Several Strangers

by Claire Tomalin

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  SEVERAL STRANGERS

  Claire Tomalin has worked in publishing and journalism all her life. Her books include The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft, which won the Whitbread First Book Prize for 1974; The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens, which won the NCR Book Award, the Hawthornden Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography; Mrs Jordan’s Profession, about nineteenth-century British actresses; the highly acclaimed Jane Austen: A Life; and, most recently, Several Strangers, a collection of writing from three decades. Her books have been widely translated and she is currently working on a biography of Samuel Pepys. She lives in London with her husband, Michael Frayn

  SEVERAL STRANGERS

  Writing from Three Decades

  CLAIRE TOMALIN

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  www.penguin.com

  First published by Viking 1999

  Published in Penguin Books 2000

  3

  Copyright © Claire Tomalin, 1969,1971,1974,1975,1976,1977,1978,1979,1981,1987,

  1988,1989,1990,1991,1992,1993,1994,1995,1996,1998,1999

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 978-0-14-190950-9

  Contents

  PART ONE

  APPRENTICESHIP

  Scott and Zelda: review of Save Me the Waltz by Zelda Fitzgerald

  Newfoundland: review of Words for a Deaf Daughter by Paul West

  A Fallen Woman: reappraisal of Letters to Imlay by Mary

  Wollstonecraft 19 The Wife’s Story: review of Katherine Mansfield: The Memories of LM

  La Belle Dame Sans Merci: review of You Might as Well Live: The Life and Times of Dorothy Parker by John Keats and A Month of Saturdays by Dorothy Parker, introduced by Lillian Hellman

  PART TWO

  LITERARY EDITOR

  Out of Africa: review of The Black House by Paul Theroux

  Anger and Accommodation: broadcast review of Seduction and Betrayal by Elizabeth Hardwick and Reader, I Married Him by Patricia Beer

  Criminal Conversation: review of The Letters of Caroline Norton to Lord Melbourne edited by James O. Hoge and Clarke Olney

  Maggie Tulliver’s Little Sisters: broadcast on William Hale White, or ‘Mark Rutherford’

  Oink: review of Ottoline: The Life of Lady Ottoline Morrell by Sandra Jobson Darroch

  Three Essays on Virginia Wool

  Frontstage Wife: review of The Letters of Virginia Woolf Volume II: 1912-1922 edited by Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann

  Millionaire: review of The Diary of Virginia Woolf Volume I: 1915-1919 edited by Anne Olivier Bell

  Introduction to Mrs Dalloway, Oxford University Press edition

  Daily Bread: review of English Bread and Yeast Cookery by Elizabeth David

  Two Essays on Thomas Hardy

  The Boy in the Grass: review of The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy. Volume I:1840-1892 edited by Richard Little Purdy and Michael Millgate, An Essay on Hardy by John Bayley, The Older Hardy and Young Thomas Hardy by Robert Gittings

  Memory and Loss: On Hardy’s Poetry

  Snapdragon: review of For Love Alone and Letty Fox: Her Luck by Christina Stead

  Patron Saint: review of E. M. Forster: A Life. Volume II by P. N. Furbank

  Winter Words: review of The View in Winter: Reflections on Old Age by Ronald Blythe

  Rosa Mundi: review of Burger’s Daughter by Nadine Gordimer

  Girl with Scissors: review of Christina Rossetti by Georgina Battiscombe

  Darkness at Dawn: review of Vedi by Ved Mehta

  PART THREE

  WRITER

  Two Men and a Mask: review of Oscar Wilde by Richard Ellmann

  Time and Distance: review of The Progress of Love by Alice Munro

  Giant Crab: review of The Memoirs of Ethel Smyth abridged and introduced by Ronald Crichton

  Never Bland: review of A Woman of Passion: The Life of E. Nesbit 1858-1924 by Julia Briggs

  London Innocents: review of Dear Girl: The Diaries and Letters of Two Working Women 1897-1917 edited by Tierl Thompson

