd and Teresa Sanger, are both described as ‘plain’; Lewis has a ‘thin, rather cruel mouth … and unmannerly ways’,
and in fact Kennedy never shies away from describing her male hero’s considerable faults – he is no Heathcliff, a romanticised brute, but rather an interestingly and sometimes alarmingly imperfect character, who is so cross, rude, shabby and selfish but brilliant that we want to know more about him. It is Teresa’s understanding and acceptance of ‘this savage youth’ that is the key to their love.

  When the novel starts, with old family friend Lewis Dodd and typical admirer Trigorin climbing the mountain to visit the legendary Sanger, the identity of the nymph in question is unclear. The likeliest candidate seems to be the beautiful older sister Antonia, who has run off with a man and scandalously lost her virginity. Again Kennedy spurns the obvious, and Teresa has no apparent nymphic qualities in the Nabokovian sense. Daringly, she is ‘the least attractive of them; in feature and person she might almost have been called ugly’, with none of the talent so apparent in her siblings; but she has an integrity, transparency and natural wildness of spirit that Lewis appreciates and has always loved. Teresa is no obvious heroine; in fact we have no clear picture of her, whereas Sanger, Lewis and Florence are more fully drawn. But she is no tabula rasa, or underdog, for the reader to champion, either. What she possesses, as the title states, is constancy. Teresa is ‘an admirable, graceless little baggage … unbalanced, untaught, fatally warm-hearted’. She is essentially unknowable: we are, to an extent, told what to think of her, and her love for Lewis is whitewashed to appear entirely innocent – ‘the constant simplicity of her young heart … her love was as natural and necessary to her as the breath she drew’.

  Kennedy’s main theme, one that preoccupied her in other work, comes into play with the arrival of refined cousin Florence, who arrives to rescue the penniless Sanger orphans once their father has died. In her many novels Margaret Kennedy writes of women’s desires, and of how they can be crushed as duty and social expectation constrain lives. Teresa represents the opposite of this, though her path doesn’t lead to happiness, either. But Kennedy, here and elsewhere, is interested in the rebels, the free spirits, the brave outsiders who know themselves – though later novels concern the very domestic and social intrigues that she was satirising in The Constant Nymph, and are generally less well rated. She reintroduced the Sangers in The Fool of the Family in 1930, but without success.

  Florence develops as a character, but not in any positive sense. She is beautiful, well dressed and animated when she first sets foot in the Tyrol, only to encounter the naked Sangers swimming in the lake. In the first flush of her romance with Lewis she appears prepossessing, though the signs of her controlling nature are there. Here Kennedy shows the danger of a romantic imagination: Florence idealises and adores the very flea-bitten lifestyle she will later so despise.

  Ignorant of just how protected her upbringing has been, she has, she fondly thinks, had enough of ‘clever young men’, and is fascinated by the savagery of Sanger’s Circus: ‘Dressed like peasants, they looked wilder than the wildest mountain people.’ But what she is seeing is a glaringly utopian version, as she blithely ignores the dirt, hunger, immorality and at times brutality at play in this apparent Shangri-La upon which she has stumbled. ‘I’m so much intrigued by all these queer friends,’ she trills. To her father, they are ‘the sweepings of the earth’. To her brother, Lewis is ‘A shoddy Bohemian! One of these bad-blooded young ruffians who defy decency and call it art.’ Of course, the truth lies somewhere between their opposing visions.

  As in Elizabeth Taylor’s 1968 novel The Wedding Group, a commune-like community ruled by a selfish patriarch, the illusion of free choice, early marriage and the artefacts of bohemia are superbly portrayed and are reminiscent of a later era. The Sanger girls’ bedroom could be a 1960s hippie pad: ‘a large barn of a place with very little furniture … the entire wardrobe of the other young ladies lay about permanently in heaps on the floor amid books, music, guitars, cigarette ends, cheery stones, and dust’. Florence, the innocent abroad, is dangerously attracted to all she finds, and there’s a terrible Schadenfreude at work as the reader watches her falling straight into a trap of her own making.

  One female protagonist – Teresa – is conditioned to desire a creative barbarian, her male role-model Albert Sanger; the other – Florence – imagines this is what she wants. She is determined to marry Lewis, and she tends to get what she aims for. This is a knowing portrait of civilised society’s fascination with the concept of the noble savage and the dissonance that results.

  Lewis is so obviously Sanger’s replacement, and Freudian echoes ring through the story. There is an inevitability to the attractions and their outcomes. Not only does Teresa love a version of her father, but Florence’s respectable aunt had run off with the scoundrel Sanger, giving birth to four children who included Teresa. History repeats itself in concentric circles.

