Several Strangers

by Claire Tomalin

  But Jacqueline Rose was a good fighter, and more intelligent than most of us. She ‘never – or almost never – forgot, or let me forget, that we were not two women having a friendly conversation over a cup of tea… but participants in a special, artificial exercise of subtle influence and counter-influence’. Rose talked to her as though she were addressing a class, says Malcolm; but she also gives her ‘a score of 99’ on the scale of ‘how people should conduct themselves with journalists’. ‘She understood the nature of the transaction – that it was a transaction – and had carefully worked out for herself exactly how much she had to give in order to receive the benefit of the interview.’

  Few of us are going to score 99 when being interviewed. The idea that we are engaged in a transaction in which we need to work out what we are prepared to ‘give’ is curious, and alien, to most people. We probably imagine that an interviewer is interested in exploring and discussing topics and events, and prepared to be open-minded about our work, even perhaps our character. Subjects who are ‘good’ at interviews are either so well defended that they refuse to say anything interesting, or so manipulative that they cannot be trusted. Perhaps these are the ones who score 100.

  Malcolm’s book is not really much concerned with Sylvia Plath, and not at all with her poetry. It is deeply concerned with the nastiness of biography, and with interviewing, and the impossibility of objectivity. There is a good deal of knockabout stuff, like the statement that biography is ‘the medium through which the remaining secrets of the famous dead are taken from them and dumped out in full view of the world’. The biographer is a burglar, rifling through drawers, driven by voyeurism and busybodyism, and seeking stolen goods. Biographer and reader, each as despicable as the other, tiptoe down corridors together, ‘to stand in front of the bedroom door and try to peep through the keyhole’. Sometimes they do; but then again, not always. Biography may concern itself with the shape of a life, with its human, historical and cultural context. It may wish to do justice to one who has not yet received it. It may uncover aspects of history that have been overlooked, or examine the interaction between the events of a life and the work produced. And sexual secrets may legitimately be discussed: how could Andrew Hodge’s superb life of Alan Turing have been written without considering Turing’s homosexuality? You don’t have to be the slobbering voyeur Malcolm loves to conjure up to think that a more complete portrait of a human being is better than a less complete one.

  Another of Malcolm’s fixed ideas is that the 1950s were a particularly low and dishonest period. Journalists love to fix labels on decades, but it is a lazy device. We are told that Plath formed part of an ‘uneasy, shifty-eyed generation’, always keeping up a pretence about something; and that she looked a thoroughly ‘vacuous girl of the fifties, with dark lipstick and blonde hair’. There was also, it seems, a special breed of young men who flourished in ‘the Eisenhower fifties’, ‘thin, nervous, little, moody, sickly’ young men, they were, but perversely attractive to women. Yes, I remember them well, but there are still some of them around in the nineties; there are still shifty eyes too, and people pretending, and even dark lipstick and blonde hair.

  Sometimes Malcolm does hit the nail on the head. She is right when she says that the story of Plath is trapped for ever at the terrible raw moment of her suicide, whereas most people get through their marital storms into calmer waters. She is also honest in declaring that she has decided to take the Hugheses’ side against their critics, even though Ted Hughes refused to talk to her, and even though she puts in a stinging reference to how one ‘cannot help wondering about the emotions of the man for whom [Olwyn] is sacrificing herself, as he observes it from his cover’.

  You can’t help thinking through all this sorry mess that it would probably have been best if Hughes had published all his wife’s journals, given his own account of what happened, however brief, and kept Olwyn out altogether. He may not like what he sees as grubby academics and journalists making money from raking about in the past, but he can’t stop the interest either in Plath’s genius or in her story.

  And the poems grow and grow, but the story is still like an open wound that will not close. Around it fester feelings of shame, grief and anger, blame, jealousy and malice, and Janet Malcolm’s shiny surgical instruments have done nothing to clean out the wound. I think of the words of Voltaire, who wrote, ‘On doit des égards aux vivants; on ne doit aux morts que la vérité.’ In sixty years, when none of those concerned is likely still to be alive, it may be possible for someone to write a more complete and truthful biography of Sylvia Plath than has yet been done.

