Financial Times has the best two opening sentences I’ve read in a long time:
William Longfellow Wollacombe, the Royal Academician, an upright figure with whiskers and the face of a statesman, a man of great truth and purpose you would have said, endowed this world somewhat bountifully with children. Indeed, he was a shade careless about it, not sufficiently distinguishing between his own field and his neighbour’s with the result that the stern visage which has now gone out of fashion stamped itself rather freely on the new age, though with diminishing incisiveness.
The wonderfully vague sense that adultery and bastardry are rather like atmospheric phenomena that take place beyond one’s control conveyed here sets the tone perfectly for the comic clash at this book’s core. If the painter Wollacombe floats through his world blithely unaware of his impact on it, he is positively razor-sharp compared to his poetess wife, Ella, sometimes referred to as “Love-in-the-Mist.” On her brief and infrequent passes through the family’s home in Kensington, she is apt to stumble into one of the many children rambling unsupervised around the place, say “I seem to know you,” and then call out indefinitely, “Give him a penny!” before passing out again.
There are, in fact, thirteen Wollacombe children, bearing artistic names such as Leonardo, Perugino, Rubens, Ingres, Veronese, Gentile, and Lippi and even more artistic manners: “They wrote, painted, made sculpture or played instruments from birth.” They gather like birds when they need to eat, descend upon unwitting grocers, taking away whatever foods strike their fancy, and signing off on hugely marked-up bills against their father’s account. Fortunately, Wollacombe is among the great artistic successes of the Victorian age: “He painted Cows. No gallery in England was complete without a number of Wollacombe Cows; no private house without one or two reproductions.”
One Wollacombe, however, is the odd number in this baker’s dozen: Titian. When his mother asks, “And what are you going to be when you grow up? Painter? Poet? Sculptor? Musician?” he snaps back, “None of that nonsense for me. I’m going into business!” Financial Times, in other words, is a fable about an ant in a world filled with grasshoppers. Unlike his siblings, Titian’s soul aches for order, and he insists on being sent away to boarding school. Fraser passes over this period with an observation some might find applicable to the current Conservative government:
We do not want to follow Titian through his schooldays: nothing could be duller. He used, later, to say that his schooldays were the happiest of his life. Men do say that. It shows they ceased to develop a short time after they left.
Titian takes all the pennies given by his mother and deposits them fastidiously in a Post Office account. And when, after leaving school, he rises quickly through the ranks of a commercial firm (his specialty is collecting outstanding debts), and is recruited by Kettering, the era’s grand financier, his father bids him a bitter farewell: “I can’t say I’m sorry you’re going. I never thought any one of mine would have sunk so low.”
Financial Times perfectly illustrates the principle that tragedy is the flipside of comedy (and vice versa). We laugh at the continual discord between upright Titian and the rest of the Wollacombe tribe. They accept him with a breadth of mind, a tolerance for all types, even a sort of affection — “rather like the affection of a scientist for some example of Neanderthal Man.” To him, though, their tolerance merely proved them utterly lacking in principle. To Leonardo et al., Titian is sad but comic figure. To the author, however, he is ultimately a tragic figure — for it’s clear from the start whose side Fraser’s on.
Despite the fact that Fraser was an accomplished and knighted administrator and civil servant, his greatest passion was for spiritual matters, especially the possibility of transcendence, of passing from this world to another realm of immortality and beauty. He saw art as one of the means by which we can build bridges between the two worlds, and so he has no choice but to take Titian through to a final judgment in the court of immortality. In Fraser’s hands, of course, it’s a kangaroo court, and it’s painful thing to witness. Painful and sadly, from an artistic standpoint, unsuccessful. Good comedy is its own reward. In Financial Times Fraser manages to earn a fortune and fritter it away trying to make a philosophical point. “There is little left to record,” he writes on page 200 — which is where he should have stopped writing. And if you take up Financial Times — which I highly recommend — I would advise you to make the editorial choice Fraser failed to. You won’t miss what you miss.
Other Reviews
- • Viola Garvin, The Evening Standard
- It sparkles with laughter and mischief; heaves hugely with a deeper mirth at the eternal comedy; gravely considers the temporal world and its mad affairs; pities both the sad and sick, both sinful and sorry, though with an aloof, measured tenderness in proportion to the larger issues. Above all, being afraid neither of beauty nor ugliness, but taking experience for the enriching thing it is, not afraid either of life or death.
- • Kate O’Brien, The Spectator
- Because Mr. Fraser writes at speed, keeps up his design of excess, overstatement and satire, sustains in all directions, pro and con his hero, a sense of non-reality, and presents a crowd of amusingly mythical figures, formal, grotesque, decorative and theatrically-lighted—his inverted theme, which might have been merely a statement, untenable, as an effect of fireworks, develops into a sustained amusement, imperfect and uneven, but well worth reading, and containing much that is colourful and out of the common. Hit or miss anyway, it is non-pedestrian, and aims at being an entertainment.