TENNYSON JESSE

Evening Star, Issue 21992, 30 March 1935, Page 2

TENNYSON JESSE

[Written by Panache, for the ‘ Evening Star.'] Authors, unless they arc fishermen, do not often come to New Zealand, and the few that do land are usually content with Auckland, having read somewhere of that city—last, loneliest, loveliest, exquisite, apart. Our literary visitors are not, as a rule, impressed. Rupert Brooke, after holidaying in Pacific Islands, walked along Green street, and, young Adonis, stigmatised our women, as plain and badly dressed. He added that they all smoked, which, if, my young remembrance serves me, was not true, even of the Auckland harpies, before the war. Gilbert Frankau penetrated as far south as Wellington, and in a novel records his impressions of his hotel, which, with its gilt mirrors and plush furniture,, seemed the last relic of Thackerayan England. Last week Tennyson Jesse (one syllable or two, as you please; her sister and she pronounce their name differently) and her husband, H. M. Harwood, the playwright, reached Auckland. As most authors have complaints about our country, let us get ours in first. Tennyson Jesse has disappointed one of her early admirers; she who is so good at yachts and talks of sailing ships as if they were her sisters, has travelled by the Monterey, a mere floating palace, a luxury liner. Tennyson Jesse’s feeling for the sea is shown in her first novel, ‘ The Milky Way,’ a joyous young book, full of the nice jokes that people save up for their first novels. It is impossible not to identify the author with her heroine, as art student and as journalist, and as a lover of Cornwall and of Provence. ‘ Who’s Who ’ confirms these deductions, and gives the additional information that the father of Tennyson Jesse was the nephew of Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Yet there are certain things in this romance of which great-uncle Alfred would not have approved, such as the device by which five people wangled themselves into the Royal Academy on Varnishing Day, with only two tickets. The heroine of ‘ The Milky Way,’ so up to date in 1913, is not old-fashioned yet, except perhaps in the boots she chose to be married in—grey suede, with black patent toes, shiny enough to mirror the sky. Her face was nothing in particular, but her legs were really superior. * The Milky Way ’ lias something of that gallantry and not a few of the ingredients that were the stuff of novels before dear sentimental old W. J. Locke died. There is a travelling theatre, and a film agent called Telemagne Charlemagne, who insisted on filming ‘ Ancassin and Nicolete,’ temporarily restoring the ruined castle of Beaucaire for the purpose. There is pre-war Cornwall, quite different from the newer St. Ives where Lawrence pursued his Frieda round the table with a knife, and literary gentlemen called each other obscene bugs. In the old Penzance there was nothing more eccentric than a model called Gladys, characterised by an aggressive purity of soul; and a tame marmoset that ate up the cohalt and rose madder. ‘ The Milky Way ’ has a happy ending, with Viv and Peter temporarily settled in a farmhouse, with £5 to go on with. Tennyson Jesse is versatile. She writes not only novels and plays, but poems and a wmrk on criminology, ‘ Murder and Its Motives.’ One of her short stories, ‘ The Man With two Mouths,’ tells of the rough justice meted out to an informer by a smuggler, and is as grim a tale as one could wish. 1 The Lacquer Lady ’ is a novel about Burma, beginning in a Brighton boarding school, and ending in a Brighton antique shop; and its heroine has been considered worthy of taking tea with Becky Sharp. The theme of ‘ Secret Bread,’ the struggle of a man with the land he hopes to pass on to his son, has been parodied into a joke; but ‘ Secret Bread ’ is a good story, and the land is not overlush. But it is at sea that Tennyson Jesse is. at her best. ‘ Tom Fool ’ is an enthralling story, as it is unfolded, to the reader as it passes through the mind of the drowning man, the skipper who used a waterspout to put out a fire. ‘ Moonraker ’ had the distinction of giving its name to a cocktail, and it is a distinguished hook in itself. It is a pleasant book to hold, and 1 gives the impression that it was a pleasure to write. Dedicated to the master and crew of the yacht Moby Dick, in memory of two winters spent at sea, it has the enchanting alternative title, ‘ Moonraker, or the Female Pirate and Her Friends.’ When you open it there inside the corners is a map of the Grievous Island of San Domingo, with its Noah’s Ark trees and monsters of the deep spouting off its coasts and mermaids blowing wreathed horns. This map was drawn by Tennyson Jesse herself, and so was the picture of Captain Lovel with his long lean face, his high nose, and his great gold car-rings, looking as little like a bloody murderer as anyone. Captain Level’s ship sails to San Domingo, and we arc told the history of Toussaint I’Ouverture, that little ugly man, scarcely more than sft high, who made even the cabin boy feel he was a great man, though he was as black as the Earl of Hell’s riding boots. Tin’s was the man who never broke his word, who was nnbrihable, and who was betrayed by the Corsican. It is in her descriptions of the sea and of ships that Tennyson Jesse is most moving; she sees waves with the double vision of the painter and of the sailor, and the description of the final catastrophe in 1 Tom Fool ’ is extraordinarily graphic. Captain Level’s wicked ship is irresistible. “ She was copper-bottomed and she carried single topsails, t’gallant sails, and royals, and set stunsails on both masts. Her Bowsprit, with the jihhoom and flying jihhoom, was the hell of a length, and it was sheered right up so that the tip of the flying jibboom looked to be above her foreyard. She flew the Jolly Roger from her spanker-gaff when in action.” 1 don’t understand a quarter of it,

any more than T understand church Latin or the ballads in the jargon, but the exultation is of the same kind. Why is this woman, who lets herself go with such zest and enthusiasm, why, in the name of all the buccaneers at once, is she sitting in a deck chair on the Monterey?