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.
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