Francis Wyndham
Journalist, fiction writer, literary editor and mentor to Jean Rhys, Bruce Chatwin and VS Naipaul
FRANCIS WYNDHAM, who has died aged 93, was a fine literary journalist and fiction writer and a supportive coaxer of manuscripts from such authors as Jean Rhys and Bruce Chatwin. Wyndham’s own fictional output was slim. It was not until 1974, aged 50, that he published his first book, Out of the War, a collection of short stories that he had written as a teenager while he was “hanging about waiting to be called up”. They then lay forgotten at the back of a drawer until the early 1970s.
The stories perfectly captured the mood of provincial towns in wartime – feeding in particular on the grimy atmospherics of the station buffet and local ABC. The dialogue was both musically accurate and wonderfully evocative: “‘Speaking perfectly frankly,’ said Mrs Mitchell, ‘I don’t trust Stalin an inch. I wish I did but I don’t.’”
“How is it,” wondered one critic, “that having set out with such confidence on this path, he then abandoned it?” The answer lay in Wyndham’s natural reserve and self-deprecation. Some found the stories reminiscent of VS Pritchett and of Henry Green, with, as the critic James Wood put it in The Sunday Telegraph, “an England so drab it is almost exotic”. Ten years later came a second collection, Mrs Henderson and Other Stories, five finely crafted stories linked by a common narrator.
In 1987 Wyndham produced his most substantial work, a 100-page novella called The Other Garden, which won the Whitbread First Novel Award when the author was 63.
The book, he admitted, was “directly autobiographical”. Set in Wiltshire during the Second World War, it charted a young man’s friendship with an intriguing, rebellious but rather pathetic older woman, Kay Demarest. The young man, who is the narrator of the story, goes to Oxford, is called up and then discharged (as Wyndham was) with diagnosed TB. His convalescence is spent in an East Anglian sanatorium, and then at home in Wiltshire.
Kay eventually dies from TB, and as a tribute to her memory the narrator “romantically swore a loyal oath … that until my own death I would eschew ambition for worldly success and avoid the wielders of influence and power, choosing my friends among the innocently uncompetitive. It is not a vow I have always been able to keep.”
Francis Guy Percy Wyndham was born in London on July 2 1924. His father was a retired colonel, much older than his mother and very different in spirit. Whereas he seemed to associate his father with stifling propriety, from his mother he received his early literary encouragement.
She was the daughter of the Jewish novelist and journalist Ada Leverson, part of the circle that included Max Beerbohm and Oscar Wilde, and had been a brave supporter of Wilde during his trial. His grandmother’s reputation rests on six brilliantly sharp, quintessentially Edwardian novels which, by Wyndham’s account, “she hated writing … and only did so to please her publisher”.
When Francis was four, the family moved to a large house in a village near Marlborough and he grew up in rural isolation. Later in life, he would “still dream of the river and the walks … it remains one’s landscape”. His memories of childhood were happy, apart from going to school (he particularly disliked Eton). He began to read at an early age.
Wyndham’s close friendship with the woman who became Kay in The Other Garden had, he recalled, “an extraordinary impact on me. She was not competitive, unlike people at school. She didn’t judge you … she either liked a thing or she didn’t.”
His TB meanwhile meant that much of his war, so eventful for Wyndham’s contemporaries, was spent “in an atmosphere of remedially arrested development, of unnatural stasis sweetly prolonged. The late rise; the morning walk; the early lunch at the British Restaurant established in the Church Hall a few paces from our house; the afternoon lie-down; the stroll to the Post Office.”
After the war, Wyndham became a publisher’s reader and book reviewer. He remembered “with delight the first year I was asked to list my ‘best books of the year’. I think it was 1949.”
As a literary adviser, then editor, at André Deutsch in the 1950s, Wyndham was instrumental in the publication of VS Naipaul’s early books, and in rediscovering the works of Jean Rhys, who had disappeared from the literary scene after the publication of Good Morning Midnight in 1939. He was told in 1950 that Jean Rhys had recently died in a sanatorium and in an article referred to her as “the late Jean Rhys”. But in 1957 he discovered her whereabouts and wrote to her asking if she was working on a new novel.
