Several Strangers

by Claire Tomalin

  Independent, 1988

  An Imagined Life

  The Truth about Lorin Jones by Alison Lurie

  When someone starts researching a biography of Alison Lurie -born Chicago 1926, grew up New York, educated Radcliffe College; married, three sons, divorced; currently professor of English at Cornell University, dividing time between New York, London and Florida; began publishing novels in 1962 to sustained acclaim, and in 1988 published her eighth, The Truth about Lorin Jones – this eighth novel is the one they may look at a shade nervously. Its theme is biography, and the subject of the imaginary biography at its centre is an American woman painter born, as it happens, in the same year as Alison Lurie. It cautions biographers to be wary, first of their own impulses to hagiography or blame, and then of the testimony of all those who knew their subject personally: family, friends, ex-husbands and lovers, professional colleagues.

  I’m not suggesting that Alison Lurie has written a warning, or even a treatise on the writing of biography, good as she is on the subject; but she has clearly grown more and more interested in the long view, in the interlocking of characters over a period of many years. Her early novels looked like brilliant episodes, paced and cut with virtuoso precision, notable for sudden dazzling changes of perspective: shifts of this kind are at the heart of the comedy of The Nowhere City, Imaginary Friends, The War between the Tates. She has lost none of the virtuoso skill, but it is now clear that each novel is part of a whole picture she has had in view for many years; and that Lorin Jones, which turns out to be one of her best yet, is a subtle web, weaving together strands from all her earlier books.

  It continues the mapping of the manners and mores of modern America at which Alison Lurie excels, and its comedy has the brilliant, biting edge we have come to expect; but there is something freer and warmer in the air too. The classical values of order and moderation, so firmly celebrated in her first novel, Love and Friendship, have taken on some elasticity over the years. There Miranda Fenn remarked that romantic love ‘deals in false images and false expectations’. Here, Professor Fenn (as she now is) sits and cries unashamedly in public for a dead friend, for a lost past. Eccentric emotion and behaviour are shown as not always dangerous but sometimes promis ing and fruitful.

  Lorin Jones herself, it appears, was not interested in any emotion but that embodied in her painting; and everything ceased to be fruitful for her when she died in 1969. Now, in the mid eighties, she is still able to arouse passions of admiration, remorse, greed, anger, resentment and love. It’s a particularly remarkable technical feat to have created this complex and ambiguous character entirely through the talk of other characters; and she does come across as a real person and a real artist, dedicated to her work above all things, unscrupulous in most ways, charming when it suited her, shy, eccentric, beautiful and possibly damaged by a mysterious trauma of her childhood; never able to forgive her father for remarrying after her mother’s death; vulnerable to drugs; and, finally, fascinated by death. Where have we met Lorin before? Like most women, she has been disguised under different names at different periods, starting life as Laura (or Laurie, or Lolly) Zimmern – a name all Lurie readers will recognize.

  Polly, Lorin’s biographer, is twenty years her junior and never met her. She starts her research from the position of passionate admiration for Lorin’s work, a degree of identification and a suspicion that her early death can be blamed on the men in her life -or rather, on their failure to cherish her as they should have done. Polly has two failures behind her, in her marriage and as a painter; but she is currently doing well in the New York art world, and bringing up her teenage son, to whom she is devoted.

  If the book has a flaw it is that Polly is a shade schematic as a character: Alter is her second name, and she obediently spends a lot of time identifying with Lorin. But her story is just too good, too subtly told and too engrossing for this to matter much.

  At thirty-nine, moved by soothing women friends and fashionable distrust of the male sex, she is ripe for induction into lesbian society. Much of the comedy of the book arises from the devastating observation of Polly’s gay circle; but it is not all unkind. Here again there is an imaginative sexual sympathy which only a very fine writer could risk and achieve. Still, I don’t suppose radical feminists will be delighted by Polly’s slow discovery that manipulation, betrayal, bullying and selfishness are not the prerogative of one sex.

  The play of wit and observation, light, glancing and deadly, is maintained on every page, and, as always in Lurie, there is a precise counterpointing of thought and feeling with the mundane activities of life. In the clatter of dishwasher-loading after Thanksgiving lunch, mother and daughter exchange intimacies that would shock them both at any other time. A broken teapot, a borrowed thesaurus, hair combings in the sink, a husband who suddenly sits down on the art deco chair that is only there to be looked at – all these are signposts to impending change, but never heavy symbols. They have no more than the weight of life, though highlighted by an exceptional percipience.

  Alison Lurie has never repeated herself in a novel; each has started out in a new direction. She has given her readers one surprise after another, perhaps the biggest being her move away from classical values and language into a freer dimension and demotic speech. The first page of Lorin Jones could almost be promising an ordinary woman’s magazine story; its last page could almost be finishing one. What’s between, though, is less simple; and perhaps its greatest triumph is in the dialogue – if that’s what you can call reported interviews in which we hear only answers, without questions – where characters are unpeeled, one after another, like ripe fruit.

