Elizabeth Jane Howard: A Dangerous Innocence
By Artemis Cooper, John Murray, 384 pages, £25
Artemis Cooper tells the story of how a friend remonstrated with the elderly Elizabeth Jane Howard after she published her autobiography, “Slipstream” — there was too much of her life in it, and not enough about her work. “I didn’t think it would interest people,” she replied.
Her friend of course said the right, respectful thing, paying her work the compliment of taking it seriously; he was from a different generation to Howard’s, and the collective cultural life in the UK has undergone a sea-change since she began to write. The British are fairly scandalised now by a past era when Howard’s admirers couldn’t seem to separate her work from her body and her beauty, her self.
Jonathan Cape invited her to lunch in 1949 when he bought her first novel, and then chased her round the table; Bob Linscott of Random House in the US ought to have been interested in the novel but seemed preoccupied by “your floating down a flight of steps as effortlessly as in a dream, or sitting on a sofa in my hotel room with your lovely long legs tucked up under you”. The “Sunday Times” in 1959 called her “the most beautiful woman novelist living in London”. Imagine any autobiography of a male novelist that hardly mentioned his work except as projects accomplished in passing, subordinated to the love affairs and the social life and the homemaking.
So when Howard said she didn’t think that writing about her work “would interest people” she was mixing up some flirtatious self-deprecation with plenty of authentic agonising self-doubt and the knowledge that it was her life that had interested others more than her books. Nonetheless, I wonder how much she would have had to say about her own work. I suspect that she wasn’t that keen on writing about writing, or in reading about it. It’s difficult to imagine Elizabeth Bowen, or Jean Rhys, or Elizabeth Taylor, dismissing their art quite so carelessly, so unstrategically.
Howard wasn’t a stylist or a deeply insightful reader, and she wasn’t a very self-conscious novelist. She poured her life into her books and they were the overspill of all the rest of what she was. And it’s especially difficult to disentangle her writing from her own story because it’s probably the Cazalet novels she’ll be remembered for — loosely based on her own family and her early years. At home in what she knew best, in these books, Howard made an enduring, engaging record of a way of life. When they were adapted for TV in 2001 she noticed the small details they didn’t get right on screen: the men didn’t stand up when their mother entered the room; the wine was not decanted; there were net curtains at the windows of Home Place. It’s the tiny realities of the past that are most eloquent, and hardest to hold on to.
To anyone who knows the Cazalet books and “Slipstream”, Artemis Cooper’s biography may feel as if it covers familiar territory. It’s an interesting enough life story, beginning in the stuffy upper middle classes in the early 20th century (the Howards, like the Cazalets, had a business importing timber) and persisting through the social revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s, through the overturning of the old deference and old hierarchies.
Howard was 90 when she died in January 2014. Perhaps some of the patterns that dismayed her in her emotional life sprang from a mismatch between the old inherited ideals of ladylike romance, and the new brutality of mid-century male sexual mores.
Reading what her husband Kingsley Amis wrote about her, you could end up pining for a bit of Victorian inhibition, and putting femininity on a pedestal. He told Philip Larkin that she had left their marriage “partly to punish me ... and partly because she realised I didn’t like her much”; to Brian Aldis as he called her “the old bitch”. To be fair, he wrote some lovely things to her when they were first together, and when he was still entranced by her performance of classy sophistication. But even in the early days one friend with a sharp eye noticed Howard taking the pins seductively out of her long hair one late night for Amis’s benefit, as if in some Edwardian romance; Kingsley only rolled his eyes and went on talking. Later he parodied her poshness.
Howard wanted to be adored, and she was often, provisionally; but she was better at romance than long-term love, and too easily suggestible, vulnerable to predatory seducers. The men really were having it all their own way. Before Amis there were her affairs with the controlling Robert Aickman and the controlling Arthur Koestler (“whatever she did threw Koestler into a fury”), and the letters Cecil Day-Lewis wrote to her only very shortly after he had left his first wife, Mary, and his long-term lover Rosamond Lehmann for actress Jill Balcon.
Howard didn’t of course have to listen to Day-Lewis, didn’t have to be so foolish as to believe any of it; she did break off the affair eventually, and only succumbed once when he pleaded with her to start it up again — but Balcon never forgave her.
Howard wasn’t an ironist, she didn’t have it in her to be guarded. Her stepson Martin Amis, who always writes about her with great generosity, and credits her with getting him reading serious books, said that “off the page” she was actually not that “clever with people”. In Cooper’s account, as in her own, she comes across as an odd mixture of gauche and formidable, fearful, energetic and rather humourless; a Tory not much interested in politics; helplessly condescending to her cleaners, and to the lower orders in her fiction; kind when anyone was ill or in trouble.
And then she also wrote those worthwhile Cazalet books, catching and holding for our attention some truth about the milieu of her childhood and youth. I’m not sure how much this biography adds to what we already knew. Howard’s novels have their own tendency to slacken in places into banal unnecessary detail; in the biography we surely didn’t need to know, for example, who was feeding the Amises’ cats when they went to New York in 1967.
On the other hand, efforts to set their lives in a wider historical context produce some comic juxtapositions. “In mid-August, Martin helped Monkey and Sargy rewire the new house. Kingsley was very worried by the build-up of Warsaw Pact troops on the border of Czechoslovakia.” There is no need to invoke anything world historical to make these lives matter in history, in their own way.
–Guardian News & Media Ltd
