Georgette Heyer

by Jennifer Kloester

  “Tact(!), Charm and Impartiality” when overseeing disputes and expressed the fervent wish that some of this Tact might be shown in The Home; and it is with mixed feelings that I watch the Creature displaying, in Court, the calm, unemotional quiet which is at such startling variance with his Home Demeanor! In Home Arguments, I am left with the impression that he marvels that God should have cursed him with a Moron for a wife, and am frequently reminded of his mother—“Ronnie, NOT so EMPHATIC!”

  Georgette sat for her portrait in 1959. Anna Murphy’s painting revealed her looking every inch the grande dame in a magnificent black evening dress and heavy pearl necklace (Richard always said she looked as though “someone had just trumped her ace!”). Ronald had the portrait hung above the fireplace in the sitting room in Albany where friends could admire it—although Georgette was always characteristically self-deprecating about having been “done.”

  She had finally started the novel set in Rye and decided to call it The Unknown Ajax after the Trojan War hero in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida. The book had another of her clever character inversions and she grew quite fond of this novel and of her large hero in particular. It helped that he was “a new one, too, which makes an epoch!” The Unknown Ajax contains some of Georgette’s funniest dialogue.

  She finished the novel in June and sent the messy typescript to Frere with a reassuring note and an apology: “Sithee, love, (as my hero would say) it’s noan so bad! I have just rushed through, correcting, & transcribing corrections; & I don’t know, but I think it’ll do. (It’ll have to, anyway!) I’m sorry it’s so messy.” She often apologized for her manuscripts, which were typically full of additions, deletions, interpolations, and corrections all written in a crabbed hand between the lines of typing. Frere was not concerned, however, for they were still legible and gave the typesetters no trouble. Her publisher knew her to be the consummate professional and, so far from needing to be pushed, Frere “had to be careful not to ask too much of her.”

  Her relationship with Frere and Pat Wallace gave Georgette great satisfaction: they liked and understood her and she felt completely at ease in their company. Her tendency to be brutally frank did not always make her easy to deal with, but she was a kind and generous friend with a marvelous sense of humor and she could be great fun. She and Ronald both adored Pat Wallace and Georgette once replied to an invitation to dinner by telling her friend that although she would “love to dine…even more would I love to see you by yourself one day, so that I can be girlish, & let my hair down.” Living in such close proximity in Albany did not prevent her from writing regular letters to the Freres at E.1. or from reveling in their replies: “I read your letter at the breakfast-table this morning,” she told Pat Wallace, “and chuckled gently. Until the Creature I married (when VERY young and stupid) said, with barely restrained impatience: ‘Well, don’t be snitchy with Wallace’s letter!’ So I read it to him, and now hail you (mediaevally) as a Spousebreaker, because the Nasty Old Man said wistfully: ‘I do love Miss Wallace!’”

  Ronald’s affection for Pat Wallace did not extend to her husband, however. The two men shared a mutual antipathy which each did his best to conceal. Georgette was aware that Frere thought Ronald opinionated and an “awful ass.” But as much as she adored her publisher she would not allow him to criticize her husband. Always reticent about such things, Ronald mostly kept his feelings to himself, although his wife was aware of the spark of resentment which smoldered within him and would sometimes deliberately defer to Ronald because of it. Her relationship with the two men gave Georgette the best of both worlds: Frere was charming, clever, well-connected, and successful; Ronald was understanding, supportive, intelligent, and capable. They both thought the world of her.

  Walter Minton of Putnam’s wrote to Joyce Weiner that year to ask if he could publish four of Georgette’s earlier titles in America. But Georgette had grown disillusioned with the firm’s apparent inability to sell her novels properly and had already asked her agent to tell Putnam’s that The Unknown Ajax would be her last publication with them. “I know you are itching to do business with him,” she wrote Frere. “Of course, I have no control over the first three titles on his list, but I will never speak to you again (except rudely) if you yield to your itch.” She had taken one of her dislikes to Minton and although she relented enough to give them one more book after Ajax, it was to be the last.