  Independent on Sunday, 1994

  True Grit

  Hidden Lives: A Family Memoir by Margaret Forster

  This is a wonderful book, perhaps the best Margaret Forster has yet given us, crowning her thirty years’ achievement as a novelist and biographer. She has found a perfect subject in her own family history, one that uses her historical sense, her researcher’s skill, and her vivid and sympathetic imagination. A few years ago she reconstructed the life of a real servant, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s maid Wilson, in fiction that occasionally verged on the lush. Here, where the servant is her own grandmother, her narrative has the bite and vigour of truth well told.

  The book sets out to do justice to the women of her family: her mother, the eldest of three sisters born at the beginning of the century, and before that her grandmother, Margaret Ann Jordan, for whom Margaret Forster herself was named. All had lives of hard physical labour. The earlier Margaret was born in Carlisle in 1869, and died there in 1936; and Carlisle, the place, is the other main theme of the book, with its markets, factories, different grades of housing estates, offices, shops, churches and schools: an almost unrelievedly grim, grey backcloth for the family drama.

  Carlisle was a pretty closed world. Amongst Margaret’s relatives, ‘the most daring journey ever made was by my father when he went as a young man to London for the day. He went to King’s Cross Station, walked round it, thought nothing of it, and came back, to boast for ever he had been to London.’ When Aunt Nan moved to Nottingham with her husband, their behaviour was judged dashing and dangerous, and when Margaret went to France as an au pair in 1955, she was the first member of her family to cross the Channel.

  Or so she believes. But there are mysteries in the family. They centre on her grandmother, who was, she discovered from her birth certificate, the illegitimate child of a Carlisle servant girl, and orphaned at two. There were then twenty hidden years of which she never spoke, and another mysterious birth which preceded her respectable years in service, and her respectable marriage to a local butcher. When I first read the book in proof, without illustrations, I imagined Margaret Ann as a self-effacing woman. Her photograph in the finished book suggests something quite different, bold dark eyes, smartly piled up hair and seductive turn of head, making guilty secrets seem likely enough.

  Margaret Forster is not able to unravel her grandmother’s story beyond the fact that her first daughter, born before she married and never acknowledged in her lifetime or in her will, actually lived round the corner and must have used the same shops and walked the same paths as her half-sisters, year after year, remaining completely unknown to them. Who her father was, and where she was born, remain a puzzle.

  The grandmother’s grit and strength passed to her three acknowledged daughters, all clever and enterprising, as they needed to be when their father died young. Each at first did well within the limitations placed on working-class girls in the 1920s. Lilian, the cleverest, became a clerk in the local Public Health office, Jean went at thirteen to Carr’s, the Quaker biscuit factory, and Nan set up her own dressmaking business. But Jean and Nan were both pretty and, by the standards of the times, wild. They attracted boys and soon made the exchange that was imposed on every girl, giving up economic freedom for sex and babies. In due course Lilian too, driven only by her desire for children, sacrificed her good career and settled for the punishin
g life of a labourer’s wife on a housing estate. It’s worth quoting the central statement of the book:

  It would have been a comfort to both Jean and Lily to have been able to say giving up their jobs had been worth it… but they couldn’t. The further the two of them got into the life of a mother and a working man’s wife the more alluring their past careers became. The only real compensation was their sons. They doted on them and if they had not given up their jobs, they could not have had them, could they? Jobs were traded for children and that was that.

  The book itself is of course an ironic demonstration of the fact that it was Lilian’s daughter who achieved the success her mother came to envy, throwing off all the shackles that had weighed down grandmother, aunts and mother, using her force of character along with the great educational system of the post-war years to leave Carlisle, to go to Oxford, to decide when to have her children – to refuse the old choice, job or children – and to reach a life of luxury.

