Great dynasties of the world / The Chaplins

Charles Chaplin

Great dynasties of the world: The Chaplins

BIOGRAPHY

Ian Sansom on the complex family saga of the silent movie star

Ian Sanson
Saturday 5 March 2011

Arecent headline in the Birmingham Mail read: "Charlie Chaplin may have been from Birmingham." It reports on a letter found by Chaplin's daughter Victoria, after her father's death, that suggests south London's most famous son may have been a Gypsy born in Smethwick. We may never know the truth: Chaplin's birth certificate has never been discovered. But we do know that his parents worked in the music halls, and that he worked in the entertainment industry for more than 75 years, and that many of his 11 children became actors: the Chaplin family story is as complex, sad and delightful as one of his finest slapstick routines. He wrote in My Autobiography (1964): "To gauge the morals of our family by commonplace standards would be as erroneous as putting a thermometer in boiling water."

Great dynasties of the world / The Brontës

Great dynasties of the world: The Brontës

Ian Sansom on three literary sisters and their 'hopeless' brother

Ian Sansom
Saturday 24 July 2010

F

or the Brontës of Haworth, west Yorkshire, 1847 was a big year. In October, Charlotte Brontë's novel Jane Eyre was published. "We can cordially recommend Jane Eyre to our readers," ran one enthusiastic review. "It is sure to be in demand." The reviewer was right. Two months later, both younger Brontë sisters also published novels: Emily's Wuthering Heights, and Anne's Agnes Grey. Wuthering Heights was an instant bestseller. The Brontës – under their male pseudonyms, Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell – had achieved what they had always sought. Fame.

Everyone now has heard of the Brontë sisters, of course – the "three weird sisters", Ted Hughes called them. They have been memorialised in films and biographies, and their work is drummed into students at school and university. There are academic conferences, Penguin classics, box sets and leather-bound collectors' editions. Isabelle Huppert plays Anne in André Téchiné's Les Soeurs Brontë. Olivia de Havilland played Charlotte in the 1946 biopic Devotion. A 1992 adaptation of Wuthering Heights starred Juliette Binoche. Brontëana available at the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth includes jewellery, mugs and cross-stitch kits. But what of the fourth Brontë sibling, the only brother, Branwell? He was the fourth of the six Brontë children – two older sisters died young. As he was the only son, expectations were high.

The Brontës' father, the Reverend Patrick Brontë, had come a long way from a two-room cottage in Drumballyroney in County Down to study theology at St John's College, Cambridge, and then be appointed to a perpetual curacy in Haworth. Branwell was not expected to fail. Elizabeth Gaskell, in her biography of Charlotte, claimed that Branwell was "a boy of remarkable promise, and, in some ways, of extraordinary precocity of talent". Douglas A Martin, in his novel based on the brother Brontë's life, Branwell (2006), writes that "Childhood was Branwell's kingdom to rule over." It was: he and Charlotte collaborated as children in the invention of a complex fictional world they called Angria. It proved an ominous name.

As the sisters began to achieve recognition – a joint collection of their poems was published to critical acclaim in 1846 – Branwell sank deeper into depression and despair. He began drinking heavily, and taking laudanum. He had failed to gain admission to the Royal Academy, failed as a portrait painter, and had begun working variously as a tutor, and as a clerk at a railway station, posts from which he was dismissed for incompetence, or worse – in one case for conducting an affair with the mother of one of his pupils. Daphne du Maurier, in The Infernal World of Branwell Brontë (1960), her brilliant and bizarre biography of Branwell, hints darkly at Branwell leading one of his young charges astray. Emily described her brother at this stage of his life as a "hopeless being".

Branwell's one and only famous painting is the only known portrait of the three sisters together: see left, now at the National Portrait Gallery. He had originally painted himself in the centre, but obliterated his image. The paint has faded, so that his ghostly presence now hovers ominously beside his sisters.

After Branwell's death in 1848, aged only 31, Charlotte wrote to her friend William Smith Williams: "I do not weep from a sense of bereavement – there is no prop withdrawn, no consolation torn away, no dear companion lost – but for the wreck of talent, the ruin of promise, the untimely, dreary extinction of what might have been a burning and a shining light."

