My miniature maple tree is now a uniform lovely dark red — I took this photo in the pouring rain
This is the November time of year in Virginia when it rains hard and steadily for several days in a row, taking away the colored leaves. That has not changed over the years. It happens in NYC in later October …
Dear friends,
My mother told me early that whatever happens to you, however unhappy you may be, you can escape into a book — Claire Tomalin
I’m in the awkward situation of having too many books and too many movies and too much activity to tell of since I last posted here. I lack a single overriding focus except to say that the fall term is starting to wind down. I write because I do not want to lose contact with my real friends who read me here. You owe this to Amazon Prime fooling me into thinking they were streaming Sally Fields’s Norma Rae, only to discover all that is on offer is a trailer so I had to send away to Netflix for a DVD and am too daunted by MacCulloch’s Thomas Cromwell (extraordinary as his recreation of the early Tudor world is) to inch further along this evening.
Both courses that I taught (Wolf Hall: A Fresh Angle on the Tudor Matter; and The Enlightenment at Risk, see Candide and La Religieuse) have gone splendidly. They and reading with others on-line, going to a conference where I gave a paper on Austen’s Persuasion and attended two plays, a guest visitor staying with me, who took this photo in front of Blackfriars’ theater in Staunton, Virginia, — all have left little time to blog:
I did have my paper proposal accepted for a coming ASECS meeting in Denver in March on Winston Graham’s historical fiction (with the much more original proposal on Henry Fielding as a feminist turned down). I read late at night and in the early mornings in bed — much to my cats’ impatience.
This week is the last of my Wolf Hall and the Tudor matter lectures, and after we finish Samuel Johnson on Scotland and watching the BBC classic documentary Culloden next week I’ve got but two sessions on Madame Roland’s memoir and the early phases of the French revolution to go. Near the end I want to do nothing so much as read Hilary Mantel and Samuel Johnson’s prose and about him by John Wain (who captures his tone and the best parts of his mind) endlessly.
Probably what has eaten into my time most is watching truly great (often classic) movies for three different courses I attended this term: I do most of this watching at night, and I’ve watched film adaptations of the books I’ve taught so as to be able to show clips in the classes of effective meaningful central scenes, and now this week I’ve added to re-watching the fourth season of Poldark, the stunningly brilliantly done film adaptation of Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (scripted by Fiona Seres), and the fourth season of Outlander (Drums in Autumn), where I just find irresistible Jamie and Claire. My favorite actress just this day is Jessie Buckley, my favorite actor Zakes Mokae. All I have had time for is to keep a list simply not to forget what I’ve seen and what’s left to see! the outstanding best of those I’ve not blogged about (I managed only women’s films) have been Paths of Glory, Judgment at Nuremberg, A Dry White Season (this last by a woman, 1989 Euzhan Palcy), and the early classic, Battleship Potemkin.
Jessie Buckley as Marion Halcombe in Fiona Seres’s 2018 Woman in White: what is distinctive is Collins’s novel is filmed so as to realize strongly its tale of a society organized on subduing and exploiting women through silent and overt violence; technically the most expert and marvelously (colored and film noir gothic) serial drama I’ve seen in a while. The use of juxtaposition, flashback, rearranged time is astonishing; all that is left out is voice-over for perfection
The unexpected: I listened in my car to a true masterpiece, E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India. I became immersed (insofar as time permitted) in E.M. Forster: he is a deeply morally good and astonishingly multi-perspective genius at novel-writing. On Trollope&Peers, we read and saw Howards End, A Room with a View, and I read a good deal of Beauman’s biography, Morgan & Charles Summer’s close reading of Forster’s writing. Thinking of Forster’s character Cyril Fielding helps me see my continual moral flaws and stupidities and agree with Forster about the sad futility of longing for “the Friend who never comes.”
E. M. Forster by Dora Carrington; a blog essay on his work by Tyler Tichelaar
And who would have thought Barbara Pym’d be a revelation: I was startled into contentment for two of her four characters in the faery tale ending of Quartet in Autumn, and strongly upset for her by her courting public sexual humiliation after she finished at Oxford (no wonder she wrote about 50 year old spinsters when she was in her mid-20s).
