The Dance of the Opposites

Fragments from the third book of the autobiographical trilogy by Philippa Burrell

One of the finest autobiographies of the 20^ century. Colin Wilson

Introduction by Colin Wilson.
Epic. Outsider. Left behind.

In January 1981,1 received one morning a large blue-bound volume entitled The Isle, the Sea & the Crown. It was published by a press I had never heard of and, to my surprise, turned out to be a play about the abdication of King Edward VIII. I had never heard of the author, Philippa Burrell, but even the briefest dip into its pages revealed that she was a woman of remarkable talent.

An allegorical prologue in which Britain emerges from the waves gave the impression that it was going to be a vast poetic drama in the manner of Thomas Hardy, The Dynasts, but an opening scene in front of Westminster Abbey on Coronation Day in 1911,soon made it clear that she was just as much at home in the style of Noel Coward's Cavalcade. I read on with admiration and a certain astonishment - the admiration for the humour and deftness of the characterisation, the astonishment for the foolhardiness of such an extraordinary literary undertaking. This 326-page play was positively Wagnerian in its dimensions; by comparison, Shaw,s Back to Methuselah seemed unambitious. Methuselah had taken five evenings to perform; this, at a guess, would take ten. So what had driven the author to write such a monster, with no hope of performance, or even of reaching a wide audience? That was a baffling mystery. I wrote her a thank you note, congratulating her on a remarkable achievement, and received a warm reply in which she thanked me for my interest. But it contained no hint of what had led her to attempt anything so vast and impractical. I had to wait another eight years before my curiosity was to be satisfied.

In January 1989, I received another parcel from Philippa Burrell. This one contained the second volume of her autobiography. The Horses & the Charioteer, and a couple of photocopied chapters from its first volume. The Golden Thread. I began to read the photocopied pages, at first casually, then with increasing interest. She is describing how. in the mid-twenties, her mother was painting a portrait of the wife of the Prime Minister, Mr Baldwin. One day, Baldwin's private secretary. Colonel Sir Ronald Waterhouse, and Mrs Baldwin's secretary. Miss Chard, came to call on Mrs Burrell to commission a portrait, and Miss Chard - a pretty and rather scatty woman in her thirties - took an instant liking to the pig- tailed Philippa, who was then seventeen.. On a subsequent visit she took Philippa's breath away by asking her if she would like to become her assistant. The reason soon emerged when Philippa started the job. Miss Chard's real job was being Sir Ronald's mistress, and her skills as a secretary were minimal; soon, Philippa was Mrs Baldwin's defacto secretary and it did not take Miss Chard long to sense that she had a rival rather than a partner. During the General Strike, Philippa - a secret socialist - was on the side of the miners [as was the Prince of Wales] and Miss Chard became openly hostile. And after a violent row, Philippa resigned.

At this point, the photocopied section ran out. I wrote to ask Philippa Burrell if I could possibly read the whole book, and in the meantime, settled down to read volume two. And here, on page 3, I discovered the central theme of the book. The year is 1932, and Philippa is twenty four. As a result of reading a volume on the drama by Maurice Baring, she has decided that she will be a playwright. But now, in the Canadian backwoods, she finds her original excitement evaporating. 'For no reason that I could see, the fire cooled and then went out; the fine creative power drained away, the ecstasy dissolved around me and I dropped from that bright mastering reality, deflated and half dead'. This is the problem that baffles her and makes here miserable - the problem that had fascinated me from childhood; 'whither has gone the visionary gleam?' the problem that tormented the romantics of the 19^ century. It had been the subject of my first book The Outsider. But in that book I had emphasised that this is not simply the problem of the artist and the poet. It happens to everyone. There are moments when life is self- evidently marvellous, and we feel that we would like to live forever; then we wake up the next day, and everything is back to normal; we are again trapped in the 'triviality of everydayness' and the infinite promise seems a delusion. Philippa goes on:

