Diary: Kathryn Davis on National Velvet
Beauty and power—if you don’t possess these qualities yourself, you look for them elsewhere. In the case of Enid Bagnold, you become a writer.
Illustration by Laurian Jones, Enid Bagnold’s daughter, from the William Morrow first edition of National Velvet. She did all the illustrations when she was fourteen years old.
When I was a girl I ran like the wind, which is to say like King of the Wind, the Godolphin Arabian, born with a white spot on his hind hoof, signifying great speed, and a wheat ear on his chest, signifying misfortune. For a while I was a horse, after I was a fairy and before I was a teenager. I nickered, I cantered. I couldn’t get enough of the words describing the self I was as a horse, especially the body parts: pastern, withers, fetlock. The farrier trimmed my hooves, taking care not to injure the frog, the beating organ of the hoof that connects directly to the heart.
When I ran like a human girl everyone could see me; I was in thrall to the condition of being human, which is also why Velvet Brown waited until dusk to canter her cut-out paper horses across the chalk hills of the Downs. “The horses were unsharable. They needed uninterrupted belief and invention,” according to Velvet’s creator, Enid Bagnold. “It was quite hard to get the collection because they had to be the same size and they had to be right-facing ones.”
How old was I the first time I read National Velvet? Probably about the same age—ten? eleven?—at which I took my first and only year of riding lessons with Miss Violet Haines. There’s a home movie showing me on Blueberry, one of the Welsh ponies us little girls were made to ride, the pony disinterestedly accomplishing a circuit of the riding ring as I sit atop the saddle with no seat to speak of, holding my arms out to either side stiffly like a dowser. I was never comfortable up there, though I remember thinking I had a great seat. More than anything I wanted Blueberry to take off like Velvet’s Pie and clear the fence, carrying me at a gallop across the great green meadowlands of Gwynedd Valley.
I have never been a horsewoman. All the horsewomen I’ve known have frightened me, though there was a time when I wanted with all my heart to be one, to possess that force of will peculiar to communion between horse and woman. Enid Bagnold, the woman who wrote National Velvet, was a consummate horsewoman; the first time she sat astride a horse she’d been about the same age I was. “First was a walk and a shout from behind. At the shout it was a trot. I couldn’t have lasted long at that but then it was a gallop. Shouts came from everywhere and dogs barked. We were headed for the stables. No stirrups, nothing but the terrible polish beneath me and the rising and falling of the hogged mane. The horse turned sharp at a corner and I flew on through the air …”
This was Up Park Camp, Jamaica, 1899. “Daturas grew round the house. The white trumpets could be filled with fireflies and shaken out after dark.” The Bagnold household consisted of an extraordinarily beautiful golden-haired mother with an eighteen-inch waist, and a powerfully opinionated father (“no woman can wind a clock,” “never have more than one dog”); there was also a younger brother waiting six years in the wings to be born, Grannie (“engine-turned with fine braid,” “her ornaments were strictly gold”), and Mademoiselle Gattey, the governess, brought in at the last minute to replace Miss Evans, who had “bad feet.” Enid by her own account was “awkward, clever, bubbling, in touch with life but not with graces, mad about herself, furious with her face, not well dressed, unable to dance, suddenly shocked, struggling, imprisoned by strange standards.”
Beauty and power—if you don’t possess these qualities yourself, you look for them elsewhere. In the case of Enid, you become a writer.
For as long as I can remember I’ve been recommending National Velvet to pretty much everyone I know, male and female, old and young. I think it’s safe to say most fans of National Velvet would be hard pressed to tell you who wrote it. Most men have never read the book and I can tell they’re not planning to (even those fellow writers who are good friends), whereas many women read it in their horse-crazy adolescence and went on to leave it behind. Lots of people saw the movie and have vague but overheated memories of Elizabeth Taylor in the title role. That face! Those eyes! There are always a few people, usually men, who will ask you whether you are aware of the fact that Elizabeth Taylor did her own riding. These men like to present their knowledge in this form, as a question to which they alone possess the correct answer.