  Observer, 1988

  Family Nightmare

  The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing

  Few writers spring such surprises on their readers as Doris Lessing. She trusts her own feelings absolutely, and has the rare power of putting feelings straight on to the page, more directly perhaps than any other contemporary writer, so directly that the effect is sometimes like a physical blow. This new novel is terrifying and, one wants to say, unfair; yet there is no reason why art should be fairer than life. It taps a basic human fear – the fear that one will give birth to a child who will prove a disastrous burden instead of a source of joy and promise – and offers no crumb of comfort.

  The whole of The Fifth Child has the intensity of a nightmare. It is one of the most chilling books I have read, a horror story poised somewhere between a naturalistic account of family life and an allegory that draws on science fiction. You could compare it with George Eliot’s Silas Marner, in which a child of unknown origin brings happiness and redemption to a miserable man into whose home she stumbles. The Fifth Child is this story in reverse. It starts with a happy family, beautifully and credibly established in a very small number of words (an appreciative grandparent describes the happiness of the household as ‘like being in the middle of some bloody great fruit pudding’, a wonderfully exact English simile). It then shows how one child by its inherent nature destroys the happiness of the family – destroys the family. No one is to blame, the good parents and the good siblings follow their natures, just as the bad fifth child follows his nature.

  This is what makes the book shocking. Little Ben is not the victim of his environment. On the contrary, he is born to exceptionally loving parents who wish for many children, and wish to do the best for them. Lessing is at pains to insist that Ben demonstrates his nature before birth, by excessive activity in the womb, and emerges large, super-active and hostile to his mother and everybody else. His siblings are soon so terrified of his violence that they lock themselves in their rooms. He strangles animals and snatches up raw meat. He appears to dislike everyone. His mother, Harriet, thinks of him as a troll, a changeling, a hobgoblin, a gnome. His father says ‘He’s probably just dropped in from Mars,’ his voice ‘full of cold dislike’ for Ben.

  Harriet bears the brunt of the situation, because her instinct as a mother who must protect her own offsprin
g is in direct conflict with the wish of all the other members of the family, that Ben should be got rid of, even at the cost of sending him off to an institution from which he is unlikely to emerge alive. Although Harriet saves him and trains him into a semblance of good behaviour, she also comes to believe that Ben is not human. At one point she asks ‘Authority’ (in the shape of a specialist) for confirmation of her belief, but ‘Authority’ is almost always dangerous and untrustworthy in Lessing, and this representative dodges the issue, leaving Harriet isolated, and feeling like a criminal.

  If this were all, there would be no question about the wholly devastating impact of The Fifth Child. It shadows hideously what is a real experience for families with autistic or other seriously disturbed children. A problem of response does arise, it seems to me, when Harriet’s heroic measures to civilize Ben bear fruit, and he becomes a viable member of society and goes to school. Although he remains alien to his family, his class and intellectual background, he is no longer alien to humanity, because at school he finds kindred spirits. At school he is no worse than a large number of boys with low IQ s and criminal tendencies.

  At this point the book changes gear, and seems to be making a different type of statement, one that will worry some people, and delight others whom Lessing may possibly not want to delight. What we get is a cry of bewildered horror at the delinquent subculture of our civilization – unteachable children with bad homes, drifting aimlessly, sustained on junk food and petty crime, entertained by endless representations of violence on video, acknowledging neither authority nor love, without moral or social sense.

  Let us be honest and acknowledge that there are such children. When children are frightening, they are much more frightening than adults, because they confound our expectations. A couple of years ago I went into a classroom of boys at a London school, with a motherly smile on my face, and found myself confronted by blank or hostile stares. Not a single smile met mine. It was weird and also terrifying. I left the school feeling shaken, and the image of that room full of inhuman-seeming boys (I know they weren’t really inhuman) has stayed with me, so that I understand what Lessing is writing about. But this is a different story from the story of Ben the goblin, Ben the Neanderthal throwback, Ben the innocently evil changeling. By combining two entirely different strands, she has weakened the impact of her tragedy. If Ben is a monster of nature who cannot be accommodated by even the most loving family, that is one thing. If he is just a boy who doesn’t fit in, because he looks ugly and behaves badly and is stupid, that is something else again: he is not a monster, but someone in the wrong setting, who might be happily placed somewhere else.

  This being said, The Fifth Child remains a hypnotically powerful account of the unpredictable nature of evil and the impossibility of excluding it from even perfectly balanced, sane and virtuous lives. Read it and tremble.

  Independent, 1988

  Sentimental Education

  Lewis Percy by Anita Brookner

  The speed with which Anita Brookner has established herself as a writer of classic reputation is easily demonstrated by turning to the fifth edition of the Oxford Companion to English Literature, which came out in 1985, and in which her name does not figure. Today, this seems incredible; but her first novel was published only in 1981, with the modest title A Start in Life. It didn’t take long for readers to understand that something remarkable and wholly original had made its appearance; a cool, dry and irresistible hand had been laid on the English language, and on us.