An HD opera was unexpectedly very good: Sanson and Dalila by Saint-Saens,and coming up is the new opera Marnie, based on Winston Graham’s novel.
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Longoni, Un gatto per Amicor
So what can I tell of out of all this that you cannot read elsewhere? Something non-famous? I’ve followed an excellent 6 week Future Learn course on Understanding Violence against Women and learnt much (what they do in their program is hold the particulars of the perpetrator in mind and work to stop or eject him). I spoke of the 1st & 2nd week here (scroll down). Now I’ll tell of the fifth week:
The course suddenly dramatically improved: now they were going to talk of survivors, how they are treated by society, what happens to them if they go for help, how they themselves feel inside as people ever after. And lo and behold there was a filmed interview of Judith Herman, and two women running rescue clinics, and shelters and in Scotland groups funded to help survivors of abuse. (I”ll lay a bet there is nothing like this in the US, and that whatever rescue shelters and clinics we’ve had are quickly going badly or being shut down since Trump&Co.)
What had been missing was the larger trajectory of the society that let this abuse inside a marriage happen (as yet there is no idea that marriage itself, compulsory marriage is at the core of all this violence permitted, even encouraged implicitly when you teach men how entitled they are and to be macho, and violence as a solution). They even critiqued themselves in that they said 25 years ago when police or social workers first really didn’t ignore calls to homes where violence had happened, the so-called investigation produced these general abstractions about what had happened instead of the particular case and what was the particular paradigms of behavior that abused the women and children, nor was the perpetrator paid attention to. All that was really written down was any physical injuries. Well no more. Now they try to pay attention to the perpetrator and look at the peculiar patterns and try to get the family members become aware and address the problem so the violence and coercion and cruelty and abuse stops.
We need to look at wider causes of this violence against women and in Judith Herman’s talk that is brought out: compulsory heterosexuality inside a family and society structure that makes women subject to other people’s exploitative uses of them with nowhere to turn. I realize she had outlined places to go, but the interview also talked about how such places don’t always address the problems, can deprive the victim of autonomy (she’s not in control), further punish her, put her further at risk
It was very hard for me to pay attention up front to some of this because I had some horrible experiences age 12-15 and probably no one ever helped me. Over the years and a lifetime I’ve somewhat recovered, but never wholly. I would hope other girls today get help; the situation is not improving in the US right now because of the Trump regime: we are going backwards as women are mocked, ridiculed and once again silenced, and social services cut
Anna Mitchell was superb. Yes we must not be content with general talk and general assessment or just pay attention to obvious physical abuse. You must look at all forms of abuse and abjection (the victim becomes abject) and hold the abuser accountable to stop the patterns of behavior that are harmful.
A movie, The Hunting Ground: It’s a powerful film, with Lady Gaga’s song (this brand name feels like an embarrassment to me — she is Stefanie Joanne Angelina Germanotta) and here it is — I hope my code stuff comes through: of many thoughts I had as I watched, I found that I became directly distressed as I watched and listened to the girl speak of the aftermath, of how they felt and were treated afterward. It was then I began to shake and couldn’t look. I’d say that just about no girl in that film ever had the slightest true justice, and every single young man who raped, gang-raped, assaulted and otherwise maimed these girls got away with it. Here and there in the film a young man is ejected from a university after he has won for them all the games he can, or is thrown out after he graduated. By contrast, a number of the girls whose story is followed through on has suffered massive insult and has been punished by her society in one way or another. I also found on line a video made by the American Enterprise Institute cleverly accusing this film of being “sensationalism.” Towards the end you see Obama and Biden get up and profess satisfaction that these brave girls have come forward and promise to help them; since DeVos has been put at the head of the education department she has turned back the rules that provided even the minimum assistance that Obama and Biden’s administration offered.
I would like to add this: thus far all the cases reported have one of the parents backing the girl, with the implication or assumption the other parent did too. When I tried to tell my mother she first scoffed, when I persisted, she called me a tramp and made derisive remarks, and finally told me she didn’t want hear about this. I am now 71 and have never forgotten those 3 years; they shaped my existence ever after. Since I believe there is nothing exceptional about me, and far from supporting me, I feel that the evidence you have produced should cases where other girls are not supported by one or the other parent. I didn’t tell my father because I was too ashamed, and also worried he too would blame me or tell me to forget about this.