  Georgette’s mediocre sales in the United States were due in part to poor publicity. She had not yet become a household name in America as she had in Britain and, despite the sale of various film and stage rights, had never had the benefit of a successful play or movie to boost her book sales. Though skeptical of the idea, she still hoped someone might eventually make a film that did justice to her work. She was envious when she heard that Pat Wallace had sold the rights to some of her father’s stories to a television production company.

  They went to Greywalls as usual in September but Georgette’s discovery of a lump in her breast meant surgery on her return. “The small, sordid job was done yesterday,” she told Pat Wallace in October, “& I hope & believe that that’s the end.” The tumor was benign. She recovered in a private hospital and despite feeling rather limp enjoyed several days of comfortably doing nothing with no one to make demands of her. The Unknown Ajax came out in November and Frere reported that sales were “running currently much higher than VENETIA over a comparable period last year, and I can assure you that the booksellers are mighty pleased with Miss Heyer.” He also apologized for neglecting her “with a capital N, but I cannot think of a period during our long, checkered, and to me wholly delightful association when you have not had every right to feel so.” It was not true, of course, but Georgette did not argue the point.

  She spent the new year writing a short story for a new woman’s magazine. Joyce Weiner had negotiated a fee of five hundred guineas for the commission—a very large sum which reflected the power of Georgette Heyer’s name to sell magazines. The story was “A Clandestine Affair” which Georgette described as “very old rope—badly frayed… an unblushing crib on the works of Georgette Heyer.” She was right, for the tale had decided echoes of her 1955 novel Bath Tangle. It was to be her last short story.

  That year, she had hopes of writing a new kind of novel but was unsure about it. She thought the book would be “neither farcical nor adventurous, & will depend for success on whether I can make the hero as charming as I believe he was! And also, of course, if I can make a quiet story interesting.” She wanted A Civil Contract to be quite different from her previous books and planned to set the story in 1814–15 with “the culminating point the financial panic in London over Waterloo. I have always had a slight yen to do that—& to see Major Percy driving in a hired hack to Carlton House, with the two Eagles sticking out of the windows.” But her writing was again destined for delay when her mother was struck down with bronchitis.

  It took Sylvia a long time to recover. Having got her into a nursing home and engaged two nurses to care for her, Georgette and her brothers now tried to persuade Sylvia that she should not continue to live alone in a hotel. Frank came up to London to try to talk his mother into moving into a nursing home on the Royal Circus in Bath. He assured her he would be nearby at Downside School and Georgette promised to visit regularly from London. It seemed the ideal solution but Sylvia refused to go. Ironically (to Georgette’s mind), her main reason was that she “did not want to be so far from me!”

  Her mother then decided that what she really wanted was to live in a Home in Brighton. Consequently, Georgette and Boris (who was now in Sussex managing a country-house hotel with Evelyn) spent a “frightful” day in Brighton looking at places—only to find on their return that Sylvia had booked herself into a room in another nursing home. It was a great relief when her mother eventually recovered and moved back into her hotel in Leicester Gardens. Georgette felt the strain of her mother’s needs; it was conducive neither to tranquillity nor to writing, and 1960 was a
nother of her rare years without a new novel.

  26 The film was eventually made as Die Bezaubernde Arabella. Although it followed Georgette’s story, the director gave it an early twentieth-century setting. It first screened in December 1959.

  32

  My style is really a mixture of Johnson & Austen—& what I rely on is a certain gift for the farcical.

  —Georgette Heyer

  Not wanting to disappoint her fans who had come to expect the annual Heyer novel, Georgette agreed to Joyce Weiner’s suggestion that she publish an anthology of her short stories instead. She chose a selection of her published stories for the book and Woman’s Journal chose “Hazard” for their Christmas issue, telling readers: “we have chosen our favorite, by your favorite author.” Some of the stories needed minor amendments or character name changes and the Coronation story “The Pursuit of Hetty” was retitled “To Have the Honor.” It was a minimal amount of work for a substantial return. Georgette was so pleased with Joyce Weiner’s idea that for several years afterwards she gave her ten percent of the royalties. They called the collection Pistols for Two. Then Georgette returned to her neglected novel.

