Far End draws closer

On 26 January I blogged about the house Far End at Kingham in Oxfordshire, which I had heard about for the first time from Mrs Mary Lowe, whom we traced as the copyright holder for unpublished works of the American writer Anne Douglas Sedgwick (1873-1935). The Guest Book for Far End, which runs from 1912 to 1963, shows that George and Kittie stayed there in 1912 and 1913, but that Kittie returned in the stressful year of 1919 after accepting that George had been killed at Gallipoli in 1915, despite the fact that his body had not (officially) been found. Her last visit was in 1922, before she moved to Petersfield.

I was fortunate to be the guest of Mrs Lowe in famously hospitable Cumbria on 21st and 22nd of February. Mrs Lowe knows more about Far End than anyone else alive, since she lived there from the 1950s until 1986. Understandably, she is eager to pass it all on to posterity; and I was fascinated to hear it. The story of Far End has, I feel, a unique poetry. This poetry has grabbed me, and I think the only way to do it justice is for Mrs Lowe and I to write an extended article with lavish illustrations for a publication like Country Life, once George Calderon: Edwardian Genius is finally signed off. In the meantime, here are a few facts that may whet your appetite.

The house was designed and built by the literary critic Basil de Sélincourt (1877-1966) in 1907. It was set in four acres of land at the edge of Kingham and came with a five-acre field. Three of Basil’s brothers were also writers and their father owned the Piccadilly store of Swan & Edgar; which was presumably a financial help. After New College, Oxford, Basil seems to have gone into ‘higher’ London journalism, but in 1905 he published a well-received book on Giotto, in 1908 he married Anne Douglas Sedgwick, they settled at Far End, and the following year he published William Blake. I have read the whole (sic) of Blake in my time, and I have read this book. It is not only beautifully written and produced, I agree entirely with de Sélincourt’s evaluation of the glories and weaknesses of Blake’s sensibility. Mrs Lowe tells me that in later years Basil would fulminate about F.R. Leavis (a great Blakophile), but on the evidence of William Blake I do not understand why. In 1914 he published a critical study of Walt Whitman.

Far End shortly after construction

Anne Douglas Sedgwick’s novels sold well, particularly in America. Between 1912 and 1929, for instance, she had three titles in the U.S. top ten for the year, and three of her bestsellers were made into films. I have read Tante (1912), The Encounter (1914), and The Little French Girl (1924). They are extremely well written, but like her readers Sedgwick clearly felt that more is more. Incidentally, in Tante, published the year before George appended the word ‘barbarian’ in Greek to his signature in the Guest Book, Sedgwick used ‘barbarous/barbarian’ several times about unrefined male views and emotions, so maybe she had applied it to George too! The three novels I have read revolve around both strong and controlling women. I have written to Virago Classics suggesting they reprint them.

From Anne’s earnings, she and Basil built a further one-storey range, which can be seen in the next image. This must have enabled them to entertain family and friends on the scale that the Guest Book testifies. But the most interesting thing about this photograph is the glimpse it provides of the enormous vegetable garden. Basil was a passionate grower. He wrote in the mornings and cultivated in the afternoons. Apparently his produce was superb. During the Second World War he turned over Far End’s tennis court to further cultivation and sold vegetables from a stall in the village.

The range built onto Far End later, with vegetable plot

Anne Douglas Sedgwick died in 1935. The last letter in the highly readable book of her selected correspondence that Basil published in 1936 is to Julia Alsop, née Chapin, and this fact is hardly fortuitous. On her deathbed, Anne told Basil that she wanted him to marry Julia, a divorced mother of four, whose old American family she had known for decades. After Basil had corresponded with Julia (whom he already knew) and travelled to the U.S. to propose to her, they were married at Gosport, Hants., on 23 September 1936. He was fifty-nine and Julia forty-eight.

Julia Chapin Alsop by John Singer Sargent, 1909

Julia Chapin Alsop was Mrs Lowe’s maternal grandmother. Mrs Lowe’s father was a colonial administrator and when her parents were abroad she was brought up by Julia and Basil at Far End. Thus Basil de Sélincourt was a father both to Julia’s children by her first marriage and Julia’s grandchildren. He was ‘the most intellectual man I have ever known’, Mrs Lowe told me. ‘All the Russian authors were in the house and Basil fed them to us as we grew up. He considered they translated better into French than English.’ Mrs Lowe describes him as a pacifist (he and Anne Douglas Sedgwick worked in French hospitals and orphanages during the First World War) and an agnostic, but a deeply ethical man and ‘probably a pantheist’.

Basil de Sélincourt, c. 1960

What impresses and fascinates me about Far End is that it was not just a house created by Basil and Anne, but a real literary hub which, unlike Garsington, had not a trace of the dilettantism that was so mercilessly satirized by Lawrence in Women in Love. Both Anne and Basil were professional, hardworking writers. She beautified the house, was herself a celebrated beauty, and he cultivated his garden. They led an intense artistic and intellectual existence together, which contemporaries from Laurence Binyon and George Calderon to Sir Edward Grey and Lady Ottiline Morrell herself were pleased to come and partake of. To some extent, as Mrs Lowe has put it to me, at Far End Basil, Anne, Julia and others lived the Good Life.

Far End in the 1980s

Basil de Sélincourt departed this life in 1966. When his widow died eight years later, Mrs Lowe inherited Far End and lived there with her husband, the distinguished art historian Ian Lowe, for another twelve years. They did not want to leave Far End, but the combination of factors prompting it seemed ineluctable. In 1986 Far End was sold.

That is not at all the end of its story, however. It had been designed by Basil to his personal taste and with his own vision of it as a literary haven, and it proved very difficult to change. For instance, the bathroom was directly off the hall, with windows opening onto the drive, successive new owners tried to move it to the first floor, but the rooms there were planned in such a way that it was impossible. Eventually, in 2008, the whole set of buildings called Far End was demolished for a new development.

On a dark afternoon in April of that year, Mr Lowe visited the site (Mrs Lowe could never bring herself to). He took photographs. On the back of one he wrote: ‘No stone survived except in a bleak nearby cottage. All was neglected in contrast to rest of village and adjacent field which has been turned into a garden. The orchard was a mess too.’ And on another: ‘I could wish that we had never left it and I shed a tear at our having done so. It was a happy house which could not be turned by at least three owners into what they wanted. Basil’s house beat them and had to be destroyed.’

What actually remains is the luminous memory of a successful experiment in living, of a cultural life that attracted some of the most original minds of its age. Reading Mrs Lowe’s accounts of life there, both before and after her birth, and listening to her vivid memories of it, I could not help thinking of a passage in Proust where after his grandmother’s death the narrator visits the resort of Balbec, which he had first made the acquaintance of when she took him there and was so caring towards him. He re-experiences things that happened then, indeed he searingly re-experiences his grandmother. But the ‘presence’ of the ‘past’ has a terrible downside:

On the one hand, I felt again an existence and a tenderness that lived on in me just as I had known them, that is to say which were created for me, a love that found its utter complement in me, its purpose […] and on the other, as soon as I had relived it as present, this happiness, I felt it crossed out by the certainty of a void that had expunged my image of that tenderness, destroyed that existence […] the moment I refound it.

Far End has, and has not, vanished.