Free A Dog's Life by Paul Bailey Page B

salivating to make them limp.
    ‘There are more where those came from.’
    And there were. Geoffrey Grigson’s chilblain-proof socks became Circe’s household toys. They were a mouthful for her. Guests were invited to share in her untiring fun. Some visitors, it has to be noted, were happier with this diversion than others. Circe was perplexed when the proffered sock was ignored, her bewilderment giving way to irritation. She barked and barked, and had to be banished from the kitchen with a stern ‘Enough’. I would put the sock out of sight and out of reach and she would sulk in the front room until it was time to play again.

    In the summer of 1975, I wrote a review for the
New Statesman
of a book by Geoffrey Grigson called
Britain Observed
. The literary editor allotted me 1,200 words, which meant that I had the long-coveted opportunity of being able to put his career into some kind of balanced perspective. It was an honour and duty to do so since Geoffrey had the reputation then – as, alas, he has now – of being little more than a scurrilous and intemperate critic. People remembered his dislike and disapproval of Edith Sitwell, Dylan Thomas and a host of tin-eared academics, whilst forgetting or overlooking the substantial fact that in his thirties and forties he ‘rescued’ those extraordinary English geniuses John Clare, Samuel Palmer, William Barnes and George Crabbe from near-oblivion. He published the early poems of W. H. Auden in his pioneering magazine
New Verse
, and discovered the very young Gavin Ewart, whose ‘Phallus in Wonderland’ and ‘Miss Twye’ he was delighted to print.
Britain Observed
proved ideal as a vehicle for expressing my considered opinion that Geoffrey Grigson, with whom I was unacquainted, is essentially a celebrator, for in its pages he praises not only Cézanne and Pissarro – ‘the greatest and humblest of landscape painters’ – but such modest, and genuine, talents as Walter Greaves, who painted views of the Thames at Chelsea, the tragic William James Blacklock, dead at forty-two, whose beautiful
Catbells and Causey Pike
is reproduced, and Wenceslas Hollar, represented by his marvellous etching of the East Side of London in 1647, simple in essence yet vividly suggestive of overcrowded city life. The book is subtitled
The Landscape Through Artists’ Eyes
, and it’s typical of Grigson’s eclecticism and respect for the undervalued that of those sixty-odd artists a good third of them are still unknown to the public at large.
    The received, or safe, opinion was anathema to him. He was always his own man with his own mind. It seemed appropriate that I should come to praise him in the
New Statesman
, because it was in that educative journal that I first encountered his criticism, along with that of V. S. Pritchett and D. J. Enright, in the late 1950s. The back half of the
Statesman
was required reading in the 1960s, when Grigson was a regular reviewer. He flourished under the editorship of Karl Miller, just as he had flourished under that of J. R. Ackerley on the
Listener
– both men earning his lasting regard for allowing him to write ‘without fear or favour’ (the words are Ackerley’s.) It was from those idiosyncratic reviews – elegantly phrased and pithily argued – that I learned about Edwin Arlington Robinson’s exquisite poems of everyday madness and despair in small-town America and the
Icelandic Journals
of William Morris, which makes even the bleakest landscape interesting. Grigson was one of my educators, at a time in my life when I was attempting to free myself of the burden of wanting to succeed as a classical actor. I read his criticism, and then the works he praised. And every so often, I glanced at those books that he alone held up to ridicule, such as Iris Murdoch’s novel
The Unicorn
, in which characters ‘cast roguish glances’ at each other, ‘converse’ rather than talk, and say things like ‘I’ll be bound!’ and ‘Effingham, she