Seamus Perry writes:

Campbell-Johnston is well disposed to Palmer, though she grows as irritated by his pliability as his son evidently was: he appears at one point as a ‘socially inept little man’ who responded to his frequently insufferable father-in-law with ‘tail-wagging gratitude’. She is quite tough on Hannah too, seeing in her ‘bourgeois will’ a version of Linnell’s will to power; but then Palmer cannot have been the easiest husband. It is on the face of it strange that great art should have ever arisen from a cast of mind that Campbell-Johnston firmly calls ‘rose-tinted’, and a period of life during which Palmer was ‘indulging his dreams of a pastoral idyll’ and ‘did not see the realities of rural life’. People who do not like Palmer have always responded to what they see as his escapism in this way: John Berger once expressed disdain for ‘his landscapes like furnished wombs’. Palmer certainly craved ‘quiet, cosy seclusion’, as his son singled out for remark in his memoir, and he relished with a curious intensity the whole idea of the ‘SNUG … how much lies in that little word’. No one modern, no one like us, thinks art should be cosy or snug, and nothing could seem cosier than pastoral, the genre which Palmer especially loved, as his several ventures into poetry confirm:

Low lies their home ’mongst many a hill,
In fruitful and deep delved womb;
A little village, safe, and still,
Where pain and vice full seldom come,
Not horrid noise of warlike drum.

(LRB 5 April 2012)

Bloomsbury | Paperback 400 pp. |ISBN: 9781408822227