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Man of Many Lives studied the plays having forgotten there was such a man. He had read Georg Brandes’s recent study of Shakespeare which he described as ‘the ablest of Shakespeare’s commentaries’, though Kingsmill noted that he made ‘no acknowledgement of his obvious debt to him’. Despite Harris’s imperfections Kingsmill’s book ends with his strengths. The finest passage in his writings is where he passes in review the spokesmen of Shakespeare’s sadness or despair: Richard II sounding the shallow vanity of man’s desires, the futility of man’s hopes; Brutus taking an everlasting farewell of his friend and going willingly to his rest; Hamlet desiring unsentient death; Vincentio turning to sleep from life’s deceptions; Lear with his shrieks of pain and pitiful ravings; Macbeth crying from the outer darkness. Kingsmill’s biography is neither adulation nor an attack. Out of his candid recognition of weakness, Rebecca West wrote, ‘there comes a living portrait which has made at least one reader who found Frank Harris’s personality violently antipathetic understand why a great many people adored him and forgave him’. MICHAEL HOLROYD’s first book, politely turned down by fifteen publishers, was Hugh Kingsmill (1964). 65
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On the Wings of History KARIN ALTENBERG I recently found myself in the excavated ruins of Stöng, a chieftain’s farmhouse in the Icelandic valley of Þjórsárdalur. The manor, along with many neighbouring farms, was abandoned when the volcano Hekla erupted in 1104, covering this Icelandic Pompeii in pumice. Stöng is the best preserved early medieval farmhouse in the Nordic area, with massive turf walls still standing waist-high and a remarkable double-drained social lavatory, which would have accommodated a large gathering. In the main hall the cold slabs of the large central fireplace are visible and I was reminded of the appropriateness of the word ‘window’ – from the Old Norse vindauga, ‘the eye of the wind’ – where the smoke would escape through a single slit in the turf roof. As I was standing there, imagining the densely walled, fire-lit hall, something stirred in me – a familiar sense of wonder and curiosity about the people who once made their lives here; who created culture in an unforgiving world, charged with the magic that stalked the borders between paganism and Christianity. An image formed in my imagination of a sleeping household, flea-ridden and night-barricaded against the battleaxe-wielding and torch-carrying neighbours of the Icelandic sagas, or perhaps against more unknown, Grendel-like monsters of the mind. Kristin Lavransdatter, the Nobel Laureate Sigrid Undset’s most celebrated work, brings the medieval North to life in an unparalleled Sigrid Undset’s trilogy Kristin Lavransdatter (1920–3) is out of print in English but we can obtain second-hand copies of a Penguin edition translated by Tiina Nunnally. 66

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Man of Many Lives studied the plays having forgotten there was such a man. He had read Georg Brandes’s recent study of Shakespeare which he described as ‘the ablest of Shakespeare’s commentaries’, though Kingsmill noted that he made ‘no acknowledgement of his obvious debt to him’. Despite Harris’s imperfections Kingsmill’s book ends with his strengths.

The finest passage in his writings is where he passes in review the spokesmen of Shakespeare’s sadness or despair: Richard II sounding the shallow vanity of man’s desires, the futility of man’s hopes; Brutus taking an everlasting farewell of his friend and going willingly to his rest; Hamlet desiring unsentient death; Vincentio turning to sleep from life’s deceptions; Lear with his shrieks of pain and pitiful ravings; Macbeth crying from the outer darkness. Kingsmill’s biography is neither adulation nor an attack. Out of his candid recognition of weakness, Rebecca West wrote, ‘there comes a living portrait which has made at least one reader who found Frank Harris’s personality violently antipathetic understand why a great many people adored him and forgave him’.

MICHAEL HOLROYD’s first book, politely turned down by fifteen publishers, was Hugh Kingsmill (1964).

65

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