Enid Bagnold—Enid Algerine Bagnold, also known as Lady Jones, CBE, wife of Sir Roderick Jones, chairman of Reuters—was forty-six years old when she wrote National Velvet, seventy-nine years old when she wrote her splendid, strange autobiography. The ferocity of her spirit is evident in both books from the outset. “Nothing can make you live again one single day except art,” her autobiography commences. “Telling won’t do it. Memory isn’t enough. Every day has leaked like a sieve ever since the beginning … I must be read from where I am—backwards. Otherwise it’s just a story. If I don’t make it work like that we are not looking out of the same window.” Enid Bagnold began life as a bohemian and ended it—following many scandalous affairs with high-profile men, including Frank Harris—as the lady of the manor. “Being scallywag she married a very rich man,” said Virginia Woolf, though her judgment was—in Margaret Drabble’s opinion—informed by jealousy and fear. Drabble considered Enid Bagnold a pioneer for women. “She sees [life] and writes the wild thing down without a misplaced or echoed word,” Walter Kerr said in his review of her play, The Chinese Prime Minister.
On the one hand, National Velvet can be read as a Cinderella story, a fairy tale: the ugly-duckling baby sister of three gorgeous “golden greyhounds” comes into possession of an ugly-duckling horse, and with the help of Mi Taylor, the man works with her father in his butcher shop, turns the ugly-duckling horse into the extraordinary creature she rides to victory in the Grand National steeplechase. National Velvet was exactly the book meant for an ugly-duckling girl in postwar Philadelphia, a girl as certain of her invisible greatness as she scorned the idea that she was merely an ugly duckling. Cinderella story notwithstanding, on a mysterious subterranean level I understood even then that National Velvet was something different; I understood it wasn’t just a fairy tale but an ultimatum.
The Browns “loved each other, deeply, from the back of the soul, with intolerance in daily life,” Enid Bagnold wrote. You can see where Velvet Brown’s family, despite her father being a butcher, is Edna Bagnold’s family: in both cases the families are large (four Brown girls and one boy, as opposed to three Bagnold boys and one girl). There is also the frightening groom McHardy transposed into Mi Taylor, horseman and drifter, taken on by Mr. Brown to help in the slaughterhouse, who also happens to be the son of the man who trained Mrs. Brown, née Araminty Potter, to swim the Channel when she was “a great girl of nineteen, neckless, clumsy, and incredibly enduring.” When you first read National Velvet—yourself a girl—you don’t pay all that much attention to Mrs. Brown, even though it’s the gold she won for swimming the Channel that provides the entry fee that makes it possible for Velvet to win the Grand National. Araminty Brown is the force that drives the novel, glad “that her daughters were not boys because she could not understand the courage of men, but only the courage of women.”
Of course Enid Bagnold is Velvet Brown, cantering down the chalk road to the village, running “on her own slender legs, making horse-noises and chirrups and occasionally striking her thigh with a switch, holding at the same time something very small before her as she ran.” But more than anything she is Araminty Brown, a woman without a sentimental bone in her body. “I put my neck into the collar and pulled,” Enid Bagnold says in her autobiography, describing her life as a wife and a mother. “When such a woman with such a husband takes three hours out of her day for writing, has four children, and all those possessions, it makes her pant.”
Enid Bagnold had a genius for the details of intense human interaction. We get none of it, though, in the scene between husband and wife in which Araminty informs Mr. Brown of her decision to use her prize money—a big bag of gold sovereigns—to pay Velvet’s hundred-pound entry fee. No, all we are told is “in the deep of the night forces were involved that stirred Araminty Potter to love and to fury, and finally to love again. In meeting a hard, but as it turned out brittle, opposition from her husband, Araminty rose like a sea monster from its home.”
Human interaction proves powerless in the face of inhuman force. It is no wonder Virginia Woolf was afraid of Enid Bagnold.
Kathryn Davis is the author of eight novels, the most recent of which is The Silk Road, as well as a memoir, Aurelia, Aurélia.
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Very charming piece on NV. I also appreciate AK's continuously shrewd coverage of the book world.
I was a horse too. My mother used to say I was even sounding like one. Of course I grew up on national v, but funnily I prefer it’s mediocre sequel International Velvet. Starring Anthony Hopkins, Christopher Plummer and Ryan O’ Neil’s daughter Tatum i’neil whom I was obsessed with because she was by the time I saw the film, at age five, was my tennis idol McEnroe’s wife. I watch international velvet every year as a ritual . I’m close to fifty now. The opening credits already reduce me to tears. I also loved the black stallion trilogy- I think Coppola did the second and maybe the third. They’re cinematographically incredible. The first still makes me cry. Strangely little luz Taylor’s velvet never touched me that deeply in the core as these.