In the US violence is mostly defined as physical violence of some sort. While there are laws in place, a few agencies and local assistance, it seems to me little true help is available. I know from experience that the psychiatric and psychological professions have gone over to CBT, which in my view is worthless: they are basically telling you to have good thoughts and conform, or they offer you a drug. Since the election of Trump, for women in the US life has deteriorated in public.
Probably all three stages are equally important, but it may be that the first two are easier to effect than the last. You need agencies and gov’t to come in and provide safety (put the man or men away in prison) and help the women and if she has children, the children involved find a good place to live, help her pay the rent as she begins to live there separately — or help her get a job. The third one involves personal relationships and this requires social skills on the part of the woman, things in the family that the community around identified with and respects, and the willingness of the people around her to become her and her children’s friends and associates. All this is hard, takes time, may not happen.
Obviously getting the community around women in different localities in the US to support the woman and/or her children. It’s clear from statistics that at this point it is the male assaulter who is supported and protected, and often goes unpunished. The challenge is to get the society as a whole and individual families and if there are institutions involved to value women as people. But the US has elected a man to be president who boasts of his sexual predation and mocks and derides women who are assaulted and come forward to protest. I see very good comments below by other people here.
I found Ann Hayne’s attitude one which would lead to genuine helping of another individual. She behaves and tells others how to behave with the needs of the traumatized individual in mind. It is the particulars that she singles out that struck me as exactly right. I have seen psychologists where the person supposed to help me makes me feel much worse by making demands I can’t meet, or in effect dismissing my fears by advising me to do things that would further terrify me. I thought the video cartoon comforting, and especially like how three very different types of trauma were included. In the talk and video were taken into account the kind of person (me) who becomes attached to someone dominating and then stays with a person because he’s kind, enables some of the things I’ve wanted to do and couldn’t on my own, and it’s so much easier. I suggest though something is left out: what about the person (me) first abused who then gets into another different kind of relationship where the abuse is not obvious, & the second relationship disguises that the first was never dealt with.
Claire Tomalin, London, 1989
The one review of Claire Tomalin’s for me utterly readable and riveting A Life of My Own that I have come across, Stacy Schiff’s “Making Herself the Subject,” in the New York Review of Books is remarkable for the reviewer’s ability to quote some of the many perceptive memorably put assessments from a few of Tomalin’s great biographies and to squeeze into a clear outline of the most significant & moving of Tomalin’s details about her ultra-busy successful life, but Schiff does omit herself, what we might surmise would be another woman writer’s reaction to Tomalin’s cool candor (shared in the comments).
Sometimes as I’d fall asleep (especially when hers was the last book of the late night) I’d find myself crying. I cried for her because she didn’t cry and I cried for myself because I never had a chance to experience, to be trained, to achieve all she has. I found I didn’t begrudge her because she eschews the self-congratulatory, she blames no one, not a whiff of boasting (and she was a literary editor of the New Statesman and Sunday Times), there is something beautiful in the way she regards herself as neither punished or rewarded, “as powerless to resist as a migrating bird or salmon swimming upstream.” I love her for her empathy in her biographies of others (and I have loved her Dora Jordan, Ellen Ternan, Mary Wollstonecraft, more or less agreed with her Jane Austen) and here for herself for not evading literal truth even when she doesn’t open up her grief or reveal her understanding of what happened, like when one of her daughters killed herself, when her husband, Nick, beat her up, even when she wrongs someone else, marrying the playwright Michael Frayn. I just felt so sad at these friendships I have missed, at the evidence of a courage and know-how that can never be mine. Maybe because she is a biographer, doing what I’d love to do in archives around the Eurocentric world. I have put her Katherine Mansfield on my night table.
Louise de Salvo’s life of Virginia Woolf; she died this week. You won’t hear her important persuasive argument and solid evidence that Woolf’s half-sisters, Laura and Stella, and her whole sister, Vanessa, were all physically as well as emotionally abused from earliest to teen years in that Victorian household, and the mother, Julia, was complicit: they put Laura away for not fitting in; they let Stella die; Vanessa survived by pretending what was in front of her was not; only Virginia reacted with full truth to what they had all experienced, so of course what she had to say was not acceptable and must be over-sensitive, diverted, re-channeled and controlled. De Salvo praised but her insights never mentioned and forgotten by others when they write, so Virginia’s experience erased, misunderstood, quite deliberately.