  No Consolation: review of Freud: A Life for Our Time by Peter Gay

  A Hate Affair: review of A Far Cry from Kensington by Muriel Spark

  An Imagined Life: review of The Truth about Lorin Jones by Alison Lurie

  Family Nightmare: review of The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing

  Sentimental Education: review of Lewis Percy by Anita Brookner

  Monster: review of Jean Rhys by Carol Angier

  The Lion and the Lady: review of Henry James and Edith Wharton: Letters 1900-1915 edited by Lyall H. Powers

  Nice People: review of A. A. Milne: His Life by Ann Thwaite

  Translating by Candlelight: review of Constance Garnett: A Heroic Life by Richard Garnett

  Another Life: review of D. H. Lawrence: The Early Years 1885-1912 by John Worthen

  Gnawed by Rats: review of G. H. Lewes: A Life by Rosemary Ashton

  Poet Underground: review of The Selected Letters of Philip Larkin 1940-1985 edited by Anthony Thwaite

  Bringing out the Worst: review of The Road to Divorce: England 1530-1987 by Lawrence Stone

  Unbeatable: review of Mrs Gaskell: A Habit of Stories by Jennifer Uglow

  The Trap: Sylvia Plath and Biography: review of The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes by Janet Malcolm

  True Grit: review of Hidden Lives: A Family Memoir by Margaret Forster

  Tante Claire: review of The Clairmont Correspondence: The Letters of Claire Clairmont, Charles Clairmont and Fanny Imlay Godwin edited by Marion Kingston Stocking

  Three Essays on Charles Dickens

  Dickens and Sons: review of The Letters of Charles Dickens. Volume VII: 1853-1855 edited by Graham Storey, Kathleen Tillotson and Angus Easson

  Carlo Furioso: review of The Letters of Charles Dickens. Volume VIII: 1856-1858 edited by Graham Storey and Kathleen Tillotson

  Dickens at Fifty: review of The Letters of Charles Dickens. Volume X: 1862-1864 edited by Graham Storey

  Dead Babies: review of Angels and Absences: Child Deaths in the Nineteenth Century by Laurence Lerner

  Tame Animals: review of The Gentleman s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England by Amanda Vickery and A Governess in the Age of Jane Austen: The Journals and Letters of Agnes Porter edited by Joanna Martin

  Carpe Diem: review of The Diary of Samuel Pepys (eleven volumes) edited by Robert Latham and William Matthews

  PART ONE

  APPRENTICESHIP

  Collecting reviews f
rom three decades has brought me face to face with several strangers who went by my name. Jane Austen was right when she wrote, ‘Seven years… are enough to change every pore of one’s skin, and every feeling of one’s mind.’ I started my working life in publishing with only a vague sense of where I was going or what I wanted to do. This changed as I was launched into journalism and literary editing, where I felt I found my natural habitat and friends. I moved to the Sunday Times, and it turned into a battlefield. Finally I became a full-time writer, solitary and obsessive as most writers are.

  The thread that has persisted through these separate lives has been reviewing. The first books I chose for myself were connected with women’s history and domestic themes. I got the books mostly because no one else wanted them. Since then the sideline has moved closer to the centre. At the time my own first book appeared, in 1974, a publisher friend said with weary condescension, ‘Not another book about the bluestockings?’ He was a man, of course. Today both sexes are running publishing firms, and male historians are as interested as women in marriage, divorce and children, and in the interaction of public and private lives. Women’s history has stopped being a sideline.

  Looking up old work has meant thinking back over my career, and made me realize how inseparable work and personal experience have been. I was thirty-five – half way through life, we used to think – when I wrote the earliest review in this collection. What held me up for so long? And how did I ever start? The introductions to the reviews offer answers to these questions, and give some account of how a woman of my generation found herself embarked on a literary life.