'As a child in California, I had my first glimpse of reality and afterwards my high moods and my dull ones while I was searching for my task. Now that I had found it and seen reality again, I learnt how quickly it was lost, and that my task was going to lead me in and out of light and darkness, with more darkness to endure than light to breathe and leap in'. This is quite clearly the central subject of the book and I realised with excitement that she was a remarkable example of that relatively rare phenomenon, a genuine female 'Outsider'. When my book had appeared in 1956,1 had received many letters from women asking me why I had not written about female Outsiders. I replied that I had not been able to find any important examples. I suppose I could have written about Emily Bronte or Marie Bashkirtseffor even Virginia Woolf; but I suspect they

would have been diminished by comparison with Van Gogh and Nietzsche and Lawrence of Arabia. But if I had read Philippa Burrell in 1955 instead of 1989, I would certainly have included her - not because I think she is 'greater' than Emily Bronte or Virginia Woolf, but simply because her search for 'the golden thread" is so much the central theme of her life. In so many female Outsiders, unfulfilment is simply a matter of what Maslow called 'deficiency needs'; if Emily Bronte had found a real-life Heathcliff, she would have felt no need to write Wuthering Heights. Philippa Burrell" s search for 'the golden thread' was a genuine craving for some form of fulfilment that transcends most of our everyday needs.

I was now eager to read the first volume, and when The Golden Thread arrived I settled down to it with enthusiasm and found myself reading obsessively. The book is so good I was astonished that it is not better known. It opens with the positively Balzacian story of her grandmother, a brilliantly talented painter who fell in love with a handsome and talented young artist named William Luker, and married him inspite of her father's frantic and agonised objections. At first all went well; his paintings of Highland cattle were exactly what the Victorians adored. Then the fashions changed, and people ceased to buy his canvases; when he was finally rejected by the Royal Academy he was a broken man. But he placed all his hopes in his sons, believing that the eldest was a genius; in fact, Willie was a second-rater, and the youngest was a sex maniac. [Even Willie tried to seduce his sister, Philippa's mother Louie] But, like her own mother, Louie turned out to be a brilliant although unsuccessful painter who, when her husband died, was left with the task of bringing up her remarkable daughter. In fact, Philippa inherited the family dream of greatness. 1 have dreamed their dream and believed in my own genius, as they did, and followed the same irregular road, climbing and falling and losing my way, losing my conscience, going without pity and doing the same mad, shabby things. And when I changed and gave the world away for the dream, I lived rootless and floating, more demented than they, anchored to nothing but the purpose and power in myself. Yes, I am one of them and, like the masters and monsters, all the ineffectual geniuses before me, I may fail in my turn... '

And this is what makes The Golden Thread such a totally absorbing work. In a garden in Los Angeles, when she was eight years old, she had her first 'visionary' experience. 1 was playing alone one day when everything around me suddenly vanished. I left my present self and leapt forward into the future where I could see myself raised up and looking down upon the world. And the figure that I saw was a military hero... riding a horse and leading a great column of men while below me in the vacant lots were my friends, grown no bigger, still grovelling in

the dust playing the same childish games... I seemed to grow and grow in strength until I was filled with a marvellous power and I knew there was nothing that I could not do; that I could lift, I could lead, I could rescue the world'.

Understandably, this vision filled her with a sense of destiny, her own future greatness. But when she and her mother returned to London after the first world war, life was hard and depressing. She was sent to a school where her headmistress developed a violent passion for her, unrecognised by her mother, ; the lady was to pursue her insanely for many years. Then Louie was commissioned to paint a portrait of an industrial tycoon called Sir Vincent Caillard, and he also conceived a passion for the teenage Philippa.At first, she was delighted, feeling that she had at last found a father figure - this is a thread that also runs through her life - but was soon disillusioned when he began luring her into empty rooms to give her passionate kisses, or persuading her to sit on his knees and trying to explore under her dress. She jumped up but she did not slap his face and run away but endured all this because she didn't want to alienate someone so interesting and important.