Over the next few years Jean Rhys became very dependent upon Wyndham’s judgment and support as she struggled to resolve problems with her narrative. The publication of her masterpiece, Wide Sargasso Sea, in 1966 owed much to his advice and encouragement. The writer was by then in her late seventies, but Wyndham let out that she could still be “a slant-eyed siren, with whom one could enjoy the full intensity of a treat … (an old tune, a new scent, a perfect cocktail, a wonderful joke).”
In the early 1960s, Wyndham worked as a drama critic on Queen magazine, where he became great friends with Mark Boxer, the art director. Boxer would later take Wyndham to the Sunday Times
Magazine, where he worked from 1964 until 1980, variously as showbusiness editor and senior editor.
He shared an office with the fashion editor Meriel Mccooey, and the two of them would habitually sing duets from Hollywood musicals and nip out at tea-time to buy a half-bottle of Teacher’s for “pre-drinks drinks”. Deemed to have a bad influence on each other, they were eventually separated, “like children in a school”. In Philip Norman’s novel Everyone’s
Gone to the Moon, Wyndham was caricatured as the brilliant journalist Evelyn Strachey, “a man of about 40 with a large balding head and the close-set eyes and drooping mouth of some inbred minor prince”. Strachey on form was “the best there is”.
Wyndham became known for his essays on writers such as John Updike as well as interviews with actresses and minor rock stars such as PJ Proby (both as an editor and a writer he enjoyed marrying good writing to apparent trivia).
A selection of his pieces was later published as The Theatre of Embarrassment (1991). Reviewing the book, Hilary Spurling hailed Wyndham’s style as “invincibly ironic, richly allusive and discreetly louche, his subjects for the most part as frivolous as his prevailing mood is sombre”.
He was particularly good on has-beens, such as ex-troupers Anne Ziegler and Webster Booth, whom he tracked down to a bungalow on the windswept Welsh coast. (“It’s a good place to retire to,” Booth said gallantly, “but the trouble is we haven’t retired.”)
Wyndham was equally important for the encouragement he gave to others, notably James Fox, David King, Don Mccullin and Bruce Chatwin. When in 1972 the Sunday Times Magazine was casting around for a new arts consultant, it was Wyndham who suggested Chatwin – who had quit Sotheby’s and spent the past three years struggling with a book about nomads.
With Wyndham’s goading Chatwin’s role soon extended to interviewing such forgotten subjects as Madeleine Vionnet, the inventor of the bias cut, and Eileen Gray, designer of the chromium chair. In 1974 it was to Wyndham that Chatwin announced – over a drink at the Chelsea Hotel in New York – that he was off to Patagonia.
Wyndham and Chatwin were temperamentally rather different – Wyndham had a horror of travelling and considered himself visually deficient – but they remained the firmest of friends until Chatwin’s death. In 1977, following the publication of In Patagonia, Chatwin wrote to Wyndham from Siena: “I spent my solitary lunch thinking of the enormous amount I owe to you.” It was, Chatwin often said, Wyndham who taught him how to prune and how to pad his prose.
Wyndham was keen to play down his contribution, recalling that Chatwin needed the minimum of editing: “If I did advise,” he told Chatwin’s biographer Nicholas Shakespeare, “it was against a certain preciousness and for crispness. Also it’s important to get how the person speaks, rather than what he says, the way they talk.”
Wyndham retired from the Sunday Times in 1980, recalling later how “a kind of apathy and disgust” had come over him. “I worked there until I physically couldn’t go into the office any more.”
Asked whether he felt guilty about having not written more, he replied: “I don’t think it is quite so nice having things published. All that inspection of one. I mean if people hate this book, then they hate me. Anyway, I don’t have guilt about not doing things. I regret the things I did do.”
Francis Wyndham, born July 2 1924, died December 28 2017