Still the famous are so sometimes for good reasons: Adrienne Rich touches deepest and widest, and I returned to her essays and poetry on and off, especially “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Experience.” I don’t cry when I read Rich, I want to return to my project The Anomaly. I will also never love or be loved by a man again. I have to be content to dream what can never be again. I have been reading tonight her book
The Fact of a Doorframe
means there is something to hold
onto with both hands
while slowly thrusting my forehead against the wood
and taking it away
one of the oldest motions of suffering
One of my favorite poems by Rich is too long to share in a blog: Transcendental Etude (this is but one stanza, gentle reader: she begins “This August evening I’ve been driving” and she ends “now the stone foundation, rockshield further/forming underneath everything that grows”). Do you know it?
How about just this to end on:
The longer I live the more I mistrust
theatricality, the false glamor cast
by performance, the more I know its poverty beside
the truths we are salvaging from
the splitting-open of our lives.
The woman who sits watching, listening,
eyes moving in the darkness
is rehearsing in her body, hearing out in her blood
a score touched off in her perhaps
by some words, a few chords, from the stage:
a tale only she can tell …No one who survives to speak
new language has avoided this:
the cutting away of an old force that held her
rooted to an old ground
the pitch of utter loneliness
where she herself and all creation
seem equally dispersed, weightless, her being a cry
to which no echo comes or can ever come …
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Camille Pissarro, Autumn at Eragny
To conclude, I’ve a new writing project: every couple of months I am to write a review of a historical fiction set in the 18th century, preferably recent, but they can go back a bit into the mid- to later 20th century. It will be for the Intelligencer, a kind of three paragraph column. I’ve a site to start looking for prospective new books (Historical Novel Society) and my own lists of Booker Prize, Whitbread and other powerful historical fiction to work from. I will once again try to subscribe to History Today, but this time through a letter and just for the paper copies. I cannot navigate their site.
It is harder to stay sane than people admit. I couldn’t do it without these routes. I wake in the morning longing for companionship, the ache in my heart so hard. I grow weary with too much life-learning and find a very few of my computer friends fulfill my heart’s needs more than most people I seem to have to work so hard to spend time with and have what’s called friendship. Claire Tomalin says the writing life is “silence, hard slog, loneliness, and old clothes:” she has omitted deep peacefulness when you are engaged, absorption so as to forget all else. Books are my best friends and I want to spend more time with her, and her characters.
Ellen
Under the Sign of Sylvia II 
Stacy Schiff: NYRB, October 25th issue:
Asked in 2011 if there might be a memoir in her future, Claire Tomalin, the author of sterling biographies of Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane Austen, Samuel Pepys, and Charles Dickens, among others, demurred. She had lived for too long through her subjects. She retained little sense of herself. “I know it sounds pathetic,” she told her interviewer, “but I don’t know who I am.” It stood to reason. The biographer has devoted years to thinking with someone else’s mind. While she has lived any number of lives she has traveled each time as a stowaway. Better than most, she knows that we are strangers to ourselves, omniscient only when it comes to others.
Seven years later Tomalin has reconsidered. She claims to have been driven in part by curiosity. “What would I learn about myself?” she wonders. Might she finally come to know the author of her books? As for the other parts, score-settling, record-straightening, and self-aggrandizing plainly figure nowhere among them. Of a subject’s late-life confidences Tomalin years ago observed: “Few people like their past to be entirely and permanently obliterated.” Or as Diana Athill put it in a very different out-from-behind-the-curtain memoir, one recoils instinctively at the prospect of being “deleted with one swipe of the great eraser.”
Another thing about other people’s lives: they have plots. History, Tomalin has noted, “is always a matter of choice and control.” Her own past strikes her as surprisingly short on design. Rather she has been the subject of her time, “as powerless to resist as a migrating bird or a salmon swimming upstream.” Causes align only obliquely with effects. As she sees it, regular infidelities on her husband’s part drove her to “progress”—how many other writers would have resisted the word “succeed”?—in her career. The more he left her in the lurch the more she realized independence was all. She would discover her true vocation only in her fifties. “My story,” she writes, “should be cheering to anyone who is finding it hard to establish a career they find congenial.” She has divined the terror in every millennial heart.
