Good as her Word: Selected Journalism

Good as her Word: Selected Journalism Lorna Sage Victor Sage Sharon Sage A sparkling collection of journalism from the critically acclaimed author of BAD BLOOD and MOMENTS OF TRUTH.This selection of the work of Lorna Sage spans the years 1972-2001, when she wrote for the London and New York literary papers and journals, and contains some of her very best pieces. From carefully worked interviews and profiles to the snappiest and deftest of weekly reviews, we can trace the often surprising development of that very distinctive voice and follow its sharpest critical reactions to the important authors and landmark publications of our times.From George Eliot, Laurence Sterne, Charles Dickens and Mary Shelley to Sylvia Plath, Angela Carter, Umberto Eco and Salman Rushdie, Sage's unmistakable voice is here: clever, hilarious, anarchic, sly, wise, kind, courageous, genial and serious. LORNA SAGE Good As Her Word Selected Journalism Edited by Sharon Sage and Victor Sage Dedication (#u416cc863-49a3-5a39-a94a-7e672d0a50f8) For Olivia Contents Cover (#u63b9fe5a-2624-5ccb-80bc-dda4e0f270d1) Title Page (#u420ff90e-e19e-5f45-8512-8514d3e65588) Dedication (#u73b49a8a-f821-568b-85f3-5ae643b72205) Introduction (#ud030f044-9125-5008-a9b0-60c0adad119b) I PRE-WAR LIFE WRITING (#ub6982c84-c508-51bf-84bf-a7c9e65874ca) Grave-side story, Observer 18 June 1978 (#u024112fa-1318-5801-8373-fe8392412eb0) Moon in Eclipse: A Life of Mary Shelley by Jane Dunn Good as her word, Observer 14 December 1980 (#u45e2c94e-0312-5582-bced-0d2aa800998a) Elizabeth Gaskell: A Portrait in Letters by J. A. V. Chapple Flora by gaslight, Observer 24 January 1982 (#u08384c5e-23ae-5769-96d3-cebe2b70116b) The London Journal of Flora Tristan Jean Hawkes (trans. and ed.) Life stories, 19 February 1984 (#u6676863b-010c-523b-9071-16fd69ee1444) A Need to Testify: Four Portraits by Iris Origo Strategy for survival, Observer 10 June 1984 (#u2eabee87-853d-5102-b7f1-fd89c766664d) Secrets of a Woman’s Heart: The Later Life of Ivy Compton-Burnett by Hilary Spurling Honest woman, Observer 5 May 1985 (#ufc790e0c-fdae-5244-8792-fc964431c483) Selections from George Eliot’s Letters Gordon S. Haight (ed.) The girl from Mrs Kelly’s, Observer 28 September 1986 (#ua386a7f4-f541-5390-8b67-f4116493bec7) Beloved Emma: The Life of Emma Lady Hamilton by Flora Fraser Half of Shandy, Observer 28 December 1986 (#uedef152c-c462-5370-a45b-48b68bb536b4) Laurence Sterne: The Later Years by Arthur H. Cash Nothing by halves, Observer 20 November 1988 (#u33b3beae-7d2b-59a1-ba6a-b1850d2bb915) The Letters of Edith Wharton R. W. B. Lewis and Nancy Lewis (eds) The bright, ferocious flames of his internal ether, Observer 27 June 1993 (#u2f7a492e-c912-5a21-8055-32d0b7ccb247) The Letters Of Charles Dickens: Volume VII, 1853–1855, The Pilgrim Edition Graham Storey, Kathleen Tillotson and Angus Easson (eds) II POST-WAR LIFE WRITING (#u37921bba-ffb6-5a96-82e0-4ebc07101113) First person singular, Observer 12 August 1979 (#u0f910e15-66df-584d-813e-9d0d2227f791) Sleepless Nights by Elizabeth Hardwick Client relationships, TLS 5 November 1982 (#u67e57fb8-aaef-524b-a20c-7af4b4d5520d) An English Madam: The Life and Work of Cynthia Payne by Paul Bailey Orient of the mind, Observer 23 October 1983 (#u5ac220a2-51cf-53dc-9f80-0f2a75482e5c) Profile of Lesley Blanch Last testament, Observer 17 June 1984 (#u0ef76aaa-7c6f-57d4-90c1-17cb3415d6f9) Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre by Simone de Beauvoir What a frightful bore it is to be Gore, Observer 15 November 1987 (#u31e9dfd9-c7ac-5cd3-8e57-4537b1268b7e) Profile of Gore Vidal Independent, 28 October 1989 (#ue9a800fb-9a74-5eda-a5ef-a02ae2e9b8b4) Obituary of Mary McCarthy The deb who caught her muse, Observer 20 January 1991 (#u48bda6e5-680b-5532-98bf-91fb8f606de9) Necessary Secrets: The Journals of Elizabeth Smart The Assumption of the Rogues and Rascals By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept by Elizabeth Smart Death of the Author, Granta 41, 1991 (#ua8d979f7-4d13-56ce-8433-107fdd7fab11) Obituary essay Angela Carter The man they mistook for Marcel Proust, Observer 18 August 1991 (#litres_trial_promo) Obituary of Terry Kilmartin Boy in a box springs forth, Observer 28 March 1993 (#litres_trial_promo) Daphne du Maurier by Margaret Forster The secret sharer, Independent On Sunday 25 April 1993 (#litres_trial_promo) What Remains and Other Stories The Writer’s Dimension: Selected Essays by Christa Wolf In full spate, TLS 17 December 1993 (#litres_trial_promo) Obituary of Anthony Burgess Secret agonies and allergies, Guardian 24 April 1994 (#litres_trial_promo) Elizabeth Bishop, One Art: Selected Letters Robert Giroux (ed.) Home is where the art is, south of the psyche, Observer 15 May 1994 (#litres_trial_promo) The Still Moment: Eudora Welty, Portrait of a Writer by Paul Binding Surviving in the wrong, TLS 4 November 1994 (#litres_trial_promo) The Silent Woman by Janet Malcolm Alone in the middle of it all, TLS 9 june 1995 (#litres_trial_promo) Angus Wilson: A Biography by Margaret Drabble Living like a poet, or, Hello to all that, Guardian 2 July 1995 (#litres_trial_promo) Life on the Edge by Miranda Seymour Robert Graves: His Life and Work by Martin Seymour-Smith Collected Writings on Poetry by Robert Graves The culture hero’s vision of sameness, Guardian 16 July 1995 (#litres_trial_promo) F. R. Leavis: A Life in Criticism by Ian MacKillop Landlocked, LRB 25 January 2001 (#litres_trial_promo) Romancing: The Life and Work of Henry Green by Jeremy Treglown III THE WOMEN’S CAMP (#litres_trial_promo) The old girl network, TLS 30 September 1977 (#litres_trial_promo) Literary Women by Ellen Moers The heroine as hero, TLS 14 April 1978 (#litres_trial_promo) Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Aurora Leigh and Other Poems introduced by Cora Kaplan A contrary Muse, TLS 29 September 1978 (#litres_trial_promo) Lawrence and Women Anne Smith (ed.) Practical ecstasies, Observer 28 January 1979 (#litres_trial_promo) St Teresa of Avila by Stephen Clissold Hearts of stone, Observer 27 October 1985 (#litres_trial_promo) Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form by Marina Warner Sisters of Sisyphus, Observer 26 January 1986 (#litres_trial_promo) Beyond Power: Women, Men and Morals by Marilyn French Staying outside the skin, TLS 16 October 1987 (#litres_trial_promo) Intercourse by Andrea Dworkin Women by Naim Attallah Woman’s whole existence, Observer 28 February 1988 (#litres_trial_promo) Women and Love: The New Hite Report by Shere Hite Forever black suspenders, Observer 24 January 1993 (#litres_trial_promo) Divine Decadence: Fascism, Female Spectacle and the Making of Sally Bowles by Linda Mizejewski Right but Romantic, TLS 25 June 1993 (#litres_trial_promo) Romanticism and Gender by Anne K. Mellor Frankenstein by Mary Shelley News from the revolution that never was, Independent On Sunday 26 September 1993 (#litres_trial_promo) Sexing the Millennium by Linda Grant TLS 21 December 1993 (#litres_trial_promo) Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing by H?l?ne Cixous Farewell Lady Nicotine, Observer 2 January 1994 (#litres_trial_promo) Cigarettes are Sublime by Richard Klein The women’s camp, TLS 15 July 1994 (#litres_trial_promo) Article on critical theory Paean to gaiety, LRB 22 September 1994 (#litres_trial_promo) The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture by Terry Castle A record of honourable defeat, THES 17 February 1995 (#litres_trial_promo) No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, Volume 3, Letters from the Front by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar They lived for their work, Los Angeles Times Book Review, 7 January 1996 (#litres_trial_promo) Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives by Natalie Zemon Davis The Goddess of More: Parallels between ancient novels and the new womanism, TLS 9 August 1996 (#litres_trial_promo) The True Story of the Novel by Margaret Anne Doody Learning new titles, TLS 17 March 2000 (#litres_trial_promo) Critical Condition: Feminism at the Turn of the Century by Susan Gubar Mother’s back, LRB 18 May 2000 (#litres_trial_promo) What Is a Woman? and Other Essays by Toril Moi IV CLASSICS (#litres_trial_promo) Daringly distasteful, TLS 26 April 1974 (#litres_trial_promo) Keats and Embarrassment by Christopher Ricks Gay old times in Greece, Observer 1 October 1978 (#litres_trial_promo) Greek Homosexuality by K. J. Dover Victorian fun and games, Observer 24 December 1978 (#litres_trial_promo) No Name by Wilkie Collins Observer Magazine 24 June 1979 (#litres_trial_promo) Villette by Charlotte Bront? When two melt into one, TLS 22 February 1980 (#litres_trial_promo) Sexuality and Feminism in Shelley by Nathaniel Brown A Scribbler comes of age, TLS 23 January 1981 (#litres_trial_promo) Lord Byron: The Complete Poetical Works Jerome J. McGann (ed.) Weaving, deceiving and indecision, TLS 5 March 1982 (#litres_trial_promo) Heroines and Hysterics by Mary R. Lefkowitz Links in a mystic chain, Observer 23 May 1982 (#litres_trial_promo) Lull and Bruno by Frances Yates Ravishment related, TLS 24 December 1982 (#litres_trial_promo) The Rapes of Lucretia by Ian Donaldson From our spot of time, TLS 9 December 1988 Review of several books on Wordsworth including (#litres_trial_promo) Wordsworth’s Revisionary Aesthetics by Theresa M. Kelley Dorothy Wordsworth and Romanticism by Susan M. Levin Peace with a vengeance, Observer 21 November 1993 (#litres_trial_promo) Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law by E. P. Thompson V CRITICAL TRADITION (#litres_trial_promo) The gay protagonist, Observer 20 Apri1 1980 (#litres_trial_promo) The Homosexual as Hero in Contemporary Fiction by Stephen Adams Seminal semantics, Observer 10 January 1982 (#litres_trial_promo) Dissemination by Jacques Derrida Men against women, Observer 19 December 1982 (#litres_trial_promo) The Rape of Clarissa by Terry Eagleton Cavalier and roundhead, Observer 24 August 1986 (#litres_trial_promo) Essays on Shakespeare by William Empson Valuation in Criticism and Other Essays by F. R. Leavis TLS 14 April 1989 (#litres_trial_promo) Harold Bloom: Poetics of Influence John Hollander (ed.) Oops, a lexical leak, Observer 20 March 1994 (#litres_trial_promo) In the Reading Gaol by Valentine Cunningham The First Bacchante, LRB 29 April 1999 (#litres_trial_promo) The Ground Beneath Her Feet by Salman Rushdie A Simpler, More Physical Kind of Empathy, LRB September 1999 (#litres_trial_promo) West of the Sun and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami VI ITALY (#litres_trial_promo) Fighting Fascists in bed, Observer Magazine 18 June 1978 (#litres_trial_promo) Italian feminists Displaced persons, Observer 13 July 1980 (#litres_trial_promo) Flight From Torregreca: Strangers and Pilgrims by Anne Cornelison Our Lady of the Accident, Observer Magazine 23 November 1980 (#litres_trial_promo) The shrine of the Madonna of Montenero Unholy ecstasies, Observer 9 February 1986 (#litres_trial_promo) Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy by Judith C. Brown Holy Anorexia by Rudolph M. Bell The vegetable paradiso, TLS 26 September 1986 (#litres_trial_promo) Sotto il sole giaguaro by ltalo Calvino Man who put the cult in occultism, Observer 1 October 1989 (#litres_trial_promo) Interview with Umberto Eco From the mind’s balcony, TLS 5 October 1990 (#litres_trial_promo) La strada di San Giovanni by Italo Calvino Calvino and the Age of Neorealism: Fables of Estrangement by Lucia Re Freedom fighter, Vogue November 1992 (#litres_trial_promo) Interview with Oriana Fallaci On the seas of story, TLS 7 October 1994 (#litres_trial_promo) ‘L’isola del giorno prima by Umberto Eco Signs of possession, TLS 19 January 2001 (#litres_trial_promo) Out of Florence: From the World of San Francesco di Paola by Harry Brewster About the Author (#litres_trial_promo) Also by the Author (#litres_trial_promo) Copyright (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) Introduction (#ulink_4f85a209-f85d-53b1-a1a9-580f3a43751e) LIKE CERTAIN PHOTOGRAPHS, WHICH hint at the gap between themselves and their future, posthumous books often have a slightly thin, accidental irony about them. This effect depends on how much they are designed to render their author’s intentions, how narrowly those intentions are inscribed in the book’s form: the stricter the author’s plan, the more the unfinished nature of the text becomes an issue. Here, there are no ghostly plans left on the desk, nothing was left unfinished. Instead, the work itself – perhaps a million and a half words written over thirty years – is just too vivid and alive to be left merely dispersed. What strikes us now, having made our selection, is how intimate a portrait of a mind and personality it provides, and how unexpectedly fresh, how new, that portrait is. As Lorna puts it in ‘Death of the Author’, her unflinching tribute to her friend Angela Carter: ‘Nothing stays, endings are final, which is why they are also beginnings’. We have selected Lorna’s journalism to display the sheer range and diversity of her writing. During the seventies and eighties, while making her reputation as a contemporary fiction-reviewer, Lorna was also writing in many of the other newspaper and magazine genres. From the days of The New Review in the early 1970s under Ian Hamilton, she continued this diverse practice all her working life: profiles, short notices, interviews, multiple book reviews, essayistic pieces and, more latterly, obituaries. In the late 1970s, she started writing for the TLS, a long-time ‘home’ (branching out briefly into the New Statesman), and settled at the Observer, with Terry Kilmartin, under whose subtle tutelage she learned the tricks of the trade. In the last years, she wrote for the Independent, the London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books. In a late essay called ‘Living on Writing’ from 1998, Lorna rebels against what she calls a ‘conspiracy of reflexiveness’ in literary journalism: Barthes’s famous saying went: ‘The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author’. But the Author’s death has led to the birth of endless lower-case authors. If you want to speak with authority as a reader, in other words, you do it first by saying that you are a writer. I have always preferred to be a hack, it seems less of a mystification. ‘Hack’ is a theatrical double-take: Lorna dressed up in her hack persona to create an outside position for herself, from which she was able to concentrate on the work of other people. She thought of herself as a correspondent, sending in urgent bulletins from the front line of reading, not a ‘lower-case writer’. The urgency of her dialogue with books is one of the distinctive aspects of her voice as a reviewer. She liked the commitment deadlines forced. She also increasingly wrote for money, needed to work, and was proud of the way her pen could supplement her income. Lorna began as an instinctive reader (voracious, indiscriminate) and this trait never left her throughout her life: during the fine contempt of adolescence, the prentice years of scholarship in the Renaissance and seventeenth century, the later years of teaching and constant reviewing, and even finally the last, hand-over-fist period in which she started to edit and write books herself, the curiosity, the primary thrill of the reader, never left her – that what she had in her hand was new; even Don Quixote felt to her passionately curious eyes like a tract of snow that no one else had walked upon. She was able rapidly to read one book after another, without pauses for assimilation, ritual movements or changes of place. Her attention was absolute. She did not appear to digest books at all. She read like this late into the night and began again early in the morning: she simply picked up the next volume, whether it was the Corpus Hermeticum or Tarzan of the Apes, propped it in front of her, her thin, long-nailed thumb creasing down the top three inches as she turned the page, and sped away in a trance of rapid eye-movement, dog-earing the leaves as she went whenever something was memorable. When laid aside, paperbacks, in particular, always had a subtly pot-bellied aspect, as if somehow they had more in them: the persistent creasing at the top caused their pages to bell out slightly. They looked as if they had been filled with reading. To write your reading was equally direct. Lorna’s habit of accuracy was like a religious devotion and her unusual memory, into which books sank, apparently whole, not a feather of their print disturbed, combined with a jesuitical kind of mischievousness, meant that she was a formidable opponent indeed in a literary discussion. She positively wielded quotation and was very canny about lines of argument. So: this very ‘directness’ is a paradox. When she was young, one of Lorna’s favourite quotations was Polonius’s ‘by indirections find directions out’. To represent your reading so directly is certainly a craft and a pleasure, to say nothing of the service it performs for your authors and readers. But that directness is the product of much meditation, a labour of indirection. When reviewing a book, Lorna would usually read the rest of the author’s works and whatever she could find (often whatever there was) of biography and criticism. Marina Warner has spoken of what it felt like as a writer to receive a Lorna Sage review. Before starting to stab, hunched and one-fingered, at the old Olivetti, or later, the little Toshiba, whose keyboard was transformed into rows of letterless cups by the furious battering it had taken, she liked to make sure she had an intimate grasp of the text. This meant picking out the one-liners she made emblematic of the whole. She often did this by ear, not eye; reading out loud with the special emphasis she put into even the smallest of phrases. The quality of her attention, witnessed by the letters and cards she used to receive from writers, came from the detailed work she put in, to represent not only that intimate grasp but also its logic, where it was heading, its implications in a wider context. Many reviewers, of course, work in this way, but what is different about Lorna’s writing is precisely what was different about her reading: a rare combination of warmth and sophistication, in which she mimes with strange fidelity the act of reading a text, while tactically holding it at arm’s length at the same time. The details eventually click to make an unexpected drift of argument that was, if you look back, there all along. There is always a lot more going on in a Lorna Sage review than the ostensible, but she is always uncannily faithful to the ostensible. The fact that her directness is also a rhetorical performance is what makes a lot of this writing so eerily coherent and readable. The articles and essays we’ve chosen seem not to develop, but to spring into print, fully fledged from the beginning. Lorna was a seasoned teacher and scholar by the time she started seriously writing for the papers in her late twenties. The development of her voice does not really take place in these pieces – it takes place offstage, earlier. It was curiously literal: a struggle against the lapidary written style of male academics – a kind of Attic dialect – which all students, regardless of gender, still had to acquire by the early sixties. You can see faint signs of that rebellion in the earlier pieces from the late seventies; the need to put the limp mandarin gesture in brackets as she speaks. When she began, Lorna would write out scripts for her voice. It was not long, however, before that’s how she spoke. The brackets were in her speech, often indicated by a switch of the gaze or a fleeting rise in pitch, to throw away the important point. This voice was the one she wanted, the one that did for all purposes, including public speaking, and writing became a staging of her own mercurial speech. When that happened, she rapidly developed the capacity to make a discussion out of an account. This work when put together has all the pleasure and risk of her bracing talk. Dialogue (between pieces, texts, authors, readers, different parts of herself) is everywhere like good sea air. Lorna pioneered for herself an informality of style that she used to translate into clear and accessible terms any form of perversity, jargon, or learned obscurity. She learned this defence of the common space of culture early on from Plato and it continually informs the ‘attack’ of these pieces. For all her tactical agility, that knack she has of seizing the acute angle, she is not to be deflected, always on a search for what is really there in front of her, its particularity. Our title comes from Lorna’s 1980 review of J. A. V. Chapple’s Elizabeth Gaskell: A Portrait in Letters. ‘Goodness’ was part of the politics of intimacy, a special preoccupation in Lorna’s writing about the lives of women, who can so easily become lost in what she calls, ironically, after George Eliot, ‘the womanly duty to mediate’. Lorna was acutely aware of the mystification of the personal life, something which was for her a spurious self-confirming logic, by which women cast themselves as appendages. She is suspicious in this piece. Gaskell is almost too normal. She must have a hidden, inner life. You can hear Lorna probing for this telltale flaw of self, calling her, cajolingly, ‘an almost infinitely divisible woman’. But in the end Gaskell’s fund of empathy seems to have matched her own, for she concedes: ‘Most good women turn out on closer inspection to be hypocritical, envious or dim (or of course bad), while she genuinely delights in living in and with others.’ As with books, so with people. Intimacy was another paradoxical aspect of Lorna’s character. She disliked formal lecturing, but was a riveting public speaker, converting even her own shortness of breath to an intimate style. She read, wrote and received visitors at the kitchen table, her ear almost imperceptibly turned towards the door. She had a gift for intimacy, a trick of ‘seeing the point’ of people (a favourite phrase of hers in later years), especially outsiders. This was compounded of a genuine curiosity about the lives of others and a talent for benignly picking them up. She liked to keep open-house, sixties-style, often passing the latest apparition at the door a draft of what she had just finished. You were expected to read it on the spot, while she watched your face keenly for reactions. A conspiratorial need for close contact ran through all her relationships – intimacy was her style, but it was a public style, an argumentative style, a performative component of the writing life. We have split the pieces into six sections, each arranged according to an internal, chronological order of publication: ‘Pre-War Life Writing’; ‘Post-War Life Writing’; ‘The Women’s Camp’; ‘Classics’; ‘Critical Tradition’; and ‘Italy’. These divisions are essentially a shaping device – loose, but inclusive – intended to allow the reader to follow chronological development on one front, or on several at once. In the first two sections we have given prominence to biography, autobiography, memoirs, letters and sketches. From the mid-nineties on, while issuing bulletins from Bad Blood and then editing The Cambridge Guide to Women’s Writing in English, Lorna had been reflecting on the whole question of ‘Life-Writing’. The project she had begun to work on after Moments of Truth was a book entitled Writing Lives. She was fascinated by the links between lives and work; in much of what she writes she traces the cuspid points between inner and outer lives: in Dickens, for example, whose manic ‘busyness’ with people kept them away so that he could work, and Angus Wilson, whose ‘inner life was lived on the outside’. Even in the other central sections, which contain a more familiar range of materials, this theme can often be found surfacing too. Finally, ‘Italy’ collects a number of different pieces Lorna wrote over the years about the culture in which she spent so many springs and summers from the seventies on. A good Latinist from childhood, her familiarity with Italian was another means of subverting binary imprisonment. It gave zest to her Renaissance interests, and with the help of the language she also kept the texts and authors of the modern tradition in view, outside the canonical effect of their English packaging. You can feel this direct contact with the language in her pieces on Calvino, and in the punning connection (‘sapere’/‘sapore’) she spots in the Italian between knowledge and appetite. She’s amused, here, to be outside and inside at once. The readerly pleasures of these pieces are many and they are tied to Lorna’s personality. Her hawk’s eye for detail and her almost Dickensian penchant for the grotesque turn up some wonderful things. On St Theresa: ‘her ecstasy was contagious. And not only to artists … General Franco carried her left hand around with him for 40 years.’ Or take this brisk paraphrase of Lawrence’s disgust at the thought of Shelley: ‘A fairy slug is at once unmanly, irrational and grossly slimy: or, in short, a bit of a woman.’ Byron’s attempts to slim: ‘I wear seven Waistcoats, & a Great Coat, run & play at cricket’, which becomes a metaphor for the mawkish ghastliness of his juvenilia. Giantess Emma Hamilton who could ‘impersonate Goddesses because she was nobody, or worse’ declined, apparently, into ‘a Juno lumbering among sceptics’. And of Flora Tristan, she writes: ‘Who else (except a Sterne) would have a chapter on pockets? Or report on a mud-splashing service for huntsmen too poor to hunt? Now there’s an idea for a small business.’ The world of these writings is a generous, but not a frictionless one. Lorna is sceptical of both puritanism and realism in just about equal measures. Both overlap with the claustrophilia of women’s personal lives. The point of writing is not to reproduce the world, but to change it. Women, she argues, have enough problems with reproduction without being locked into it as an aesthetic mode as well. And she is also suspicious of the exclusionary mechanisms of canon-making. She champions outsiders, writers who (as she used to put it) ‘have no reason to exist’, who invent themselves. The most important task of criticism for her is the act of finding a vocabulary for the value of those who are awkward and hard to define, like Elizabeth Smart, for example, whose writerly career, says Lorna, safety-pinning two reproductive functions in one phrase, ‘came to a sticky end in low mimetic prose, and babies’. Yet she still feels, despite the slenderness of her ?uvre, that Smart’s prodigal, high lyricism, her offence to the quotidian, has a chance of being read when other, more plausible writers are not. Outsiders count. Lorna’s critical prejudices embrace anything writerly that she feels gets women out of the jails of biology, sex and gender. She’s on the watch for ‘stickiness’, reproduction, fake authenticity, false being, instrumentality, and bad faith. The positive values that support this running critique come in various forms, but are usually performative, theatrical versions of ‘inauthenticity’: camp, pastiche, carnivalesque, perverse, decadent, even self-destructive or contradictory gestures. She was attracted by the idea, long before Queer Theory, that all women ‘are’ female impersonators. Agency in the world, above all, is what she is committed to in these writings, and a resistance to myths of propriety and self-absorption. All writing for her was a form of ‘doing’, not talking about it. Or talking about the possibility of talking about it. The postponement of the object of knowledge, she observes in her pieces on Shere Hite and Linda Grant, has infected the space of mediatised culture: ‘privatised emotions [lead] further into therapy-speak, and oral and masturbatory culture, of which the Hite reports are themselves a part’. Before all, she abhors ‘loss of nerve’. The test of theory is the production of real (i.e. particular, different) things – they always bite back the theoretical hand. The consistent feature of Lorna’s proliferation of roles between Grub Street and Academe is her knowingness about her own potentially divided position. She writes for what’s left of the common reader in us. She mimes, performs, re-presents the manoeuvres of her authors, not to ‘reproduce’ them, but to expose them for contemplation. Her convictions cross the line between authors and readers, and all theory to her, even the most shrinkingly narcissistic, is a form of (political) practice, which conforms to the same rules as any other species of persuasive writing, including fiction, where much of the thinking gets done. Cultural space is not like physical space: in writing you can (and need to) be in more than one place at once. There’s always more room than you think. She’s instinctively against identity politics from the start, because it literalises cultural space. Her appreciative piece on Susan Gubar’s 1999 Critical Condition demonstrates the nature of this retreat: ‘Has “What is to be done?” been replaced by “Who am I?” she asks, and the answer must be partly yes.’ Her response to Gubar’s remarks about the factionalising of women in the academy is characteristic of what Lorna stands for: ‘There is room to live intellectually, in other words, without having to compete over who’s more marginal than whom.’ Like many another thought in this heartening body of work, it’s a good place to start. Sharon & Victor Sage, 2003 I Pre-War Life Writing (#ulink_d1e2271b-7d44-5aa0-8e95-0d75c5f455e8) Grave-side story (#ulink_bb77b170-54de-5909-b6ec-6f601abd1c5b) Moon in Eclipse: A Life of Mary Shelley JANE DUNN JANE DUNN’S TITLE SETS out the glaring problem for Mary Shelley’s biographers: that she exists more as the child of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, and as Shelley’s satellite, than as her own focus of interest. For much of her life she was, even to herself, a lesser light, so that although we know a lot about her, the information hasn’t ever quite added up. Her other relationships, too, were oblique, filtered through Shelley: (Byron, Hogg, Claire Clairmont, Jane Williams); and after his death the pattern if anything intensified: with her fantasy-relation to Washington Irving and her indiscreet letters to the blackmailing Gatteschi look very like sad attempts to re-create scenes from the drama of her marriage. She was, as Jane Dunn says, intensely lonely for most of her 53 years, precisely because of her talent for intimacy. She had of course, other talents: ‘my dreams,’ she wrote in her introduction to Frankenstein, ‘were all my own; I accounted for them to nobody; they were my refuge when annoyed – my dearest pleasure when free.’ For once (or almost twice, if you count The Last Man, the only other of her novels with something of this force) she contrived to build the contradictions of her experience – her agonies about parenthood as child and mother (or indeed, both simultaneously), the depressing human debris that surrounded her passionate marriage – into a fantasy that would dominate other people’s imaginations. Frankenstein toiling away in his charnel-house laboratory (‘my workshop of filthy creation’) grew out of what was for her a natural association of creativity with destruction. There were the circumstances of her own birth, which killed her mother; then her father’s chilly and increasingly groundless and absurd performance of the role of ‘great man’ (‘You have it in your power,’ he wrote once to a prospective second wife, ‘to give me new life … to raise me from the grave in which my heart is buried. You are invited to form the sole happiness of one of the best-known men of the age’). Her first assignations with Shelley took place round her mother’s grave in St Pancras churchyard; and the way he seems to have talked of rejecting his first wife, Harriet – ‘I felt as if a dead and living body had been linked together in loathsome and horrible communion’ – reveals a truly Frankensteinish capacity to switch from enthusiastic consciousness-raising to revulsion. By the time Mary finished the first draft of the book, Harriet’s suicide had lent a more literal horror to Shelley’s cruel metaphor (‘Poor Harriet,’ she wrote years later in her journal, ‘to whose sad fate I attribute so many of my own heavy sorrows, as the atonement claimed by fate for her death’). Her half-sister Fanny Imlay, Mary Wollstone-craft’s illegitimate daughter, put an apologetic end to her drab, unwanted existence with an overdose of laudanum, leaving nothing to identify her body but her mother’s initials on her stays. Further shades of the charnel-house were supplied by the death (the year before) of Mary’s first child: the way she talks about the book (‘my hideous progeny’ and so on) shows that she made that connection too. Her own life, for the moment, was going well (was, in other words, only routinely precarious, dogged with money worries, begging letters from Godwin, and Shelley’s relation to Claire) and that seems to have enabled her to create the elaborate mythic mix of loneliness, guilt and innocent outrage that makes the novel such a splendid focus for everyone’s nightmares. Usually, though, and almost always in the long years of her widowhood (she was 24 when Shelley died), her complex inner life was consigned to the amorphous, unhappy pages of her journal, where it came to nothing: ‘It has struck me what a very imperfect picture these querulous pages afford of me. This arises from their being a record of my feelings, and not of my imagination … my Kubla Khan, my pleasure grounds.’ She seems to have played her part courageously, but (as though the playing of it exhausted her, as well it might) she became more and more unable to imagine. Her losses and her memories isolated, as she said ‘islanded’, her, ‘sunk me in a state of loneliness no other human being ever before, I believe, endured except Robinson Crusoe.’ There were compensations – her surviving son Percy Florence (reassuringly ordinary), her socialising: she was abused by Shelley’s friends for her lack of radical fire, but she could reassure herself that while she couldn’t deal with abstractions (except in symbols), she practised liberation (‘I have never written to vindicate the rights of women, I have ever befriended women when oppressed’). A very clever, perceptive woman. And yet still in eclipse. Jane Dunn retells the story fairly straightforwardly, but that’s not enough to rescue Mary Shelley from unreality. It was a mistake, too, to underplay the fiction and the intellectual issues (references to ‘Shelley and his philosophising, and his ideas’ just won’t do) as if they weren’t part of the life. All too often Jane Dunn gets stuck on the conventional surface of her narrative (Byron was ‘worldly, red-blooded and extravagant’, Paolo ‘a hard-working but amoral Italian’) when what’s needed is precisely the boldness and inventiveness to delve underneath and challenge that ready-made perspective; and I suspect that her assumptions are too common-sensical and un-literary for such a venture. Good as her word (#ulink_ba209c59-0c52-57f4-bfe0-17859cd99407) Elizabeth Gaskell: A Portrait in Letters J. A. V. CHAPPLE ASSISTED BY L. G. SHARPS MRS GASKELL’S VICTORIAN REPUTATION for goodness has survived modern scholarship. Most of her writer-contemporaries have long been satisfactorily shown up as selfish, obsessive, perverse, quirky or inadequate: her all-round human decency seems simply confirmed by what we learn about her. She disapproved of introspection (it was ‘morbid’ and narcissistic, a form of hypochondria) but no commentator since has seriously claimed she had an ‘other’ secret self. She remains bewilderingly nice. The result is that a book like Elizabeth Gaskell: A Portrait in Letters is bound to seem at first insipid. Her ‘Cranford’ (Knutsford) childhood may have had its sadnesses – she was after all motherless, and in effect fatherless, living with her aunt – but no letters survive to say so, and there is much fictional evidence to the contrary. Her marriage to Unitarian minister William Gaskell at 21 sounds happy enough, even if it didn’t sustain the first honeymoon rapture; she worked with him; she loved her four daughters dearly; and though the death of her baby son in 1846 was a dreadful sorrow, she turned from personal grief to chronicle the sufferings of the Manchester working classes in her first novel Mary Barton. Her writing thus came to seem an extension of her indefatigable social and charitable work in her husband’s parish and beyond – exactly what, in contemporary terms, it should have been. And she has of course (true to her anti-self-consciousness line) little to say about the processes of imagination, or the art of writing: ‘a good writer of fiction,’ she says to an aspiring authoress, ‘must have lived an active and sympathetic life if she wishes her books to have strength and vitality in them. When you are forty.…’ The Portrait in Letters, in short, is hardly a self-portrait. But from another angle, this very omission is fascinating. What we get is a picture of a ‘self’ diffused, a ‘self’ distributed and absorbed in the family, and in society at large – an unperson surprisingly like Mrs Ramsay in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, or even Mrs Dalloway. Mrs Gaskell is sturdier and much more worthy, but there is something of a stream of consciousness in her letters, especially those to her eldest daughter. This one starts off on a charitable project: We have got up to ?2,236, and have more in hand. And I have had a letter from Mr Walpole (brother to the Home Secy) saying his brother will help on the Government pension, and the Hornbys (cousins of Lord Derby) are stirring him up; so we are in good hopes. I should think any air of Mendelssohn’s must be beautiful. Don’t call Shifts chemises. Take the pretty English word whenever you can … independently of the word we shall be most glad of the thing. Flossie is at her last shifts in two senses.… ‘Shifts’ indeed. She’s a brilliant lateral thinker, an almost infinitely divisible woman: ‘One of my me’s is, I do believe, a true Christian (only other people call her socialist and communist), another of my me’s is a wife and mother … that’s my “social” self I suppose. Then again I’ve another self with a full taste for beauty …’ One is not, however, to imagine these selves squabbling or repressing one another (this is not introspection); they are all equally present, equally vocal. Her reaction to literary fame was not to concentrate herself, but to spread her energies yet further. She travelled to Paris, to Italy, to Germany (as well as to the Lake District and Oxford), acquiring more and more connections, without shedding those in Manchester or London or Knutsford. Henry James, a friend of friends, recognised in her the social spirit that held fictions – and people – together: ‘Clear echoes of a “good time” (as we have lived on to call it) break out in her full, close page.…’ She saw what she was not – she admired George Eliot from a distance, and paid tribute in her Life of Charlotte Bront? to the woman writer who most questioned her values. She believed implicitly in the importance of the individual, though in certain senses she wasn’t one. She was, perhaps, something more rare. Most good women turn out on closer inspection to be hypocritical, envious or dim (or of course bad), while she genuinely delights in living in and with others. Professor Chapple and Mr Sharps, in assembling the book (and doing an admirable job in making material from the 1966 Manchester University Press Collected Letters practically available) make no great claims. Professor Chapple ends indeed by quoting Charlotte Bront? on Mrs Gaskell: ‘Do you who have so many friends – so large a circle of acquaintance – find it easy, when you sit down to write, to isolate yourself from all those ties, and their sweet associations, so as to be your own woman … ?’ The answer was no. You couldn’t and be good. Flora by gaslight (#ulink_d1db6974-8754-524f-bc5d-3c616b76e48f) The London Journal of Flora Tristan TRANSLATED, ANNOTATED AND INTRODUCED BY JEAN HAWKES FLORA TRISTAN’S INTEREST AS an investigator of nineteenth-century London starts with the fact that she is so un-English – so utterly immune, that is, to the atmosphere of decorum and common sense that covered the English public women of her time like a veil. It’s not just that she is French, or at least it’s more complicated than that: her parents were a French ?migr?e and a Peruvian grandee; she was dubiously legitimate and certainly disinherited; her own marriage failed, and when, after a battle for the children, she won a court separation, her husband shot her in the back and got 20 years – all of which she rushed into print, along with an account of her voyage to Peru to claim kin. Unsuccessfully – hence her hand-to-mouth career as a wandering socialist prophet, and hence the London Journal, based on her visits in the 1820s and 1830s. She was also Gauguin’s grandmother, as the most recent biography (C. N. Gattey’s Gauguin’s Astonishing Grandmother) chauvinistically announces. However, here she is in her own right, in a new translation by Jean Hawkes, who admits to removing some exclamation marks and dashes, but has otherwise splendidly preserved an original collage of romance, realism, high feeling and visionary prejudice. We start from the Port of London, bamboozled by sheer size – the world’s biggest city – and mesmerized by the glamour of gaslight; but within a couple of pages we adjust to the English pace: it’s nearly impossible to get from A to B, which is why people are so churlish and weary, not to mention the climate, which is what drives them to drink … In short, Londoners are glum, snobbish, sycophantic, inhospitable, punctual (very sinister this, since journeys take hours) and appallingly conventional: If a daguerreotype were made of the public in Regent Street or Hyde Park it would be remarkable for the same artificial expressions and submissive demeanour that characterise the crude figures in Chinese painting. Flora, on the other hand, is a woman of spirit, labouring under the burden of reporting British Podsnappery for the sake of posterity (England is the shape of things to come, if we’re not careful). She is also very French, and blissfully unaware of it – ‘Thank God I long ago renounced any notion of nationality, a mean and narrow concept.’ She also doesn’t exactly believe in God (a mean and narrow concept). ‘Beer and gas are the two main products consumed in London.’ Can it have been true? Could it be still? The link between debauchery and drunkenness is obvious: ‘The sober Englishman is chaste to the point of prudery.’ But other equally incautious remarks give one pause – on the connection between Protestantism, free enterprise and insanity, for instance, or on religious education (‘in the Bible criminals can find good reason for persisting in their life of crime’). And if she’s altogether of her time when she visits prisons looking out for criminal physiognomy and ‘bumps,’ she soars into wilder regions when she confesses: ‘I see prostitution as either an appalling madness or an act so sublime that my mortal understanding cannot comprehend it.’ Her section on the need for infant schools from the age of two, on the other hand, is so prosaic, sane and obvious, it quite takes one’s breath away in our neo-Victorian age. Volatile as she is, however (she is inconsistent on principle), it’s not hard to see how she reads England. Its commercial supremacy is founded on India (sharp of her in the 1830s?). It abolished the Slave Trade to prevent other countries founding colonies, and has proletarianised the West Indian Negroes, who are now almost as wretched as the English working class. London itself – the final exposure of British ‘humanitarianism’ – is a slave market, where young children (of both sexes, she observed coolly) are sold for prostitution. England is imperialist, materialist, masculine. Hope lies with the Chartists and the women, then, logically enough. Her account of a Chartist meeting is in deliberate contrast with her visit to Parliament (squalid boredom, quite apart from the fact that she had to disguise herself as a Turk to get in). The Chartist delegates are alive, eager, visionary, and hopeful – ‘You can see that the poor boy believes in God, in Woman, in self-sacrifice’ – as are the women writers, though perhaps they write because their lives are so socially null: In France, and any country which prides itself on being civilised, the most honoured of living creatures is woman. In England it is the horse … Her profundities and inanities alike spring from the weird acuteness of the angle at which she approaches England. Who (except a Sterne) would have a chapter on pockets? Or report on a mud-splashing service for huntsmen too poor to hunt? Now there’s an idea for a small business. You never know, though, with this wild lady, when she’ll turn out to be timely. A final thought for the day: Oh! The railways, the railways! In them I see the means whereby every base attempt to prevent the growth of union and brotherhood will be utterly confounded. Life stories (#ulink_912cb553-255f-5c4d-96bc-3f2c180f8530) A Need to Testify: Four Portraits IRIS ORIGO THIS BOOK IS A SET of variations on the theme of biography: its dubious credentials, its delights and pieties, and – Iris Origo would argue, hence her title – its necessity. The four portraits here, all of people involved in resisting Italian fascism, make space for the quiddities and peculiarities of their subjects (whom she knew), but serve at the same time as statements of faith in ‘character’. Her people may be merely particular, but they are also stubborn and courageous; they are loners who none the less feel for and with one another, and many others. The first of her subjects, Lauro de Bosis, is the hardest for her to make real, partly because he seems to have lived out his brief life as mythology. He was aristocratic, half-American, brought up on Shelley and Whitman, a bard and a chemist who advocated a conservative (King and Church) take-over from Mussolini. At 26 he wrote a verse drama about Icarus, and at 30, in 1931, he flew over Rome in a small plane, scattering anti-fascist leaflets, and vanished west to crash into the sea. His style, in every sense, was excessive – though he did, in one letter, locate the twist in history that would lend him substance. ‘If the American Revolution had failed, Washington and Jefferson would be considered as seditious Bolsheviks,’ he reflected. When, 12 years later, Mussolini fell in (roughly) the way he had planned, de Bosis’s story returned to earth. It was never, anyway, as Marchesa Origo points out, just his story: three years before his terminal gesture he had fallen in love with a celebrated American actress, Ruth Draper, whose long life comes next, linked with his. Here the biographer’s brief is different, for Ruth Draper not only came from a densely sociable background (‘old New York,’ very Edith Wharton), but had monologued her way through a multitude of characters, and round the world, before she met de Bosis, in middle age. She was all life-wish and, though savaged by his death, went on adding to her repertoire and her friends for a quarter of a century. Her practical belief in his cause outlived him too: among other things, she endowed a chair in Italian history at Harvard, which was occupied by a man unlike de Bosis in every way but one, Gaetano Salvemini, socialist, republican, sceptic – and anti-fascist. Salvemini is the anchor man of the book, ‘the man who would not conform’ though events battered him grotesquely. In 1908 his wife and their five children died in the Messina earthquake; in the years that followed his whole generation, it almost seemed, was dispersed and destroyed – murdered on fascist orders, murdered in Spain, driven (like himself) into exile. In 1946, as the world repaired itself, the stepson of his second marriage was tried and executed as a collaborator in France. He comes through it all, in this portrait, suffering, resilient and mocking, with just a hint of secular sainthood. Here Iris Origo’s conviction that ‘Every individual life is also the story of Everyman’ occupies the foreground. Her last subject, Ignazio Silone, is allowed to characterise himself, in passages from Fontamara, Bread and Wine and Emergency Exit, but at the same time the book’s structure quietly manoeuvres him into an exemplary role, as the priest of a non-existent church. Silone’s defection from the Communist Party, his long exile and his even longer wait for recognition in his own country, even the form of his final illness, in 1978, when agraphia scrambled words for him with a last irony – all of this piles up as evidence of ‘the need to testify’. Strategy for survival (#ulink_303b1c17-3fa4-5d0a-9624-7632310dff19) Secrets of a Woman’s Heart: The Later Life of Ivy Compton-Burnett HILARY SPURLING ‘I AM ILL AT ease with people whose lives are an open book’ – so says Felix (aptly and most deliberately named) in More Women Than Men (1933). Ivy Compton-Burnett’s happiest, wisest and most uncharitably perspicacious characters are all convinced of the virtue of concealment. As, famously, was their creator, who was apt in her later years to regale learned and inquiring fans with tea, toast, Gentleman’s Relish and advice on (say) how to mend holes in rugs. Her ‘inner’ life – the obsessive family scenarios that fed her fiction – seemed to belong, like her clothes and hairstyle, to a period before the First World War, locked away in the past. Hilary Spurling, in her splendid biography of 10 years ago, Ivy When Young, rather shared this carefully fostered impression. The tragic passions she unravelled in the lives of the Compton-Burnetts seemed more than sufficient to account for an after-life spent, as it were, writing them up. However, as she says, there turned out to be another story to tell, with its own rather different fascination: the story of how, when ‘family life was in ruins, her last link with the only world she knew had been snapped by the death of her brother Noel on the Somme in 1916, and she herself had nearly died in the great influenza episode of 1918’, Ivy reinvented herself as a woman and as a novelist. The title Mrs Spurling has chosen – Secrets of a Woman’s Heart – has a teasing irony about it, since what she’s doing this time is exploring secretiveness itself as a strategy for survival. It is, as she shows, by evolving ‘layer by layer the extraordinary protective armour’ that Ivy became so subtle and radical a writer. The relationship with Margaret Jourdain which sustained her, and which ended only with Margaret’s death in 1951, seems to have held no ‘secrets’ of the sexual sort (they adopted each other, they weren’t lovers). Only, shockingly, it was based on the assumption that living in any ambitious or indeed ‘normal’ way was hideously dangerous. To start with, Ivy played the invalid – there were ‘months, even years, when she lay about the flat eating sweets, reading Wilkie Collins and silently watching Margaret’s callers’ before producing Pastors and Masters in 1925. They perfected what one might call, travestying F. R. Leavis, an irreverent closedness before life. Not in the social sense (their tea parties, like the Mad Hatter’s, were never-ending) but in the sense of an offensive neutrality (‘we are neuters’) in the midst of the permanent state of hostilities represented by marriage and the family. Like Ivy, Margaret Jourdain was a veteran of that battlefield. Her vicarage family was large, proud, almost penniless and wretchedly quarrelsome, though full of energy and talent. Three elder sisters were teachers (Eleanor eventually became Principal of St Hugh’s College, Oxford), Margaret herself became an eminent historian of furniture and the domestic arts, brother Frank was a founding father of British ornithology, and Philip was a distinguished mathematician though afflicted, like the youngest sister, Milly, with multiple sclerosis, thought to be hereditary. Mrs Spurling, who is especially good on this kind of thing, traces their histories in some detail: Margaret’s early poetical leanings, suppressed in favour of furniture; the family’s disgust at Philip’s marriage; Eleanor’s intrigues and forced retirement; Milly’s lucid poems on her own decay. The final score is daunting: Margaret died, like her four sisters, unmarried, and though the five brothers each took a wife … only Frank had children: they were born before the disease affecting Philip and Milly had declared itself fully, and all three died … without issue, so that by the middle of the century it was clear that the Jourdains like the Compton-Burnetts – families of 10 and 13 children respectively – drew the line at reproducing themselves. Margaret – formidable, mocking, protective – had had other prot?g?s, though none so (eventually), successful as Ivy. Though it’s clearly not the case, as she once confided to a strange man from Gollancz on a bus, that she was the real author (‘I write all her books’), her strength and her acid wit helped stake out Ivy’s special ‘no-man’s-land’. As did her 1920s Country Life set, which included Firbankian figures like Ernest Thesiger, cousin to the Viceroy of India, actor, narcissist and needleman (nothing was more terrible, wrote Beverley Nichols, than to see Ernest ‘sitting under the lamplight doing this embroidery’), or interior decorator Herman Schrijver (whom Margaret referred to as ‘Ivy’s Jewish friend’) who bet Ivy she couldn’t name one heterosexual male among their acquaintance. The bleak, unillusioned tone of the novels was, as Mrs Spurling points out, part forged in this heretical set, for all ‘Ivy’s old-world style’. In fact, it matched the times increasingly well. As Edward Sackville-West wrote in 1946, ‘Apart from physical violence and starvation, there is no feature of the totalitarian regime which has not its counterpart in the atrocious families depicted in these books.’ Or, as Mrs Spurling more moderately puts it, ‘the moral economy of Ivy’s books had always been organised on a war footing’. After the war her fame burgeoned. People at the tea parties included Angus Wilson, Nathalie Sarraute, Mary McCarthy … and Ivy perfected her techniques of evasion. She did, however (especially after Margaret’s death), unbend to some of the younger writers who sought her out, like Robert Liddell, Elizabeth Taylor and Kay Dick, who provide evidence of her kindness and generosity as well as her more ‘frightening’ habits, like interspersing conversations with muttered asides to imaginary characters. In 1967, two years before her death, she was made a Dame, which it’s hard not to see as a tribute to her tea-table persona, as much as to her writing. She had kept her counsel; her atrocities were committed in the books. Hilary Spurling’s brilliant and meticulous account – studded with scones, sticky with honey – is a study in secret survivalism. Honest woman (#ulink_6d83e284-c884-5e6c-9a6e-673b8bde8ab9) Selections from George Eliot’s Letters EDITED BY GORDON S. HAIGHT GEORGE ELIOT’S PERSONAL LIFE is one of the grand anomalies of Victorian culture. She ought to have been an outsider, a Bohemian, a George like George Sand, whereas of course she made her way to the centre of things, to become the lion of her day and its literary conscience. Boston Brahmin Charles Eliot Norton, nervously contemplating paying a call on her at ‘The Priory’ in 1869, described her position with such comic, twitching refinement that it’s worth quoting the whole passage: She is an object of great interest and great curiosity to society here. She is not received in general society, and the women who visit her are either so emancip?e as not to mind what the world says about them, or have no social position to maintain. Lewes dines out a good deal, and some of the men with whom he dines go without their wives to his house on Sundays. No one whom I have heard speak, speaks in other than terms of respect of Mrs Lewes, but the common feeling is that it will not do. However, as you can tell from his tone (he protests altogether too much), he managed to transcend ‘common feeling’ and not only go along to one of ‘Mrs Lewes’s Sundays’ but to take Mrs Norton too. George Eliot’s enormous critical prestige and popular success had overborne the old story that years before someone called Mary Ann Evans openly set up house with George Henry Lewes when he couldn’t divorce his wife. But it wasn’t just that: she had a special authority precisely because people came to her on her own terms, as an author, which they wouldn’t have done anything like so much if she had been ‘received in general society’. She was condemned – and freed – to live in a world more concentratedly literary than that of any of her female contemporaries. In the letters, selected by Gordon S. Haight from his monumental nine-volume edition (1954–78), you can see the effects of this. Instead of (say) Jane Austen’s network of family ties, here there’s a surrogate family of colleagues, peers and (latterly) admirers. She did salvage a few old friends, and she developed a motherly relationship with Lewes’s sons, but for the most part these are personal bonds created around the writing, and the warmth and respect it generated. She had, as people remarked, a talent for friendship, and apart from a few early, preachy and pretentious letters addressed to school-friends and an ex-teacher from her evangelical days, she’s a generous, concerned, thoroughly unselfish correspondent. She even worries about the egoism of not wanting to seem an egoist: ‘… my anxiety not to appear what I should hate to be … is surely not an ignoble egoistic anxiety …’ And this is the way she hides herself. Or rather, the way she contrives to remain pseudonymous, removed from the mere marketplace of prejudices and opinions and controversy. This must have been part of the secret of her impressive ‘rightness’ – that she questioned conventional rigidities less by what she said than by what she was. The other side of this is that there is always – nearly always – an embargo on intimacy. Only one letter here reveals the passionate and needy self she kept to herself, the woman who found fulfilment with Lewes, and it is, ironically enough, a letter not to him but to that cold fish Herbert Spencer with whom she had fallen horribly in love in pre-Lewes days: I want to know if you can assure me that you will not forsake me, that you will always be with me as much as you can … I find it impossible to contemplate life under any other conditions … I have struggled – indeed I have – to renounce everything and be entirely unselfish, but I find myself utterly unequal to it … I suppose no other woman ever before wrote such a letter as this – but I am not ashamed. One is grateful that Spencer was cad enough to preserve this explosive, desperate stuff, because it enables one to measure something of the achievement of the creation of ‘George Eliot,’ the person she became with Lewes. As do, more indirectly, the letters to friends and publishers in which he figures as Muse, critic and go-between, her constant and loving companion. Their union (too close for letters) is the unspoken theme of the collection, the necessary condition for the warmth and sanity she is able to summon on topics as diverse as women’s suffrage, table-rapping or the Franco-Prussian war. Their mutual solitude, as she knew, was what enabled her range and freedom as a writer. ‘I prefer excommunication,’ she wrote to one of her closest women friends, Barbara Bodichon, who had suggested that perhaps Lewes might be able to get a dubious divorce abroad. ‘I have no earthly thing I care for, to gain by being brought within the pale of people’s personal attention, and I have many things to care for that I should lose – my freedom from petty worldly torments … and that isolation which really keeps my charity warm … Not that ‘petty wordly torments’ are lacking. The letters are splendidly domestic in their running commentary on the myriad, wracking changes of the weather and touchingly ordinary and wifely – and ominous – in their concern with Lewes’s fragile health. His death (in 1878) is marked by a wordless gap, as though she ceased to exist for weeks on end. When she comes back she seems stunned, and only recovers herself when she can replace him (it’s hard to see it in any other light) with their young friend, her devoted admirer, John Cross. Their marriage was more shocking, in its way, than the years with Lewes had been. But as Anne Ritchie (Thackeray’s daughter, who had herself married a man 17 years her junior) wrote: ‘She is an honest woman, and goes in with all her might for what she is about.’ It’s this honesty of need, perhaps, that makes her so eloquent an advocate of what she calls, in one letter, the ‘impersonal life’, the life that we identify with the George Eliot of the novels: I try to delight in the sunshine that will be when I shall never see it any more. And I think it is possible for this sort of impersonal life to attain great intensity – possible for us to gain much more independence, than is usually believed, of the small bundle of facts that make our own personality. The girl from Mrs Kelly’s (#ulink_82369c88-6440-5227-9a8d-681e0407df24) Beloved Emma: The Life of Emma Lady Hamilton FLORA FRASER EMMA HAMILTON WAS ENDLESSLY gossiped about, in every tone imaginable from awe to contempt. The best quick summing-up seems to have been Lady Elgin’s: ‘She is indeed a Whapper!’ This was in 1799, in Emma’s hour of triumph, when a lifetime’s posing in classical attitudes paid off on the stage of world history, in her affair with Nelson. She was a heroine, larger than life, sublimely improbable and very possibly absurd. Flora Fraser’s biography, which mostly lets Emma and her contemporaries speak for themselves, produces an impression of a generous giantess, a woman constructed from the outside in. Romney’s portraits of her in her teens already show her as somehow on a different scale from ordinary sitters. As of course she was – she had no social identity to speak of, and could impersonate goddesses partly because she was ‘nobody’, or worse. The first extraordinary thing about her is that she survived at all in the world of three dimensions, that she wasn’t just a vanishing ‘model’ sucked down into poverty and whoredom. It seems (the early years are very murky) that her beauty was so striking, as well as classically fashionable, that she brought out the Pygmalion in people. Sir Harry Fetherstonhaugh plucked her out of Mrs Kelly’s brothel (a ‘nunnery’ in the style of the brothel in Fanny Hill) and passed her on to his friend Charles Greville, a dilettante and collector who set her up in domestic seclusion in the Edgware Road and began the process of educating her into a largeness of spirit that would match her splendid physique. She was a collector’s item, ‘a modern piece of virtu’ as he proclaimed her (‘ridiculous man’ says Ms Fraser with unusual sternness), and he watched over his investment. It was he who introduced her to Romney; it was he who, when his finances became chronically embarrassed, passed her on to a more kindly and civilised collector, his uncle, the British ambassador in Naples, Sir William Hamilton. This part of the story is always fascinating. Greville seems to have conned Emma into believing that her trip to Naples was part of her education, while to Sir William (recently widowed) he represented it as a mutually beneficial arrangement – he would be free to look for an heiress, his uncle would become the possessor of an enviable objet, who was also pleasantly domesticated and quite likeable in bed. Greville is here a study in himself, the quintessential dilettante—‘the whole art of going through life tolerably is to keep oneself eager about anything’. He also seems to have been hoping to distract Sir William from a second marriage, since he was his uncle’s heir. In the event (served him right) Sir William became so attached to Emma that he made her Lady Hamilton, and forced English society to acknowledge her, though at the convenient distance of Naples. Emma’s injured and statuesque innocence throughout the whole episode is (again) extraordinary. For a girl from Mrs Kelly’s she had already come a long way, and now she moved from a heroic passion of resentment against Greville (‘If I was with you, I would murder you and myself boath’) to a fervent attachment to Sir William in the grandest, most unhesitating style. To the astonishment of her protectors, she took herself seriously: the classical ‘Attitudes’ in which Sir William perfected her (and which she performed for the company after dinner) were reflected in an awesome personal straightforwardness that made people accept her as a brilliant exception, outside the rules. Greville had written to Sir William that she was ‘capable of anything grand, masculine or feminine’; and Sir William, justifying his marriage, described her as ‘an extraordinary being’ – ‘It has often been remarked that a reformed rake makes the best husband, Why not vice versa?’ Visitors to Naples saw in her classical antiquities brought to life. This is Goethe, one of the after-dinner audience: The spectator … sees what thousands of artists would have liked to express realised before him in movements and surprising transformations … in her [Sir William] has found all the antiquities, all the profiles of Sicilian coins, even the Apollo Belvedere. And so the stage was set for her apotheosis as Nelson’s consort. Here the sublime teeters on the edge of the ridiculous: he came along only just in time (she was getting dangerously large in her thirties) and few observers could quite take the real life enactment of a passion on the Olympian scale. Spiteful Mrs Trench was only one of many unbelievers – ‘She is bold, forward, coarse, assuming, and vain. Her figure is colossal … Lord Nelson is a little man, without any dignity.’ Suddenly she is a Juno lumbering among sceptics, her grandeur turned to grossness like one of Swift’s simple-minded Brobdingnagians. With Nelson’s death, her claims to heroic stature fell away, and the story leads with a sad inevitability to the boozy death in Calais, embittered further by the clause in Nelson’s will which bequeathed her (as though she were indeed a great work of art) to the nation. Flora Fraser doesn’t moralise over the ending – not even over the nastiest part of it, Emma’s failure to acknowledge her daughter by Nelson, Horatia, who watched her die, repelled and mystified. ‘Why she should so fascinate is difficult to answer’ is the nearest we get to a conclusion. Ms Fraser lays out the evidence in a conscientious, noncommittal fashion that reminds one that she’s a third-generation biographer, following in the footsteps of mother, and of grandmother Elizabeth Longford, and so confident (perhaps a touch too confident) that 200-year-old gossip will prove sufficiently riveting. But she has chosen her subject well – deeper speculation, one suspects, would be out of place with a character so entirely public property from the start. Half of Shandy (#ulink_a8dfb9d7-6c57-57d4-a55c-48506e8cc96f) Laurence Sterne: The Later Years ARTHUR H. CASH ‘HE IS IN VOGUE. He is the man of Humour, he is the toast of the British nation.’ So reported Yorkshireman Sir Thomas Robinson from London in May 1760. Laurence Sterne, the vicar of Coxwold, was the hero of the hour, famous to a degree literary men seldom manage – like an actor, or a saint. The second volume of Arthur H. Cash’s Sterne biography covers the years when he became public property, following the publication of the first euphoric instalment of Tristram Shandy. Sterne and his creature Tristram merged into one tricksy and titillating ‘character’, larger than life and twice as odd, a prodigy, a ‘phenomenon’. Lapdogs and racehorses were named after Tristram; Garrick befriended him; Sir Joshua Reynolds painted him; 19-year-old James Boswell, looking for someone to hero-worship, tried him out for size in a ‘poetical Epistle’: He runs about from place to place Now with my Lord, then with his Grace … A budding whisper flys about, Where’er he comes they point him out. Boswell, though, went on to settle on someone quite different, soundly three-dimensional Dr Johnson, whose maggots and eccentricities were ballasted with moral authority. Sterne was slippery, skinny and ambiguous, his fascination tied up with his contradictions – the obscenity with the sentiment, the tears with the wit, the clergyman with the buffoon. Moreover, he had stage-managed his own d?but, ghosting a letter from his mistress to Garrick (‘The Author … is a kind and generous friend of mine’) and arranging for Hogarth to be shown another letter to a third party, in which Sterne wished – all innocently – for a Hogarth illustration for his book … and so forth. Small wonder it soon became the height of fashion to complain about how fashionable he was: ‘A very insipid and tedious performance,’ opined Horace Walpole enviously; and the classics tutor at Emmanuel, one Richard Farmer, solemnly predicted that ‘in the course of 20 years, should anyone wish to refer to the book in question, he will be obliged to go to an antiquary for it’. There was more to his respectable contemporaries’ distaste than fashion, however. One of Sterne’s most lasting friendships was with dangerous John Wilkes, atheist, rake, and proto-revolutionary; and his admirers included d’Holbach, Diderot and the Encyclopaedists. The philosopher David Hume pronounced Tristram Shandy ‘the best Book that has been writ by any Englishman these 30 years … bad as it is’. Shameless Shandy was a subversive, all the more effective because he posed as a humble jester (‘alas, poor Yorick!’), and threw off his jibes against authority with a whimsical air. He was profoundly, irretrievably indecorous – not just in the matter of doubles entendres, smut and playing with dirt (‘a naughty boy, and a little apt to dirty his frock,’ said motherly blue stocking Elizabeth Montagu), but in the way he upset hierarchies and categories of meaning. He was an intellectual, but he refused to sweep out his mind, or spring-clean his imagination – and (worse) he persuaded his readers to collude with him in his nastiness and irreverence. It’s this promiscuous closeness with strangers – on or off the page – that’s perhaps the most striking and extraordinary thing about him. Professor Cash, after patiently tracing and identifying hundreds of friends and contacts, sums it up this way: ‘Sterne had a knack for intimacy, in his letters, his life and his fiction. His letters to his bankers … read as though written to brothers.’ The cumulative effect is close, cloying, a touch repulsive even – a whisper in one’s ear, a breath on one’s neck, a thumb in one’s buttonhole. One of Professor Cash’s most telling exhibits is a caricature in oils by the historical painter John Hamilton Mortimer reproduced on the handsome dustjacket. It shows a boozy, dishevelled and unshaven group of boon companions of the 1760s – all flushed faces, grey jowls, hectic, rolling eyes – with a grinning, emaciated wigless Sterne baring his breast to display the locket that holds the picture of his last chaste and sentimental love, Eliza Draper. It’s an image that is at once comically congenial and somehow chilling. Sterne was, of course, dying of TB, and he knew it; indeed, he’d been dying all his life a lot more consciously than most of us (he had his first major haemorrhage as a student at Cambridge) and it was that awareness that gave the edge of urgency to his jokes – especially the ones about sex. Professor Cash is not given to elaborate theorising about Sterne’s subconscious goings-on, but he does point out that the sentimental affairs (and the wretched quarrels with his wife) were not about love (or hate) but the desperate desire for health. Sex ‘straight’ reminded Sterne of his own mortality; only postponed, avoided, played with did it promise life. He regularly compared writing with childbirth (‘I miscarried of my tenth volume’) and he played both father and mother to his own creations. His wife Elizabeth and his daughter Lydia were, in the end, excised like rejected chapters, less real to him than the life on paper. In effect, and ironically enough, this means that this splendid biography makes him less real, and a lot more distant, than he is in his fiction. In the books he is everyone’s closest friend; here, he is a bit of a monster, a man who bled black ink for posterity, and wrote out his death. There’s a macabre appropriateness about the postscript: Sterne’s body was snatched from the grave for an anatomy lesson almost as soon as he was laid to rest, by those experts in immortality known as resurrection men. Nothing by halves (#ulink_87f908ed-aeaa-5142-bd6b-2958b132ada2) The Letters of Edith Wharton EDITED BY R. W. B. LEWIS AND NANCY LEWIS EDITH WHARTON’S POWERS OF mobilising people and making things happen extended, famously, far beyond her fiction. Her good friend Henry James pretended awe in the face of her energy, wealth and social appetites and heard in the sound of her car-horn (‘your silver-sounding toot’) an echo of the Last Trump. He consented, of course, to be called back to life every time, but got his revenge by portraying her as a comic figure, a matron of misrule. This picture was given new depth by the revelations about her passionate affair (at 45) with fellow expatriate journalist and writer W. Morton Fullerton, in R. W. B. Lewis’s 1975 biography; and in this book of the letters he’s able to reveal more by printing letters to Fullerton which came mysteriously to light only in 1980. The intensity of her response to Fullerton took her by surprise (‘you woke me from a long lethargy … all one side of me was asleep’) and so did his absences, mystifications and lies: Dear, won’t you tell me the meaning of this silence … this aching uncertainty … we might have had together, at least for a short time, a life of exquisite collaborations … But it was not to be. Morton seems to have been a practised juggler, who liked to keep several ladies in the air at once, so that Edith found herself, humiliatingly, elaborating a whole love-story round a man who only wanted the occasional intimate episode: What you wish, apparently, is to take of my life the inmost & uttermost that a woman – a woman like me – can give, for an hour, now & then, when it suits you; & when the hour is over, to leave me out of your mind & out of your life. I think I am worth more than that … Professor Lewis suggests that these complaints ‘cannot but strike a disquieting note for a reader in the late 1980s’, but I’m not sure why. It isn’t as if this particular problem has dated. It’s true that Edith revealed her vulnerability, but she also copes with it splendidly. In the end, you feel, she proves that she was simply better at loving than Fullerton – more able to rise to the occasion, rather as she did when she set about gruelling war-work six years later in 1914. She did nothing by halves (this was what terrorised James) but she was very good at patching up disasters, and before long she’d rewritten Morton as one of her entourage of friends. She had already radically rearranged most parts of her life; it only remained to divorce mindless and increasingly manic-depressive Teddy Wharton, who’d married her as ‘Pussy’ Jones back in Old New York and whom she’d long left behind in the senses that counted. She could look back on the ready-made, dull distinction that stifled her so long with brisk aversion: ‘… for 12 years I seldom knew what it was to be, for more than an hour or two of the 24, without an intense feeling of nausea … this form of neurasthenia consumed the best years of my youth … Mais quoi! I worked through it, & came out on the other side …’ Born to a fortune, she earned a bigger one from her writing; born into a monstrous network of cousins and snobbish connections, she invented her own (equally snobbish it has to be said) cultural and literary world; born American, she improved her heritage by settling in France the better to celebrate and satirise her native land. Rumour even had it that she was illegitimate, based, it seems, mainly on the fact that there was not the slightest precedent in her family for her talent or energy. Energy is the key word. Given the busyness of her social life, and the impression left by the photos (semi-regal, all corseted curves, pearl chokers and small dogs), it’s easy to conclude that she merely swapped one established role for another. However, the letters tell a different story: she designed and sustained her personal world rather as she restored houses and made gardens. The letters aren’t mostly meditative or analytic (she never wrote much about her writing); instead they’re a vivid jumble of plans, aper?us, provocations, descriptions. Gossip she prized; and over the years the writer she came to feel closest to was Trollope. ‘I’m trying now to think out his case in relation to his contemporaries,’ she wrote to Bernard Berenson in 1934 ‘& a strange and interesting one it is. To them he was simply a good story-teller, whose books one could “leave about.”’ She felt the same fate overtaking her work. Would the novels have been better if she hadn’t had to invent her life alongside them? She would have thought not, would have said – unlike most of her modernist, male contemporaries – that you can’t separate the two. The bright, ferocious flames of his internal ether (#ulink_2137c901-87c0-5854-9a15-1e763e4e6e61) The Letters of Charles Dickens: Volume VII, 1853–1855,The Pilgrim Edition EDITED BY GRAHAM STOREY, KATHLEEN TILLOTSON AND ANGUS EASSON NO WONDER DICKENS BELIEVED in spontaneous combustion. The three years covered by this volume are so absurdly full of life that he seems himself in danger of burning up or flying apart. The labours of the Oxford editors have retrieved 1,271 letters from this brief period, bearing witness to the extraordinary balancing-act he was managing: the public man and do-gooder, the man of letters, the crony and diner-out, the amateur actor, the editor (Household Words), the friend, the mentor, the traveller writing home. Not to mention the novelist. At the beginning of the volume he’s finishing Bleak House, in the middle he writes Hard Times, and by the end he has started Little Dorrit. At the height of his powers, he is ebullient, sentimental, a practised and hard-nosed literary entrepreneur. If he believes in unrealities – like spontaneous combustion – he does it with shameless conviction. The victims go up in flames because they’re old and gin-soaked, he assures a sceptical George Henry Lewes. His own fuel is altogether more mysterious stuff – seemingly inexhaustible psychic energy. Except that he did get ill, for about a week, and frightened himself, in the last stages of Bleak House: ‘I have been shaving a man every morning – a stranger to me – with big gaunt eyes and a hollow cheek’, he wrote to Lady Eastlake. And he finished the book in relative retreat in Boulogne, away from the teeming London that gave it its epic shape. In fact, he hardly notices London any more in the letters, now that he’s got it onto the page so triumphantly. Only the occasional casual afterthought registers the city – ‘Today there is a great thaw, and London looks as if it had a gigantic dirty nose’ – where it’s a familiar grubby urchin, for all its immensity. Nor does he comment on the creative process, though he does confess to not having invented the character of Harold Skimpole in Bleak House, who is not merely based on, but is, Leigh Hunt: ‘I suppose he is the most exact portrait that ever was painted in words! … It is an absolute reproduction of a real man.’ (Later on we find him apologising to the original – ‘I am deeply sorry, and … I feel I did wrong in doing it’. But in fact he got the egregious effrontery of Hunt so right, that he didn’t care, and their friendship was hardly affected at all.) Escaping for a while from novel-writing in the autumn of 1853 he goes on a continental jaunt with Wilkie Collins and painter Augustus Egg, whipping through Italy with impatient zest. It’s wonderful in this pretty land, of course, but: I am so restless to be doing – and always shall be, I think, so long as I have any portion in Time – that if I were to stay more than a week in any one city here, I believe I should be half desperate to begin some new story!! So by his own frenetic logic he has to stay on the move in order to ‘rest’ from writing. It’s the same story a little less than a year later, when he’s finished Hard Times and is troubled by ‘dreadful thoughts of getting away somewhere’: Restlessness, you will say. Whatever it is, it is always driving me, and I cannot help it … If I couldn’t walk fast and far, I should just explode and perish. His travels are mostly described in the comic vein, though. On the earlier journey’s channel crossing, for instance, he describes, courtesy of Collins’s malicious eye-view (‘raised aloft on a high pile of luggage’) a deckfull of sick ladies ‘wet through … like an immense picnic party with everybody intent upon a pigeon pie of her own – from the immense number of white basins’. He celebrates discomfort wherever he finds it, in fact – ‘We have been in the most extraordinary vehicles – like Swings, like boats, like Noah’s arks, like barges and enormous bedsteads.’ And wherever he goes he not only sends letters, but demands them. Writing to Georgina Howarth from Naples he bewails the absence of mail – ‘I wish I had arranged … to find some letters here. It is a blank to stay for five days in a place without any.’ For of course he lives on words, anybody’s and everybody’s. He may cruelly reject aspiring contributors to Household Words, but he very much enjoys doing it: People don’t plunge into Churches and play the Organs, without knowing the notes or having the ghost of an ear. Yet fifty people a day will rush into manuscript … who have no earthly qualification but the actual physical act of writing. With real writers he is circumspect. Mrs Gaskell, whose Cranford and North and South he serialised, brought him out in facetious-but-furious asides (‘If I were Mr G. O Heaven how I would beat her!’). He professed to think Collins’s apprentice Hide and Seek ‘much beyond Mrs Gaskell’, and was even a touch gratified that circulation went down during North and South – ‘Mrs Gaskell’s story, so divided, is wearisome in the last degree.’ In Hard Times he kept out of her way, plot-wise (‘I am not striking’), and in general of course their styles couldn’t have been more different. When she writes about working people, and about the north, she’s calling on her intimate observation, and she does it in the mediating anti-excess tones of the realist. Whereas he is melodramatic by conviction. He was, at the same time, indefatigable in his efforts on behalf of Miss Coutts’s Home for reclaiming fallen women, and many of these letters are to her, and are eminently practical. Still there’s the characteristic note (‘one more chance in this bitter weather’) even here; and perhaps it’s not unfair to note that it was in mass readings (an audience of 3,700 in St George’s Hall in Bradford) that he seems to have come closest to working people. These years are of course only an arbitrary slice of his life. However, the volume does acquire an almost fictional plot of its own when, towards the end, one finds him writing to Forster, gestating Little Dorrit: Am altogether in a dishevelled state of mind – motes of new books in the dirty air, miseries of older growth threatening to close upon me … And, seemingly summoned from the ether by this mood, his old adolescent love Maria Beadnell (now, slightly ominously, middle-aged Mrs Winter) resurfaces suddenly in a letter – ‘the remembrance of your hand, came upon me with an influence that I cannot express to you. Three or four and twenty years vanished like a dream.’ Her reappearance provokes a kind of self-analysis that’s rare with him – ‘the wasted tenderness of those hard years … I refer to it the habit of suppression which now belongs to me … which makes me chary of showing my affections, even to my children, except when they are very young.’ All sorts of discontents and anxieties begin to surface, and although Mrs Winter herself is soon fobbed off, the excuse he uses (that his work demands all his time and energy) rings true: A necessity upon me now – as at most times – of wandering about in my own wild way, to think … I hold my inventive capacity on the stern condition that it must master my whole life, often have complete possession of me … Despite the many-sidedness of his life, this makes sense. His sociability by the end almost looks like a way of keeping people at a distance, while he gets on with the job. II Post-War Life Writing (#ulink_74d7cd12-64d9-5d36-8561-4aaa9f173fc5) First person singular (#ulink_b9b2006a-41b4-5b1e-9184-2fa7c3fb1252) Sleepless Nights ELIZABETH HARDWICK THIS IS A FICTIONAL autobiography – an autobiography of just such a scrupulous, reticent, cunning kind as one might expect from Elizabeth Hardwick. All her critic’s experience and discrimination, all her scepticism about making life over into stories and people into characters (‘People do not live their biographies’) has been turned on herself. And the result is an impressively personal book that manages to fit none of the formulas. In looking back over a life that led from Kentucky (religion and racehorses) to literary/artistic New York, and many worlds between, her point of view is dictated by a sense – a conviction, even – of her own present aloneness. This seems to have worked back on the past so that she recalls other people too as fundamentally and vividly alone, their lifelines broken into fragments. So the book is populated by isolates, people encapsulated in their own settings and idioms from suave literary bachelors to exhausted Irish cleaning ladies, and from Billie Holiday seen in Harlem to careful, saving senior citizens in country retreats. It is a lone person’s life, outlined through friends, acquaintances and neighbours, the outer circle. As for the inner circle, the attempt to cure loneliness with love, or with marriage – that has slipped away. ‘I was then a “we,”’ she writes, referring to her marriage to Robert Lowell, doubly broken by their divorce and his death – as if to say that the ‘we’ could never have written this book, and so can’t really appear in it. Homes seem to have turned into hotels, people into hotel-dwellers, ‘undomestic, restless, unreliable, changeable, disloyal’. And yet there is a regard, and a generosity, in her portrayal of them that make even the saddest or most brittle seem possibly heroic. Miss Cramer, for instance, once a music teacher, a snob, a genteel traveller, now a derelict in ‘dreadful freedom’, with her ‘dress of printed silk, soiled here and there with a new pattern of damage and no stockings to cover her bruised, discoloured legs’. Or a survivor of another sort, spoiled, desiccated, once-promising Alex who suddenly ‘is radical again and has the beard of a terrorist. The students like him and the faculty does not. He lives in a dreadful house and mows the lawn – starting over, poor, on time as it were.’ The breaks and new directions in people’s lives don’t at all point one way (there’s a very good section on variegated 1940s Marxists trying to cope with this, in their personal histories). Miss Hardwick is scrupulous always to tell other lives, that add up differently. Thus, New York’s savage divorces are balanced comically (it’s often a very humorous book) with the way they arrange things in Amsterdam:– There, first husbands and first wives are always at the same dinner parties and birthday celebrations with their second husbands and wives. Divorces and fractured loves mingled together as if the past were a sort of vinegar blending with the oil of the present. The care she takes with this salad simile is characteristic too. It’s often said, sometimes rightly, that critics write fiction badly, because they’re hopelessly self-conscious. Elizabeth Hardwick, however, has contrived to turn her critic’s virtues – a generous interest in others, a sharp sense of the boundaries between literature and living – into novelistic assets. There is a sense of strain in Sleepless Nights, of tight-strung, nervous energy, but that’s essential to its effect of individuality and honesty. It’s also, curiously, a hopeful book, because it suggests that aloneness, the absence or loss of intimacy, doesn’t mean the loss of humanity. Client relationships (#ulink_5db80280-2912-5a29-905e-19bc6f512b6e) An English Madam: The Life and Work of Cynthia Payne PAUL BAILEY ‘MADAME CYN’, SHOUTED THE headlines: ‘luncheon vouchers’, ‘Streatham’. It was somehow obvious from the start that Cynthia Payne’s ‘disorderly house’ was not the usual kind: that it was, on the contrary, bizarrely orderly. As details of Cynthia’s domestic economy emerged the curious subculture of ‘Cranmore’ looked, in fact, so exactly an inversion of the banalities of middle-class existence that legal outrage seemed absurd. It wasn’t just a matter of the 10p and 15p vouchers clutched by the queue of middle-aged-to-elderly clients on the stairs (though these puzzled the police); nor of the clients’ own professions – church, civil service, politics, the bar. As Cynthia’s trial and appeal (plus her recent confessions in the News of the World) have revealed, her Streatham brothel was not a house but a Home, a place where the repressions of everyday life were reflected in a fun-house mirror. And she herself was that most English of institutions, a ‘character’. Hence Paul Bailey’s splendid study, An English Madam, which removes Cynthia (with her willing cooperation) out of the commercial underworld, and installs her in a niche in the Dickensian tradition of social fantasy. There is after all, Mr Bailey insinuates, a certain similarity between Cynthia’s role and that of, say, Mrs Todgers in Martin Chuzzlewit. She is the landlady as comic genius loci, the ‘hostess’ restored to matronly dignity. Consider the management skills involved: the house, for instance, was cleaned by ‘Philip’, who paid Cynthia a modest sum to stand over him with a switch and complain when he (always accidentally) missed a tiny corner. Roughly the same arrangement, with ‘Rodney’, took care of the large garden. Drinks were served by the ex-Squadron leader, disguised as the butler or (judging from his photograph) Theda Bara as the mood took him. Sometimes a noted political commentator helped out as ‘Tweeny’, and was spanked by Theda Bara for answering back. ‘Gregory’ provided an advice-sheet on the apparatus of domination (‘WIG: as most dominants are blonde, a platinum wig or hairpiece worn to show below the helmet, as stated’). Once, the bank manager, a difficult customer who could never be humiliated enough, was brought to the verge of ecstasy when pelted with the contents of the hoover, which Philip had been warned to fill to bursting. More conventional clients watched blue movies, and ‘went upstairs’ when they felt like it. The party atmosphere was maintained by a system of paying (?25) on entry (hence the famous vouchers), with discounts for pensioners and the impotent. It all sounds like an inspired experiment in energy saving, with Cynthia (‘Lady Domina’ as she was known to the help, though the Squadron Leader, an old friend, called her ‘Madam Baloney’) orchestrating the follies like a benevolent deity. The carnival spirit however, depended – as carnival spirit tends to – on the conviction, shared by Cynthia and her party-goers, that the world outside Cranmore was an alien, bleak, unaccommodating place. If Mr Bailey’s instincts as a writer led him back to the nineteenth century it must have been partly because Cranmore was a kind of time-machine, a refuge from the present where, for example, second childhoods were catered for (again very Dickensian), and where it was taken for granted that your little ways and wants might be entirely out of sync with the greyish person who’d ‘settled down’ or ‘grown old’. It’s not exactly that the set-up resembles a Victorian comedy of humours: a lot of the time it is one, and the intensity of the illusion is a measure of the futuristic bleakness, to Cranmorians, of the supposedly permissive society. What they wanted was the delirious unfreedom – queueing in their socks, with tickets, poached eggs on toast afterwards – of living in the past, not necessarily their own pasts, though some of the fantasies are very specific, but a collective daydream of early life. Cynthia understood all this so well, apparently, because her own early life (in fact, her first thirty-odd years) had been fairly unrelievedly awful. As the book’s hilarious account of the historic police raid modulates into the story of her experiences before she found her vocation and acquired her house, the party atmosphere is rapidly dissipated. In many ways we still seem to be in the nineteenth century, but now the ambience is less English, more Maupassant. Cynthia’s mother died young, in 1943, and her father, whom she and her sister hardly knew (he’d been a hairdresser on the cruise liners) wasn’t well-equipped to cope alone, though he had to, since potential second wives found his girls too difficult, and his own conscious respectability cut him off from the sort of surrounding support his working-class background might have provided. Each sister reacted in her own way – Cynthia ‘ran wild’, used bad language, and displayed a generous curiosity about sex, Melanie became sensible and ‘posh’ (and married a police inspector). As ‘Cinders’ drifted away from home on the south-east coast and into London (failed hairdresser, waitress, unmarried mother) she seems, by her own account, to have lost control of her life with frightening speed. She semi-starved for a season in a slum basement with a derelict who ‘looked like Christie’, though all he did was, harmlessly, to collect other social casualties into a family of sorts. Her men seem to have been either father-substitutes (though penniless and inept – she only managed one ‘sugar daddy’) or sexy spivs like ‘Sam’, who worked in the amusement arcade, and got her pregnant with nightmarish regularity. This is a twilight world of female drudgery (waitressing, pregnancies), of more-or-less lost children (for her first son she arranged fostering, her second was adopted), of abortions and sexual fear. Only as she nears her destiny as a Madam does Cynthia seem to be a person at all. Indeed, she never is quite a person; she moves from unperson to personage (via a short and unpleasant spell on the game herself) in a most disconcerting fashion. As a casualty of family life, and an exile from it, she is a self-made expert in the weird, nostalgic fantasies about domesticity that set the tone at Cranmore. Perhaps the point is made most painfully and absurdly when her long-estranged father, lonelier than ever, and now an old man, becomes one of her party-goers, and joins the queue on the stairs. This is, in a way, Cynthia’s moment of triumph, the closing of the magic circle. She provides the home from home, a haven for refugees from the respectable world she couldn’t live in, and becomes herself a motherless Mother Superior. (House rules excluded men under forty – ‘Old men are more appreciative’ – and her ‘girls’ were chosen because they did it for love as well as money.) And so we return to the domain of Madam Baloney, the hilarity by now slightly shadowed, the humour blacker. Cynthia has preserved letters from her clients specifying their wants, and a selection of the most picturesque of these forms the funniest part of the book. A methodical diplomat describes in enormous detail how the lady of his dreams (‘aged 38–46 if possible, and preferably English [including Jewish], otherwise European, blonde or brunette’) is to create the precise quality that turns him on: ‘a very strong, natural odour coming through her blouse from under her arms’. After instructions about not washing and so on, he continues. My request is really quite a simple one and not really all that demanding, if you consider that less than 100 years ago, when ladies seldom took a bath and scent was too costly for most people to afford, it was considered perfectly normal for ladies to smell of ‘B.O’ … And he hints darkly at tortures of the damned on the rush-hour tube of a hot summer’s evening. Others are briefer, and perhaps less sincere: Honoured Partygiver. Can you supply a nun at your next shindig? Severe face and Irish accent for preference. Yours beatificially, ‘Decameron George’ What they all have in common is longing for that lost past, that time before they grew up and became insurance men or vicars or whatever, when women dominated and enveloped them. Many can only do it when reminded of Nanny (‘Who’s been a naughty boy then?’). Some hanker after housework as the only really exciting thing, like the retired police superintendent who pursues one of Cynthia’s ‘girls’ back home to Somerset to clean her oven in the nude while ‘Agatha’ whips away. ‘Agatha’, in fact, comes dangerously close to enjoying her work: ‘I thought of all those years washing my husband’s socks and underpants, cooking his meals, waiting on him hand and foot, and it suddenly gave me a lovely feeling, punishing that policeman.’ But this isn’t Cynthia’s line: she never married, after all, and is more disinterested, ‘unswervingly loyal’, indeed, Bailey discovers, ‘to the curious notion that the male is the superior of the species’. When they left her house, they returned to their dog-collared or pinstriped adult disguises, and (you realize, with a dazed feeling) to running the society we live in. Paul Bailey, I think, relished his task because he saw in Cranmore’s alternative economy a satire on normalcy, and more specifically on the family as an institution. Cynthia provided a place where ‘earnest obsessionists’ could painlessly (unless they insisted) act out their quirky emendations on the family scenario, and thus unwittingly proclaim (as it turned out) the quiet insanity of English life and manners. The satiric effect is, however, in the end overlaid with a rather different one: a sense that this particular comic subculture is autonomous, endemic, changeless. Cranmore’s world reflects remarkably few of the things that are supposed to have happened to relations between the sexes in the last hundred years. Except of course that they can be written about – something Bailey here does marvellously well. For the rest it’s as though the only testimonies to a century of hectic change are roll-on deodorants, Philip’s hoover, and assorted electronic gadgets, littering a family mansion still really inhabited by our great-grandfathers in short trousers, or, possibly, skirts. Orient of the mind (#ulink_92b86b29-7ce0-55c3-b72c-0ee222d9a9a3) Profile of Lesley Blanch LESLEY BLANCH HAD JUST returned to the south of France from a visit to Turkey. ‘I’m at home anywhere and nowhere,’ she’d said, and I saw why when I climbed through the jungly tunnel of foliage in her steep little garden and stepped through the looking-glass into her Persian parlour, all latticed windows, low divans and overlapping rugs. ‘The Orient of my mind,’ she announced jokily, with nonetheless something of the air of a satisfied magician – a small, ageless, quicksilver woman in a striped cotton jellaba, who reclined leaning on an elbow to answer my questions. These were, first, inevitably, about her style of living. She must be a ruthlessly practical dreamer, I realised, to have stamped her desires so clearly on everything surrounding her. So we started with gardens. The romantic green twilight, she said, is achieved by concentrating not on flowers but on leaves – ‘leaves of every kind, mimosa, cypress, fig, jasmine, thickets of bamboo, oranges and lemons and datura … If you sleep under the datura it’s supposed to send you mad for love, but, she added with an air of gallant regret, ‘there’s no one sleeping under mine.’ She has lived here alone now for 10 years, but it’s not the first house she’s ‘made Turkish’: there was an earlier one up the hill in Roquebrune village which she shared with her husband writer-diplomat Romain Gary 30 years ago. After their divorce she tried Paris but hated its greyness so settled again for the south. ‘I craved the sun. I never feel the need for people, or much else, if it shines on me …’ Her love of sunshine is not the only reason, however, why she has not returned to England. (She became a French citizen on marrying dashing Gary in 1946.) Animal quarantine regulations of ‘pig-headed rigidity’ (I’m to make sure to put this in my piece) also keep her pets and hence herself out. She loves animals – ‘but for my travels there’d be a menagerie’. Indeed, pictures of animals are everywhere: an Indian painting of a tree-bear, a pathetic Victorian spaniel needing a home, stray na?ve paintings, taken in, ‘out of charity’. And it seems to be true that her things are her pets, as it were. The room is furnished with fetish-objects; everything has a story, a sentimental footnote, a personal ‘point’ – ‘I prefer things to people, you don’t have to entertain things, they keep you company and they’re loyal …’ She’s not, of course, a mere armchair traveller herself, but she knows how they tick. That was the secret of her first book and surprise best-seller The Wilder Shores of Love in 1954, with its shamelessly romantic evocation of the lives of French and English women who turned their backs on the grey North (‘comfort maybe, but hysterical comfort’) and chose the passionate East. ‘At the time Romain was First Secretary to the French Embassy at Berne in Switzerland – which I found a place of absolutely hallucinatory boredom – and I took off to North Africa, to the Sahara, and began thinking about other ladies who’d turned East. The East attracted them romantically and adventurously; they willed things into a pattern they liked. It’s rare … You need imagination and will combined for this sort of transformation of your life – not into fiction exactly, but into something which becomes fact in the living of it.’ Her new biography on French writer Pierre Loti – traveller, romantic, egocentric and shameless and passionate poseur, who was admired by the adolescent Proust and even by an ironic Henry James – is again an intimate portrait, a kind of conspiracy with her dubious and nowadays rather discredited hero. ‘A wonderful combination of subject and author,’ says her publisher Philip Ziegler of Collins, with the air of a man who perhaps got more than he bargained for. Not that Lesley Blanch idolises Loti as his contemporary fans did: ‘I would have found him maddening, not at all attractive, despite all the women … imagine, a midget charmer.’ What she recognises in Pierre Loti is the completeness of his dedication to fantasy: the house in provincial Rochefort that concealed a lavish private mosque behind its quiet, bourgeois frontage; the discontented spirit that sent him off again and again on new journeys, new affairs of the heart; the romantic hubris that drove him to reject his own appearance (‘I was not my type,’ is his immortal line) and to try every means from gymnastics to lifts and cosmetics to transform it. She does, of course, find him frequently funny, whereas he seems to have found himself grandly pathetic. Nonetheless, the identification is close. One thing she certainly shares with Loti is his hatred of the colonising culture he himself (as a French naval officer) was a part of. Like him, she is fierce against the West’s arrogant materialism – what she sums up in shorthand as ‘machine-mindedness, big business’: ‘West’ spells true alienation to her. Her response to this is a combination of domestic retreat and rebellion. She will rhapsodise about clothes: ‘I’ve a beautiful collection of exotica … gold-embroidered velvet jackets, pantaloons, Turkish court robes, men’s kaftans and burnous …’ She’s a skilled needlewoman, too, and used to create pictures in gros point of places she’d visited. ‘I’d do the picture as I’d go, no tracing in advance, just stick in the needle and start on the Nile or a tea-house in Afghanistan … Like the heroines of Wilder Shores, she finds the habits of submission exciting because they’re strange – a role to play. Otherwise, she’s all for rebellion: ‘I’ve been a rebel throughout my life. I am disciplined about some things, but I’ve no social disciplines … I haven’t wanted to be as selfish as I probably am; I do have regrets that I haven’t been more understanding of certain people – the few I’ve really cared about. Again, she finds parallels with Loti – ‘he had nearly everything, but there’s something that makes people miserable’ – and with Romain Gary, who committed suicide two years ago: ‘Adventurous people cut and run’. As my time with her ran out, and I was about to plunge again into the green pool of her garden, she suddenly sounded hungry for change, as though she might strike camp any minute: ‘I might live in Turkey, I’m very tempted, I long to have a house-slave, someone who’d make me more time to write … North Africa perhaps? They do cherish the old, which is a very glorious thought.’ But then, her great gift to her readers has all along been her romantic restlessness and sheer dissatisfaction. It’s this quality that makes her writing addictive – what she calls in a nice phrase from the new book, ‘the habit of faraway places’. Last testament (#ulink_2cfcdb16-ea96-58a1-88b3-288191505cfa) Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR TRANSLATED BY PATRICK O’BRIAN THIS BOOK IS A deliberate affront to conventional notions of privacy and dignity. It’s an exact, stoical account of Sartre’s disintegration during his last 10 years, and in writing it Simone de Beauvoir is testifying, with a kind of obstinate scrupulosity, to their shared freedom from all such conventional decencies as would – for example – keep a great man’s image ‘intact’. ‘Honesty suited us,’ she said in a 1973 interview – as though too much truth might be damaging in less extraordinary lives. And there’s something of the same pride in the writing here. Sartre’s dying, you are meant to feel, is watchable because he had himself unfolded the possibilities of his experience (in the books, in his political life) so honestly. The book is as much a matter of keeping the record straight as a labour of love, from this point of view, and indeed the refusal of sentimental language is itself part of the pain of the thing. We start in 1970, with Sartre at 65, in a frenzy of activity, involved with the militants, the Maoists in particular. Protest meetings, speeches, articles, manifestos, demonstrations, jostle with his work on Flaubert. He is working to redefine the role of the intellectual, in terms of ‘decentralising and concrete’ alliances when, out of the blue, come the first cruel intimations that old age means to decentralise him in its own way: at the start only hints of dizziness and vertigo; then in May of the following year a slight stroke, that pulls his mouth sideways in the night; and in July, another. Still, he’s most inconvenienced by terminal problems with his remaining teeth. He resurrects himself, almost magically. At the same time, he suffers from incontinence, leaving behind occasional small puddles that could be blamed on the cat, if there was a cat. You get the sense that the people around him now start to divide into two groups – those intimate (mostly women) friends, de Beauvoir above all, who read the signs; and the activists and literary contacts who see him as a figurehead, a spokesman, a signatory, and through whom he maintains a kind of collusion with youth. Since de Beauvoir insists on the material truth, her focus shifts more and more onto the daily business of living (dying), away from the political life and the projects. They go on, but at a painful distance after the third stroke, in 1973, which leaves him for the first time undeniably mentally damaged, ‘wandering’, haunted by phantom appointments, and wearing ‘a fixed smile of universal kindness’ upon his face, ‘caused by a slight paralysis of the facial muscles’. Worse blows follow: the progressive failure of his eyesight, which divorces him from the world of books; the last cigarette, the never-quite-last whisky; the diabetes. All this interspersed with happy but no longer believable periods of recovery, travel, talk. One of the things that de Beauvoir most wants to insist on is the way the style of life they’d evolved held up under the strain. The women friends that surrounded Sartre shared him with her, as usual, and shared something of her dread. And he was helped, supported, ‘coddled’ even, without being immobilised or isolated. Until nearly the end he lived in ‘vagrant’ style, which removes some of the bitterness from her account of the closing stages of his public career – the legs that won’t carry him on marches, his being increasingly ‘spoken for’ by others, in particular by Pierre Victor, under the guise of the ‘dialogue’ with a new generation he so prized. She tried, she says, to persuade herself that he had somehow ‘chosen’ his death, but she failed. True, he had driven himself obsessively, but he was not ‘the master of his fate’. When the end came in 1980 she wanted him lied to, and was grateful for the drugs that blurred his consciousness. At the funeral, ‘I told myself that this was exactly the funeral Sartre had wanted, and that he would never know about it.’ His dispersal was finally complete. The only kind of consolation she allows herself is his afterlife in words: here (in the second part of the book) she transcribes a series of taped conversations they had in 1974, as a substitute for the work he could no longer do, in which she prompted him to gather his thoughts, once again, on writing, childhood, sexuality, and time. It is a sceptic’s testament – a sort of upside-down version of those confessions and conversions priests like to extract from atheists on their death-beds. What de Beauvoir extracts is a set of casual and irreverent reflections on the necessity of living in the present. Or even the future: I’ve always thought … that you don’t have experience, that you don’t grow older. The slow accumulation of events and experiences that gradually create a character is one of the myths of the late nineteenth century. He congratulates himself on belonging to old age, at least in the sense that ‘I’m not an adult any more’ and ‘only faintly’ male. ‘Adult,’ ‘male’ sex, we learn, he never really enjoyed (‘I was more a masturbator of women than a copulator’) perhaps because he disliked ‘letting go’ – ideally ‘the other person was yielded up and I was not’. He connects his writings with his general predilection for what is against nature, humanly invented: even in the matter of food, it’s always been the cooked for him, not the raw. He goes into a comic ecstasy of squeamishness at the thought of fresh fruit. ‘It’s lying on the ground, in the grass. It’s not there for me; it doesn’t come from me.’ Nature, fecundity – ‘all that’ – constitute ‘a philosophical problem’. Perhaps I am exaggerating the lightness of the conversation. Certainly graver matters are touched on: ‘I wrote, which has been the essence of my life. I’ve succeeded in what I longed for from the age of seven or eight …’ But what de Beauvoir gives here (and, surely, what she wanted) is the specifically, even absurdly, human. She ends with a dialogue about God – that ‘infinite intermediary’ Sartre and she had learnt to do without, though His Almighty absence explained why one must face one’s freedom, why one must write everything out again, including, or especially, age and death: You and I, for example, have lived without paying attention to the problem [of God]. And yet we’ve lived; we feel that we’ve taken an interest in our world … To keep God out, you need to deconstruct the myth of ‘the great man’, too. This, or something like it, is de Beauvoir’s logic, and she’s probably right. ‘Adieu’ – except that le bon Dieu has nothing to do with it, ‘this life owes nothing to God’. What a frightful bore it is to be Gore (#ulink_d444b553-c1ea-53dd-9bda-4b014e93af18) Profile of Gore Vidal GORE VIDAL IS ON the brink of immortality. He must be, he has a biographer, and so will soon have a Life. Or will he? True, he’s lately taken to writing down luminous, pastoral reminiscences about his boyhood age of innocence (which did not last long, and he couldn’t wait to get it over with) – going brown and barefoot into the Senate to visit his grandfather, blind Senator Gore from Oklahoma, and flying across the States in the Thirties with his dashing aviator father, Gene. But for the rest? ‘Most biographies are about love and marriage and divorce and children, the more autistic the better, and alcoholism and suicide. The usual American writer’s life. I seem to have missed most of the Great Things …’ About the only way in which he’s a rounded character is physical. These days he’s, well, large, and indeed looks magisterial, not entirely unlike the Senator. (‘All the senators were fat – I always thought everybody’s grandfather was fat and a senator.’) He’s disappointed in himself. ‘I never thought I would lose my beauty,’ he says, waving it away with sincere regret. He likes people’s outsides and (worse, much worse) says so, instead of claiming to be interested in their souls. His new novel, Empire, about the rise of Theodore Roosevelt, is one of his respectable ones, but nonetheless continues in its own way his scandalous polemic against inwardness, niceness, the mystification of the personal, ‘real folks’, unconscious destiny and such. The style, in keeping with the period, has a whiff of Edith Wharton, a writer he admires. ‘I like Wharton’s wit, and her toughness. She knows her world, and there is nothing soft or romantic in her approach. One must look to men,’ he adds nastily, ‘for those feminine qualities.’ He is a moralist: he believes that heterosexist, imperialist, born-again Americans are wicked. Or rather, he would if he believed in sin. Instead he thinks them hypocritical, deluded and dangerous, their gospel very Bad News. So clear is he about this that he himself is in danger of preaching. ‘The American Empire is one of the most successful inventions in history, and all the more remarkable because no one knows it’s there. Now the economy is coming apart and the locus of the world’s economy has shifted to our far eastern province of Japan. There will be wars of liberation in due course.’ He relishes all this stuff, playing the prophet of doom, Cassandra-to-whom-no-one-paid-attention-until-it-was-too-late. What saves him from his own opinions is, first, that in fact he hates not being listened to, and knows it’s the jokes and the inventions that spellbind; and secondly, that his impulse to mock and his sense of absurdity are in any case out of his control. In conversation he’s a mimic, with a repertoire of voices ranging from the wise man’s drawl, complete with pauses for deep thought, to an ecstatic tweetie-pie babble used for talking to the animals and cutting out the humans. In his work the propensity for mimicry famously displays itself in the variety of his styles and genres – theatre, television, film scripts, essays, historical novels and satires, not in that order, nor in any particular order at all. Even his soberest third-person voice in the fiction has a doubleness about it (now be serious) and of course his regal first persons include the Emperor Julian and Myra Breckinridge, so ably plagiarised by our own Dame Edna. Vidal thinks, or says he thinks, that it may all have something to do with his granny. ‘I don’t know where my voices come from, and I don’t try to find out. All I know is that they start and I write down what they say, the way my grandmother went in for automatic writing. She was in touch with the dead, of course. As they don’t exist for me, I hear from the living … it’s probably Shirley Maclaine, anyway. She was given several hundred hours (it seemed) on television to tell us about her extra-terrestrial adventures and the fact that she is God. Which of course she is, but isn’t it a bit immodest to say so on television? Even the dread Jesus did a bit of shit-kicking when Pontius Pilate started asking him snooping questions. “You have said it,” has always been my own way of handling Godhood.’ Myra B., megastar and living legend, came out in 1968 (‘Has literary decency fallen so low?’ – Time) and has now been resurrected, revised, and reissued back to back, or whatever is the right way to put it, with Myron, in a bumper edition. Both books seem to have been meticulously dirtied up by the author. Anyone who couldn’t work out before exactly how Myra unmanned Rusty Godowski as part of her neo-Malthusian plot to control population and dominate the world, or what a prostate is for, will now be enlightened. With Myron the operation was simpler: in the original Vidal wittily excised all the bad words and replaced them with the names of the members of the Supreme Court who’d just decided (1974) to privatise censorship, and allow local communities to do it themselves. That joke lost its topicality and has been abandoned, so that readers will no longer have to puzzle over the translation of (for example) ‘the whizzer whites that are cutting our powells off’. Not that these changes really signal a slackening of censorship, rather (something that fills him with despair) the fact that books are so relatively unread that they simply don’t matter. Book-readers are a tiny minority, and probably perverts anyway. The censorship has shifted with the majority, to television, whose programme-makers are increasingly urged to produce uplifting fibs, as in Plato’s Spartan Republic. Vidal is somewhat tempted by TV, too: he wrote a lot of drama for the box in the Fifties when he was making his money and smarting from the reception of his homosexual novel, The City and the Pillar, and he still returns from time to time. He recently scripted a much-watched ‘mini-series’ (the kind of word he really relishes) about a murder at West Point. He wrote film scripts too, and points out that he was in on the end of the great studios. He also, of course, performs. He’s very good (which in his case means bad, Bad Taste, scene-stealing and so on) at being interviewed, confronted, chatted up, and inclines to be sceptical about other people’s desire to stay pure. He tells a story of two Britishers: ‘In Moscow I had a late dinner with Graham Greene. There had been a froideur between him and his neighbour, Anthony Burgess. As I quite like both, I am tactful. Greene suddenly said, “I saw him on television. In France. I don’t do television, you know.” I pointed out that in Moscow the two of us had not been off television for four days. “Well, this is Eastern,” he said. “It won’t get back. I hate having one’s face known, and talking on television.” I said sternly that I liked television very much because it was my only opportunity to talk about politics directly, without the discrediting mediation of a journalist. “Of course,” I said, “I never talk about my books if I can help it. What did Anthony talk about?” Greene shuddered, and whispered, as if something too obscene for others, “His books.” Greene’s eyes were wide with horror. “In French.”’ Vidal himself belongs in a less squeamish club (the late Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams spring to mind, as does Norman Mailer) – the author as celebrity: ‘Modesty is a British invention that has never had much of a market in the United States. I do note at times a sort of dismay amongst your deep critics when faced with a writer who contemplates actual power in this world and does not blush and apologise. Different cultures. You are too modest – in a very vain way. We are too busy – in a very humble way, of course.’ He is interested in ‘actual power’ and has several times been tempted to cut corners and go into politics – in 1972 he joined Dr Spock in the People’s Party, in 1982 he polled half a million votes for the Senate, in California. A few years back he explained to Michael Billington that politics seemed to him a family firm – ‘most of those who write about politics are essentially provincials, journalists from the provinces who arrive with big round eyes. To me it’s the family business, like being brought up in a tannery. I know exactly what the smells are, and how the leather’s made.’ However, since he also knows the world of the media inside out – and since politics now happens in the media – what might once upon a time have been a public career has been turned inside out. Vidal is one of the age’s most scathing commentators on the way in which newspapers and television, especially television, have changed the political process, emptied it out, filled it with fictions, ‘public images’ and lies. In the new novel, Empire, the front man is Teddy Roosevelt, but the power belongs to William Randolph Hearst’s newspapers. ‘Hearst is the great original. If there is no news you invent it. While I was “inventing” him, I kept thinking of that passage in Oblomov where the hero starts his slide into perfect sloth by giving up newspapers and coffee houses, where everyone talks about (say) the political situation in Turkey. But is there really such a place as Turkey? My Hearst wouldn’t care. If there was no Turkey he’d make one up. What does one ever know about anything?’ The general sloth, passivity, delight in being lied to, is his great topic. And he brings to it an urgency of outrage that must have a lot to do with his conviction that in a parallel universe, on another channel somewhere, he could have been one of the actors. His most savage satire yet, Duluth (1983), one of his best and most frenziedly inventive books, has characters entirely enmeshed in third-rate dreams. On a more practical level, he foresaw long before it happened that the logical presidential candidate would be an actor; and more recently, in News-week, he exactly prophesied the effect Ollie North would have via the networks. When we learn from Bob Woodward’s Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA that ‘since Ronald Reagan did not read many books but watched movies the CIA began to produce profiles of leaders that could be shown to the President … soon the CIA began providing a classified travelogue of all countries that Reagan planned to visit’, then we’re in Vidal’s territory. Not only is the President in a movie, but everyone else has to join him there. Duluth, though, was only a book. Vidal’s satires are fuelled with frustration. ‘Myra Breckinridge is very much a frustrated power figure who takes charge of her admittedly fictive universe.’ He flourishes in gloomy triumph a sheet of statistics thoughtfully compiled by the British Public Lending Right people, which shows that last year 30,000 people borrowed Duluth, but you feel that 30,000 strikes him as not very many. He likes to point out (his own statistics) that at least one third of Americans are functionally illiterate. So he is back to his public/private dilemma. ‘The public self is just that – the extent to which one wants to get involved with politics or whatever. The private self does the writing. I don’t think I bring the two together. I certainly try not to.’ But what about the Life? Well, his writing self lives, and has done for more than 30 years, with Howard Austen, who is even less of a sentimentalist (were that possible) than Vidal. They – he – used to explain to romantically ‘programmed’ interviewers that it wasn’t a marriage – ‘none of the assumptions are there. Each marriage I know of starts on the assumption of sexual exclusivity’; however, as time’s gone by, the distinctions seem to have lapsed, perhaps because marriages in any case tend to become companionable. The house in Ravello, Italy, where I talked with him is out on a promontory, islanded from the town by gardens, vines, walks. He was entertained to discover that it had been built by my husband’s first cousin twice-removed, Lucille Beckett – ‘Welcome to your patrimony … How are the mighty fallen.’ Some of the Thirties furniture is still there, the floors are tiled, the walls white, with 18th-century paintings and a Roman mosaic. There is the patter of tiny feet (two dogs, a cat) and there are books, books, books. They have an apartment in Rome and another place in Los Angeles, but this, increasingly, is where the writing gets done. The hapless biographer will have to dig deep to come up with the inner Life, there’s so much on the surface. Vidal has long ago published his selected indiscretions – for instance, Ana?s Nin (‘Well she was exotic, I must say; and I was 20, she was 42, and she had a radiant act’). Then there was the conquest of Jack Kerouac. He is, he says, distracting his biographer with famous friends – ‘Greta Garbo, Eleanor Roosevelt, Edith Sitwell, Hannah Arendt, Elizabeth Taylor’, not to mention Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward and other assorted celebrities. ‘I have lived in many different worlds … I didn’t even try to meet anyone. I give my biographer all sorts of fascinating names to track down, hoping he’ll forget all about me.’ Mary McCarthy (#ulink_97516cd8-0ac3-566a-8e00-5b296b7c1c76) Obituary MARY MCCARTHY DIED, IT’S safe to assume, unreconciled and unconciliated. The salad of genes and traditions that went into her making – Catholic on father’s side, Jewish and Protestant on mother’s – was a good start for a life-long balancing-act, and also for laying claim forcefully to the elusive middle ground of American cultural life. She was a liberal. She was the liberal, it sometimes seemed, but then the very label had already joined the ranks of near-unusable words, degenerated into a term of abuse. She was to compile, during her life in literature and politics, a sort of informal lexicon of these, rising to heights of comic indignation during the Watergate hearings when she realised that Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Krogh and company thought of themselves as an intellectual elite. Her characteristic tone was cool, fastidious, reasonable and despairing. And this may have had to do with the other basic autobiographical datum – that she was orphaned in early childhood, which was what led to being passed around the various sides of the family, and perhaps helps to account for her deep distaste for dramatics, shows of sincerity and breast-beating. She cut her teeth and honed her pen during the McCarthy era. The eerie coincidence of the name was itself a portent of a career of needling the histrionic public figures by getting inside their rhetoric and gutting it. Her essays from the period – like ‘The Contagion of Ideas’ from 1952 – are a series of extraordinary and almost exotic exercises in ‘balance’. For her, the real casualty was not so much the Left as the language of sanity and criticism, drowned out by the clamour of accusations, betrayals, confessions, excommunications and conversions. It was in the midst of this collective paranoia that she became (to quote an ironic Norman Mailer) ‘our saint, our umpire, our lit. arbiter’, and uttered one of her most memorable sentences – ‘the liberal’s only problem is to avoid succumbing to the illusion of “having to choose”’. She makes the whole thing sound like a bad movie, a vulgar and untruthful projection of private grey areas into public technicolour. The leading characteristic of the modern world, she said a bit later, was its ‘irreality’, by which she meant the packaging and marketing of life-styles and the erosion of cultural common ground which had made democracy a media event. In her own account of her early years she attributes her style to having fallen in love with Julius Caesar in the Latin class. (In real life she fell in love with Edmund Wilson, not quite the same thing.) Caesar was, she said, ‘the first piercing contact with an impersonal reality … just, laconic, severe, magnanimous, detached’. He wrote about himself, moreover, in the third person (‘the very grammar … was beatified by the objective temperament that ordered it’). In our times, though, more desperate and satiric measures were called for. Her first fiction is characteristed by acts of near-Swiftean impersonation, where she puts on the voice of the detested enemy in order to expose him, and where the ironies are compounded by the fact that the plot is about the defeat of ‘the ordinary liberal imagination’ by some authoritarian, devious poseur. I’m thinking about The Groves of Academe in 1953, in particular, where a boring right-winger gets tenure by insinuating that he’s a secret Red and so enlisting all the campus wets in his defence. McCarthy is of course ‘dry’ about all this; though during these years she wrote several pieces on the death of the novel, or at least the realist novel, dedicated as it used to be to common sense and characters who were more solid than the bright, grotesque types the present threw up. Comic characters, for her, were always secret codes for authorial despair, just as the abuse of the word ‘hopefully’ was a sign of the utter absence of hope. Once upon a time novelists had heroes who, however flawed, represented our subjective conviction of human freedom. She was to have no heroes on the page, nor heroines either, though in life she admired and loved Hannah Arendt, Philip Rahv, Nicola Chiaramonte and many others. Her greatest novel, The Group, is structured around absences – the absentee hero/heroine, the (unwritable) novel of the common ground, and it still has the dangerous flavour of savage laughter about it. At the time (1963) she managed to get furious reviews from both Norman Mailer and Norman Podhoretz (those failed male Norms): Podhoretz grandly accused her of being ‘wilfully blind to the spirit of moral ambition and the dream of self-transcendence’ (though he was talking about the Thirties, when the novel was set); Mailer accused her of not being a ‘good enough woman’ to write a great book, because she devalued ‘the horror beneath’, and had ‘no root’ (so wasn’t a good enough man either). Her power to offend couldn’t have been more graphically illustrated. It was, and remains, a marvellous book about the transmogrification of life, and style, into ‘life-style’ and meaningless freedoms. It was also a prophetic book, which set the scene – the theatrical metaphor is appropriate – for the novels of protest and Liberation in the next decade, where women writers rose up to demand to be listened to in their own first persons, the ‘I’ without the irony. She, on the other hand, might well have taken refuge in nostalgia – nostalgia for the cultural conditions that would give a voice like hers a more direct part in the script. The thing was, I suppose, that she could never reconcile herself to the notion that literature and life should fall apart, nor to the notion (which she’d have thought utopian in the extreme) that they could come together again. Like Humpty Dumpty, the realist novel and the high liberal tradition, were irretrievably shattered, and you almost feel that it was a point of honour with her not to pretend otherwise. During the Seventies she became more what she had always been, an ‘occasional’ writer – that is, more essayistic, more concerned to inject the sceptical, cajoling, quizzical tone into the turn of events. In one piece about visiting a press-briefing in Vietnam she’d declared ‘If I had dropped straight from Mars … I would have known from the periphrastic, circumspect way our spokesmen expressed themselves that an indefensible action of some sort was going on …’ It’s a characteristic thought, she was a bit of a Martian, but then the Martian perspective is precisely the one favoured by sceptics from Socrates to Swift, who set themselves up as public eyes, and she doesn’t dishonour that great tradition. For her creation and criticism were inseparable, and circumstances saw to it that she was more of a critic when she created than the other way around. She paid attention unwaveringly, wittily, and without bitterness. She was in public more admired than liked. Gore Vidal says about her, ‘She was our most brilliant literary critic, uncorrupted by compassion’ – and says it with admiration, without irony. The deb who caught her muse (#ulink_63ebdf51-ae2b-53f6-a579-fdecc86a5fb1) Necessary Secrets: The Journals of Elizabeth Smart EDITED BY ALICE VAN WART The Assumption of the Rogues and Rascals By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept ELIZABETH SMART ELIZABETH SMART DIED IN 1986. Her extraordinary novel, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, first published in 1945, had already been resurrected a couple of times by then. Now it is republished again, along with its companion piece, The Assumption of the Rogues and Rascals. Together these two slim and surreal volumes constitute her fictional oeuvre; and yet she has a better chance of being read in a century’s time than many of her more solid, conventional contemporaries. She keeps being rediscovered, and each time the vividness and panache of the writing are more striking. Weirdly enough, she anticipated fate – reached out to posterity, rather than her contemporaries. Being jilted by it is her theme. By Grand Central Station is the story of her love affair with the high style, and with the poet George Barker, which came to a sticky end in low-mimetic prose, and babies. As the blurbs used to put it: ‘They never married but Elizabeth bore George four children’, and then worked in advertising and journalism to support them. Necessary Secrets, made up of excerpts from her journals from 1933 to 1941, covers her pre-Barker twenties and shows how she transformed herself from a rather bored Canadian deb into the passionate and intransigent Bohemian of the books. It makes fascinating reading. The journals more than confirm the novels’ picture of Smart as plotting her grand passion before she even met Barker, ‘when he, when he was only a word’. First she buys a Barker manuscript; then she dreams greedily about him (‘If Barker should appear now I would eat him up with eagerness’); finally, she organises a ‘rescue’ package to help him and his wife leave Japan (this is 1940) and come to California, where she plays hostess Lady Macbeth-fashion, conspiring relentlessly to break up his marriage. The resulting mess is what she made over into a shapely, poetical agony. Brigid Brophy, prefacing the first Smart reissue in 1966, said that ‘the entire book is like a wound’, and she’s been echoed by many commentators since. It’s a misleading description, though, unless you remember that Brophy (like Smart) is a shameless formalist. ‘Every scar’, says Smart’s narrator, ‘will have a satin covering and be new glitter to attack his heart’ – which pretty well describes the erotic artifice she goes in for. One reason she published so little is that she wouldn’t write the kind of modest prose you can fit in round the edges of domestic life. It was all or nothing for her: eloquent moments of blazing intensity (pain or pleasure, either would do), otherwise silence: I cannot write a novel – the form needs padding, the form needs to be filled up with air – for no truth can last so long or be so boringly consistent. I want each word to be essence … In the event, she produces her own eccentric form. In the journals she uses metaphors of sex and birth continuously: ‘Each word must rip up virgin ground. No past effort must ease the new birth.’ (Male writers had talked like this for centuries, of course, but they didn’t proceed to get literally pregnant by their Muse.) Editor Alice Van Wart says that this edition represents less than a third of the journals. She seems to have done a good job of selecting the material that illuminates Smart the writer, as she pillages seventeenth-century metaphysical poets (Donne, Herbert) and contemporary sex-mongers (Ana?s Nin, Henry Miller) to concoct her own heady style. Smart isn’t a good travel writer (she went round the world, improbably, with a matron who was addressing Women’s Institutes); what’s interesting is her egocentric habit of making everything grist to her mill. ‘Sculpture. Mummies. Jewellery. Shoes’ all serve her purpose. Wars and atrocities turn to imagery – ‘I will not be taken like Abyssinia.’ This arrogant ingestion of the world is her great strength. She takes things impossibly personally, as sensation on her skin, ‘something only the body’s language can say, oiled by the tides of mysterious passion’. No wonder one of her favourite quotations was Donne’s line from ‘The Canonisation’, about lovers epitomising the world. The journals, at least in this selection, show her mythologising herself even in private. Death of the Author (#ulink_89933baf-32fc-5b1b-86f6-c5cea83cdecf) Obituary Essay on Angela Carter THERE’S A PIECE ON Byron by William Hazlitt in which, as he’s routinely and genially abusing the latest instalment of Don Juan, he learns that Byron is dead. Well, of course, Hazlitt says, he was the greatest writer of the age. The sudden deaths of contemporaries wrong-foot us: we have to turn too quickly into posterity’s representatives. A living writer is part of the unsatisfying, provisional, myopic, linear, altogether human present, but add a full stop and you can read the work backwards, sideways, whatever, because now it’s an oeuvre, truly finished. Angela Carter annoyed people quite a lot when she was alive (‘I certainly don’t seem to get the sympathy vote,’ she observed with more than a shadow of satisfaction when last year’s big prizes were announced). But when she died everyone scrambled to make up for it, and perhaps there was more than a shadow of satisfaction behind some of those glowing obituaries, too: she isn’t going to come up with any more surprises; that disturbing sense of someone making it up as she went along will fade; Literature can take its course. For the first time I see that there’s at least one virtue in literary biography: a ‘Life’ can demythologize the work in the best sense, preserving its fallibility, which is also the condition for its brilliance. This has been critical heresy for a long time. Writers’ lives merely distract us from the true slipperiness and anonymity of any text worth its salt. A text is a text is a text. Angela, of course, was of the generation nourished on the Death of the Author (Barthes, 1968 vintage), as was I. Looking back, she recaptured some of the euphoria of that time: Truly, it felt like Year One … all that was holy was in the process of being profaned … I can date to that time … and to that sense of heightened awareness of the society around me in the summer of 1968, my own questioning of the nature of my reality as a woman. How that social fiction of my ‘femininity’ was created, by means outside my control, and palmed off on me as the real thing. But she went on to qualify the ‘sense of limitless freedom’ you get by sloughing off the myths with a sentence which ought to stand as the epigraph to any attempt at a biography of her: ‘I am the pure product of an advanced, industrialized, post-imperialist country in decline.’ Well, perhaps not. But it is a remark that captures her tone pretty exactly: I can just see the moue of amused disgust (but also disgusted disgust at the same time, morally and intellectually fastidious disgust) with which she’d greet the notion that you could somehow levitate out of history. A Life doesn’t have to reinvent its subject as a ‘real’ person. Angela Carter’s life – the background of social mobility, the teenage anorexia, the education and self-education, the early marriage and divorce, the role-playing and shape-shifting, the travels, the choice of a man much younger, the baby in her forties – is the story of someone walking a tightrope. It’s all happening ‘on the edge’, in no man’s land, among the debris of past convictions. By the end, her life fitted her more or less like a glove, but that’s because she’d put it together, by trial and error, bricolage, all in the (conventionally) wrong order. Her genius for estrangement came out of a thin-skinned extremity of response to the circumstances of her life and to the signs of the times. She was, indeed, literally thin-skinned: her skin was very fair, pink and white; she weathered quite a bit but never tanned, and you could see the veins easily. You might almost say her body thought. She had very good bones and was photogenic, so that it didn’t matter that she’d stopped looking in mirrors and painting her face. She let her hair grow out white in wisps two or three years before she got pregnant. I could have been a grandmother by the time she was a mother, and I was younger than she. The shape a woman’s life takes now is a lot less determined than once it was. Or: the determinations are more subtle, you’re sentenced to assemble your own version. Beginning There’s a theory, one I find persuasive, that the quest for knowledge is, at bottom, the search for the answer to the question: ‘Where was I before I was born?’ In the beginning was … what? Perhaps, in the beginning, there was a curious room, a room like this one, crammed with wonders … Angela Carter, ‘The Curious Room’, SPELL (Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature), 1990 She cultivated the role of fairy godmother and/or witch, and – in The Bloody Chamber (1979) – rewrote the Bluebeard story with pistol-toting Mother riding to the rescue at the last minute. However, it was not her own mother, one of a family of ‘great examination-passers’ (a scholarship girl who’d left school at fifteen to work at Selfridges) who provided the model for this kind of figure, but her maternal grandmother, who’d come originally from South Yorkshire. Granny came to the rescue in the year of Angela’s birth (1940) and evacuated herself and her grandchildren from south London back to the gritty coal-mining village of Wath-upon-Dearne, kidnapping them safely into the past for the duration of the war. Skipping a generation took Angela back to ‘Votes for Women’, working-class radicalism, outside lavatories and coal-dust coughs. Granny ought, perhaps, to have surfaced in the fiction as the spirit of social realism, though actually it makes sense that she’s in the magical mode, since her brand of eccentric toughness was already thoroughly archaic from the point of view of the post-war and the south of England. In Angela’s last novel, Wise Children, the granny-figure is killed in the Blitz, but bequeaths to her adoptive grand-daughters Dora and Nora the Brixton house that offers them a safe haven when they have to retire from the stage. ‘When the bombardments began, Grandma would go outside and shake her fist at the old men in the sky … She was our air-raid shelter; she was our entertainment; she was our breast,’ says Dora. Grandma figures as the house in this book, the matriarchal space of the Carter house of fiction – ‘but the whole place never looked plausible’ (Dora again). In a New Review series on ‘Family Life’ back in 1976, Angela wrote that her grandmother ‘was a woman of such physical and spiritual heaviness she seemed to have been born with a greater degree of gravity than most people’. Her personality had an architectonic quality; I think of her when I see some of the great London railway termini, especially Saint Pancras, with its soot and turrets, and she overshadowed her own daughters, whom she did not understand – my mother, who liked things to be nice; my dotty aunt … Grandmother is a larger-than-life ‘character’ for her – Leninist Lizzie, the heroine’s minder in Nights at the Circus, looks like another avatar – but mother is almost a missing person. Not unusual this, at all, particularly for daughters growing up in the 1940s and 1950s, with upwardly socially mobile mothers who’d given up work: women girlified, exiled and isolated in domesticity, who hadn’t ‘done anything’ with their education. She wrote about her Scottish journalist father with obvious pleasure: ‘very little to do with the stern, fearful face of the Father in patriarchy … there was no fear’ (‘Sugar Daddy’ in Fathers, Virago, 1983). Whereas about her mother, who was younger but died first, she was wry, oblique, regretful, protective: ‘There was to be no struggle for my mother, who married herself young to an adoring husband who indulged her, who was subject to ill-health, who spoke standard English, who continued to wear fancy clothes.’ Angela was supposed to do something with her own education, so instead of course she married young herself, in reaction against what her mother wanted for her, though it didn’t last long. If you look for the provenance of the feminist writer, mother is the key. The women who really nailed patriarchy weren’t on the whole the ones with authoritarian fathers, but the ones with troubled, contradictory mothers: you aim your feminism less at men than at the picture of the woman you don’t want to be, the enemy within. In this case, the girl-wife. Hence (again) a motive for skipping a generation, in imagination. Back to Gran. It wasn’t a card she openly played until she got older, when she took to fairy tales and ribaldry. However, the whole camp quality of writing of the 1960s derives from this sense of a lost (deliberately distanced) reality: working-class, northern, matriarchal. None of this could she be, or speak directly for, but she could do it in pastiche – and she did, writing in ghostly quotation marks. If there was nearly nothing ‘natural’ about her style, this was perhaps because her kind of family background introduced her early on to the notion that the culture was a dressing-up box and to the bliss and nightmare of turning the clock back. That is what The Magic Toyshop (1967) is about – slipping out of your precarious middle-classness into the house of (superficial) horrors and (libidinal) mirrors. Ten years after that she said to me in an interview (I’d asked, ‘Do you think your environment shaped you?’): Well, my brother and I speculate endlessly on this point. We often say to one another, How is it possible such camp little flowers as ourselves emanated from Balham via Wath-upon-Dearne and the places my father comes from, north Aberdeenshire, stark, bleak and apparently lugubriously Calvinistic, witch-burning country? But obviously, something in this peculiar rootless, upward, downward, sideways socially mobile family, living in twilight zones … This is not about nostalgia but connects with a quite different contemporary sensation: of coming at the end, mopping up, having the freedom of anomie. ‘Perhaps, in the beginning, there was a curious room …’ Crammed with wonders? The beginning, for Carter, is a magical lumber-room. Over the years her own south London house came rather to resemble this cabinet of curiosities. It was a toy-box long before her son Alexander arrived, though he completed its transformation so that there was hardly room to swing a cat. Indeed, the cats were eventually exiled to the garden. A letter she wrote to me just after that first 1977 interview records the beginnings of this process: The NEW REVIEW piece is smashing. Thanks. The only snag, as far as I’m concerned, is that I only have the one script, alas, so that a number of the details of my autobiography are repeated in the ‘Family Life’ piece – repeated word for word, what’s more. Which is a great tribute to my internal consistency, I suppose; only, my childhood, boyhood and youth is a kind of cabaret turn performed, nowadays, with such a practised style it comes out engine-turned on demand. What a creep I am. And I always get cast down by my own pusillanimity. The notion that one day the red dawn will indeed break over Clapham is the one thing that keeps me going. Of course, I have my own private lists prepared for the purges but … I’m more interested in socialist reconstruction after the revolution than the revolution itself, which seems to mark me out from my peers. We have just had the exterior of this house painted quite a jolly red, by the way. The front steps look as if the Valentine’s Day massacre had been performed on them. However, I also managed to persuade Christine downstairs to have a black front door so it is the jolly old red & black & VIVA LA MUERTE & sucks boo to Snoo’s barley and bamboos; we’re going to have a real Clapham front garden, the anarchist colours & pieces of motorcycle & broken bottles & used condoms lightly scattered over all … PS I didn’t manage to post this until today, Sunday, or rather 00.30 Monday morning, after a brisk search for the letter (in Portuguese) inviting me to this ruddy do [a Festival of Free Art], which begins to look more and more like a nightmare. Chris [‘Christine downstairs’] wants me to bring home a 6 ft. ceramic cockerel. I have house-guests, just arrived, having driven from Nepal – the sister of a Korean ex-boyfriend of mine plus her bloke. Mark has strained a muscle in his back – I’d planned to have him push me around in my wheelchair in 20 years time; what if I have to push him around in one in 5 years time? It’s like a soap opera in this house, an everyday story of alternative folk, I suppose. You can see in the discussion of the decor here something of her inverted dandyism; also the self-consciousness which was her inheritance, for better and for worse. The whole place ‘never looked plausible’. Middle They seemed to have made the entire city into a cold hall of mirrors which continually proliferated whole galleries of constantly changing appearances, all marvellous but none tangible … One morning, we woke to find the house next door reduced to nothing but a heap of sticks and a pile of newspapers neatly tied with string, left out for the garbage collector. Angela Carter, ‘A Souvenir of Japan’, Fireworks, 1974 Japan (1969–72) had been her rite of passage in between, the place where she lost and found herself. Being young was traumatic: she’d been anorexic, her tall, big-boned body and her intransigent spirit had been at odds with the ways women were expected to be, inside or outside. Looking back to her teenage years, she always made the same joke: I now [1983] recall this period with intense embarrassment, because my parents’ concern to protect me from predatory boys was only equalled by the enthusiasm with which the boys I did indeed occasionally meet protected themselves against me. Her first marriage she portrayed as a more or less desperate measure, with her making the running (‘Somebody who would go to Godard movies with me and on CND marches and even have sexual intercourse with me, though he insisted we should be engaged first’). And in her five 1960s novels the point of view is interestingly vagrant – as readily male as female. When she impersonated a girl she described the boys as sex objects; when she went in for cross-dressing she did it, she later remarked, with almost ‘sinister’ effectiveness: ‘I was, as a girl, suffering a degree of colonialization of the mind. Especially in the journalism I was writing then, I’d – quite unconsciously – posit a male point of view as the general one. So there was an element of the male impersonator about this young person as she was finding herself.’ That is one way to put it. Perhaps she adopted the male point of view also because, under the mask of the ‘general’, it was more aggressive, more licensed, more authorial. At any rate, the result is that in the early fiction her boys and girls look into each others’ eyes and see – themselves. Then in 1969 she broke the pattern. She and her husband parted company, and she went to live with a Japanese lover, in Japan. And there her size – and her colour – made her utterly foreign. She compounded her oddity when she stepped into the looking-glass world of a culture that reflected her back to herself as an alien, ‘learning the hard way that most people on this planet are not Caucasian and have no reason to either love or respect Caucasians’. Her 1974 collection, Fireworks, contains three stories that, most uncharacteristically, are hardly fictionalized at all. She must have felt that their built-in strangeness provided sufficient distance, and it does: I had never been so absolutely the mysterious other. I had become a kind of phoenix, a fabulous beast; I was an outlandish jewel. He found me, I think, inexpressibly exotic. But I often felt like a female impersonator. In the department store there was a rack of dresses labelled: ‘For Young and Cute Girls Only’. When I looked at them, I felt as gross as Glumdalclitch. I wore men’s sandals … the largest size. My pink cheeks, blue eyes and blatant yellow hair made of me, in the visual orchestration of this city … an instrument which played upon an alien scale … He was so delicately put together that I thought his skeleton must have the airy elegance of a bird’s and I was sometimes afraid that I might smash him. Feeling a freak was a kind of rehearsal for the invention of her lumpen winged aerealiste Fevvers years later. At the time, in Tokyo, whatever she was looking for, she discovered the truthfulness and finality of appearances, images emptied of their usual freight of recognition and guilt. This wasn’t, in other words, old-fashioned orientalism, but the new-fangled sort that denied you access to any essence of otherness. Tokyo offered cruel but cleansing reflections. In another piece called ‘Flesh and the Mirror’, she described an erotic encounter so impersonal it left no room at all for soul-searching: ‘This mirror refused to conspire with me.’ Self-consciousness had been her bane from the start, hence the anorexia. But while most women come out the other side and learn to act naturally, she somehow managed not to, and Japan is the shorthand, I think, for how. She discovered and retained a way of looking at herself, and other people, as unnatural. She was, even in ordinary and relaxed situations, a touch unlikely on principle. Her hair went through all the colours of the rainbow before becoming white at the moment when decorum would have suggested a discreet, still-youthful streaked mouse. Once, when I was staying at her house, I discovered I had mislaid my make-up and she dug out a paintbox from Japan, some kind of actor’s or geisha’s kit, which was all slick purple, rusty carmine and green grease. She escaped the character expected of the woman writer by similar strategies. That is, she substituted work for inwardness. She’d once wanted, in adolescence, to be an actress; when I talked with her in 1977, she insisted that writing was public: ‘Sometimes when you say to people you’re a writer, they say, “Have you had anything published?” Which is a bit like saying to an actor, “Have you ever been on the stage?” Because if it’s not published it doesn’t exist.’ And the same point, made more succinctly: ‘I mean, it’s like the right true end of love.’ Not that she stopped consulting the mirror. A small allegory: Plotinus and later Neoplatonists suggested mischievously that you could draw a subversive moral from the fate of Narcissus – it’s not self-obsession that destroys you, but the failure to love yourself coolly and intelligently and sceptically enough. If he’d recognized his own image in the water he could have made a real beginning on knowing himself. Angela looked into some dangerous mirrors—for instance, de Sade’s (in The Sadeian Woman, 1979), but by then she’d stepped through the Japanese looking-glass and could say, ‘Flesh comes to us out of history.’ When she came back to England she had her career to build all over again, and that’s what she did, with help from journalism and an Arts Council Fellowship in Sheffield. She was hard up and marginalized in ways she didn’t at all relish. She had no secure relationship with a publisher – between 1971 and 1977 she moved from Hart-Davis to Quartet to Gollancz – she couldn’t make enough money out of her fiction to live on and she didn’t fit easily into the classic outsider role. She never accepted the madwoman-in-the-attic school of thought about the woman writer, particularly not about the Gothic or fantastical writer: freaks and fairies, she believed, were as much socially determined as anyone else; our ‘symbols’ are of course ours. Theory apart, however, she had a thin time during the 1970s, and she was painfully prickly about her reputation. When she filled in an author’s publicity form for Gollancz (who published The Passion of New Eve in 1977 in their ‘science fiction and fantasy’ category), there was a section asking her to list her previous publications. Angela wrote simply ‘7 novels’, without giving even the titles. Some time before this, she wrote to me from Albert Road, Sheffield, about Virago, and her great friend and fan Carmen Callil’s plans to republish women. She was thinking hard about ‘the woman writer’, and meeting a pissed Elizabeth Smart at a party at Emma Tennant’s had given her bitter food for thought: ‘It is hard for women,’ she slurred. Actually it was a very peculiar experience because she clearly wanted to talk in polished gnomic epigrams about anguish and death and boredom and I honestly couldn’t think of anything to say. Except, I understand why men hate women and they are right, yes, right. Because we should set good examples to the poor things. (Was surprised to find Mary Wollstonecraft making exactly the same point, in a way.) … It was all very odd. I don’t mean to sound hard. I mean, I’m sure her life has been astoundingly tragic. And I began to plot a study of the Jean Rhys/E. Smart/E. O’Brien woman titled ‘Self-inflicted wounds’, which kind of brings me to the point, or anyway, a point. I’m on the editorial committee of this publishing firm, VIRAGO … From her point of view, Virago was meant – among many, many other things – to make money out of and for women’s writing and to rescue it from the slough of passive suffering: The whole idea is very tentative at the moment, obviously. I suppose I am moved towards it by the desire that no daughter of mine should ever be in a position to be able to write BY GRAND CENTRAL STATION I SAT DOWN AND WEPT, exquisite prose though it might contain. (BY GRAND CENTRAL STATION I TORE OFF HIS BALLS would be more like it, I should hope.) She herself was working on the Sade book at the time, and her ideas for Virago included some books by men (Sade’s Justine, Richardson’s Clarissa) which got at the roots of female ‘pathology’. She feared and loathed and found hilarious the spectacle of the suffering woman. The Sade book was an exorcism of sorts, too. She needed to theorize in order to feel in charge and to cheer herself up, and that has left its mark marvellously on the fiction too, which is full of ideas, armed with them. (Desiderio in The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, 1972, avoids being eaten by a tribe of river Indians, who are hoping magically to absorb his literacy, because he’s a good enough anthropologist to rumble their plans. Like Angela, he’s read his L?vi-Strauss. Much more recently, in Nights at the Circus, Fevvers escapes a murderous Rosicrucian by the same ploy, having this time read Frances Yates, I’d imagine.) Anyway, with the Sade book and The Bloody Chamber in 1979, she rounded off the decade triumphantly. The fairy tale idea was a real breakthrough and enabled her to read with a new appropriateness and panache, as though she was telling these stories. She took to teaching creative writing too. In 1980 she went to the United States, to Brown University, where she substituted for John Hawkes: no one had read her, she said, but she enjoyed it enormously and had the company of her friends Robert and Pili Coover. Bit by bit, her earlier work would be republished (in Picador and King Penguin, as well as Virago); she would acquire a solid relation with Chatto & Windus, when Carmen Callil moved there; she would become a delighting globe-trotter, a visiting writer/teacher/performer; and her work would be translated into all the major European languages. In 1984 she was still broke enough to be tempted to come and teach on the creative writing programme at my university, East Anglia. I acted – apprehensively – as the go-between on this deal, well aware that she didn’t see eye to eye with Malcolm Bradbury, who ran the course. Since he wasn’t there when she was, this arrangement survived precariously until 1987, with the two of them alternating like the man and woman who forecast the weather. She chucked it in with relief, though students as different as Kazuo Ishiguro and Glenn Patterson had been rewards in themselves. I suppose the point to make about these years is this: she had to struggle hard to sustain her confidence, in the face of frequent indifference, condescension and type-casting. She was not, either, able to repose securely in the bosom of the sisterhood, since her insistence on reclaiming the territory of the pornographers – just for example – set her against feminist puritans and separatists. And of course she was in general an offence to the modest, inward, realist version of the woman writer. John Bayley, lately, in the New York Review of Books, contrived to imply that she had an almost cosy ‘place’ from the start: a magical realist, a post-modernist. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Her work was unclassifiable in terms of British fiction, except as ‘Gothic’ or ‘fantasy’, throughout the whole difficult middle period of her career. If that situation has changed, it is largely because she refused to write ‘fantasy’ as (merely) alternative, ‘in opposition’, and because she made large demands on her readers. Bad-tempered footnotes department: Exhibit One: a letter undated, ‘Tuesday’: Very bland place. At least, Toronto is … The son and his father didn’t miss me. But they seem glad to see me back. It seems we might well be going to Texas next spring; am awaiting letter. Am planning to write novel about sensitive, fine-grained art historian whose PTO life is totally changed by winning large, vulgar cash prize, she dies [sic] her hair green and wears leather trousers etc. Sniffs glue and turns into Kathy Acker … Exhibit Two: a postcard from the States: Have just heard about the Booker. I hope he drinks himself to death on the prize money (you know me, ever fair and compassionate). Will telephone soon – I keep meaning to write you the kind of letter people write in biographies, but there ain’t time. Ending Because I simply could not have existed, as I am, in any other preceding time or place … I could have been a professional writer at any period since the seventeenth century in Britain or in France. But I could not have combined this latter with a life as a sexually active woman until the introduction of contraception … A ‘new kind of being,’ unburdened with a past. The voluntarily sterile yet sexually active being, existing in more than a few numbers, is a being without precedent … Angela Carter, ‘Notes from the Front Line’, 1983 Angela made parenthood her theme in her last novel, Wise Children – parenthood of all sorts, literary, literal and lateral (twins as mirrors to each other). She’d also had her son, Alexander, at the last minute in 1983. Alex was perhaps partly responsible for the long gap between this novel and its predecessor (seven years), but it had always taken her a long time to ‘gestate’ the next because she was original, always moving on and changing. She didn’t think there was anything Mythological about that: Wise Children in fact is all about coming from the wrong side of the tracks to claim kin with Shakespeare, traditionally one of the favourite examples of mythic fatherhood. She had long before used pregnancy as a plot device, a way of ending a novel: first in Heroes and Villains (1969) and then in New Eve very elaborately indeed, so that it turns into an evolutionary re-run, with branches of the family tree for archaeopteryx and other intermediate beings missed out first time round. She had trouble with endings once she had taken to using the picaresque format of allegorical travels, and wanted them to stay ‘open’. And it wasn’t too different with her life. She and Mark Pearce had ‘settled down’ over the years, but in a most vagrant fashion. She travelled all over the place for jobs, residencies, tours; the Clapham house was always being changed around (her friend Christine moved out quite shortly), and was never finished. ‘At home’ they cooked, decorated, gardened, collected cats, kites, prints, paintings, gadgets, all piecemeal. The house became filled with the jetsam of their enthusiasms. Mark worked as a potter for a while and made plates that were beautiful but also enormous, so that they hardly fitted on the makeshift kitchen table and you felt like a guest at a giants’ feast. The two of them took to wearing identical military surplus greatcoats outdoors, announcing their unanimity and accentuating their height. Domestically they communed in silence, which was very much Mark’s speciality, though she was pretty good at it too. They conspired to present their relationship as somehow sui generis, like a relation between creatures of different species who both happened to be tall. They had nothing much conventionally ‘in common’ except that they were both eccentric, stubborn, intransigent, wordlessly intimate. She didn’t, I’m sure, study to conceive, but simply found herself pregnant and decided to go ahead with it. An aged primagravida, she joked, but obviously her condition underlined the difference in their ages and made her granny disguise all the more outrageous. That November, in her last weeks of pregnancy and on the day after she had helped to judge the Booker Prize (which went to J. M. Coetzee), she developed high blood pressure and was hospitalized. From hospital she wrote me a furious letter: My blood pressure rating has not been improved by my second run-in with the consultant obstetrician. Every time I remember what she said, I feel raptly incredulous and racked by impotent fury. Although at the time I said nothing, because I could not believe my ears. So she says: ‘How are you feeling?’ ‘Fine but apprehensive,’ I say, ‘not of the birth itself but of the next 20 years.’ ‘How is your husband feeling?’ she asked. I paused to think of the right way of putting it and she said quickly: ‘I know he’s only your common-law husband.’ While I was digesting this, she pressed down on my belly so I couldn’t move and said: ‘Of course you’ve done absolutely the right thing by not having an abortion but now is the time to contemplate adoption and I urge you to think about it very seriously.’ That is exactly what she said! Each time I think about it, the adrenalin surges through my veins. I want to kill this woman. I want the BMA to crucify her. I want to rip out her insides. Anyway, then she said: ‘Its [sic] policy of the hospital to put older women into hospital for the last two weeks of pregnancy and I’ll be generous, you can go home to collect your nightie & be back in an hour.’ Nobody had told me about this policy before & I feel she may have made it up on the spur of the moment. Needless to say, she then buggered off back to her private practice. Was she being punitive? Why didn’t I kick her in the crotch, you may ask. Why didn’t I cry, shreik [sic] & kick my heels on the ground, demanding she be forthwith stripped of her degrees & set to cleaning out the latrines. Why did I come in, after all that! Everybody else in this hospital is so nice & kind & sensible & sympathetic. There would have been a round of applause if I’d kicked her in the crotch. But, anyway, it turns out that I’m not in here for nothing—this ward is full of women with high blood pressure, swollen feet & the thing they make you collect your piss for, the dreaded protein in the urine. The doctor who looked at me today said they all spent a lot of time patching things up after my consultant, who is evidently famed for making strong women break down. Evidently I can agitate to go home again on Monday if my blood pressure has gone down. ‘What about the consultant’s weekly clinic?’ I said, because I’m supposed to go to it. ‘Dodge her,’ the doctor said. The doctor is a slip of a right-on sister young enough to be my daughter. The consultant is a Thatcher-clone – evidently a Catholic, I’m told – old enough to be my mother. I am the uneasy filling in this sandwich. A good example, this, of the way motherhood is used as a means of denying a woman’s own meanings, taking away her choices, extruding her from normality’s roster. Actually, the birth went all right, and despite the seemingly inevitable hospital infection, Angela was able to rejoice from the beginning in Alex’s Caravaggiesque beauty. But you can see how hard it was for her, at times, to make up her life as she went along. The writing in this letter belongs to a genre she disliked – the low mimetic, the language that reproduces the world. Small wonder she preferred surreal transformations, nothing to do with autobiography or confession or testament. But that seeming impersonality was, I’m arguing, entirely personal at base – a refusal to be placed or characterized or saved Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/lorna-sage/good-as-her-word-selected-journalism/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. 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