I bought Viva King’s autobiography, The Weeping and the Laughter, on the strength of a single review: “How pleasant to know Viva King even if it only be at second-hand through this candid and amusing book.” It also said that “There were few of that period [Bloomsbury, 1920s] whom Viva King did not come to know.” Ezra Pound greeted her naked once (he, not she). She corresponded with Augustus John, dined in Soho with Norman Douglas, had Ivy Compton-Burnett and her partner Margaret Jourdain to tea. Maurice Richardson quipped in the Observer, “If you fired a shotgun at one of Mrs. King’s parties you would risk peppering half the characters in the novels of Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell.” Anthony Blond wrote that trying to keep track of the people who flash through King’s pages was like trying to read the names of stations on a fast-moving train.
But reviewers also noted her reputation for exceptional generosity; Richardson called her “a sort of British Higher Bohemian Mother Courage” and admired her honesty in writing of an affair she had with a sailor 40-plus years her junior when she was 70 — despite his tendency to make off with her jewelry. (She offers a fastidious way of saying that her lovers were uniformly bad at foreplay: “I needed revving up — and though the men may have had the right tools, they were bad mechanics.”)
When, as is my habit, I went in search of other reviews of Viva King’s book, I quickly discovered that “The Weeping and the Laughter” is a popular title. The phrase comes not from Shakespeare, as usual, but from an Ernest Dowson poem whose title, “Vitae Summa Brevis Spem Nos Vetat Incohare Longam,” is taken, in turn, from a poem by the Roman poet Horace (translation: “The brief sum of life forbids us the hope of enduring long”). Dowson’s poem is appropriate for an autobiography written in one’s eighties after a long and busy life:
They are not long, the weeping and the laughter,
Love and desire and hate:
I think they have no portion in us after
We pass the gate.They are not long, the days of wine and roses:
Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
Within a dream.
That hasn’t prevented other authors from using it for their own purposes. So, let’s take a look at some of the other books with this title.
The first, from what I can determine, to use the title was the English translation of this German novel about the murky details surrounding the murder of a Hamburg businessman. Married to a dancer whose career was cut short by an accident, Ernst Tylmann never understood the artistic temperaments of his wife or their three children, so the police suspect any of them might have killed him for his sheer obtuseness. Several reviewers compared the novel to Crime and Punishment — and then quickly added that Maass lacked Dostoevsky’s obsessive intensity. This may be one of those books whose cover outrates its contents.
Vera Caspary’s publisher boasted that The Weeping and the Laughter was her “debut in serious fiction” — which, of course, is a slight against Laura and previous novels that were marked as suspense or murder mysteries and consequently, not “serious.” The mystery here is Beverly Hills widow Emily Arkwright’s own psyche and motivations. Why did she attempt suicide when she was, on the surface, popular, happy, and successful? Dorothy B. Hughes — no slouch at writing “serious fiction” mislabelled as suspense herself — called it a fine portrait of “the self-sufficient modern woman who will break before she will bend.” This was reissued some years ago by the Murder Room Press, but for some reason, Amazon reports the Kindle edition is “out of stock” (is this even a thing?).
Julian Maclaren-Ross, who might have caught some buckshot had a shotgun been fired at one of Viva King’s parties (he was X. Trapnel in Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time), took the phrase as the title for his first memoir. This volume covers his childhood up to the age of ten. Born in Ramsgate, he wrote that his first memory was of seeing an attack by German Zeppelins (an astonishing feat if it was the first raid on Ramsgate in late 1914). Arthur Marshall wrote in the New Statesman that some of Maclaren-Ross’s recollections were “probably tosh,” but overall the book gave a “charmed pleasure” and was “immensely engaging.”
When it was publised, The Weeping and the Laughter was intended to be the first of a total of four books of autobiography. They even had titles: Threnody on a Gramophone, The Sea Coast of Bohemia, and Khaki and Cockayne. Drink, poverty, and chaotic habits undermined his plans, and it was up to London Magazine editor Alan Ross to assemble posthumously his fragments into Memoirs of the Forties (1965), which achieved a success that eluded Maclaren-Ross during his lifetime. These were subsequently combined with The Weeping and the Laughter and other pieces into Collected Memoirs, which was published by Black Spring Press in 2005. I’m shocked to see that this edition been out of print for over a decade now. Unacceptable!
I include this only for the sake of completeness. This is the sort of book that no one bothers to review. The publisher’s own jacket blurb suffices to explain why:
Kate Fielding – a widow, but still comparatively young – seems to have everything a woman could wish for in life – except someone with whom to share it. Then she meets and falls passionately in love with a young artist — Larry Stafford. Can their love survive the difference of a decade in their ages, the criticism of friends and of Kate’s daughter, Roz, herself deeply involved with a married man? Can they overcome the terrifying illness which attacks Kate?
Folks, Lloyd Douglas wrote this story back in 1929. It’s called Magnificent Obsession. Save your time and watch the Douglas Sirk – Rock Hudson – Jane Wyman movie version, which put the O in overwrought (and we’re all the better for it).
This was Barber’s 32nd novel, published posthumously. A bestseller, probably because he’d amassed an army of fans with the previous 31. Twins of noble birth are separated in the turmoil of the Russian Revolution. The lucky one makes it to Paris and finds success in love and business. The other is lost and written off as dead. But is he? And what about that teddy bear: is it just an object of childhood obsession like Charles Foster Kane’s Rosebud? Or is there more to the story? I’m pretty sure I will never know. Or care.
Where are the The Weeping and the Laughters of this century? Has Ernest Dowson lost his capacity to inspire?