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Peter Vansittart
"My novels have been appreciated, if not always enjoyed, more by critics than the reading public, which shows no sign of enjoying them at all," he ruefully observed. "This must be partly due to my obsession with language and speculation at the expense of narrative, however much I relish narrative in others."His highly personal style could be difficult and off putting, as in the opening page of A Safe Conduct (1995): "Blessed Thomas Aquinas is invoked against thunder and sudden death, you can rout a demon by uttering his secret name, never easy to discover; a mistletoe twig, if carried into the underworld, Hermes Kelly handbag copy assures your safe returne_SLps "If nothing else, such cryptic observations illustrated his refusal to recreate the past through the lens of traditional historical fiction, in which the English saw their ancestors as "only ourselves in fancy dress".A fluent raconteur with formidable powers of recall, Vansittart disliked name dropping, but could entertain with stories of his encounters with many towering figures of the early 20th century literary scene. He knew George Orwell (who paid 1 for his first book review for Tribune in the 1940s), Hilaire Belloc, GK Chesterton, George Bernard Shaw and HG Wells; he once, however, advised a talkative, overweight Yorkshireman that he should try writing a Hermes bag copy book, failing to recognise JB Priestley.As an historical novelist Vansittart forged his reputation by rejecting the romantic tradition of picturesque sentimentality in favour of a grittier "warts and all" approach, exemplified in his trilogy Lancelot (1978), The Death of Robin Hood (1981) and Parsifal (1988).Often defying accepted historical context, his novels treat of famine, war, plague and persecution, and range from the European forests of 3000 BC via the occupying Romans, the Dark Ages and medieval France to an English private school in the 1930s and, finally, the Thatcher years.The result was much de mythologising of accepted lore and legend, much as when Vansittart debunked the old story about the Duke of Wellington claiming that the Battle of Waterloo had been won on the playing fields of Eton. "In fact, there were no playing fields at Eton in the Duke's time," Vansittart noted. "What he actually said in 1815 was: 'Gentlemen, I think I owe my spirit of enterprise to the tricks I used to play in the garden'. That was translated into French, then translated back into English 50 years later, in the version that we now know."In Vansittart's view the historical novel needed less research and more speculation; too much knowledge could corrupt. "No one will read a novel of mine for exact information about Roman belts, Bismarck's cigars, the length of Hitler's penis," he explained.Peter Vansittart was born on August 27 1920 at Bedford, into what he was told was "a very old family forbidding information that seemed to imply imminent extinction". Sir Robert (later Lord) Vansittart, permanent under secretary at the Foreign Office during the 1930s, was a distant cousin.He never knew his father, who died before he was born; his musical mother, who studied the piano in pre 1914 Germany, had refused a marriage proposal from the virtuoso pianist Solomon.Peter, a solitary, bookish, only child, was brought up at Southsea and Hampstead until his stepfather took a management job in the Middle East oilfields and he was sent to board, first at Marlborough House School, Hove, and later at Haileybury.As editor of the school magazine, he once bicycled from Haileybury to George Bernard Shaw's house at Ayot St Lawrence and called unannounced; as a servant turned him away, GBS himself emerged, invited Peter in, and obliged him with an interview.He spent the first year of the Second World War at Oxford, having won a major scholarship to Worcester College to read History, but soon realised that this was not for him and left without taking a degree.Judged medically unfit handbag Hermes fake to fight, he served in bag Hermes replica the London Fire Brigade and civil defence before being invalided out and taking a teaching post at a school in Bournemouth. In the meantime his first novel, I Am The World (1942), about an imaginary dictator, had flopped, one critic damning it as "the worst book ever published".After the war he returned to Hampstead and taught at the experimental Burgess Hill school, where lessons were voluntary and children were discouraged from learning to read or to count, and which inspired his novel Broken Canes (1950).Money was always tight. Behind his back, the poet Stephen Spender successfully applied on his behalf for an Arts Council grant. Once, urged on by another friend, Vansittart wrote to the post war prime minister, Clement Atlee, a fellow Haileyburian, who arranged for a one off payment of 150 from a charitable fund called the Royal Bounty.For many years Vansittart lived in Belsize Park, north London, in a large house he claimed he had bought from an Irishman in a Hampstead pub, and who explained that he had been forced to sell on account of his starting a prison sentence the next day. Impecunious as ever, Vansittart let part of the house to lodgers, dividing his time between his London base and his mother's cottage in rural Suffolk. Because he never learned to drive, he regularly walked the 10 miles to and from the nearest railway station.He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1985, and was appointed OBE in the last New Year's Honours list. He published two volumes of autobiography, Paths from a White Horse (1985) and Survival Tactics (1999), in which he sketched gossipy vignettes of post war literary figures. His final novel, Secret Protocols (2006), was considered one of his finest.He had attended the regular lunches and summer parties hosted by The Spectator magazine since the 1950s and was a member of the Wednesday Club, a men only luncheon and drinking circle founded in 1953 by Benedict Nicolson and Philip Toynbee.Peter Vansittart, who died on October 4, is survived by his long term partner, Justine Woodward, and by a step daughter from his failed early marriage to a fellow teacher at Burgess Hill, Jacqueline Goldsmith. "The worst review I ever received," he recalled, "was not of a booke_SLps but of myself, from my ex wife. 'Yes, it is true, I have cancer. I did not want to tell you as I knew you would not be interested. I have six months.' An unanswerable indictment," Vansittart noted, "of a marriage which lasted 15 years."
