Catherine Carswell - Lying Awake

MY mother left this book unfinished. She did not wish the work of her last years to be published until after her death, and although she worked persistently at it until her last illness, she refused to think of this book about herself as pressing, but rather as a reflective and prolonged spinning of the various threads of her life. However long she had lived, I think she would still have left the book behind still incomplete. In one of the many notes found among the material for this book notes meant for her own guidance but also serving as finger-posts for a future editor she says as much: End. Make it abrupt; no reason why it should ever end. Not in any form though informed by a theme. Merely an attempt to give the texture.

She died in 1946, a few weeks before her sixty-seventh birthday and very nearly three years after writing to me that she was working on something longer for which Ive been making notes for years. Every now and then she sent me a passage or referred to the tussle with the book Im trying to write, and the value she put upon it was a strange one. She mentioned once with mild disdain an excited author she had met purring over his first proofs; but after an air-raid she wrote that, What I think of most at the moment is how disgusting it would be for my papers and bits of things to be destroyed. She set no store by her book (though she had lived by letters for many years past) but she valued it, perhaps, more than any of her previous work. During three difficult years, this book, so eagerly begun, and pressed on today I made myself write for some hours at my book was the recurring ground-bass of her life. The war, her friends, her movements about England, even her illnesses and she had one serious illness during this time never succeeded in diverting her from this work. They were built into it, as suited her purpose.

During most of this time I was serving in the East, and heard, though constantly, only by letter. I knew, or had been told, that some day I should be the editor of this book, but I had every reason for hoping that day would not be soon. Although, when I returned to England in 1945, my mother was sixty-six, it never struck me that she was old; and her last illness was sudden and catastrophic. Not long before its onset she had been through and destroyed a great number of her many papers; but I am certain that everything she meant for this book survived. She had not yet given it a title, nor had she ever drawn up (so far as I have been able to discover) any complete scheme of the way in which she saw the book as a whole. She left me, too early, to understand and make good her intentions.

Before I went abroad I would neither have hoped nor have dared to attempt to do this; but four years of absence and constant correspondence brought me to know my mother and to understand her better, perhaps, than all the years that I had till then spent close to her. I began to understand how she had made a calling, not a profession of letters the distinction, of which my mother would have approved, is Virginia Woolfs; and in some ways I had always accepted this fact, as children and adolescents do. But then I came to see how it had been achieved, and at what expense and labour. The reading and editing of the material for this book have enlarged that awareness still more. As she says in the course of the book itself, and in many of her letters, she could not but be a writer, and though she once exclaimed to me, It is awful feeling that one would rather do anything than write! She immediately added, But one has to set against this the undoubted sense of conquest in having written.

She was a frank critic, both of her own and other peoples work, particularly when it smacked of the kind of intellectualising (as she called it) which marred a hopeful essay I once sent her from abroad: too many thoughts in it and not enough thought was her comment. She believed that successful writing demanded the history of thought, effort, secret failure which had been her own experience. How ill-read some of these lads are, she wrote to me once of that one among my contemporaries whom I had always thought the best read man I knew. He had, I think, owned up to having read only one novel by George Eliot. Her own reading, while she was writing this book, was wide, various and largely unfashionable Herzen, Alfred de Vigny, the Prince de Ligne, Dickens, Rabelais and T. S. Eliot, and for several weeks nothing but a small French dictionary every word from A to Z are random samples from a single years correspondence. As it is I rarely get started to the book till after supper, and my reading is done mostly in bed between 1 and 2.30 a.m. Then, though I dont usually get up at all early, I get sleepy during the day. Yesterday I lay on the floor and slept for two solid hours.

The book she was writing at this time this book was not intended to be a simple narrative of her own life. Even if she had lived to finish it I do not think she would have tried to give anything like a description of her most active years. The plan was rather to stake out her position in childhood and in old age, and to weave across the years which lay between, from one charted position to the other. I was meant, she wrote, if I may use a questionable expression which sadly dates I was meant perhaps to be a child and an old woman. I did my best in between, but in age the ecstasy returns without the agony, though it is not forgotten. This was the theme she hoped would inform the book, and even in this unfinished state one can see that she was successful. The two positions are clearly stated in detail; the process of casting threads between them has been begun; the texture can be discerned. Its author would have expanded and improved this book if she had lived, but she would not have wanted to alter its nature.

Some of the letters collected at the end of this book particularly those to Florence McNeill, will help to supply those middle and active years which my mother deliberately passes over almost in silence. The account which she gives stops short at the moment her career was beginning, when, beautiful and talented, she had just come back to Glasgow after studying music for two years at Frankfort. But instead of teaching music she turned to the Glasgow School of Art and then to Glasgow University then for the first time admitting women. She was studying English Literature and at the end of her first year was promoted to read honours under one of the universitys stars, Professor Walter Raleigh. She was twenty-four.

In 1904 she made her first, and an unhappy, marriage, which, after an early separation, was in the end annulled. She returned to Glasgow with her daughter Diana, and began a serious career as dramatic and literary critic, becoming a regular member of the staff of the Glasgow Herald. In 1912 the death of her mother dissolved the household in which she had been brought up (her father was already dead), and with her daughter she moved to London.

As a literary reviewer and dramatic critic on The Observer under St John Irvine she began to make a name. With Ivy Low, later the wife of Maxim Litvinov, she came to know D. H. Lawrence she describes the beginning of this friendship in the early pages of The Savage Pilgrimage, the narrative of Lawrence which she wrote shortly after his death. The friendship between them was one of the closest of both their lives. It was Lawrence who encouraged her to press on with the novel she had already begun about her youth in Glasgow, and in 1920