Everything but Simplicity

MEREDITH (269 pp.) -Siegfried Sassoon -Viking ($3.50)

George Meredith was the Evelyn Waugh of the Victorians. He was wondrously clever, with a wit that snapped and crackled and never faltered through more than 20 novels. "His pages so teem with fine sayings and magniloquent epigrams, gorgeous images, and fantastic locutions," said Critic W. E. Henley, that "the mind would welcome a little dullness as a glad relief." Had he had the virtue of simplicity, in addition to his other talents, he might have been to English fiction what Shakespeare is to its poetry and drama.

'Humorist's Handicap. Born in 1828, the son of a tailor and naval outfitter, Meredith was redheaded, hardworking, and fond of boxing. At 21 he married a daughter of Thomas Love Peacock, whose novels are minor classics of his time. His wife was a poet, brilliant, beautiful, and six and a half years older than he. After bearing him a child, she ran off to Capri with a painter, returned in due time with another child in her arms.

Meredith refused to forgive her, a circumstance that led his early biographers to consider him hardhearted. Mary Meredith wandered from place to place, unhappy and alone; her husband was relentless until just before her death, when he allowed their son to visit her. Out of the tragedy of their life, Meredith fashioned the stylized poetic sequence, Modern Love, fifty 16-line sonnets of what Sassoon calls "highly perfected workmanship, constructed as a finely woven monodrama, and abounding in memorable passages and variety of mood." Poet Sassoon had thought that it must have taken him at least three years to finish the work; to his astonishment, he learned when he began his biography that Meredith had written it in three months.

Novelist's Poetry. Meredith's career was full of such prodigies of creation. He sometimes had two or three novels going at once, while he also read manuscripts for the publishing house of Chapman & Hall (he was their chief reader, and discovered Hardy), wrote poetry, and lived a reasonably full social life. His friends were critics and editors, poets like Swinburne, naval heroes like Admiral Frederick Maxse, or permanent officials in the Treasury, like Sir Alexander Duff Gordon. "Socially, they were swells; but they were unaffluent and unconventional swells."

Meredith lived in his little house at Box Hill near London, climbed the hill at dawn to watch the sunrise, went to the City one day each week to his office. When the authors whose manuscripts he accepted talked over their books with him, they were never told his name: he was referred to at his publishers' as "the reader." His first 16 books (until Diana of the Crossways) were failures.

Biographer Sassoon sees Meredith as being made uneasy by a sense of social inferiority. He was at 36 "anxious to be brilliant in conversation, and conscious that no reputation had preceded him as a person of any great importance." He would talk audaciously and cleverly, and suddenly turn about to ridicule half of what he had said seriously just before. He could not write quietly. In his novels, he never allowed a character to enter a room; there had to be some unexpected twist of phrase in the description. Among the "social swells" he was "more than ever defiantly aware of his natural high breeding and intellectual distinction"; among novelists, he was so impatient of stereotyped plots and usages that he was always inventing queer turns of situation and phrase that made his works seem almost like parodies of each other.

Poet's Novels. Siegfried Sassoon's life of Meredith is simple and unpretentious, written with warmth and good nature and an occasional bland parody of conventional biographical usages. He characterizes Meredith's novels accurately, admires them profoundly, judges them kindly.

Like most poets, he seldom seems to realize the arresting nature of his most valuable insights, and wastes in a sentence or a paragraph what might well have been a chapter of criticism. The informality and ease of his prose is engaging, and his portrait of Meredith in his old age, deaf, lionized, paralyzed, and still brilliant, is masterly.

Sassoon scarcely attempts to establish Meredith's novels as works of contemporary significance. Unlike Henry James, whose books can generally be read without an introduction, Meredith needs an interpreter for the present age. Many of his passages are still vividly contemporary, but they give way without warning to writings so fantastically affected as to be almost unreadable. In unpredictable parts his work was compounded of fractured metaphors and broken cliches, like the work of a philosophical Sid Perelman; it depended on a knowledge of thousands of stilted conversations in romantic novels, scrambled allusions to stock Victorian attitudes and poses. Yet, with all the queerness of his novels, the characters are alive; it is as if a Hardy and a Max Beerbohm were collaborating.

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