  Above all, Kennedy is a superb psychologist. As Anita Brookner so accurately says, ‘she knows the ways of men and women very well indeed’. Few writers are quite so psychologically astute, their characters’ thoughts so wincingly and exhilaratingly universal. This, again, is where the supposedly romantic writer bolts from categorisation, and her characters’ emotional lives are multilayered, complex and contradictory. They can make for uncomfortable reading. For example, when the love-struck Lewis’s proposal is accepted by Florence with far greater celerity than expected, he feels the chill of the reversal of his feelings, the immediate heart-sinking knowledge of what the marriage will mean.

  Florence sends the orphaned Sangers to school and attempts to civilise her feral lover by caging him in the house that he refers to as ‘the silver sty’, so that she may launch him upon musical society. This is exactly what Lewis has run away from, and what Florence thinks she has rebelled against. Once the children, ‘strange oaths’ intact, have escaped from school and Teresa is left to suffer between the warring Dodds, the pace of the novel undeniably flags. The theme begins to be repeated, as we are shown Establishment versus anarchy; ‘cultured provincialism’ stifling art; ‘the people who would chain [Lewis] and his labour to the chariot wheels of a social structure’ in conflict with the noble savages down from their mountain.

  Kennedy’s portrait of the English as a race is admirably clear-sighted. What is less admirable is the shocking and seemingly casual anti-Semitism that runs through the novel; this was in evidence in her first novel, and is here attached to the figure of Jacob Birnbaum, Antonia’s husband, whom the Sangers insist on calling ‘Ikey Mo’ and generally racially insulting. The Russian Trigorin is also a stock object of ridicule with his flourishes and enthusiasms, and Roberto the Italian is no more nuanced; but it is the portrait of Birnbaum that is truly offensive.

  Having married Florence without recognising that it is Teresa he really loves, Lewis has to understand what his nymph, with her unwavering devotion, has known all along. Her love is supposedly about innocence, predestination and childhood attachment rather than passion. But even so their romance and elopement are full of hitches, and the ending is both a shock and a staggering disappointment. To a contemporary reader, the conclusion may seem inexplicable as a plotting device, but for Kennedy this was an almost obligatory compromise, and it can only be read in context. The nymph could not be seen to have sex, so the solution had to be dramatic.

  If there is any message in this novel, it is that we should be true to ourselves. But even then there were punishments for authenticity, in an era in which unmarried sex could not be condoned. Kennedy was, like so many of her characters, constrained by her time; but her profound understanding of the perennial essence of human behaviour is her great achievement. She maintains an exquisite distance on the shenanigans of her players, but can plunge into their secret psyches with ease. This is a strange, wonderful and unforgettable novel. As a study of human nature, The Constant Nymph is ageless.

  Joanna Briscoe, 2014

  BOOK ONE

  SANGER’S CIRCUS

  1

  At the time of his death the name of Albert Sanger wa
s barely known to the musical public of Great Britain. Among the very few who had heard of him there were even some who called him Sanjé, in the French manner, being disinclined to suppose that great men are occasionally born in Hammersmith.

  That, however, is where he was born, of lower middle class parents, in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The whole world knew of it as soon as he was dead and buried. Englishmen, discovering a new belonging, became excited; it appeared that Sanger had been very much heard of everywhere else. His claims to immortality were canvassed eagerly by people who hoped soon to have an opportunity of hearing his work. His idiom, which was demonstrably neither Latin nor Gothic nor yet Slav, was discovered to be Anglo-Saxon. Obituary columns talked of the gay simplicity of his rhythms, an unmistakably national feature, which, they declared, took one back to Chaucer. They lamented that yet another prophet had passed without honour in his own country.

  But for this the British public was not entirely to blame; few people can sincerely admire a piece of music which they have not heard. During Sanger’s lifetime his work was never performed in England. It was partly his own fault since he composed nothing but operas and these on a particularly grandiose scale. Their production was a risky enterprise, under the most promising conditions; and in England the conditions attending the production of an opera are never promising. The press suggested that other British composers had been heard in London repeatedly while Sanger languished in a little limbo of neglect. This was not quite the case. The limbo has never been as little as that.

  Sanger, moreover, hated England, left it at an early age, never went back, and seldom spoke of it without some strong qualification.

  Appreciation, though tardy, was generous when it came. A special effort was made, about a year after Sanger’s death, and the Nine Muses, an enterprising repertory theatre south of the river, undertook the production of ‘Prester John’, the shortest and simplest of the operas. The success of the piece was unqualified. All the intelligentzia and some others flocked to hear, and proved by their applause how ready they were to appreciate English music as soon as ever they got the chance. There were no howls of rage such as had arisen when ‘Prester John’ was produced in Paris; no free fights in the gallery between the partizans and foes of the composer. The whole thing was as decorous as possible and the respectful ardour of the audience, their prolonged cheers at the end, left no doubt as to Sanger’s posthumous position in his own country. They were not unlike the ovation accorded to a guest of honour who arrives a little late.