Tomalin begins with her parents, whom she introduces—the biographical instinct dies hard—by their Christian names. Émile Delavenay was French; the foreign last name bestowed on his daughter a kind of freedom, confesses Tomalin, “because the English could not easily place me.” A brilliant son of the Haute-Savoie, Delavenay early on identified Great Britain as the promised land, having fallen in love with London at fifteen. He devoted himself to English literature at the École Normale Supérieure, where his tutor duly informed him “that he would not be properly bilingual until nobody in England complimented him on his good English.”1 He rose to the challenge.
In 1926 a friend introduced Delavenay to a slight, stunning, raven-haired music student eight years his senior (which he would not immediately discover). Already she was a published composer. A Liverpool native, Muriel Herbert had won a scholarship to the Royal College of Music; she afterward wrote primarily for voice and piano. If ever a couple were destined to produce a daughter who would beg for an OED on her thirteenth birthday, it was these two. They courted by way of volumes of poetry. Tomalin’s father made a point of reading the text before a Shakespeare performance. Her mother spent the honeymoon setting Joyce’s poetry to music and performed her composition for him in Paris.
We would assume the talented, attractive ex-provincials bound for a bohemian idyll were it not for the fact that Tomalin has already cut us off at the pass. Early on she warns that her father will undergo a change in fortune that will drive him to the brink of madness and that her mother will be partially destroyed in the process. Trouble begins on the honeymoon, when the birth control evidently provided more amusement than the sex. Only the latter proved effective: a baby girl arrived ten months later. In Tomalin’s retelling that child is not her older sister but “their daughter Marguerite.” She seems to distance herself from the family she has not yet joined, or instinctively to reach for safe biographical ground.
The marriage quickly unraveled. Émile found Muriel moody, irrational, jealous. He withdrew or raged; she blamed him “for turning her from a gentle and lovable creature into a hellcat.” Tomalin catalogs the flying objects, the suicide attempts, the misery, but assigns no blame. Her father longed for escape. Her mother longed for another child. By September 1932 the relationship had soured to the point that while walking along a high Cornwall cliff husband contemplated pushing wife over the edge. Homicide yielded to a different urge that evening: Claire Tomalin may be the first person serenely to describe having been conceived “not only without love but with the gritted teeth of murderous loathing.”
She learned of the Cornwall episode in her late fifties, after her mother’s death, when her father kindly shared the pages of his own memoir.2 “Was he ridding himself of the guilt of having had a murderous thought by making this secular confession?” she asks. For reasons she finds herself unable to fathom, she would never pursue the matter with him. The candor continues to mystify all the same. Her father had concealed plenty in his pages. Was he attempting somehow to explicate his hatred of her as a child?
From her mother she heard only of the much-desired daughter who had arrived precisely on schedule and without complication. Early on Tomalin grasped that there were alternate narratives just as there were mismatched religions, opposing 1938 views of Chamberlain, even French and English Napoleons. There was to be another essential legacy. “My mother told me early,” writes Tomalin, “that whatever happens to you, however unhappy you may be, you can escape into a book.”
Family life effectively ended when Tomalin was eight; her parents never spoke to each other again. Literature was the constant companion as she shuttled among schools, depending on which parent got his or her way: she knew the Wordsworth poem before she first laid eyes on daffodils. In her late teens, just before her Newnham College interview, a beloved headmaster rebuked her for having, after a small mishap, behaved “like a tragic opera heroine.” It was less a scolding than an inoculation. Tomalin brings to these pages the same equanimity she does to her biographies and, at times, yet more restraint: no Tomalin subject would be likely to get away with so slender an account of an exhilarating romance with Martin Amis. (Tomalin was forty. Amis was twenty-five, not yet a man of the world, though already he sounded like one. She introduced him to Der Rosenkavalier, to which he did not take. The love affair ended unhappily.) This is in many ways a private book, hardly the most selling word in memoir but no less gripping for it. One does wonder if Tomalin treads lightly, nearly shyly here given the sting of her father’s pages.
