Harriet Devine's Blog

Rosamund Lehmann: A Life

I've been really busy the last few days but have managed to read this biography in what little time I've had. Having consumed four (well, three and a half) Lehmann novels over the past couple of weeks, I was fascinated to know about her life. Goodness, what a sad life it was, really. It's tempting to say that the problems she had were largely of her own making -- but of course she acted as she did because of who she was, and she was who she was because of ... what? Her childhood, perhaps? That's what Selina Hastings, in this wonderfully thorough and balanced biography, suggests. Certainly Rosamund felt, with some justification, that her handsome, urbane, clever father did not love her as much as he loved her siblings -- calm, beautiful Helen, witty adorable Bea and John, the only son. So, the argument goes, she spent her life falling for men who resembled her father, and then falling into despair and angry recrimination when her increasing insecurity and neediness drove them away. She was, of course, a beauty, and had no trouble attracting the men in the first place -- they all started out quite wild about her, and so their cooling off was perhaps all the more terrible. And having been such a beauty, her old age was rather terrible too -- though she managed to delude herself that men were still falling in love with her even when she was in her eighties. The most tragic event of all this rather tragic life was of course the sudden death of her young and newly married daughter Sally. As is well known, this precipitated her into an extraordinary phase in which she was convinced she was in communication with Sally on "the other side". She drew great comfort from this, but unfortunately it also alienated many, even most, of her closest friends, sceptics all. It also went to produce her last and much admired book, The Swan in the Evening, which I have just ordered (used) from Amazon. It is great, though, to be reminded of what a wonderful revival her writing had in the early 1980s, thanks to Virago.

This really is an exemplary biography. Having read all those novels so recently, I found the accounts of their writing really interesting, and also good to hear about the critical reception -- which pretty much echoed my own responses. An extra resonance for me was that I believe my parents knew Rosamund, and definitely knew her actress sister Bea -- certainly many of the people who appear in the novel were family friends who I was used to hearing about when I was a child.

Seven Weird Facts

Well, I got tagged for this by litlove on Tales from the Reading Room so here goes. These are the rules, by the way:

1. Link to the person’s blog who tagged you. 
2. Post these rules on your blog.
3. List seven random and/or weird facts about yourself.
4. Tag seven random [?] people at the end of your post and include links to their blogs.
5. Let each person know that they have been tagged by posting a comment on their blog

1. I hate making phone calls, except to close friends and family. Love emailing or writing notes, though.

2. I was a carnivore until I was 23, but became (and remained) a vegetarian overnight after watching a friend cutting up raw beef for a pie. Just suddenly saw it was a dead animal and couldn't bear it.

3. I stopped growing when I was thirteen, having reached five foot two.

4. I rarely drink because alcohol keeps me awake at night.

5. I have a PhD (well, a DPhil, in fact) and spent many years as a university lecturer but I never took any A-levels.

6. I hate being cold and can sometimes be seen in a coat and scarf when everyone else in the room is in t-shirts.

7. I got 20% in my maths O-level after a year of private coaching.

Tagging: Danielle (A Work in Progress), Ann (Table Talk), Karen (Cornflower), Terence (Books Do Furnish A Room), Elaine (Random Jottings), Ruth (Crafty People) and Catherine (new blogger -- go for it! -- French Kiss).

Woman Reading (8)

Woman Reading in a Garden by the great Impressionist painter Mary Cassatt.

Four by Four

This was on the lovely Cornflower blog and I liked the look of it, so here are my answers.

Four jobs I've had

Assistant Stage Manager -- my first proper job, when I was just seventeen, making sure props were in the right place and knocking on doors saying 'Five minutes, please'.

Waitress -- in the holidays from drama school. I worked in a cafe where I had often eaten, but after I started working there and saw the state of the kitchen, I never ate there again. Thank God we now have Health and Safety inspectors!

TEFL teacher -- trying to impart English grammar into the minds of disaffected French boys in Oxford

University lecturer -- English literature, just retired. I got rather sick of the admin side of things but wouldn't have missed it all for the world. I've had some wonderful, brilliant, rewarding students who were a joy to teach.

Four places I've lived

London, where I lived from age four, when we moved from the Kent countryside, until I was in my twenties, and then again some years later. I still think of myself as basically a Londoner.

East Pennard, Somerset, in the 1960s, living in a 17th century cottage and growing our own vegetables.

Shippensburg Pennsylvania, a very pretty town full of 18th-century clapboard houses, where I spent a happy six months teaching at the university.

West Lancashire, where I have lived for seventeen years. I got a job, and came up here with some trepidation, having almost never been north of Birmingham. I felt like a real southerner for quite a while, but have grown to love this lovely rural area.

