Slipstream: a memoir
Elizabeth Jane Howard Macmillan, 493pp, £20
ISBN 0333903498
Kingsley Amis's observation that "Women are much nicer than men/No wonder we like them" might have made a witty epigraph to Elizabeth Jane Howard's memoir. "I feel as though I have lived most of my life in the slipstream of experience," she writes (a glancing reference to Martin Amis's memoir Experience, perhaps). Indeed, she seems often to have been drawn almost helplessly along in the more forceful path of others - usually a man. She modestly describes this autobiography as "a household book of accounts", a balance sheet of emotional expenses and returns.
She learnt to take second place to boys early on, overshadowed by her angelic younger brother. But, caught between a charming, over-affectionate father and chilly unaffectionate mother, her conventional upper-class childhood was only averagely unhappy. In 1942, she married the naturalist Peter Scott, wearing off-ration white lace and parachute silk knickers. But the marriage never really took off. By the time she was 21, she was a guiltily reluctant mother, with two ex-lovers and a wrecked marriage - thereby establishing the pattern of the rest of her life.
Few pages pass without Howard receiving wild declarations of love, marriage proposals or holiday propositions from one smitten chap or another. For her part, she fell in love hard and fast. As her ambitions switched from acting to writing and she became a successful novelist, she chose her lovers from the literary world in which she moved. Her reminiscences of Cecil Day Lewis and Laurie Lee are vivid and affectionate. Her affairs with others, such as Kenneth Tynan and Arthur Koestler, were more tempestuous. She was at once vulnerable and ruthless (even betraying close friends on a couple of occasions). Eventually, she tired of always being the other woman, and rushed into a particularly unpropitious second marriage.
Kingsley Amis enters this messy, self-destructive story almost as the hero. On their first date, he immediately informed her that "He'd booked a room in a nearby hotel . . . If I didn't want to spend the night with him, he must cancel the room or it wouldn't be fair on the hotel." What a considerate fellow. Howard swiftly succumbed - she most admired him for his honesty, after all.
Their middle-aged marriage, her third, was perhaps the closest she came to happiness. Her accounts of their holiday routines, each working at adjoining typewriters before lunch and a siesta, are touching. At home, she chivied the Amis family into some kind of domestic order, bringing what Martin Amis (whose education she rescued) describes as a "penetrating sanity" to the household. Sadly, it was not to last. Her devotion was rewarded by writer's block, and drunken boorishness from Kingsley. They parted after 18 turbulent years. "Now I felt I'd be alone for the rest of my life. Nobody would want a bolter of 56."
Howard is too humble about her own writing, which, like her life, is fitted around the more important pursuit of love. Like Nancy Mitford and Rosamond Lehmann (an unforgiving enemy after Howard's fling with Cecil Day Lewis), her attractiveness seems to have been a curse. But, as with those other aristocratic beauties, her looks and mildly scandalous lifestyle were integral to her work and character.
Slipstream creates an engaging portrait of the postwar bohemian circles in which Howard moved. She wittily overcomes the inevitable problem of name-dropping by beginning with an audacious and impressive cast of characters from the arts world of that time. Over the years, she worked on and off for several publishers, in small, shabby offices, a world away from today's corporate giants, consuming endless manuscripts and buns.
She may feel guilt and self-pity, but the reader is struck more by her obdurate lack of self-knowledge (despite years of therapy) and refusal to learn from her mistakes. At times, she is disarmingly disingenuous. Did she really consider herself plain? She plainly wasn't. Was she entirely helpless to avoid all the bad (and often hurtful) choices she made? Despite her proclaimed quest for truth, Howard remains unrepentantly romantic.
At 74, she was still up to her old tricks - falling for a stranger who turned out to be a complete crook, but who was, at least, good in bed. Now, at nearly 80, she lives sedately alone in the countryside, enjoying writing, gardening and the company of friends. She may have lived life in the slipstream, but she has made sure of having the last word. With this memoir, she has proved herself to be as much an old devil as the best of them.
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