A Woman on the Edge of Time

by Gavron, Jeremy;

  Hannah, with her ‘lunatic driving’, ‘unrepentant’, my grandfather called her at one point, was the cause of all this. They pressed her to give up John Hayes, to try again with my father. ‘Enormously relieved,’ my grandfather wrote when she agreed. ‘Not bearable,’ when she changed her mind.

  They also pressured her to see a psychiatrist, as if her unhappiness in her marriage, her falling in love with another man, her desire to fulfil herself as a woman, were symptoms of mental illness. ‘It could be that I am sick,’ Hannah wrote sadly in one of her notes to my father. ‘Tho I do not think so.’

  By the time it occurred to my grandfather that the most troubled person was his daughter, that she might have needed support rather than criticism from her parents, it was too late. ‘I should have said to H bring John to see me,’ my grandfather lamented in his diary four days after her death. ‘I’m good with young men. Should have helped her. In my blindness, my fear of losing Pop, I did not.’

  2. WORK. The troubles with her doctorate, the LSE, McGregor, had hit her confidence. And it was only not only her confidence. Bedford and the LSE were the only London University colleges with sociology departments. Even if there had been a job at Sussex, or somewhere else outside London, with two young children it would have been difficult for her to move.

  For someone normally so organised and reliable, it is revealing that she seems to have abandoned the introduction to sociology she had signed a contract to write. ‘If you can let me have a note of its progress and a likely date of delivery,’ her editor wrote to her a few weeks before her death. But when my grandfather went through her work papers later, he found only rough notes for it.

  Even the book she had finished, The Captive Wife, gave her little cause for optimism. It had been held back by the delay over her thesis, and her desire to see it out by Christmas had been thwarted. Her closest female friend warned her that publishing it would ruin her career. David Page remembers her talking ‘disparagingly’ about the book, ‘something to the effect of “They wanted statistics, so I cobbled some together.” ’ He suggested this showed she didn’t care about ‘professional cachet’, but perhaps it showed how low her confidence was.

  In the last couple of weeks she did finally secure a job, at the Institute of Education. It was a good position, but not the academic teaching post she wanted, and too late perhaps, her mind already turned against academics. A year after her death, my grandfather wrote of her asking after her dinner with her prospective employees, ‘are BBC people as bitchy as academics?’

  3. CHARACTER FLAWS (A). Hannah’s life had not prepared her for failure, rejection, disapprobation, shame. The stories my grandmother told about her successes as a poet, rider, actress, woman were understandably exaggerated, but over the course of her twenty-nine years she had usually got what she wanted, succeeded in most of what she did.

  She hadn’t inherited the family propensities for gloominess, depression, but she does seem to have been prone to anxiety, panic, sudden ‘fits of despair’, as Sonia described them, on the rare occasions when things did go wrong. Sonia remembered ‘floods of tears’ if she lost at riding. Susan Downes described Hannah ‘turning green and shaking’ on the mountain with the headmaster, and again in a classroom with a teacher. In his diary, my grandfather kept coming back to these moments of ‘uncontrolled emotions’, such as a young Hannah ‘standing still and screaming in panic’ when cornered in a game of chase with Sonia and Tasha. ‘No way out?’ he wrote.

  Was this how it was with Hannah in those last hours? Did the pressure my grandparents put on her to stop seeing John, to stop being so egotistical, to see a psychiatrist, take her back to her teenage years, when her escape was to go to boarding school, to marry my father? Where was her way out now?

  4. FRIENDS. For most of her life, when she had her despairs, there was someone there to comfort her. Sonia and Tasha would ‘calm her down’. Susan Downes acted as the ‘big sister type’ she needed. My father told me how Hannah would get suddenly upset about something, and he would put his ‘arm around her sympathetically and crack a joke, and it would flare down’.

  But my father wasn’t around in those last weeks and days — she had kicked him out of the house. And where were the close female friends she had relied on in the past? She had started seeing Susan again, but as a couple, without the old closeness, and she saw little in her last years of Shirley, Sonia, even Tasha.