Four places I've been on holiday

France, where I used to go with my parents when I was little, and where I now have a house.

Morocco -- an amazing winter spent travelling around in a VW van. Yes, this was the 60s again!

Cornwall, where we used to go when the children were small and we couldn't afford holidays abroad. We had friends with a house in the middle of nowhere who always welcomed us -- I have the happiest of memories of that time, and still think Cornwall is one of the most beautiful places in the world.

Greek islands -- some lovely holidays island hopping with my teenage daughter.

 

Four favourite foods

This is a surprisingly hard one -- so much depends on my mood. As a vegetarian with various intolerances, who is usually on a rather restrictive diet, there are some things I adore but can only eat very rarely. So this is the sort of food I sometimes dream of:

French bread, with French butter and some kind of lovely French cheese

Cannelloni stuffed with ricotta and spinach in a creamy cheese sauce

Hot rhubarb crumble with lashings of hot custard

Any really good kind of chocolate ice-cream

 

Four places I'd rather be

This is hard, too. I'm quite contented at home, though the weather right now is dreadful. But I'd always be up for a trip to...

South India -- actually almost anywhere in India, but the south is my favourite. I've been lucky enough  to have spent quite a lot of time there lately and always feel very happy and at home.

My daughter's house in London, reading the Saturday Guardian in front of the Aga, and hugging my grandchildren

Italy -- not a place I know all that well, but one that has always entranced me

Bali, where I once spent ten unforgettable days. Glorious place.

The Echoing Grove

                                                    Enough already! This is my fourth Rosamund Lehmann in a row, and I have to stop. In fact I have stopped, even before I got to the end of the novel. I started off OK, and read about half the book, and there is nothing wrong with it at all. In fact if I'd got to it sooner I expect I'd have loved it. I did enjoy the first half -- it has a rather fascinating plot. Two sisters, the beautiful, rather naive Madeleine, and the less beautiful but more sensual, strange and attractive Diana, are in love with the same man, Rickie. The trouble is, he is Madeleine's husband. The story swings around through time rather, back and forth between the present of the novel, in which Diana is visiting Madeleine for the first time in fifteen years and Rickie has long ago died from a duodenal ulcer, and various times in the past when he is with one or other of the two women. I thought the passages of the novel in which Rickie and Madeleine were together, trying to work out whether their marriage was still viable, were painfully well observed -- Rickie rather shifty, confused, uncertain, unable to conceal the fact that he still loved and longed for Diana, and Madeleine angry, hurt, unable to trust him or to restrain herself from making sharp, smart comments -- and yet both of them still capable of enjoying days out as a family, in the country, with the children. My goodness, Lehmann does know about human beings and how they behave in relationship to each other.

I shall hang onto this and probably read the rest soon. I just needed a break from RL, though I've just ordered Selina Hastings biog of her so when that comes I'll probably be back with a vengeance. Meanwhile I am reading Harlan Coban for a bit of light relief.

Dusty Answer

"Dusty Answer, my first novel, uncorked a torrent of letters, literally hundreds of letters ~ chiefly from America in the beginning, later chiefly from France ~ explaining that I had written their own unhappy love story: how could I possibly have known or guessed it? More than one lesbian lady urged me to abandon my so obviously frustrated heterosexual life and share her hearth and home. One young Frenchman withdrew to a mountain-top and there typed out a two hundred thousand word sequel to Dusty Answer, accompanied by photographs and letters designed to prepare me for our joint future, when he would teach me love. And so it went on, with twists and variations which it might be tedious to multiply. It was one of those curious, unaccountable explosions of zeitgeist".
So wrote Rosamund Lehmann in her autobiography, The Swan in the Evening, from which you can read an extract here.
Dusty Answer is an astonishing first novel. Lehmann wrote it in 1927, when she was in her early twenties, unhappily married and uncertain what to do with her life. The young heroine, Judith Earle, is similarly uncertain. The novel follows her from her childhood, when, in her pleasant, cultured, middle-class home by a river, she is entranced by the rather older children who sometimes stay next door with their grandmother: "stupid, funny, serious Martin", beautiful Charlie, sarcastic, clever Julian, attractive, mercurial Roddy, and Mariella, the only girl, "remote and unruffled, coolly friendly". After the first world war, Judith, now a young adult, meets them again, by which time Charlie has been killed in the war, first having married Mariella, who is now bringing up their baby son Peter. The story now follows Judith through her three years as an undergraduate at Cambridge, where she becomes involved in an intense relationship with the beautiful, wild Jennifer Baird. Flung into despair at the ending of that relationship, when Jennifer abandons her for the unsympathetic, domineering lesbian Geraldine Manners, Judith becomes involved, one after another, with all three of the surviving young men. All three involvements end badly. After an idyllic night with Roddy, she writes to him expressing her undying love, only to find he had seen their night together as a passing diversion. Devastated, and unable to forget Roddy, she agrees to marry Martin, but realises in time that she cannot go through with it, and breaks the engagement. Julian, who has always been in love with her, now proposes that she should become his mistress, but though she initially agrees, this relationship too ends when it is revealed that Martin has been drowned at sea. Judith is left alone at the end, "a person whose whole past had made one great circle, completed now and ready to be discarded. Soon she must begin to think: What next? But not quite yet".
All this may sound very intense and breathless, and in truth it is. But it is so astonishingly perceptive, so acute in its observation of people, and their feelings, and the way they relate to each other. And Lehmann writes so superbly: her descriptions of the natural world are wonderful. Here's just one taster to finish with:
"It was autumn, and soon the lawn had a chill smoke-blue mist on it. All the blurred heavy garden was as still as glass, bowed down, folded up into itself, deaf, dumb and blind with secrets. Under the mist the silky river lay flat and flawless, wanly shining. All the colours of sky and earth were thin ghosts of themselves: and on the air were the troubling bitter-sweet odours of decay".

