Yesterday’s post and the quotation from The Young Visiters last week, were culled from an anthology, Marriage, compiled by Elizabeth Jane Howard in 1997.
It is a subject of which she had more experience than some of us. Her first marriage, when she was nineteen – but women got married younger in those days – was to Peter Scott, only son of the Antarctic explorer. Next an affair with Robert Aickman and when she was thirty-five marriage to an Australian broadcaster, Jim Douglas-Henry. This was all good preparation for her third marriage, to Kingsley Amis becoming his second wife.
They gave her plenty of inspiration. I recently read Something in Disguise. It depicts a number of marriages in a family; almost all are deeply unhappy but the joy of the novel is how she mercilessly skewers her characters. Their behaviour in many cases is so appalling it becomes funny. She knows how to describe the upper middle class, their shortcomings, weaknesses and lack of insight into their condition.
Now I am reading Getting It Right in which the main character is a working class hairdresser in his early thirties. It is an enjoyable read but she is much less sure-footed dealing with a socio-economic strata with which she is unfamiliar. I can imagine her sitting in a hairdresser in the 1960s, bored of flicking through dog eared women’s’ magazines and inventing a life around the hairdresser that she can make into a novel. While a novelist is often imaginative EJH is better on territory with which she is familiar and has a firm grasp. Next I will re-read her memoir: Slipstream. Meanwhile here is a flavour from the cover.
“Born in 1923 and raised in the austere yet close embrace of a large Edwardian family, privately educated at home, unsure of herself, of her worth and of her intelligence, Elizabeth Jane Howard’s story reflects that of a generation of English women. The War and short-lived careers as an actress, model, and publishing editor gave her a degree of independence and experience that had been closed to her forebears, and brought her into contact with the artistic community that was to encompass her professional and private life. Her first novel was published in 1950 and her most recent in 1999. Her circle of friends has included some of the most interesting writers and thinkers of the day – Laurie Lee, Arthur Koestler, Olivia Manning, Cyril Connolly, Ken Tynan and Cecil Day-Lewis, among many others. She has been married three times – firstly to Peter Scott, the naturalist and son of Captain Scott, and most famously and tempestuously to Kingsley Amis.”