The Long View

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Be a writer', he said. 'You - a writer? But you never read anything'. He looked at me and said 'give me a book, then'." Slowly, the fairytale castle transformed, until the princess began to look like a witch, and the prince who had rescued her turned ogreish. Sargy Mann says, "I don't like admitting this but one of the reasons I wasn't more help to Jane was that I was too busy staying on the right side of Kingsley. You had to be sycophan tic around him. And if he was happy, it was great. It is very easy to give Kingsley a bad press because he was a sod in lots of ways, but he was also tremendously marvellous in lots of ways." Adams, Matthew (3–4 June 2017). "Talent and torment". The Sydney Morning Herald . Retrieved 4 September 2017. I looked up, his face was lit with intention. He pushed the pencil into my hand and rubbed the slate carefully clean for my reply. I wrote, 'You very kind. Can't marry anybody must learn typing for the war.' He read it, and his face changed slowly, like the sun going in. He shrugged his shoulders very gently and wrote, 'Tuesday. 12s 6d don't get bombed.'

During those years she wrote a number of witty novels, full of the pleasures of life, while enduring periods of deep misery. Her husband was making money and collecting applause, but she kept faith with her talent. Well-bred people did not make a fuss or make a noise, her mother had told her, even when having a baby. That is a prescription for emotional deadness, not creative growth. But if pain can be survived, it can perhaps be channelled and put to work. In her novels Howard described delusion and self-delusion. She totted up the price of lies and the price of truth. She saw damage inflicted, damage reflected or absorbed. She had learned more from Austen than from her mother. Comedy is not generated by a writer who sails to her desk saying, “Now I will be funny”. It comes from someone who crawls to her desk, leaking shame and despair, and begins to describe faithfully how things are. In that fidelity to the details of misery, one feels relish. The grimmer it is, the better it is: slowly, reluctantly, comedy seeps through.

She was remarkably imaginative, supportive and tremendously reliable," Baird says. "I've been grateful to her ever since. She has this great quality of unsoupy sympathy." The arrangement was largely practical, but after Peter Scott remarried and Nicola went to live with her new stepmother, Josie Baird fell seriously ill with TB and Howard started visiting her in hospital.

Artemis Cooper tells the story of how a friend remonstrated with the elderly Elizabeth Jane Howard after she published her autobiography, Slipstream – there was too much of her life in it, and not enough about her work. “I didn’t think it would interest people,” she replied. She is the godmother of one child of the marriage, Tamasin Day Lewis, the cookery writer, who was also at one stage the girlfriend of Martin Amis. Laurie Lee took Howard to Spain to recover from an unhappy affair. What had his wife made of that? Throughout the 1950s men queued to fall in love with Howard. Baird says, "I remember how extraordinarily good-looking she was. She had a very pretty figure and she always dressed with good colours. She had interesting but not infallible taste. Not all men found her attractive, but those who did found her very attractive." Above all, she strongly dislikes the idea of a comic novel: "The best novels have comedy in them; in Jane Austen there are some very, very funny moments, in situation and in character and dialogue. But they're not comic novels. I think the best comedy is always generated by very depressed people, very sad people, who have an acute awareness of death and suffering, and are using that to make you laugh.Elizabeth Jane Howard CBE FRSL (26 March 1923 – 2 January 2014), was an English novelist. She wrote 12 novels including the best-selling series The Cazalet Chronicles. [1] Early life [ edit ] The grown-ups had had no warning until the doorbell rang; the children had not been told their father was sharing his flat with a woman. She appeared behind him in the hall in a dressing gown with hair down to her waist, and set about making bacon and eggs. Hardly anyone has a good word to say for Jane Howard's mother Kit, the former ballerina so humiliatingly abandoned by her husband. Martin Amis, Howard's step- son, thought Kit "a snob and a grouch" at the end of her life, especially towards her "sweet-natured" son, Colin, who now designs and makes hi-fi speakers. Originally published in 1956, The Long View is Elizabeth Jane Howard's uncannily authentic portrait of one marriage and one woman. Written with exhilarating wit, it is a gut-wrenching account of the birth and death of a relationship.

