Books

Georgian Poseur

Gilbert Cannan: A Georgian Prodigy

Diana Farr

Chatto and Windus

Before even opening the book I could find two factors working against me. Firstly, it is a biography, which I generally think of as an excuse for writers either to form some all-embracing theory about the Artistic temperment, or merely to get all the dirt on their favourite notables. The other encumbrance was that I had never heard of Gilbert Cannan However he had some impressive credentials, listed on the book cover, and a virtual galaxy of friends, including Katherine Mansfield. Bertrand Russel and Dora Carrington.

My appetite thus whetted, I borrowed some of his works from the library: the small cluster of yellowing tomes suggests a lot of other people haven't heard of him either. I was surprised that he has dropped so far into obscurity, as his style is readable and sensitive, with a subtle underlying irony.

The most popular biographies deal with people who are more than a little eccentric, being read by duller-than-average people who experience life vicariously, or by jaded ones looking for new ideas. A Georgian Prodigy offers interesting reading for both categories, as it is about a man who not only hobnobbed with the luminaries of twentieth century literature, but had the added prestige of going gradually insane.

He spent the last thirty-one years of his life in exclusive mental institutions run like hotels. Farr's book follows a pretty standard format, tracing his life from childhood through literary and sexual development to his eventual decay. She also goes into the reactions of well known people of the day to Cannan's early fame.

Lytton Strachey described him as "an empty bucket . . . filled up to the brim with modern ideas simply because it happened to be standing near that tap." Shaw directed some of his venom at him in "Fanny's First Play". Many were incensed by Cannan's attacks on the London theatre for its sterility, and subsequently he began to establish himself in the younger literary circle surrounding Catherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry. Farr puts his unpopularity with the older group down to the latter's resentment of his early success mixed with a feeling of being deserted by him.

Gilbert was an artist suffering (typically) from feelings of inadequacy alternating with exaggerated ideas of his own uniqueness, apparently bred into all members of the Cannan family. "To be ordinary was, for them, to fail," says Farr. "Every Cannan was expected to make his mark and those males who were unsuccessful took to drink . . ."

Gilbert certainly made a mark on the literary world of his day but he also succeded in alienating the Cannans, mainly because six of his novels were autobiographical and fairly uncharitable to various members of his family. It was this rather than the unorthodox sexual habits of his literary circle which branded him as the "black sheep".

In true romantic style, Cannan's first major love affair, with sculptor Kathleen Bruce, was unconsummated. A convent-bred girl, Kathleen's feelings for Gilbert were on the whole maternal, and she was also engaged to the explorer Scott at the time. Farr sees Gilbert's singleminded pusuit of the unattainable Kathleen for several years as important among his love interests, notable because it was never used as inspiration for his writing.

Once the usual phase of languishing in the throes of unrequited love was past, Cannan went headlong into an affair with that other Romantic standby, an Older Woman. To make matters complicated, this one was already married to J.M. Barrie. The triangle gave Cannan a wealthy source of literary ideas, and the biographer an opportunity to devote several pages to comparing Cannan's virility with Barie's lack of it. In order to avert a scandal, Cannan is pushed into a marriage with Mary Barrie that he doesn't really want.

To Farr this reluctant transferral of an exciting intrigue, complete with ladders to bedroom windows, into an ordinary domesticity was another significant part of Cannan's life.

A Georgian Prodigy shows us a writer whose popularity was established remarkably quickly, but whose obsession with himself compelled him to write about his own life and the people close to him, thus treading on a lot of toes. After the onset of mental illness his writing consisted largely of hysterical letters to the newspapers denouncing society.

Diana Farr conveys the pathos of the writer in his later years by describing him posting those letters under the watchful eye of the sanitorium nurses, who later secretly destroyed them. She spares us any heartfelt musings about the terrible waste of one of the century's literary geniuses, while still giving a sympathetic account of what was indeed a tragic life.

Her style throughout is unpretentious without being boring, but for those who haven't heard of Gilbert Cannan, I suggest giving him a try first—he is well worth it.

Bridget Turnbull