  It was partly that they all had their own busy lives. But it was also that Hannah’s rush to grow up had pushed her in advance of her old friends. ‘Why do I never see or hear from you?’ she wrote to Tasha, who was still at school when Hannah got engaged to my father. ‘Is it because Pop is a businessman?’

  It was partly, too, that her ambitions, her efforts to be a new kind of woman, had isolated her from other women, as it had with the exceptional women in Rachel Cooke’s book about the 1950s. Phyll Willmott, a newer friend, but warm, intelligent, living close by, might have been someone who could have provided support and perspective. Phyll even picked up that Hannah ‘was having a bad time in some way’ and ‘wondered if she might talk about it’, but when she didn’t, Phyll didn’t encourage her. After Hannah’s death, she wrote of her guilt that she didn’t realise that Hannah was in trouble, didn’t help her, ‘and more guilt because of my always slightly ambivalent feelings towards her’.

  It was also, perhaps, her pride, as Gunilla Lavelle said, a reluctance to admit she was in trouble. Hannah was the one advising Tasha with her boyfriend problems, helping Erica with her abortion, climbing through Katrin Stroh’s window. She ‘always seemed so much in command of every situation it never occurred to us she had problems of her own’, Sonia wrote after her death.

  The one female friend she did confide in, who knew about John, who allowed her to meet him in her flat, was Anne Wicks. But Anne was another clever, strong, ambitious woman, not the arm-around-the shoulder type. When Hannah told her she would kill herself if John Hayes rejected her, Anne didn’t take it seriously. Instead she told Hannah that her book wasn’t rigorous enough, that publishing it would ruin her reputation.

  5. CHARACTER FLAWS (B). One of the old family friends who I discover goes back to Hannah’s time is the playwright Arnold Wesker. ‘Her death affected me very deeply,’ he writes after I leave a message. ‘Not because we knew her intimately but because she was sweet, kind, and beautiful, and her death was so unexpected — she was so young. It affected me so much that I recreated her in one of my stories, “Six Sundays in January”. I can’t put my hand on my heart and say Katerina Levinson is a head-on portrait of your mother, but something of her atmosphere touches the story. It might give you a hint of her.’

  Katerina is not the main character of ‘Six Sundays in January’. The story follows another young mother across a series of Sundays, on one of which she encounters Katerina in a café in the East End. The Sunday afterwards, the phone rings with the news that Katerina has killed herself.

  It is not a head-on portrait, Arnold writes; he didn’t know Hannah well. But he knew her a little, knew the times, knew women of her age struggling perhaps with similar things, was an intuitive witness to the world he was living in.

  Sheila Rowbotham, writing of her own struggles as a young woman in the 1960s, used remarkably similar language as Arnold to describe her own ‘splintering identity, seeking words that somehow glance off my fingertips, clinging to an assortment of stray ends I couldn’t fit together’. There is something, too, in Katerina’s monologues of Hannah’s sweeping dismissals of her contemporaries to her grandfather: ‘The young technicians are too busy acquiring their little car.’

  Was this Hannah in her last days? Frail, battered, splintered. Oversensitive to fraudulence (those ‘bitchy’ academics). Despairing of the ‘facile image’ of women that ‘countless magazines perpetrate’. Bruised by her own young man with his ‘pleasant songs’ who had disappeared and
left ‘great confusion’.

  ‘I don’t want any more knowledge of pain,’ Katerina says. ‘Forgive me Annie,’ Hannah wrote on the envelope. ‘But the pain was too much.’

  Another woman might have struggled on, accepted compromises, confided in friends, waited for things to get better, the winter to turn into spring, her book to be published. But Hannah wasn’t much good at patience, compromise, asking for help. In her nature was rather a family unreadiness to be taken beyond a certain limit, an accompanying steeliness, ruthlessness. A disregard, too, for the usual rules, the accepted codes, of life. ‘The whole of that terrific force,’ my psychoanalyst neighbour said, ‘turned against herself’.

  IN SOME WAYS, I am the least qualified person to write about Hannah. Unlike the people I have interviewed about her, I have no memories of my own of her. But, at the same time, I am her son. Half the genes that shaped me I got from her. If I didn’t know her, I knew her parents, her other son, know her sister, her five grandchildren. If the Hannah of these pages is a construct of other people’s memories, viewpoints, and my own imagination, then that imagination is informed by the knowledge, the instinctive connection, that blood brings.

