Amazon says: As one of the best biographers of her generation, Claire Tomalin has written about great novelists and poets to huge success: now, she turns to look at her own life.
This enthralling memoir follows her through triumph and tragedy in about equal measure, from the disastrous marriage of her parents and the often difficult wartime childhood that followed, to her own marriage to the brilliant young journalist Nicholas Tomalin. When he was killed on assignment as a war correspondent she was left to bring up their four children - and at the same time make her own career.
She writes of the intense joys of a fascinating progression as she became one of the most successful literary editors in London before discovering her true vocation as a biographer, alongside overwhelming grief at the loss of a child.
Writing with the élan and insight which characterize her biographies, Claire Tomalin sets her own life in a wider cultural and political context, vividly and frankly portraying the social pressures on a woman in the Fifties and Sixties, and showing 'how it was for a European girl growing up in mid-twentieth-century England ... carried along by conflicting desires to have children and a worthwhile working life.'
You will find it hard not to be amazed, and impossible not to be moved, by the indomitable spirit that drives this memoir. Though dealt a terrible hand in her middle years, Claire Tomalin remains so utterly without self-pity, so brimful of stoicism and courage, that at times she comes across like the heroine of a great novel. Memoirs, especially writers’ memoirs, are often the occasion for score-settling, an excuse to produce that dish best served cold, yet even in the face of mighty provocation, this writer transcends petulance and piety. Such is her restraint, indeed, that the reader may feel occasionally chastened by the high-mindedness of it all.
It is, I should add, a hugely entertaining book. Having read her work, I expected the biographer’s lightness of touch, instinctive sympathy and eye for the killer detail; here those attributes are enlivened by a story she knows better than anyone else’s. Born of artistic middle-class parents – her father a French rationalist, her mother a Christian Scientist from Liverpool – she had a childhood disrupted by the war and haunted by a distinct perception: “As soon as I was aware of anything I knew my father disliked me.” Her parents’ marriage was gothically wretched. She was conceived on a holiday in Cornwall on the same day her father had “thought seriously” of killing her mother. Again, it sounds as if it should be in a novel. They separated when she was eight, in 1941.
A tension in Tomalin’s character becomes apparent. She is clear-sighted and remarkably lacks sourness in her account of Nick, whose multiple infidelities and defections left her and her young children in a state of miserable uncertainty. Partly in retaliation, partly in keeping with the times, she embarked on an affair of her own with “a clever and likable journalist”. When the philandering husband hears of this he throws a punch at her, which she ducks. But what we really want to know is the man’s name, not the scene’s affinity to The Marriage of Figaro (“he will not allow the countess any equivalent freedom”). Tomalin’s reticence is presumably a courtesy to people still living; to the reader, alas, it is maddening. Later, when books editor of the New Statesman, she is wooed by a “brilliant and witty colleague”, also married. Her refusal to spill his name forces her into locutions (“my lover rang me”) that sound old-fashioned and coy – surely not her intention. Later still, at the Sunday Times, a malicious colleague tries to stitch her up in a spat with Auberon Waugh at Private Eye. Who, for heaven’s sake?She exercises a discretion on her private life she would never dream of conceding to her biographical subjects. (I kept thinking of her elucidation of Dickens’s mislaid 1867 diary in her superb life of Nelly Ternan, The Invisible Woman).
On the other hand, her restraint in dealing with the twin tragedies of her life, seven years apart, is moving. In October 1973 Nick Tomalin, reporting on the Yom Kippur war, was killed on the Golan Heights by a Syrian missile. She recounts the shock of his death, for herself, her family, colleagues, with a tenderness that feels raw even today: “It felt as though the sun had been eclipsed.” She grieved for Nick – the charmer, the chancer, the fearless journalist – yet she also felt released in some way. She knew she had her own life to make: “I was already standing alone, and not afraid.” Her first book, The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft, appeared the following year, and she plunged right into the thick of literary London, reviewing, editing, even finding the time for an affair with Martin Amis (“I succumbed to the charm of his smoker’s voice”). The love of her daughters and her son Tom, born with spina bifida, sustained her. Men were constantly offering themselves as protectors and domestic helpmeets. I would have liked to know the story of how Michael Frayn, a shadowy presence here, became her soulmate and second husband, but again, she isn’t telling.
All seemed to be well until she was blindsided by another bolt from nowhere. Her middle daughter, Susanna, a bright and high-spirited girl, fell prey to “a cruel and inexplicable blackness” whose warnings neither her mother nor the medical profession sufficiently heeded. She made several attempts on her own life, and finally succeeded in August 1980. Again, sorrowful acceptance of her lot is Tomalin’s keynote. “I should have protected her, and I failed,” she writes, concluding a fine and affecting account of her daughter’s short life. The bough creaks, and bends; somehow it does not break. “Work has to be the healer” – the joyful work of life-writing and, in the disputatious 1980s, a final stint in journalism as literary editor of the Sunday Times, first under Harold Evans, later under the celebrity-chasing aegis of Andrew Neil. It’s a farewell to the old Fleet Street spirit as Rupert Murdoch outwits the print unions after moving his papers to Wapping.