The beloved headmaster would turn up later for a Cambridge visit, leaving a flustered Tomalin, after lunch, with a kiss on the mouth. It is but one reminder of an earlier world, one in which it was assumed that female Cambridge undergraduates could at best expect to become schoolteachers. (Convinced her First in literature prepared her for the typing pool, Tomalin’s father enrolled her in secretarial school.) Throughout there is a lust for knowledge, if not necessarily for the lunging men who dispensed it. In 1955 Tomalin interviewed for an editorial position at Heinemann—a job she secured, she learned later, at least in part for her looks: she had scored a seven out of ten. Her assessor, a poet by trade, would not be alone in his admiration. Saul Bellow enthused about her legs.
In her third Cambridge year, shortly after she had determined to devote herself wholly to George Eliot, Dickens, and Coleridge, she found herself hailed one evening from an upper-story Trinity Hall window. A disembodied voice asked if she might have any poems for Granta. Nick Tomalin materialized the next day to collect them. Tall, dashing, carefree, he too hailed from an unorthodox, artistic family. Here in particular the coursing current took over: “I let myself be carried along,” she writes of Nick, before the engagement, “although I knew there was something missing.” Despite doubts she felt powerless to reroute events. Around this time emerged a second regret. Tomalin had banked on a future as a poet. Dissatisfied with her voice, she stopped writing after Cambridge. The decision, she confesses, “left me with an emptiness in my life which has never quite been filled.” It is an uncommonly plangent note for these pages.
There is little emptiness to the early years with Nick. In the first five came four babies, one of whom the family buried weeks after his birth. Nick’s journalism career took off at a gallop, but so did he; Tomalin’s spirits sank accordingly, though she may be more forthcoming elsewhere than here. In her 1994 review of Janet Malcolm’s The Silent Woman, Tomalin allowed that “one of my most vivid memories of the mid-l950s is of crying into a washbasin full of soapy grey baby clothes—there were no washing machines—while my handsome and adored husband was off playing football in the park on Sunday morning with all the delightful young men who had been friends to both of us at Cambridge three years earlier.” She had hoped she might actually do something with her life. Instead she watched ambition circle the drain.
The soapsuds make no appearance here, nor is Nick any longer the charming bolter who “fell for the office vamp.” Tomalin is decidedly less pointed in her memoir than in the short pieces that serve as connective tissue to her 1999 collection of criticism. (She is also less naughty: we no longer catch her, while employed by his publisher, steaming open Graham Greene’s mail.) She defers regularly to her diary, which effectively keeps the emotions at bay. “I wrote in my diary, ‘I think Nick will destroy me,’” she notes, veering into a discussion of real estate, calculated to restore marital harmony. The relationship with Nick was very much on-again, off-again; Tomalin rails to find herself the wife of a faithless husband, a role that offends for its utter banality. It does not help that Nick shows her a letter from her father in which he confided that “he had not been able to live with my mother and so understood why Nick could not live with me.” While it may have qualified as “male solidarity,” Tomalin dryly observes, “it was not the act of an affectionate father.” She sounds nothing at all like a tragic heroine.
With three children at home she found work as a reader for several British publishers; before long she began reviewing, initially for The Observer. With the Mary Quant wardrobe, the twist, and the Profumo affair the moral climate shifted, Tomalin along with it. As her birthday approached in 1963 she had an epiphany: “I decided almost on the spur of the moment that, as une femme de trente ans, I might lunch with an admirer and embark on an affair.” When Nick learned of the indiscretion he attempted to punch Tomalin in the face. She ducked. Her mother had taught her well: her first thought was of the Countess in Figaro, unable to enjoy the same adventures as her husband. Nick next tried to run over his wife’s lover. On a later occasion he slapped her so hard she required stitches.
You have to admire a woman whose first thought after an assault is of Mozart. You want to rescue the one who admits she needs thenceforth to be alert to violence whenever her husband is angry, who covers up a beating for the family’s sake, who blames herself. Therapy helped. Work arguably helped more. “Couples,” Tomalin would observe, writing of Katherine Mansfield’s short stories, “are like cannibals.”