  She did not find writing A Civil Contract easy. Beset by interruptions she told Pat Wallace that it remained

  much where it was—& where it ought to be is in an incinerator, & would be if I hadn’t pledged myself to write it. To be honest with you, I do not wish to write this book. Or any other book. I have no inspiration, no energy, no enthusiasm, & no power-of-the-pen! I sit & look at the bloody thing, & wonder what can have possessed me to embark on it.

  Georgette had rarely before struggled with a book and she found it disconcerting to find herself sitting at her typewriter gazing at an unfinished page. She pressed on, however, and eventually finished what some readers consider to be one of her best novels. A Civil Contract is about a series of unequal relationships and the different kinds of love that can make or mar them. Its prosaic romance between her plain, middle-class heroine and gentle, aristocratic hero set it apart from her other Regency novels. The book also contains one of Georgette’s comic triumphs in Jonathan Chawleigh, her heroine’s fabulously wealthy and vulgar father who continually “tried to steal the whole book, & had to be firmly pushed off the stage.”

  Georgette went to Paris for Christmas, spending a riotous week there with Ronald and Richard. Returning home in good spirits, a few days later she wrenched her back carrying her typewriter. Stuck at home with orders not to stoop or climb stairs she sent off the Civil Contract manuscript in a rather gloomy frame of mind. She also sent a message to Frere asking him to read it: “Don’t if you don’t want to, but if you have, let me know what you think…I still feel very doubtful, and am, for once in my life anxious to see how it reads in print.” But Frere had other things on his mind. There were serious problems at Heinemann and he was facing increasing alienation and opposition to his command.

  After several years of decreasing profits, the firm was near bankruptcy and there was dissension among the board members about how to address the problem. Five years earlier, Frere had attempted to get Heinemann into paperback publishing but had met with stiff resistance from the other directors. He was eventually overruled and the plan fell through. Kingswood had also become an expensive white elephant and with no significant new authors the firm was overly reliant on its long-established stars. Many of Heinemann’s key writers, including Somerset Maugham, Graham Greene, John Steinbeck, J.B. Priestley, Eric Ambler, and Georgette Heyer herself, were well past middle age and could not be relied on to produce bestselling novels indefinitely.

  The dire financial situation had prompted Frere and Lionel Fraser, the chairman of the Thomas Tilling Group (which owned a majority share of Heinemann), to try and sell the company to McGraw-Hill, the successful American technical and academic publisher. The proposal was made in absolute secrecy, with Frere the only member of the Heinemann board to know of it. Consequently, when the deal was leaked, several of Heinemann’s directors vehemently opposed it on the grounds that McGraw-Hill was too big and too American. It was a xenophobic view which conveniently ignored the fact that Heinemann had once been successfully owned by the American firm of Doubleday. The anti-McGraw-Hill lobby prevailed, however, and the deal did not go through.

  Desperate to save the company in which they had invested so much, Tilling had bought up the rest of the Heinemann equity and set about reorganizing the firm and its board. By April 1961 Frere’s fears were realized and he was “kicked upstairs” to occupy a new, non-managerial position as president. His long-held belief in publishing without consulting others ultimately proved his undoing.

  Although Georgette was disturbed by the machinations at Heinemann, as long as Frere was still there she was content to let things continue as before. To her, at least, Frere appears to have downplayed both his anger and the true nature of the situation, for she wrote to him just as usual during that tumultuous spring and summer. By March she had already decided that it was not a good year. Her mother had had a fall and broken a rib, Frank’s wife Joan was in hospital recovering from a mastectomy, Boris and Evelyn were moving north to Northumberland to run a pub, and “a large demand from the I.R. sharks” meant calling in the Civil Contract advance early. When a fan wrote “to draw your attention to a flagrant example of plagiarism” of Georgette’s work it seemed the final straw.

