The Long View

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In 1969, the Amises bought Lemmons, a Georgian house set in three acres in London's northern suburbs. It sheltered a rambling collection of family and friends: Kit Howard lived there until she died in 1971; Colin shared the house for eight years. His friend, the painter Sargy Mann, also had a part of the house until he left to marry another painter, Frances Carey. Cecil Day Lewis came there to die when no more could be done for his cancer, and he wrote his last poem celebrating the house and its inhabitants. Adams, Matthew (3–4 June 2017). "Talent and torment". The Sydney Morning Herald . Retrieved 4 September 2017. Howard was hopelessly unfaithful, first with Peter Scott's half-brother. Within five years the marriage had become stranded in antarctic latitudes of distant courtesy. In 1947, she left Scott and their infant daughter Nicola to become a writer. She moved into a flat in a run-down 18th-century building off Baker Street: "I remember my first night there, a bare bulb in the ceiling, wooden floors full of malignant nails, the odour of decay that seeped through the wet paint smell and the unpleasant feeling that everything was dirty except my bedclothes. Above all I felt alone, and the only thing I was sure of was that I wanted to write."

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.'

Amis had been an extraordinarily vigorous and inventive adulterer for most of his marriage. Hilly had retaliated with affairs of her own. But they had three children and were planning to spend a year in Majorca, close to Robert Graves. The best part of the day came after the formal interview. We walked in her wonderful garden, which merged into a meadow that ran down past the River Waveney. I made notes that evening: 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. Green Shades: An Anthology of Plants, Gardens and Gardeners. Pan Macmillan. 2021. ISBN 978-1529050738. The journalist Angela Lambert has asked why The Long View is not recognised as one of the great novels of the 20th century. One might ask why Howard’s whole body of work is not rated more highly. It’s true her social settings are limited; so are Jane Austen’s. As in Austen’s novels, a busy underground stream of anxiety threatens to break the surface of leisured lives. The anxiety is about resources. Have I enough? Enough money in my purse? Enough credit with the world? In various stories, Howard’s characters teeter on the verge of destitution. Elsewhere, money flows in from mysterious sources. But her characters do not command those sources, nor comprehend them. Emotionally, financially, her vulnerable heroines live from hand to mouth. Even if they have enough, they do not know enough.

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. 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. When he was exploring genre fiction, in a way it suited him best. I don't admire them. The bad ones are pretty bad, really, though there were always marvellous bits in all of them. A biography, entitled Elizabeth Jane Howard: A Dangerous Innocence by Artemis Cooper, was published by John Murray in 2017. A reviewer said it was "strongest in the case it makes for the virtues of Howard's fiction". [10] Personal life [ edit ]

Howard thinks of it as her most accomplished novel. Shortly after it was published she received an appreciative postcard in familiar writing: "Have started a new adventure," it read. The signature was "Henry" - the dismissed suitor recognising himself in Falling 's gardener. That was the end of her romantic hopes. Illness, serious and unpleasant, interrupted work on her autobiography. verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ Colin Howard dislikes this description of Kit but says, "Mother quite obviously preferred her sons [there was another brother, Robin], and couldn't see anything good about Jane. I said once, after reading one of Jane's novels, 'I think she does write rather beautifully', and mother replied, 'It's a pity she doesn't have anything to write about'. And I know that if I had written anything even half as good, she would have been embarrassing in her praise."

In 1975, the household at Lemmons broke up, and the Amises moved to Hampstead, where there was no room for the extended household; it was also too small for their burgeoning resentments. In 1980, she finally left Kingsley by way of a lawyer's letter sent from a health farm whence she had retreated for a week with the quarter-written manuscript of a novel called Getting it Right.So when Howard said she didn’t think that writing about her work “would interest people” she was mixing up some flirtatious self-deprecation with plenty of authentic agonising self-doubt and the knowledge that it was her life that had interested others more than her books. Nonetheless, I wonder how much she would have had to say about her own work. I suspect that she wasn’t that keen on writing about writing, or in reading about it. It’s difficult to imagine Elizabeth Bowen, or Jean Rhys, or Elizabeth Taylor, dismissing their art quite so carelessly, so unstrategically. Howard published five additional novels before she embarked on her best known work, the five-volume Cazalet Chronicles. As Artemis Cooper describes it: “Jane had two ideas, and could not decide which to embark on; so she invited her stepson Martin [Amis] round for a drink to ask his advice. One idea was an updated version of Sense and Sensibility … the other was a three-volume family saga … Martin said immediately, “Do that one.” [6]