DIANA TRILLING
23
from whom - of Goronwy's famous affair with Rosamond Lehmann.
Where Goronwy's affair with Pamela Warburg was of relatively recent
vintage, the affair with Lehmann was the well-advertised adventure of his
youth - it dated from before his marriage. In this affair it was only
Lehmann, eight years Goronwy's senior and already married, who was
adulterous. Yet as the story was recounted to us, Goronwy was made to
seem, even at this early stage of his career, a practiced and conscienceless
seducer.
When Goronwy and Rosamond Lehmann met, Lehmann had already
published an unusually successful first novel,
Dusty Answer.
She was also a
widely-acclaimed beauty. Indeed, I remember from my own young
womanhood my admiration for her photograph on the cover of that
book, the tranquil, unsmiling face (as I then saw it), with its wide, calm
brow; the patrician poise of the head; the finely-chiseled cheeks and chin
and the delicately-lined mouth. Today, I leaf through an improbable
English publication,
Rosamond Lehmann's Album,
a pictorial survey of her
life, and I not only marvel that such a volume should have been
commercially published but
'I
am stupefied that I once thought this
image a model of female loveliness. Did the young women of my
generation really envy a beauty this blank, this lacking in spirit?
Somewhere, wherever it is that people live their lives of feeling, the
woman in these photographs had to have been out of reach, or not
worth reaching for.
. It had been a legendary encounter, the meeting of Lehmann and
Rees, and it was reported to me in sunlit detail. On a fine summer after–
noon they had both of them been guests at Bowen's Court, the home
in Ireland of the novelist Elizabeth Bowen. Rosamond Lehmann was
chatting with others of the company in Bowen's sitting-room when the
garden doors opened and in came Goronwy. He was barefoot - so went
the reverential account - and wore light linen trousers. The sleeves of his
shirt were rolled to the elbow and the shirt was Byronically open at the
throat. A soft curJ of hair fell carelessly over his forehead. Across the
sitting-room floor, the beautiful young Rosamond and the beautiful
younger Goronwy looked into each other's eyes and fell in love. It was
in Rosamond's, not Elizabeth's, bed that Goronwy spent that night - or
have I neglected to mention that, according to my informant, Goronwy
was Bowen's lover at this time? The walls of the house were not
sufficiently solid to keep this hidden from their hostess. There was left to
Bowen only such solace as she might one day find in recreating Rees -
so it is said - in the character of the repugnant Eddie in her best-known
work of fiction,
The Death of the Heart.