  Georgette reluctantly read Winsome Lass by Kathleen Lindsay and sent Frere a scathing assessment of it: “The book is very poor stuff indeed, but not, I think, actionable. There is scarcely a character in it who wasn’t suggested by me, or sometimes, two of mine, but since none of them has any life, far less charm, I hardly think I can be hurt by this utterly blatant piece of piracy. The woman hasn’t a clue!…Utterly without wit or humor…You know, I can’t imagine how she contrived to get some 6 books published, because she can’t write!”27 On Frere’s advice Georgette wrote a stiff letter of protest to Kathleen Lindsay’s publisher, Robert Lusty of Hurst & Blackett, which she hoped would put an end to the matter.

  To her astonishment, a few weeks later she received a reply informing her that Kathleen Lindsay took “considerable exception” to the accusations and demanded details of the alleged borrowings. Appalled by what she saw as a fellow-author’s dishonesty Georgette sent Lusty a detailed summary and a two-page list of similarities. A second reply from Kathleen Lindsay, demanding “What does it all amount to? About four incidents and two lines” shocked Georgette so profoundly that she worked up an eleven-page analysis of Winsome Lass cross-referenced against eight of her own novels and sent it to her solicitor. Counsel’s opinion was for an injunction, but Georgette’s only desire was to prevent further infringements and to put the incident behind her. Neither author was willing to give ground, however. Georgette testily told Kathleen Lindsay’s publisher that “I realize that she and I do not speak the same language, or share the same principles.” Like the Cartland case before it, this one never came to court.

  Georgette’s blood pressure soared in April. Her doctor put it down to the plagiarism affair but his patient thought it was more likely the result of Richard’s decision to become involved with the wife of one of his bridge-playing friends. Only a year earlier he had told his mother (much to her despair) that he had “no intention of entering the married state” and yet now he appeared to have fallen for a married woman. Richard had known Jeremy and Susanna Flint for some time and when her marriage had foundered Susie had turned to Richard for support. The relationship had evolved from there. It was a potentially scandalous situation, however, for divorce was still seriously frowned upon in 1960s England. At first, Georgette and Ronald were horrified at the idea of Richard marrying a divorcée.

  It was not until Susie joined them at Greywalls in September that they were won over: “We have had Richard’s Intended with us since Tuesday, & I rather think Ronald is becoming reconciled. To Susie, if not to her circumstances—& God knows I’m not reconciled to them, & nor is Susie he
rself…But she is a charming guest, with the prettiest manner, & a gratifying way of enjoying herself.” Georgette confessed to being a little puzzled over her son’s choice of bride, however: “I should never have picked her as a suitable type for R.G. I think her intelligent, but, as far as I can discover, she is definitely not Bookish, & I do rather wonder what mutual contact there will be, since R.G. is extremely Bookish. However, he’s not a boy or a fool, & I must suppose that he’s weighed it all up, in his peculiarly cold-fish way.” It was a perceptive comment, for even with Susie—whom he seemed determined to marry in the face of all opposition—Richard would never be ardent or make his inner feelings known. Ronald was won over by Susie’s enthusiasm and the realization that she had endured a lot. Georgette was certain that she would be a delightful daughter-in-law.

  Within a fortnight of their return to London Georgette was struck down by some kind of respiratory ailment. “It seems strange that I was once a fairly successful novelist,” she told Pat Wallace. “I feel today like a slow worm. It is an intolerable effort to move from one chair to another, & I wish that I were dead.” Fortunately, the feeling did not last and by Christmas she was well enough to write one of her long, chatty letters to the Freres to thank them for their gifts—including an elegant copy of War and Peace which Georgette thought “almost lovely enough to make me read it. Not quite—unless I have to go on a long sea-voyage, or into hospital for weeks & weeks—because (I say it defiantly) I am Wholly Allergic to Russian Literature, drama, & art. For one thing, they all have such Stephen Leacock names, like Ivan Ivanovitch; & for another, I loathe & despise their silly Fatalism.” Richard told his mother that she did not understand tragedy—an observation shared by Ronald who had once threatened to divorce Georgette after she had insisted that “the sooner Anna Karenina flung herself under a train the better it would be.”