FOREIGN COUNTRY: THE LIFE OF L P HARTLEY
An extract from the article ‘A Boyhood Hero’ by Charles Roberts in the Eastern Daily Press, 29 March 1996
When Norah (Leslie’s sister) died, Fletton Tower [the Hartley home in Peterborough] was put up for sale, and its contents auctioned. Adrian went over to look at the lots before the auction.
‘The two main executors of Norah’s will took me into her parlour. From a cardboard box they took a portrait of Leslie and handed it to me and said ‘The family would like you to have this.’ I was moved - and speechless.’ The small portrait in oils, within a solid gilt frame, shows Hartley as a young man, the face ruddy, the lips full, the eyes bland. It looked down on us in Wright’s sitting room at his home in Poringland, as we ruminated on secret countries of the mind and heart. That picture alone, one feels, is reward enough for Adrian Wright’s three and a half years’ of work on his biography. That the book has been lauded by critics and seems set for rewarding sales is a handsome bonus.
As Wright says with startling honesty in his introduction, ‘It seemed to me there was a link between us, a chain of communication, a spirit. Perhaps one of the reasons why I was so fascinated with him was that in his character I recognised much of my own: the eagerness to please, the deep craving for approval, the sense of isolation, the snobbishness, the feeling that the best has been long before - the list is long and largely discreditable.’
Coming across this article (a whole page in the broadsheet EDP) after so many years I realised, perhaps for the first time, how very generous it was of the late Charles Roberts, the EDP’s distinguished drama critic, to write it. I remember him phoning me at the time and telling me the EDP had asked him to do the feature. He said ‘It was the most difficult thing I’ve ever been asked to write.’ He left me in no doubt that he had been reluctant to take on the task!
As for those ‘secret countries of the mind and heart’ he wrote of, I believe that subsequently Charles found his own happiness - and perhaps himself - in France. I am pleased to be able to remember him here.
REVIEWS
Foreign Country reflects almost too accurately the desiccation and desolation of Hartley’s days … an absorbing book. Peter Parker, TLS
A real contribution to English literature. A L Rowse
This is an outstanding biography, in which Wright persuasively shows how, throughout his life, it was Hartley’s role to be a go-between: between the working classes and the aristocracy; between the heterosexual world and the homosexual one; between the novel as practised by James and Hawthorne and the novel as practised by Forster and Proust. He writes with arresting vividness. Elegantly written, rigorously researched, penetrating in its insights.
Francis King, SPECTATOR
Gripping … It paints a compelling picture.
Caroline Moore, SUNDAY TELEGRAPH