It would give me great pleasure to continue to describe her life and quote from her remarkable book,, but if I did so, this introduction would become absurdly long. I can only say that, by this time, I had become so absorbed in her life and experiences that reading her had become an addiction.

She can be brutally frank about herself- about her desire to 'climb' in the world, about her 'acting and pretending' - and there are moments when she will remind some readers of Becky Sharpe. But the frankness is part of her fascination, and makes her marvellously readable. In India, she became engaged to a Gordon Highlander and lost her virginity . The trouble was that he bored her. She didn't like being 'owned and ordered', although she knew it would solve her financial problems. So she broke it off. She fell in love with an aristocratic cavalryman named John and for awhile they were deliriously happy; then his father ended the dream by threatening to disinherit him. Life seemed to be falling apart - and then once again, she experienced the revelation that had come to her as a child in Los Angeles; the recognition of all her failures and inadequacies, and the deeper sense of the reality of her true self. 'Gigantic in a field of glory, I danced for the remainder of the night, and in the morning, someone else rose from the bed, someone newly-made and different'. And here ends the first volume of what is surely one of the finest autobiographies of the twentieth century. In volume two, we learn of the failure of her first play in New York [in 193 8], and how she began to write her 'epic' about the sea and the abdication of Edward VIII - it was to take her sixteen years. When the war came she joined the ATS and fell in love with a major who was already married . But when the war ended, she returned to her 'epic', and the affair also came to an end. In 1950, she sent two of her plays to the actor-producer Gordon Craig, and then went to see him in Vence. Craig seemed to be exactly the kind of father-lover figure she had always been searching for, and the two embarked on a tempestuous affair, although he was 36 years her senior .But Craig himself was too mercurial - and too childish - for a permanent relationship. A few months, she finally met the man she had spent her life looking for, the Indian statesman Sir C.P.Ramaswami Aiyar, whom she heard delivering a brilliant speech at a PEN Club Congress. Soon after this he invited her to tea, 'And I knew that, at last, I had found my father-teacher-lover' He was almost thirty years her senior, but the relationship endured until his death fifteen years later

About this time, she had another strange experience. One day, while working, she had a vision of herself as a monstrous erection emitting seed . 1 could have been the bride and sustainer of men and mother of children if the opposite talent, equally sublime, had not been implanted in me at birth to turn me into a male begetter, a half mad beater of thoughts into forms into a Promethean furnace.' In 1954 she finished the epic and the second volume ends with her description of reading most of the play to an audience who crowded - uninvited - into the village hall, and spent most of the night discussing it. Inevitably, I began to read the third volume the moment the proof arrived. but since you are now holding it in your hands , I shall not even attempt to summarise it. I knew, of course, before I opened it that it was bound to be, in a sense, an anticlimax - after all, the only suitable climax would have been the triumphant stage production of the 'epic'. In fact, this failed to materialise, and the book itself was ignored. Yet if it happened, it would have been the vulgar, obvious triumph. What actually happened was more tragic and more interesting. Her obsessive quest of the 'golden thread' continued, and took her again to India, then to communist China. Back in England, her involvement with an extraordinary guru ended in disillusionment, while her work on a play about 'spirit communication', based on someone else's book ended in bitterness. Another play. The Journey - into which she poured all the money she could raise -was a failure in London. And the book ends on a note of self-questioning that has all her typically fierce and brutal honesty. It sounds almost as if she is subscribing to Yeat's comment that life is a long preparation for something that never happens . And I can understand why, to an eighty-year-old playwright whose work still remains unknown this should appear to be so.. But I can also see what she fails to understand, that in capturing her extraordinary life in such detail on paper, she has left behind a monument to herself that can bear comparison with Jean Jacques Rousseau. What happens to her plays is unimportant, they are a mere part of her. This autobiography, if not the whole, is something very close to it, and it is her justification. She has , after all, succeeded in leaving the most important part of herself behind.

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