  Covering the more familiar ground of a working mother’s experience in London in the 1960s, the last part of the book is less enthralling, although it is a necessary part of the story; and the shifting grounds between daughter and mother, a complicated terrain made up of love, disapproval, exasperation, jealousy, bewilderment, guilt and love again, are as well charted as they could be.

  When Margaret was in her teens her mother would go every Friday night to Her Majesty’s Theatre in Carlisle to see the Salisbury Players, and also to the local amateur dramatic society’s performances. Local theatre was an important part of education in those days, and Margaret was often taken too. Thus encouraged, she began to listen to Saturday Night Theatre on the family wireless, which she had to plug into a light socket in her bedroom and listen to in the dark. She never heard the last ten minutes of any play because,

  My father would come back from the pub and he had to have the wireless on. So just before he was due back my mother would come up and unplug the wireless and take it downstairs for him. I never even attempted to protest. That’s how it was… My mother always said, as she did the unplugging, ‘I’m sorry, but you knew it would be needed,’ and she was right.

  Hidden Lives is a box full of these treasures, a book to be put on the A-level syllabus, a slice of history to be recalled whenever people lament the lovely world we have lost.

  Independent, 1995

  Tante Claire

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

  Claire Clairmont is one of the awkward fringe figures of literary history. She has not won much approval: a silly girl who changed her name on a whim from Jane to Claire and went ‘prancing’ after Byron (the word was his); whose perpetual presence in the Shelley household, and closeness to Shelley, was a torment to Mary Shelley; who outlived almost all the other actors in the great drama of the Romantics in Italy, cocking a final snook at the tut-tutters by inserting herself yet again into the imagination of a great writer, as inspiration for Henry James’s The Aspern Papers.

  ‘She transgressed the laws of society without the excuse of either passion or conviction, but with the resolution to obtain by her adventures the celebrity which she could not obtain by her abilities’: the DNB was at its most pompous in addressing itself to Claire, although it did concede that she was clever, and wrote ‘excellent letters’. Some were to Byron, whose biographers have found her as troublesome as he did. Peter Quennell pitied her en passant and did not seek to defend Byron’s behaviour, but Doris Langley Moore labelled Claire common, coarse, tedious and vulgar, and accused her of penning boring and cruel letters to Lord B. Even Claire’s own recent biographers, the late Robert Gittings and his wife Jo Manton, adopted a cool tone towards her. I find this puzzling. Like Thomas Love Peacock, I have grown fond of Claire. (He proposed to her, and was turned down.) I have sympathized with her ever since I read her journals, edited by Marion Kingston Stocking and published in 1968. Yes, she was a silly eighteen-year-old when she ran after Byron, but he was not obliged to go along with the silliness; and she paid for it in years of the most cruel punishment imaginable, during which she showed herself to be a dignified, responsible and intelligent woman.

  Now Marion Kingston Stocking has edited Claire’s letters – along with some by her half-brother Charles and stepsister Fanny Imlay – and we can read all that are known complete and together for the first time. Do they change the picture? I think they do, at least in relation to the matter of Claire’s and Byron’s behaviour towards their daughter Allegra.

  The outlines of Claire’s story are these. She was born in April 1798, place and father unknown; he was not married to her mother, Mary Jane Clairmont, a bright, unshackled Englishwoman who already had a son, Charles, by a different lover. Mrs Clairmont appears not to have explained their paternity to either of her children, but she improved their situation markedly when she married the philosopher William Godwin in 1801. He was a widower, and the resulting family consisted of his daughter Mary (by Mary Wollstone-craft, who had died in 1797), Mary Wollstonecraft’s older daughter Fanny (by Gilbert Imlay, who had disappeared), Mary Jane’s Charles and Claire (at this time called Jane); last came a son, William, born to the Godwins in 1803. The Victorians disapproved of such a mixed bag of children, but we may think Mr and Mrs Godwin heroic in rearing them all. They were always poor, yet each child was given a good education.