  I have come, I feel, to understand her. I get her sense of humour. That she could be both selfish and generous, both emotional and rational, makes sense to me. I understand her irreverence, her outrageousness, her melodramas, her moral integrity, her sense of justice. I understand her when she is difficult.

  I even feel that I understand her suicide, or at least the steps that led to her suicide — except for one key element of the story: how she came to invest herself so completely in a future with John Hayes that was so clearly a fantasy, a ‘fiction’, as my grandfather’s friend said.

  We all make mistakes, see things wrongly, at times. Hannah was known when she was younger for imagining dull romances into great love affairs. But that was when she was a teenager. The Hannah who so misjudged what was happening with John Hayes was a woman of nearly thirty, with two children, ten years of marriage behind her. She was the Hannah who had navigated her controversial doctorate through hostile waters to the verge of publication, the author of the clear-eyed prose of The Captive Wife. The woman John Hayes himself described as having an ‘intense clarity of mind that burned like a sun’.

  It wasn’t that John wasn’t worth wanting a future with. He was handsome, intelligent, charming, a grammar-school boy who had made his way to Oxford. He would go on to have sparkling friendships with brilliant women like Angela Carter and Carmen Callil, as he might have had with Hannah under different circumstances.

  It wasn’t even, or only, that he was homosexual, that he had never slept with a woman before Hannah. He wouldn’t have been the first person to discover new elements of sexuality in a love affair. But while Hannah and my father had separated, and Hannah was talking about divorce, John Hayes was still firmly living with the other John, as he still does today. When Hannah mentioned marriage, moving in together, John had ‘a major recoil’. Their few sexual encounters had been ‘tawdry’, a ‘mistake’. He had never met Simon and me, let alone entertained the idea of becoming our stepfather. And suddenly, out of nowhere, Hannah was talking about being married by Christmas.

  Love can be blinding. Cherry Marshall told my grandfather how, when she had fallen in love with a man outside her marriage, ‘husband, children, work — all vanished. It was like catching a disease.’ But for it to be so deluding to such an intelligent woman, such an acute observer of other people, someone who had managed her own life so successfully — it was as if she had lost her wits, lost her mind.

  I GO BACK OVER MY NOTES, searching for an explanation. Anne Wicks told my grandfather that Hannah was worried she would be ‘an old maid if John did not marry her’, and was ‘genuinely afraid of being alone’. Can this be the answer? Did she really think that John Hayes was her last chance?

  It seems a ridiculous thing for a beautiful, intelligent, twenty-nine-year-old woman to believe. But is that a twenty-first century perspective? In my efforts to understand Hannah, I have been reading writing by women of her time. The great woman’s novel of Hannah’s last years was Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, published in 1962. It is a sacred feminist work, a ‘powerful account of a woman searching for her personal and political identity’, as it says on the back of my paperback copy. But veined through the novel, for character after character, even those who are trying most forcefully to be ‘free women’, is the question of whether a woman can be happy without a man.

  ‘Women’s emotions are all still fitted for a kind of society that no longer exists,’ says Ella, a fictional woman within the fiction. ‘My deep emotions, my real ones are to do with my relationship with a man.’ Even the novel’s protagonist, Anna Wulf, confesses, ‘I’d like to be married. I don’t like living like this.’ To be with a man is ‘to cancel myself out’, but to be without a man is to be ‘alone, frightened to be alone, without resources’.

  Memoirs of real free women of the period tell of similar fears. Sheila Rowbotham writes that she ‘could not become myself’ while living in her boyfriend’s shadow, but when she left him she found herself ‘unsure how to be apart and on my own. A diffuse anxiety assumed physical form one night when I was overwhelmed by a choking feeling which left me panting for breath.’

  Even Joan Bakewell, the epitome of the woman who had it all, came to a crisis when her marriage fell apart. ‘I found myself alone with two young children to care for,’ she writes in The Centre of the Bed. ‘Emotionally I was confused and unhappy, drifting deeper and deeper into bewilderment and despair.’

