Books: Wicked Tongues

CUSTOMS AND CHARACTERS by Peter Quennell Little, Brown; 176 pages; $16.50

As a biographer, historian, editor and critic, Peter Quennell has been one of England's radiant literary lights for more than half a century. He is also an assiduous collector and chronicler of eccentrics, a pointillist of foible, a raconteur without fear or peer. His latest memoir, drawn mostly from the '20s and '30s, is named Customs and Characters.

Here, he is largely concerned with Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury set that assemblage of brains and beauty whose wanton mores were matched only by their wicked tongues. Take for example passing conversations about Vivienne Haigh-Wood, the first wife whom T.S. Eliot left in 1933 after an unhappy marriage of 18 years. "None of the poet's associates appears to have known her well," Quennell observes, noting that Bertrand Russell "alleged once to have seduced her," then told a friend that she was, after all, "not so bad—light, a little vulgar, adventurous, full of life." Aldous Huxley echoed the endorsement, whereas Sacheverell Sitwell denied that she was vulgar.

Quennell, now 79 years old, is similarly uninhibited in describing Poet Victoria Sackville-West's celebrated affair with Virginia Woolf. The former's appearance, he writes, was "strange almost beyond the reach of adjectives . . . she resembled Lady Chatterley and her lover rolled into one." According to the author, Vita Sackville-West's husband, Harold Nicolson, and Virginia's spouse, Leonard, "observed the affair from the point of view of cautious guardians, determined that [Virginia's] unaccustomed feelings must not disturb [her] mental balance." Woolf's novel Orlando, "the direct result of her emotional adventures," was an immediate success, though Critic Quennell today finds it "embarrassingly arch and whimsical."

Writers, artists and beauties flit through Quennell's pages like guests at one of Lady Ottoline Morrell's parties. Here is George Orwell, with his face of "haggard nobility"; Novelist Ivy Compton-Burnett, "clever, sharp-nosed, sharp-chinned, close-lipped"; and Rose Macaulay, telling a friend at the end of her life, "I think I'm going to die in a fortnight. When are you pushing off?" Quennell writes affectionately of Artist Augustus John, with his gypsy ways and tribe of illegitimate children; John was immensely popular in his heyday, yet "had nothing of the fatuous outward bloom, the glossy patina of self-approval, that goes frequently with public fame."

Quennell was fascinated by Greta Garbo, whose beauty "was at times a burden—a valuable but perishable gift, like a magic snowball, held in the palm of the hand, that is bound to melt away." But he adds: "Beauty to be entirely irresistible should be observed across a gulf." The author has been married five times, in each case to a ravishing beauty.

Describing a colorful long-ago friend, Quennell almost casually defines a "character": "He was 'somebody,' a redoubtable human phenomenon, never totally silenced or permanently dismayed." The definition fits most of the people in Quennell's memoir, not least the author himself.