A Poem

A few years ago I used to run a course called Twentieth-Century Women Poets. It was very popular and I loved teaching it. I was reminded of it yesterday by a poem that appeared in Saturday's Guardian. It's by Fleur Adcock, a poet I have always admired. So for those who didn't see it (or who'd like to read it again) here it is:

Country Station

First she made a little garden
of sorrel stalks wedged among
some yellowy-brown moss-cushions

and fenced it with ice-lolly sticks
(there were just enough); then she
set out biscuit-crumbs on a brick

for the ants; now she sits on a
deserted luggage-trolley
to watch them come for their dinner.

It's nice here - cloudy but quite warm.
Five trains have swooshed through, and one
stopped, but at the other platform.

Later, when no one is looking,
she may climb the roof of that
low shed. Her mother is making

another telephone call (she
isn't crying any more).
Perhaps they will stay here all day.

Woman Reading (7)

Here's rather a charming one -- I don't have a source for it, though.

Invitation to the Waltz

As I said in my post on The Weather in the Streets, I am rediscovering the great novels of Rosamund Lehmann. I raced down to the local library on Monday where I found they had all of her novels, though they were not on the shelves but in a sad place somewhere in the basement reserved for people who have gone right out of fashion. A kind lady went and fetched three for me, of which this was one. It had to be read first, of course, as it is the story of that same Olivia who appears in the later book. Here she is just seventeen -- in fact the story begins on her seventeenth birthday. The plot can be described in a couple of sentences. Olivia gets a length of scarlet silk for her birthday and gets it made up into an evening dress by the the rather clumsy, though well-meaning, village dressmaker. She wears it to her first grown-up dance, at the Spencer's grand country mansion, where, accompanied by a rather annoying young curate -- a distant cousin produced by her parents to save her appearing without a partner --  she feels childish and awkward, but is much comforted by an encounter with the son of the house, the handsome, charming Rollo, who treats her with sweet solicitousness. That's it, really. But the great joy of this lovely novel is in the detail -- Olivia's relationship with her older, more beautiful sister Kate, with her little brother James, and with her mother -- the strange and sometimes rather disturbing people she meets at the dance -- and above all, the insights into her mind and thoughts as she struggles to assimilate all the new experiences she is having and to process all the new information she is presented with. I suppose it could remind you a little of Jane Austen -- Northanger Abbey? But it is very much of its time, which is the 1930s, and also wonderful in ways that Austen is not (though she is wonderful too, of course).

Apparently Lehmann is not as popular with critics today as she deserves because she is viewed as being too obsessed with romance and romantic love -- "Lehmann does not provide feminist alternatives to the genre of romance; she merely updates it. Femininity is firmly dependent on being verified by male desire", according to one critic I have just read. I suppose I can see what they mean but my goodness this is such a narrow view and one that completely misses her wonderfully subtle and perceptive analysis of so much that goes on in the minds of her protagonists, a great deal of which has nothing whatever to do with romance. I'm now reading her first novel, Dusty Answer, of which more soon.

Women in Art

Women in Art!
A little something for people who have been enjoying the pictures -- a glorious and brilliantly constructed collage movie of women in paintings through the ages, accompanied by a Bach cello piece. This has been around for a while but I was reminded of it this morning by someone on a discussion group I belong to -- thanks, Sarah.