Poor, unpleasant Pum
RAPHAEL CORMACK Gayer-anderson: The Life and Afterlife of the Irish Pasha by Louise Foxcroft American University in Cairo Press £24.95
At first glance, this new biography of Robert ‘Pum’ Gayer-anderson by Louise Foxcroft is a portrait of the kind of picturesque eccentric that the British are supposed to love.
It is the story of an Irish aesthete who travelled the world as a doctor, eventually finding a degree of stability, spending nine months of the year in a Mameluke house attached to a mosque in Cairo. The other three months he spent in the small East Anglian town of Lavenham, whose inhabitants he mostly loathed.
In Cairo, he favoured the so-called ‘native’ quarters. With his coterie of animals – which at one point included a hyena, two cheetahs and a gazelle – and a few close friends, he smoked from long Turkish pipes and drank sherbet, shunning the customary beer with the officers in the Turf Club.
He is remembered today, if at all, because of the Gayer-anderson Cat in the British Museum, or his house in Cairo, which became the Gayer-anderson Museum. Both were donated on condition that they carried his name.
Using unpublished memoirs and archival material in the Bodleian Library, Foxcroft has managed to put together a much fuller picture of his life and collecting habits. Outwardly successful and well connected, he was present at the opening of Tutankhamen’s tomb and knew people ranging from Conan Doyle and T E Lawrence to Stephen Spender.
But this biography also examines his inner life, from his difficult childhood spent between Ireland and North America to his medical training, service in the Empire and subsequent life in Cairo. Unfortunately, the personal nature of the primary sources and Gayer-Anderson’s own reclusive character dictate that we know less about his circle of friends or social life in Egypt than about his belief in ghosts, his psychological turmoil, his feelings about his twin brother, Tom, and his pets.
His inner thoughts and emotions were, often, extremely disturbing. Those expecting the colonial romp that the book appears to promise, will not find it here. Gayer-anderson’s early years were characterised by increasing degrees of physical and psychological torture inflicted by his father. He inherited a taste for hatred of Jews, women and other races but perhaps most of all of himself.
His sexual life will draw particular attention. His desire for a male heir motivated him to overcome his revulsion towards everything feminine at least twice. The first attempt produced a female heir who was promptly dispatched to South Africa, but the second provided a son. He spent most of the rest of his life ignoring the boy and his mother. The primary object of his desire was located more in the ‘beauty of (male) youth’. Foxcroft does not find any direct evidence of paedophilia. Still, the inferences drawn from his writings and borderline pornographic drawings in the Bodleian alone are damning, even making the usual allowances for the period.
One incident that seems to encapsulate the tragedy of Pum’s life came when his mother and stern elderly father visited Lavenham in 1926. As always, his father brought with him the family account books – symbols of his domination, in which he recorded the minutest expense. Somehow, with the help of a doctor, Pum managed to convince his father to let him destroy them. What followed ought to have been a wild, orgiastic conflagration, a Bacchic ritual casting off the yoke of the old order. In practice, it turned into a cruel and wretched scene.
Pum, with bloodshot eyes, heaped books onto the fire as his dying father, regretting his weakness, tried vainly to conserve his life’s work. They never saw each other again. To order from Wordery for £17.49 incl p&p, go to http://www.theoldie.co.uk/books
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