  A start in life it certainly was. With her fourth novel she won the Booker Prize in 1984. She has written another each year since then, and is now publishing her ninth. We all have favourites, and the Booker winner was never mine; but it seems to me that she is writing better than ever in 1989, extending her scope with delicacy but also with absolute certainty of aim.

  The characteristic flavour of a Brookner novel is an extreme fastidiousness; no one is so good at making you feel your own fingernails are slightly grubby. Through the eyes of her protagonists, who used to be women but lately have become men, the world is perceived as mainly gross and cruel. Greed rules: greed for food, for romance, for presents, for shopping, for a good time. Those who don’t push forward for their share of the good time find themselves relegated to silence, frugality, dignified resignation. Loneliness, and the manoeuvres whereby the lonely cheat panic and lethargy, is superbly delineated.

  Some readers have complained of too much despondency in her work. Pain is not glossed over, it’s true. You might even say that pain is what she does best, the pain of headache, of misplaced hope, of nursing a sick parent, of being mistaken in someone else’s intentions. But pain is not all. Her last novel, the subtle and beautiful Latecomers, followed a businessman who overcame the painful part of his history to make a modest triumph of his life.

  Lewis Percy also traces the path of a young man, a scholar, through years of abnegation into something riskier and warmer. There is a partly familiar Brookner background: the library, the London suburb, the mild adventure of a trip to Paris. There are some awful women too – an anthology of these might be made from her work – one giving herself away by sporting a brooch in the shape of a tennis racquet, with a small pearl as the ball; a second revealed trying to lure a pet dog from its jealous owner at a neighbouring restaurant table. Then there is the well-observed contrast between literature and life. Lewis Percy produces a thesis on the concept of heroism in the nineteenth-century novel, and the shades of Julien Sorel and Lucien de Rubempré are there to throw into relief his own brand of heroism, which is much quieter, and gentle; sometimes desperate but never careless.

  In the foreground there is something quite new, however. Percy starts as a mother’s boy, and when his mother tells him to remember that ‘Good women are better than bad women. Bad women are merely tiresome,’ it sounds like an aphorism that has the author’s endorsement. In fact his story involves unlearning, or rejecting, this rule, breaking out of his cautious and lonely cocoon, daring to prefer adventure to the ‘fatal lack of joy’ he diagnoses in his wife and mother-in-law.

  The time span is long, and used to real effect as people are shown in shifting perspectives, changing their shape and habits and significance. A dislikeable character is seen to possess redeeming charms and gifts; a shy, virtuous girl develops into something sly and selfish. Percy, who dreams of women as ministering angels, begins to sort out dream from reality towards the end. It is a sentimental education but not brutal in the manner of Flaubert.

  Clamorous superlatives seem out of key when speaking of Anita Brookner, but honesty compels me to say I read Lewis Percy with the most intense enjoyment. It’s partly that she has the best teachers’ knack of making the world seem transparent as long as you are in her company. Yes, you think, now I see, now I understand. She also makes you laugh, not at an occasional joke but through the steady play of wit dealt out by that cool, dry hand of hers. How many living novelists can match her for sustained intelligence? Very few.

  Observer, 1989

  Monster

  Jean Rhys by Carol Angier

  When you feel you’ve had about all you can stand of Jean Rhys’s behaviour – a feeling that comes over you pretty regularly as you progress through the seven hundred pages of this remarkable biography – try turning to her short story, ‘The Lotus’. Written when she was seventy-six, it describes an evening when a batty middle-aged woman, Lotus Heath, emerges from her basement flat in Notting Hill to cadge a drink – several drinks, as it turns out – from her upstairs neighbours. He is a kindly man, ready to pour whiskies until the bottle is empty, to listen to her recite a poem she has written and talk of how she is working on a novel; but his wife observes only that she seems half cracked, has the reputation of an old tart locally and is made up like one, with red nails, blotched lipstick and a grey stain of powder down the front of her unsuitably sleeveless black dress. The wife will neither take an interest in Lotus nor pity her because she knows that ‘when
people have a rotten time you can bet it’s their own fault’. And of course she’s right; Lotus gets drunk, so drunk that the evening ends with her rushing naked into the street and being carted off to hospital by the police.

  There were many evenings like this in Jean Rhys’s life, many appearances in magistrates’ courts, nights in police cells, threats of committal to private asylums, even a spell in Holloway Prison Hospital. The extraordinary thing is that she wrote ‘The Lotus’, and made it funny. She saw herself, with her lipstick rubbed off and her spilt powder, her slurred insults to the wife and her invented bottle of port downstairs with which to spin out the evening. She saw it and set it down so that once read it can never be forgotten.

  Ars brevis – five short novels and some stories – and vita longa: Jean Rhys’s life span was eighty-nine years. She wrote like an angel and lived mostly like a monster, offering a peculiarly difficult challenge to Carol Angier, whose point of departure was her admiration for the work, and who has uncovered layer after layer of muddle, mess, squalor and horror in her investigation of the life. The challenge is so well met that this must surely be the definitive biography. It is deeply researched, subtle, sympathetic and just towards its great, appalling subject.