  I was twenty-one when I took my degree at Cambridge and found a room in London. It was a basement in the house of the artist Roger Hilton, in Shepherd’s Bush, for which I paid £2 a week. My walls were hung with his abstract paintings; the sound of his wife Ruth’s violin filtered down, and I babysat for their two small children. There was also a good deal of wild life. My kitchenette in the old coal hole was haunted by giant spiders, and when the cat gave birth to kittens in the back room a ferocious tom, their father we supposed, came in through the window and tore the little ones to shreds. But neither spiders nor murdering cats dented my happiness for long. I was in love with Nick, also just down from Cambridge, and he was living in a room round the corner, in a house belonging to another artist, Patrick Heron.

  This was the summer of 1954. I had gone through three years reading English without much thought of the future. I was an innocent, dreamy, not to say dozy, and there was full employment. I had been writing poetry from the age of seven, and although some of my verses appeared in undergraduate magazines, and one poem in Karl Miller’s Poetry from Cambridge, I did not connect this with the world of careers. I meant to find myself a serious job, but knew I did not want to be a teacher, a civil servant or anything in the theatre. I could not imagine writing fiction, and did not even think of journalism then, because newspapers seemed so masculine, and I had a low opinion of women’s magazines.

  My father pronounced that shorthand and typing were always useful to women, and offered to put me through a secretarial training course. I took it, and afterwards applied to the B B C : I was bilingual in French, with good secretarial skills, and a First, but the response was a short letter informing me ‘that the competition for General Trainees is confined to men’. (I still have the letter.) I wrote to Time and Tide, was interviewed and turned down again, quite rightly, because it was obvious I had not read the magazine. Then my father mentioned me to someone he knew in publishing, and I found myself invited for an interview with an editor at Heinemann.

  The Heinemann offices were at No. 99 Great Russell Street, a steep-staired Georgian house almost next door to the British Museum. Three flights up, through an outer office and I was in a very small room where a thin fair-haired man with a quizzical face just fitted behind his desk. His name was Roland Gant, and he would be my boss if I got the job. A few minutes into the interview a younger man, thick-set and wearing heavy glasses, came in without a word and put a piece of paper on Roland’s desk. He was James Michie, the poet, and he had been in the outer office as I walked through. Later he told me he had been awarding me marks for my looks. Seven out of ten, he gave me, just enough for the job of secretary/editorial assistant, at £5.10s. a week. This was how things were done in 1954.

  My desk was in the outer office, where sacks of manuscripts were dumped every day. Roland and James looked through them and decided who should read what. One of my tasks was to pack them up again for Mrs Tegan Harries, a reader who never appeared in person. From her rasping telephone voice I imagined her as a county lady down on her luck, cigarette dangling over the typewriter as she tapped out her reports in triplicate. The other reader was Moira Lynd, who did come in, from Hampstead, and took books away with her. She was a charming woman, combining political opinions of the extreme left with a good nose for a best-seller. She had refused to learn to type for fear of being given the sort of work I was expected to do, and she wrote out her reports by hand in the office on Wednesdays. Each line sloped more sharply as her pen travelled down the page, so that there was always a large gap in the bottom right-hand corner. Some of the novels that came in were still handwritten too. They were not viewed with favour, but we read them.

  I did type letters, but very few, and I can remember only one occasion when Roland dictated to me in French to test my foreign shorthand skills. My impression was that it was more of an ordeal for him than for me. He was a sweet-natured man, a writer and a book lover, and he saw that I liked reading better than typing. My first Reading Room ticket at the British Museum was arranged by him; in this way he was responsible for a great deal of happiness in my life.

  It was a cheerful office. One of my jobs was forwarding mail to authors. Roland had been in intelligence during the war, and when he noticed an elaborately formal letter addressed to Graham Greene he said, ‘Let’s steam it open.’ So we did, with the office kettle. The letter was offering Greene a knighthood. Two weeks later an official rang to ask if all letters to Greene had been forwarded, because he had received no answer to an important one. They had indeed, I answered firmly. He said he would post a duplicate in any case. Later I found the original on one of the filing cabinets; and later still we knew that Greene had refused the knighthood, and we thought all the better of him.