I loved the way the book’s closing chapter belatedly back circles to its beginning via her posthumous discovery of songs in a manuscript written by her mother, not just a talented pianist but an accomplished composer. “How hard she had worked, and how well.” With her father, who lived much longer, she became reconciled, though when he published in his own memoir the atrocious story of her conception she never challenged him: “I cannot explain why I failed to.” Perhaps this is simply the way she has learned to survive, and what looks like a blind spot to some readers will strike others as majestic decorum. That Tomalin knows who she is seems to have made it easy for her to understand others. Aged 84 now, she wants to follow the example of her longest-lived subject, Thomas Hardy, and keep writing to the end. She intends to begin another book after this. I can’t wait for it.
My notes:
I found this book difficult to set aside. I am not normally a fan of biographical literature. I found this woman's life, and the milieu in which she moved and worked from her earliest days being steeped as it was in literature and music, to be fascinating.
"Lorna Sage, professor of English at the University of East Anglia, has written an almost unbearably eloquent memoir of the unlikely childhood and adolescence that shaped her. Nothing else I have read, save Carolyn Steedman's Landscape for a Good Woman, destroys so successfully the fantasy of the family as a safe place to be or describes so well the way in which rage, grief and frustrated desire are passed down the family line like a curse, leaving offspring to live out the inherited, unresolved lives of their forebears." So reads the review of this book in The Guardian.
In a sense this is what autobiography is about: the ways in which your own story is not really yours at all, but a version of the tale of your parents or grandparents. These are the ways in which you become, as Steedman puts it, "not quite yourself, but someone else", and this is what makes it such a dissatisfying genre for those wanting a reassuring or comfortable description of the growth of an individual mind.
The "fierce monogamy" of Sage's parents took on a violence of its own: their intimacy allowed no one in and made orphans of their two children. Her father, a distant figure, happiest during the war when he had a role and a mission, later gallantly protected his spouse from the passions of her family - and particularly those of Lorna, fiery and bookish and thus an inheritor of Grandpa's bad blood.
It is Sage's Byronic grandfather, the local vicar, who provides the centre of the story, and around whom Sage forges her identity. Cursing a marriage that has neither love, understanding nor imagination, he turns to a life of unabashed wickedness. Indulging in lust and drink, he becomes for his granddaughter a "defiant and grandly outrageous" figure in his self-defeating recklessness, a Gothic outsider with all "the glamour of the undead". (I despised the man as I read about him).
In Sage's celebration - or invention - of the glamorous alter ego beneath her grandfather's desperately limited life, Bad Blood is at its most gripping, and its most moving touch is her tribute to his thwarted ambition and ridiculed desires. Finding an old pocket diary for 1934 and decoding the banal secret life it records -"It was the diary of a nobody" - she quotes his hurt at being "taunted" by his teenage lover, a friend of his daughter, for resolving to escape the philistine values of the parish and the vicarage and to start a new life as a writer. "That freelance existence never materialised for him," his grand-daughter writes; "here are his words, though, in print at last." The vicar of Hanmer is redeemed from the "squalor of insignificance" he fought against. The heir of his bad blood has rewritten his story, giving to its grim drudgery the grandeur and dignity of a Greek tragedy.
A central theme in Bad Blood is places and spaces, and how we learn to shape ourselves around them. Hanmer, on the borders of Wales and England and where Sage spends the first part of her childhood, becomes a metaphor for the suffocation of living "in-between": between the second world war and the 1960s, between the covers of books when there is no space left elsewhere, in the limited space between other people's lives. People and houses are imprisoning.
It is only in the printed word that Lorna can breathe; even then she feels Grandpa looking over her shoulder as she reads. Sage is interested in lives that don't fit: family black sheep, misshapen marriages, homes too small to house either the hatred of their inhabitants or their exclusive love. Either way, other people are hell. Having lived sandwiched between these two marriages, Sage, believing she is still a virgin, unwittingly finds herself pregnant at 16 and embarking on her own marriage. Both she and Victor, the child's father, are doing their A-levels.
It is here that the story closes, and it is given a happy ending. A daughter, Sharon, is born; Victor and Lorna both gain firsts in English from Durham University, and both join the English department at the new University of East Anglia. There are no doubt many other endings she might have chosen, but Sage breaks off at the point at which her life, if not her blood, became her own.
PS Sage's era pretty much echoes my own. She was born four years before I was but her life and mine are divergent. Such grandparents as I knew were principally my paternal grandmother of whom I was so very fond, and a maternal stepmother with whom I never connected. She was rather distant, and cold. My family life was dominated by the father figure, my mother being the ultimate home-maker but with no encouragement to have a life, however minor that component might be, of her own. A few aspects of Lorna's teenage life echo my own though. I also met my husband at a tender age, seventeen, and he was eighteen. We had hiccups but married when I was 21 and after a very brief working life I was confined at the age of 24. With two more children before I was 29, I never went back to a conventional working life. Lorna Sage discovered her ability and passion for words at a very early age, it would be years later before I would discover the real delight in reading and writing a little bit of prose. I also got science and that is a whole other story...........