  Claire met Shelley in 1812, when she was fourteen. They were friends from the start, the friendship persisting when he met and fell in love with Mary two years later; and, as is well known, Claire went with them when they eloped to France, and thereafter lived more often with than away from them, to Mary’s intense chagrin and irritation. This was partly caused by her jealousy of the intimacy between Shelley and Claire, and partly by the fact that the world believed Shelley was sexually involved with both of them. Whether he was or not is a point over which Shelley scholars continue to agonize, and which will probably never be established for certain. What is important is that Claire shared Shelley’s views about the emancipation of women, and about marriage. She wrote, much later, when she was a governess (in 1835), ‘I can with certainty affirm that all the pupils I have ever had will be violent defenders of the Rights of Women.’

  Claire, probably with the idea of capturing a poet of her own, pursued Byron and became pregnant by him in 1816. She followed him to Switzerland with Shelley and Mary and their baby son William, and shared in the experiences of that famous rainy summer beside Lac Léman in which Mary first dreamt of Frankenstein and his monster, and Shelley wrote his ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’ and ‘Mont Blanc’. The Byron party and the Shelley party breakfasted and supped together and the two men became friends, although they were divided in their view of women, Shelley seeing them as intellectual companions, Byron as temporary diversions, useful for sex and copying out his verses – Claire performed both functions for him, Mary the latter only – but not to be taken seriously. The two men shared a sailing boat to explore the lake, Shelley revealing during a dangerous squall that he could not swim but did not mind drowning. After this he made a will leaving a considerable sum of money to Claire and, indirectly, to her coming child; he also took part in her negotiations with Byron over the child’s future. According to Claire’s later testimony, Byron first suggested that the child should be brought up by his half-sister Augusta:

  To this I objected on the ground that a Child always wanted a parent’s care at least till seven years old… He yielded and said it was best it should live with him – he promised faithfully never to give it until seven years of age into a stranger’s care. I was to be called the Child’s Aunt and in that character I could see it & watch over it without injury to anyone’s reputation.

  There is no reason to doubt this account. Byron accepted that the child was his and appeared to want it; at the same time he took against Claire, no doubt finding her too assertive and demanding. She returned to England with th
e Shelley party and gave birth to her daughter in Bath in January 1817, concealing the fact from the Godwins, the more easily perhaps because it followed by a few weeks the suicides of both Fanny Imlay and Shelley’s wife Harriet. It was a time of horror for the whole family. None the less Shelley wrote to Byron at once to announce the birth of ‘a most beautiful girl’ and continued to send him regular news of the child, as did Claire, who called her Alba and proved an ecstatic and devoted mother. For most of 1817 they lived happily at Marlow with the Shelleys, the two Wunderkinder, William and Alba, equally adored. She believed she must, for the child’s own future good, give her up to her father, but Byron was in Italy and there was no pressure from him; it was rather Mary, now respectably married to Shelley, who was eager to send away a child people suspected of being her husband’s. Shelley did not share this view; he adored Alba, was half in love with Claire, and happy to live with an extended family. In March 1818 Alba was christened with Shelley’s children. At this point Byron exerted his parental authority and insisted on her being named Allegra; Claire prefixed this with the name Clara, which was also given to Mary’s new baby daughter. The whole party then set off for Italy.

  The story thereafter is well known. Claire gave up Allegra to Byron: ‘I have sent you my child because I love her too well to keep her.’ He was not much more interested in her than if she had been a pet animal, and when she was four he put her into a convent near Ravenna to be cared for by the nuns, ignoring Claire’s protest that a child under seven needed the care of a parent, and that Allegra’s health was likely to suffer. Claire was right, Byron was wrong, and Allegra did indeed die of fever at the age of five, unvisited in her last illness by her father, who could not be bothered, or her mother, who was denied access and information, and would have given her own life to save her child’s.