The current exhibition on Branwell at the Brontë Parsonage Museum is titled Sex, Drugs and Literature.

THE GUARDIAN

Lucian Freud

Great dynasties of the world: The Freuds

Analyse this – the psychoanalyst's family tree by Ian Sansom

Ian Samson

Saturday 7 August 2010

I

n 1909 Sigmund Freud published a short essay titled Der Familienroman der Neurotiker. In James Strachey's famous English translation of the complete works of Freud, the essay is titled Family Romances. It begins:

"The liberation of an individual, as he grows up, from the authority of his parents is one of the most necessary, though one of the most painful, results brought about by the course of his development. It is quite essential that the liberation should occur and it may be presumed that it has been to some extent achieved by everyone who has reached a normal state. Indeed, the whole progress of society rests upon the opposition between successive generations. On the other hand, there is a class of neurotics whose condition is recognisably determined by their having failed in this task."

The Freud family seems to have been no more or less neurotic than anyone else.Freud was the eldest of eight children, a fact he felt not insignificant. "A man who has been the indisputable favourite of his mother", he is quoted as saying, "keeps for life the feeling of conqueror, that confidence of success which often induces success." Needless to say, Freud's own mother, Amalie, seems to have adored him. In his An Autobiographical Study (1925), Freud is brisk and businesslike in relating his family history. Of his family background, for example, he remarks merely: "My parents were Jews, and I have remained a Jew myself." In The Interpretation of Dreams, meanwhile, he is lavishly, complexly self-revealing – the book is a kind of living autopsy in which Freud dissects and discusses his own and others' dreams and fantasies.

In 1886 Freud married Martha Bernays, whose grandfather was Hamburg's chief rabbi. James Strachey describes the Freuds' domestic arrangements as "devoid of episode", though Peter Gay, in his biography Freud: A Life for Our Time (1988), offers plenty of interesting episodes to mull over. There is, for example, the unresolved matter of the exact nature of Freud's relationship with his sister-in-law, Minna Bernays. Carl Jung put about a rumour they were having an affair – but he was probably just mischief-making.

Sigmund Freud
Mathieu Laca

What we know for sure is that Freud and Martha had six children, and that only Anna, their youngest, became a psychoanalyst. One son, Oliver, became a civil engineer. Another, Ernst, became an architect. The Freuds' eldest son, Martin – of whom there were high hopes and expectations – ended up running a tobacconist in Bloomsbury. He also wrote a book, Glory Reflected: Sigmund Freud – Man and Father (1957), in which he said: "The son of a genius remains the son of a genius, and his chances of winning human approval of anything he may do hardly exist if he is to attempt to make any claim to a fame detached from that of his father."

Freud's grandchildren are perhaps better known than his children. Among the famous British Freuds – the sons of Ernst – there was Clement, the politician and broadcaster, and there is Lucian, the painter. Among their children are Matthew Freud, the PR guru married to Elisabeth Murdoch; Emma Freud, the broadcaster married to Richard Curtis; Esther, the novelist; and Bella, the fashion designer.

Freud’s Reflection With Two Children (Self Portrait)
Lucian Freud

And this is not to mention Clement and Lucian's older brother, Stephen, one of the many forgotten Freuds, who ran an ironmongery business just off Baker Street. In a rare interview in 2008, Stephen, proving himself to have been one of the sanest of the Freuds, told the Daily Telegraph: "Golf has played quite a large part in my life." Clement Freud boasted of never having read a word of his grandfather's work. And Lucian Freud once said: "Family is not important to me. It doesn't bother me in the slightest."

THE GUARDIAN

Evelyn Waugh

Great dynasties of the world: The Waughs

Ian Sansom on a family of writers who admired and disliked each other

Ian Sansom
Saturday 5 February 2011

Y

ou might know the banana story. During the second world war, Evelyn Waugh's wife managed to procure three bananas for their children. When she brought the fruit home, Evelyn sat down in front of the children, peeled the bananas, poured on cream and sugar, and ate them all. "It would be absurd to say that I never forgave him," wrote Waugh's son Auberon many years later, in his autobiography, Will This Do? (1991), "but he was permanently marked down in my estimation from that moment."