My favourite line from Sage's book: "Being five foot three, tongue-tied and blonde I mostly passed muster, except that I was so unskilled in small talk that I sometimes blurted big words (hypocrisy, or pretentiousness), which jumped out of my mouth like the toads in the fairy tale before I knew it."
In four early books J G Ballard succeeded in making a kind of steely poetry out of the nastiest incidentals of late twentieth century life. So reads the Guardian review for 'Empire of the Sun'. This novel however merits consideration as a work which distinct from that early, essentially science fiction, genre.
"Based on events which Ballard himself witnessed and suffered while interned as a boy in Shanghai during the Second World War, this is an extraordinary addition to our modern literature of war.
Indeed, it could be said that if there is still room for a masterpiece about the Second World War, then this is it - and like other masterpieces it gains its initial effect in standing at a slightly oblique and unexpected angle to its subject matter. By concentrating on the expatriate colony of Shanghai, and by showing us the events following the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor through the eyes of an eleven-year-old boy, Ballard achieves the creation of an amazing microcosm. Above all, the book is a triumph of truthfulness of tone. The boy, Jim, separated from his parents, camping out first in his own empty house and then in the deserted house of his parents' friends, eventually interned for four years in the camp at Lunghua, becomes an admirable clear-eyed guide to a most peculiar inferno. This, Ballard convinces us, is how it was. No heroes, no heroics, just war as the normal condition, and the only battle that to survive."
The tone of the narrative of Empire of the Sun sounds authoritative and, lacking the need for imagination in the events which take place between the pages of the book, it is completely convincing. I 'read' this novel as an Audible experience. The narrator, Steven Pacey, made an excellent job of characterisation, finding voices and accents for the cast and in particular for Jim, the young and naive ingenu who is caught up in the adult folly of war.
Another novel by Ballard, High Rise, was another Audible read. A new high-rise block seems to give its well-established tenants all the conveniences and commodities that modern life has to offer: swimming pools, its own school, a supermarket and high-speed lifts. But at the same time, the building seems to be designed to isolate the occupants from the outside world, allowing for the possibility to create their own closed environment. Life in the
high-rise begins to degenerate quickly, as minor power failures and petty annoyances among neighbours escalate into an orgy of violence. Soon skirmishes are being fought throughout the building, as floors try to claim lifts and hold them for their own. Groups gather to defend their rights to the swimming pools. And party-goers attack "enemy floors" to raid and vandalize them. It does not take long for the occupants of the entire building to abandon all social restraints, and give in to their most primal urges. The tenants completely shut out the outside world, content with their life in the high-rise; people abandon their jobs and families and stay indoors permanently, losing all sense of time. Even as hunger starts to set in, many still seem to be enjoying themselves, as the building allows them a chance to break free from the social restrictions of modern society and embrace their own dark urges and desires. As the commodities of the high-rise break down and bodies begin to pile up no one considers leaving or alerting the authorities.
In time the tenants abandon all social and moral etiquette. As their environment gives way to a hunter/gatherer culture, they gather together in small clans, claim food sources from where they can (which includes eating the many dogs in the building, and eventually even the other tenants). Every stranger is met with extreme violence.
Ballard here offers a vision of how modern life in an urban landscape and the advances of technology could warp the human psyche in hitherto unexplored ways. It is an allegory based on the tower block phenomenon, an architectural money-saving expedient in maximising potential accommodation over a given area. But with this new approach to providing living space came various social problems which discredited this innovation. Ballard's satire illustrates these issues in an extreme way.
As a postscript to the above reviews there are two further things to say about Empire of the Sun. Firstly, in order to comply with a requirement of the Read Harder Book Challenge 2016 that I have embarked on, I sat down to watch the film of the book. Steven Spielberg directed the 1987 American production with Christian Bale playing the role of Ballard as a boy and John Malkovich playing Basie. Ballard chose Bale (who was 12 at the time he was cast) because he felt he bore some resemblance to himself as a boy. The casting was based on the recommendation of the wife of Steven Spielberg; more than 4,000 child actors were auditioned.
By and large I felt the film was fairly faithful to the book although visually it was heavily sanitised in comparison to the narrative of the novel. To complete my understanding of the novel I also read Ballard's Miracles of Life which is a short autobiography describing his childhood and early teenage years in Shanghai in the 1930s and the early 1940s, when the city is ravaged by war. Ballard is plucked from a happy and comfortable childhood to experience the horrors and deprivation of internment camp with his parents.
After being liberated by the Americans in 1945, James travels to England with his mother and sister, but he finds the atmosphere of post-war Britain difficult to penetrate. After his schooling he embarks on medical studies but throws this over to enlist in the RAF. This also turns out to be a wrong move and subsequently Ballard marries, becomes a father only to be widowed unexpectedly. Faced with bringing up his three children single-handed he embarks on his literary career and makes forays into the art world of the 60s and 70s. The book ends with Ballard's return to Shanghai in 1991, and with a very short and moving epilogue, dated September 2007, wherein he announces that he is sick with a terminal illness