Cooper, Artemis ‘’Elizabeth Jane Howard: A Dangerous Innocence’’, London: John Murray (2016), p.260.This was not good preparation for Jane's marriage to the talented, honourable and charming Peter Scott. She was 19, he 32, and she soon knew that she did not love him. He was not practised at intimacy with women, though he had no trouble seducing them. She was lonely, spendthrift and oppressed by her brilliant and dominating mother-in-law, the sculptor Kathleen Scott, who had married Lord Kennet after her first husband died. She worked briefly as an actres in provincial repertory; she remained an ingenue. The figure of a beautiful young girl admired for everything except her real virtues recurs often in Howard's 12 novels. In Slipstream it is possible to see just how autobiographical this was, though the characters in the autobiography are less alive than when they appear in the novels. David Howard had enlisted in the Machine Gun Corps in 1914 aged 17, and survived four years on the western front. He told his daughter once that he had won his second military cross by peeing on a machine gun to cool it down so it could keep firing. Otherwise he never talked of his wartime experiences. Elizabeth Jane Howard, known as Jane, was born in 1923, the eldest child of David Howard, who played at being a timber merchant with rather less enthusiasm than he shot, sailed, danced and chased women; and Kit, née Somervell, a composer's daughter, who had given up her career as a dancer in the Ballet Rambert for marriage and who never really found anything to replace it. There was another marriage, a brief one, to a fellow writer. Then she became the second wife of Kingsley Amis, an acclaimed and fashionable novelist. Jane wanted love, sexual and every kind; she said so all her life, and she was bold in saying so, because it is always taken as a confession of weakness. The early years of the Amis marriage were happy and companionable. There is a picture of the couple working at adjacent typewriters. It belies the essential nature of the trade. Howard was strung on the razor wire of a paradox. She wanted intimacy, and writing is solitary. She wanted to be valued, and writers often aren’t. The household was busy and bohemian. She kept house and cooked for guests, some of them demanding, some of them long-stayers. She was a kind, inspiring stepmother to Amis’s three children. The marriage was, as Martin Amis has said, “dynamic”, but the husband’s work was privileged, whereas Jane’s was seen as incidental, to be fitted around a wife’s natural domestic obligations.

The Chronicles were a family saga "about the ways in which English life changed during the war years, particularly for women." They follow three generations of a middle-class English family and draw strongly from Howard's own life and memories. [7] The first four volumes, The Light Years, Marking Time, Confusion, and Casting Off, were published from 1990 to 1995. Howard wrote the fifth, All Change (2013), in one year; it was her final novel. Millions of copies of the Cazalet Chronicles were sold worldwide. [1] Eventually, at the end of the second world war, one mistress secured him completely. He divorced - the first time it happened in the Howard family - and remarried; the new stepmother worked steadily to detach him from his children. Two large chub lurked under the wooden footbridge. She fed a widower swan which approached us very slowly up the narrow stream. She knew, of course, the bird's past history. The apple and willow trees that overhang the stream often hid the body of the swan in its journey, so we could only see the reflection float slowly towards us, upside down.In the late 1950s Howard learned, she says, to work properly, despite the distraction of brief affairs with Cyril Connolly and Kenneth Tynan: "I can plough on with books through feelings of frightful anxiety, when I feel that they aren't any good. But I can't think very well. I think probably it's a bit late to start learning how to now, when I am nearly 80. I feel uneducated. There are a lot of things I can't do at all, and don't know anything about. I would very much like to have gone to university and had a course of English literature. I read madly to catch up, but I am still not well-read in the sense that my stepson is. With it goes a greater ease of expressing yourself. I haven't written essays for people and I haven't been told to do this or that; I think that would have been very good for me." She wrote a book of short stories, Mr. Wrong (1975), and edited two anthologies, including The Lover's Companion (1978). [1] Autobiography and biographies [ edit ] Cooper, Jonathan (23 April 1990). "Novelist Martin Amis Carries on a Family Tradition: Scathing Wit and Supreme Self-Confidence". People . Retrieved 15 June 2012. verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{