  I AM TRYING to make sense of this when the latest edition of the New Yorker magazine drops through my letterbox. Inside is an article by Susan Faludi about an American feminist who recently died. ‘Death of a Revolutionary’, it is headlined. ‘Shulamith Firestone helped to create a new society. But she couldn’t live in it.’

  I am immediately struck by similarities between Shulamith Firestone and Hannah. Fiery and stubborn, Firestone skipped the last year of school to get away from her Jewish parents and train to be a painter. She published an early feminist text. She was both striking looking — ‘a mane of black hair down to her waist, and piercing dark eyes’ — and charismatic. ‘It was thrilling to be in her company,’ one friend is quoted as saying. ‘She flashed brightly across the midnight sky,’ another said at her funeral, ‘and then she disappeared.’

  As I read on, the two stories separate. Firestone never married, had no children. She was almost a decade younger than Hannah, and far more radical. She also developed schizophrenia. Not long after her book was published, she withdrew from the feminist scene, and in time withdrew from life. She became an eccentric, wandering her neighbourhood in New York. She was hospitalised several times and died alone in an East Village tenement walk-up.

  This was not Hannah. But the article goes on to consider the ‘whole generation’ of founding American feminists, how so many of them were ‘unable to thrive in the world they had done so much to create’. As well as Firestone, there was Kate Millett, who had a breakdown and was hospitalised after publishing the best-selling Sexual Politics, also in 1970, and others who ended in ‘painful solitude, poverty, infirmity’, and in two named cases, suicide.

  The article quotes another early feminist, Meredith Tax, who used the phrase ‘female schizophrenia’ to describe ‘a realm of unreality where a woman either belonged to a man or was “nowhere, disappeared, teetering on the edge of a void” ’. It also refers to Elaine Showalter’s book, The Female Malady, about women and madness in England, and I look this up. Showalter’s main thesis is that female madness is a construction of male society, that when women challenge the status quo they are told they are mad (as Hannah was pressed to see a psychiatrist when she fell in love with another man.) But Showalter also suggests that women’s position in a man’s world can actually drive them mad. />
  Her chapter on the 1960s focuses on R. D. Laing, the Scottish ‘anti-psychiatrist’ Hannah admired. The book Hannah probably read was his 1960 work, The Divided Self, which argues that schizophrenia in women isn’t an illness but a response to an ‘unlivable situation’. With her nature in conflict with her environment, a woman is ‘split in two’.

  Could this be the explanation? That Hannah was schizoid after all? That she was driven mad, split in two, by the conflict of her situation?

  Among the papers from my stepmother’s filing cabinet is a rough draft of a review Hannah wrote of two films. It is unfinished, and I haven’t been able to discover whether it was ever published. It is also undated, but the films were released in mid-1965, so it must have been written in her last months.

  Darling, starring Julie Christie and Dirk Bogarde, is a glamorous 1960s tragedy about a woman who gorges on the fruits of her beauty but then finds herself alone, and in desperation agrees to a loveless marriage. Four in the Morning is smaller, more sombre, offering little hope for female fulfillment and happiness in the modern world, and ends, as Hannah wrote, with the body of an ‘unidentified young woman aged about twenty six who has committed suicide’.

  Other than her returned cheques, these are Hannah’s last surviving written words.

  THE FILMS, Hannah’s review, address the dilemma of modern women’s ‘desire to be free, and given both the structure of our society and their own biological and emotional make up, their inability to hold onto that freedom’. But Hannah wasn’t only trying to live as a free woman. She was, like the early American feminists, immersed in the subject intellectually. She had devoted much of the last years of her life to talking to captive wives, to thinking, researching, and writing about ways to free such women from that captivity.

  As much, perhaps, as any other woman in England at the time, Hannah had a clear view of what was wrong with the world from a woman’s point of view, what needed to be changed, and had experienced, too, in her work the difficulties of challenging the status quo. Victorian women pioneers ‘could still make a fuss and change things the way we can’t any more’, she told my grandfather. ‘Intellectuals are no use to anybody today.’