Family life was to be restored, ruptured, restored again. Ultimately Tomalin left the decision of whether Nick should be allowed another chance to her eldest child, then twelve. “I want Daddy,” came the reply. Nick returned. Tomalin had by then begun working part-time as deputy literary editor of The New Statesman; it was around this time that the same daughter would observe—though not in this memoir—that her mother came recognizably into her own. Indeed Tomalin may be at her best here, attempting to make sense of a life from the inside, about as foolproof as applying make-up without a mirror. She was thirty-six, deep into the family Middlemarch-reading and marmalade-potting, eager to salvage a marriage.
Soon enough she was again pregnant. Without a wink at the reader she implies that a riotous production of The Two of Us—she is today married to its author, Michael Frayn—sent her into labor. Tom would be born in August 1970 with spina bifida. Henceforth the literature and the medical reports overlap. Many of us thank our children in our acknowledgments. Tomalin thanks her babysitters.
Tom’s early years coincided with his mother’s first start as a biographer. “I knew I had at last found my vocation,” she writes, intensely happy, nearly forty, and in the close company of Mary Wollstonecraft, who seemed more and more modern, the kind of woman who—like the trailing biographer—carried her baby on business trips. Tomalin was at work on the page proofs when, early in October 1973, Nick headed to Israel to report on the Yom Kippur War. Just over a week later three somber emissaries turned up in her office: Nick had been killed by a Syrian missile in the Golan Heights. Before the memorial service, Tomalin’s mother informed her that the death affected her more profoundly than it did her daughter and that “whereas I might build a new life, she could not.” Muriel was right on the second count. Also before the memorial service the widowed mother of four had to decide whether to replace John Gross as The New Statesman’s literary editor. There was to be no more current carrying her along unwillingly: with the grief arrived a sense of release. Tomalin felt finally in sole charge of her life. She took the job.
As a critic Tomalin is large-hearted, bracing, incisive, effortlessly epigrammatic. Little attuned to the emotions of others, Dickens is given to issuing “Mr Toad-like accounts of his own brilliance.” To her husband’s dismay, Mrs. Milne “was for romance and against sex”; Jean Rhys “wrote like an angel and lived mostly like a monster.” Well before the biographical career Tomalin demonstrated a marked interest in female lives and writers: the enthusiasms range from Muriel Spark to Alice Munro to Anita Brookner, of whom she writes, “No one is so good at making you feel your own fingernails are slightly grubby.” She should know. No one can make you feel as intellectually rumpled as Tomalin. The style is cool, light, crisp—linen on the page.
She has reduced the writing life to six words: “silence, hard slog, loneliness, old clothes”; were she to confess to the cold coffee and the chocolate wrappers she would have a haiku. The loneliness weighed especially heavily. The years with Wollstonecraft made Tomalin long for the camaraderie of the office. Back she went, as the powerful literary editor of The Sunday Times, leaving a life of Katherine Mansfield by the wayside. A tour of the British literary firmament follows: if you want to know who wrote long, who wrote fast, and who wrote only when not drinking, here is your chance. Success does not translate into the most successful pages, however, inevitably producing at least a few that sound like mad parodies of Christmas cards. (As V.S. Pritchett noted, “The second part even of Rousseau’s Confessions is dull.”)
Granted, it is difficult to avoid the hailstorm of proper names when the nannies go on to become prize-winning poets or best-selling novelists, when Alan Bennett lives across the way. In one respect Tomalin hews more to the elegant restraint of her biographies. Michael Frayn sidles in from the wings without a last name and nearly without introduction, unless you count the earlier cameos. Tomalin does confess to having inspired a memorable running gag in Noises Off. At times it is difficult to tell whether she means to spare us or herself.
She can do neither when her second daughter succumbs—just before Tomalin sets Mansfield aside—to “a cruel and inexplicable blackness” while at Oxford. A prominent psychiatrist claims never to have treated a more depressed patient. With medication the darkness lifts; Susanna joins the family in France for their 1980 summer vacation. The morning after their return, delivering a cup of tea, Tomalin finds her lifeless on the floor of her room. She had left a brief note. “I should have protected her, and I failed,” writes Tomalin. The grief never evaporates: “The best things I saw, heard, read, felt, often brought me to tears because they came with the knowledge that my daughter was never going to return to share them. She had gone forever.”