"My novels have been appreciated, if not always enjoyed, more by critics than the reading public, which shows no sign of enjoying them at all," he ruefully observed. "This must be partly due to my obsession with language and speculation at the expense of narrative, however much I relish narrative in others."His highly personal style could be difficult and off putting, as in the opening page of A Safe Conduct (1995): "Blessed Thomas Aquinas is invoked against thunder and sudden death, you can rout a demon by uttering his secret name, never easy to discover; a mistletoe twig, if carried into the underworld, Hermes Kelly handbag copy assures your safe returne_SLps "If nothing else, such cryptic observations illustrated his refusal to recreate the past through the lens of traditional historical fiction, in which the English saw their ancestors as "only ourselves in fancy dress".A fluent raconteur with formidable powers of recall, Vansittart disliked name dropping, but could entertain with stories of his encounters with many towering figures of the early 20th century literary scene. He knew George Orwell (who paid 1 for his first book review for Tribune in the 1940s), Hilaire Belloc, GK Chesterton, George Bernard Shaw and HG Wells; he once, however, advised a talkative, overweight Yorkshireman that he should try writing a Hermes bag copy book, failing to recognise JB Priestley.As an historical novelist Vansittart forged his reputation by rejecting the romantic tradition of picturesque sentimentality in favour of a grittier "warts and all" approach, exemplified in his trilogy Lancelot (1978), The Death of Robin Hood (1981) and Parsifal (1988).Often defying accepted historical context, his novels treat of famine, war, plague and persecution, and range from the European forests of 3000 BC via the occupying Romans, the Dark Ages and medieval France to an English private school in the 1930s and, finally, the Thatcher years.The result was much de mythologising of accepted lore and legend, much as when Vansittart debunked the old story about the Duke of Wellington claiming that the Battle of Waterloo had been won on the playing fields of Eton. "In fact, there were no playing fields at Eton in the Duke's time," Vansittart noted. "What he actually said in 1815 was: 'Gentlemen, I think I owe my spirit of enterprise to the tricks I used to play in the garden'. That was translated into French, then translated back into English 50 years later, in the version that we now know."In Vansittart's view the historical novel needed less research and more speculation; too much knowledge could corrupt. "No one will read a novel of mine for exact information about Roman belts, Bismarck's cigars, the length of Hitler's penis," he explained.Peter Vansittart was born on August 27 1920 at Bedford, into what he was told was "a very old family forbidding information that seemed to imply imminent extinction". Sir Robert (later Lord) Vansittart, permanent under secretary at the Foreign Office during the 1930s, was a distant cousin.He never knew his father, who died before he was born; his musical mother, who studied the piano in pre 1914 Germany, had refused a marriage proposal from the virtuoso pianist Solomon.Peter, a solitary, bookish, only child, was brought up at Southsea and Hampstead until his stepfather took a management job in the Middle East oilfields and he was sent to board, first at Marlborough House School, Hove, and later at Haileybury.As editor of the school magazine, he once bicycled from Haileybury to George Bernard Shaw's house at Ayot St Lawrence and called unannounced; as a servant turned him away, GBS himself emerged, invited Peter in, and obliged him with an interview.He spent the first year of the Second World War at Oxford, having won a major scholarship to Worcester College to read History, but soon realised that this was not for him and left without taking a degree.Judged medically unfit handbag Hermes fake to fight, he served in bag Hermes replica the London Fire Brigade and civil defence before being invalided out and taking a teaching post at a school in Bournemouth. In the meantime his first novel, I Am The World (1942), about an imaginary dictator, had flopped, one critic damning it as "the worst book ever published".After the war he returned to Hampstead and taught at the experimental Burgess Hill school, where lessons were voluntary and children were discouraged from learning to read or to count, and which inspired his novel Broken Canes (1950).Money was always tight. Behind his back, the poet Stephen Spender successfully applied on his behalf for an Arts Council grant. Once, urged on by another friend, Vansittart wrote to the post war prime minister, Clement Atlee, a fellow Haileyburian, who arranged for a one off payment of 150 from a charitable fund called the Royal Bounty.For many years Vansittart lived in Belsize Park, north London, in a large house he claimed he had bought from an Irishman in a Hampstead pub, and who explained that he had been forced to sell on account of his starting a prison sentence the next day. Impecunious as ever, Vansittart let part of the house to lodgers, dividing his time between his London base and his mother's cottage in rural Suffolk. Because he never learned to drive, he regularly walked the 10 miles to and from the nearest railway station.He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1985, and was appointed OBE in the last New Year's Honours list. He published two volumes of autobiography, Paths from a White Horse (1985) and Survival Tactics (1999), in which he sketched gossipy vignettes of post war literary figures. His final novel, Secret Protocols (2006), was considered one of his finest.He had attended the regular lunches and summer parties hosted by The Spectator magazine since the 1950s and was a member of the Wednesday Club, a men only luncheon and drinking circle founded in 1953 by Benedict Nicolson and Philip Toynbee.Peter Vansittart, who died on October 4, is survived by his long term partner, Justine Woodward, and by a step daughter from his failed early marriage to a fellow teacher at Burgess Hill, Jacqueline Goldsmith. "The worst review I ever received," he recalled, "was not of a booke_SLps but of myself, from my ex wife. 'Yes, it is true, I have cancer. I did not want to tell you as I knew you would not be interested. I have six months.' An unanswerable indictment," Vansittart noted, "of a marriage which lasted 15 years."
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