  Soon I was helping out with reading and reporting on novels. I remember Moira recommending the first volume of Anthony Burgess’s Malayan trilogy, and everyone enthusing about Dodie Smith’s Hundred and One Dalmatians. My reports were neatly typed, but I made no discoveries. Wanting to prove I was not a blinkered highbrow, I wrote a favourable report on a steamy love story about a concert pianist which I thought might sell; Moira damned it, and she was right. Editorial jobs came my way too. I was asked to work on the Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence. I sent the chairman, A. S. Frere, a note asking if I should restore the word ‘fuck’ where earlier editions had printed a dash. I was told he showed my memo round, amused by such brazen behaviour in a young female employee, but I never met him.

  In September 1955 Nick and I married. He was now working for the Daily Express. We found a two-room flat on Primrose Hill and spent a week’s honeymoon in his aunt’s cottage in Suffolk. Soon I was pregnant; we planned to have six children. I worked through most of my pregnancy, and translated a book in the evenings to improve our finances. Translating and nausea have gone together in my mind ever since, because I translated two more books during my next two pregnancies. There was no maternity leave. But I was invited to return to Heinemann. ‘Only you’ll have more children, I suppose,’ said the director, who spoke to me gloomily, and I agreed that I would.

  My second daughter was born less than eighteen months after my first, and by then I was working at home as a reader. Nick’s career as a journalist was going well, and Lord Beaverbrook sent him to New York. He instructed him to go alone, taking the view that a wife and children were an encumbrance to a young reporter,
but Nick insisted on my joining him with Josephine and Susanna. He flew out, I followed with the babies on a listing French liner. The next year was the only one of my adult life in which I have not worked. I saw little enough of Nick, but I was happily absorbed in the children.

  We arrived back in 1959. London was preparing to swing. I was pregnant again, and at once found work reading for several publishers. My career, such as it was, took second place to the demands of husband and children. I no longer wrote poetry, and it still did not occur to me to try my hand at journalism. But one day Katharine Whitehorn, who had been at my college just before me and whose column in the Observer made her one of the most admired journalists of the time, held out a friendly hand and asked me to write a couple of pieces for the Observer. I was surprised – no one had invented the idea of an old girls’ network then – and I’m still grateful. All I remember of the articles is that one was about baby clothes; perhaps they both were. I managed to irritate older women in the family with my confident pronouncements, which seemed a good thing at the time. Katharine then got me a column in a magazine called the Motor. I was ‘Woman at the Wheel’, and wrote a monthly piece on topics such as how to keep children amused in the car, how to avoid creasing your evening dress when driving to a dance (you sit on tissue paper) and so on. Since I could barely drive at the time, I didn’t last very long on the Motor. My next patron was a male Cambridge contemporary, Ronald Bryden, who offered me children’s books to review for the Spectator. My daughters were precocious readers, and they appreciated them even more than I did. In one fat batch of books came Ted Hughes’s Meet My Folks!: they loved the poems, I declared it a classic.

  By the time I was twenty-eight I had had four children. The work I was doing was precious to me because it gave me something to exercise my mind while allowing me to stay at home. You can breastfeed and read at the same time, and write reports and reviews when the children are asleep. But it was the lower end of Grub Street. What changed things for me was disaster and sorrow. My third child, a boy, was born with many things wrong. He never came home from hospital, but died when he was a month old. I wrote something about that experience, and began to think I might write more. I also determined to have another baby at once, and my third daughter, Emily, was born on her missing brother’s first birthday. But as that sorrow passed, another came. Nick – my charming and successful husband – became a bolter. He fell for the office vamp, and that started him on a series of affairs. I learnt not to be surprised if he did not come home at night. One day he would insist that our marriage had been a mistake, and that a divorce would be the best solution. A few weeks later he would change his mind, bombard me with flowers, rings and letters insisting that he was really happy in the marriage, and wanted more children. For a while all would be well, until another irresistible girl appeared. So it went on. Looking at an old diary reminds me what a heap of dejection I let myself be reduced to.