Tomalin resigned abruptly from the Times in 1986, having come to blows with management. Here only she allows herself a sliver of score-settling: “I could not stomach Murdoch’s mixture of bullying and bribery,” she professes. She was fifty-three. It was, she would write later, “the end of my brilliant career.” In truth, the exemplary biographies still lay ahead. Early on she ventured to suggest that there might be an advantage to sharing a gender with one’s subject. Someone who had similarly bushwhacked her way through the male world, “taking a traditional female role, but also seeking male privileges,” might be expected to find Mansfield “less baffling than even the most understanding of men.” Having begun with largely invisible women, Tomalin would make her way, beginning with Pepys, to colossally conspicuous men.
The painter turns up in some corner of every portrait, but glimpses of Tomalin in her work are causes for special celebration. Of Austen in 1805, orphaned and without prospects, she writes, “These were not things you wrote down; if possible you did not allow yourself even to think about them.” In Samuel Pepys she mischievously sticks her head over the biographical parapet to describe her hero’s erotic bluster. Indeed there had been unrealized adventures. But Pepys is confident that each one of those unseduced women would have been his had the circumstances only been different. “We don’t believe him, and he probably doesn’t really believe himself,” muses Tomalin, “but it looks good on the page and cheers him up.”
It is unclear if self-exposure has cheered her or if after 331 pages Tomalin sees herself any more clearly. We certainly do. With the Mansfield came an echo of an earlier description of her charmed New Statesman years: “It was like having the best of a woman’s life,” Tomalin wrote her father, “and a man’s too.” She proves indomitable on both fronts, as brave as she is eloquent, sustained by comic opera, the heroine of her own life after all. One smiles anew at her description of Dickens, all charm and moxie, having perfected his “trick of putting aside agony and exhaustion and reappearing suddenly, like a clown from behind the curtain, full of energy, amazing everyone with his good humour and laughter, and his determination to get on with the chief work of his life.”
I do think Jessie Buckley in The Woman in White steals the show. None of the other characters maintain my interest or fascination so much as her. I have also greatly been enjoying out delving into Forster. Thank you for the link to my blog. It keeps us going having so many interesting books and films to add color to the darkness of our lives.
Tyler Tichelaar
Yes this all is what keeps me going. I saw a couple of nasty remarks about the character Buckley plays — of course this kind of stupidity aims it at her (“lesbian loon”&V) — all the more do I admire Feres for making a genuinely original contentful film adaptation.
Thank you for the Historical Novel site.
Do you like the idea of Collins’s novel, Woman in White for Trollope&Peers this spring?
Such ridiculous comments about Buckley. Yes, I’d be happy to read The Woman in White or any of Collins’ novels. I’ve only read The Woman in White and The Moonstone and both many years ago.
IN response to my Irish friend who spoke of how the EU wants everyone to skip “summertime:” “Since the change in the hour from summertime at end of October, the days seem to have got very dark. The EU are suggesting that the entire EU region should abandon the annnual summertime shift and all adopt the same timezone. Whether this will come into force I do not know, but if it does, we’ll just get used to it. ”
This is the first year (honest) in my memory that when we switched the clocks back an hour I don’t feel that we have all that much extra light at night. It is now 10 after 5 and the sky is rapidly darkening. It’s pretty — a sort of darkish blue- purple with red streaks but it’s fading. The day light is just less. I felt less the sense of depression because I’ve been sleeping a little later. Tomorrow I must get up to leavve the house at 8:40 to get to my teaching at 9:40 but after this no more. I’ve asked for classes 11:50 am or 1:45 in one place and 11:50 or 2:15 in the other.
I’m thinking about this project to review books on historical fiction set in the 18th century. I have to identify them, start reading them, and then see if there is a repeated theme or interest that they show.
I have to look to see if there is a difference between say a historical novel set in the 18th century from different countries: say, Ireland, or England, or America, or France, or Canada ….
This is a big project — too amorphous and might not be feasible.
[…] winter and a film club I attended from spring across the summer to early fall I was driven simply to list the titles lest now and again I forget them. As a holiday to myself I am over the next two days reading a book […]
[…] write a blog-essay on this one after I’ve watched all six, comparing it to the recent 4 part Woman in White scripted by Fiona Seres. Davies’s movie does not supersede the now famous musical but might be regarded as what can […]