by Diana Athill
* Only one of his father’s letters refers to anyone of African descent – and that one letter is frantically agitated: a niece has started to date a man half-Indian, half-African; how should he deal with this frightful event?
MOLLY KEANE
I KNOW THAT I have sometimes been described as ‘one of the best editors in London’, and I can’t deny that it has given me pleasure; but I also know how little I had to do to earn this reputation beyond routine work and being agreeable to interesting people. And another example of this is my dealings with the person I liked best among those I came to know on the job: the Irish novelist Molly Keane.
It is common knowledge that after establishing herself in her youth as a novelist and playwright, Molly went silent for over thirty years and was ‘rediscovered’ in 1981 when André Deutsch Limited published Good Behaviour. Because I was her editor I was often congratulated on this ‘rediscovery’ – which is nonsense. We got the book by pure luck.
The person who persuaded Molly to offer it for publication was Peggy Ashcroft, who had remained a close friend of hers since acting in one of her plays, and who said one day, when staying with her, how sad it was that she had stopped writing. Molly told her that she had recently started again and had a novel which she was unsure about tucked away in a drawer. Peggy insisted on taking it to bed with her that night, and as a result of her enthusiasm Molly sent it to Ian Parsons of Chatto & Windus. That was where our good luck began: Ian didn’t like it. Worse mistakes have been made – publishers often used to console themselves by remembering that André Gide, reading Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, turned it down . . . although if you envisage that enormous manuscript, and discovering that many of its sentences are as long as most people’s paragraphs, that mistake was perhaps less odd than failing to respond to a novel as accessible as Good Behaviour.
Our next stroke of luck was that Molly then chose Gina Pollinger as her agent. Gina had been an editor before she married into agenting, and her last job as such had been with us. When she called me to say that she had just read something she loved, and felt sure I would love it too, I was hearing from someone whose taste I knew and respected, rather than listening to a sales spiel, so naturally I read the book at once – and it happened that I, unlike Ian Parsons, had not fallen on my head. So much for being Molly’s rediscoverer.
Molly did usually need a little editing because she could get into muddles about timing – make, for instance, an event happen after an interval of two years when something in the text revealed that at least three years must have passed – and she had little tricks of phrasing, such as describing a person’s interests as her ‘importances’, which she sometimes overdid. (Such tricks are part of a writer’s ‘voice’, so it is usually best to leave some of them in – but not enough of them to be annoying.) She was always glad to have such things pointed out, and she was equally co-operative over the only big question that needed solving in the course of her last three novels.
This occurred in Good Behaviour, at a point where a small English boy is discovered hiding up a tree in order to read poetry, which causes his extremely upper-class parents to go into paroxysms of dismay. At that point Molly’s sense of comedy had taken the bit between its teeth and bolted, carrying the story off into the realm of the grotesque. It was wildly funny, but funny in a way at odds with the rest of the book so that it fractured its surface. I asked her to cool it, which she did. She was always ‘splendidly cooperative to work with’, as John Gielgud was to say in a letter to the Daily Telegraph after her death, remembering the days when he directed the four plays which she wrote in the thirties.
He also paid a warm tribute to her charm and wit, adding that ‘she was endlessly painstaking and industrious’ – slightly surprising words applied to someone as sparkly as Molly, but they do catch the absence of pretentiousness in her attitude to her work. Her background was that of the Irish landed gentry, whose daughters were lucky, in her day, if they got more than a scrappy education. Not that most of them, including Molly, were likely to clamour for more, since horses and men interested them far more than anything else; but Molly had come to feel the lack and it made her humble: she needed to be convinced that she was a good writer.
She was well aware, however, that Good Behaviour was different from the eleven early novels which she had written under the pen-name M. J. Farrell – a pen-name because who would want to dance with a girl so brainy that she wrote books? (You probably need to have had a ‘county’ upbringing fully to feel the withering effect of that adjective: ‘You’re the brainy one, aren’t you?’ It still makes me flinch.) Molly always said that she wrote the early books simply for money, because her parents couldn’t afford to give her a dress allowance – though the verve of the writing suggests that she must have enjoyed doing it. Good Behaviour, on the other hand, had insisted on being written. She described it as a book that ‘truly interested and involved’ her: ‘Black comedy, perhaps, but with some of the truth in it, and the pity I feel for the kind of people I lived with and laughed with in the happy maligned thirties.’ She said that she dropped the pen-name because so much time had gone by; but in fact she took a lot of urging, and left me with the impression that she finally agreed because she had allowed herself to be persuaded that this one was the real thing.
The reason why Good Behaviour is so gripping is that Molly brings off something much cleverer than she had ever attempted before: she manoeuvres her readers into collaboration. Her narrator, Aroon St Charles, the large, clumsy daughter of a remote and elegant little mother who finds her painfully boring, tells us everything she sees – and often fails to understand what she is telling. It is up to us, the readers, to do the understanding – most crucially concerning Aroon’s beloved brother Hubert and the friend he brings home from Cambridge, Richard Massingham (once the little boy who read poetry up a tree). Aroon has never heard of homosexuality, because the rules of Good Behaviour are the rules of behaving ‘as if. You may be afraid but you must behave as if you were brave; you may be poor but you must behave as if you can afford things; your husband may be randy but you must behave as if he wasn’t; embarrassing things such as men falling in love with men may happen, but you must behave as if they don’t. How could Aroon, who doesn’t read and has few friends, know anything about being gay? But in spite of all the ‘as iffing’, her father starts to feel uneasy about the two young men, they become alarmed – and Hubert has a brilliant idea: Richard must start behaving as though he were courting Aroon. He must even go into her bedroom one night, and make sure that her father hears him leaving it . . . We hear nothing of all this but what Aroon tells us: that Richard does this, and Richard does that, so surely he must like her – must even be finding her attractive – must love her! After he has been to her room we see her half-sensing that something is wrong (his Respecting her Virginity is acceptable, but there is something about his manner . . .). And we see her, very soon, working herself into a blissful daze of happiness at having a lover. And all the time, as though we were observant guests in the house, we can see what is really going on. It is powerfully involving, and it continues through-out the book: at one point thirty pages go by before we are allowed a flash of understanding (the family lawyer has made a tentative pass at Aroon, which seems a bit odd – until the times comes, as it would do in ‘real life’, when one exclaims ‘But of course! He knew what was in her father’s will!’).
Molly called this book ‘black comedy’, and comic it often is – brilliantly so. She is studying tribal behaviour, and no one could hit off its absurdities to better effect. But its strength comes from her fierce, sad knowledge of what underlies Good Behaviour, and is crippled by it; and she once told me something about herself which struck me as the seed from which this novel’s power grew.
Molly’s husband Robert Keane died in his thirties, with appalling suddenness, when they were visiting London with their two little daughters, having a very good time. He became violently ill so that he had to b
e rushed to hospital, but once he was there everything seemed to be under control, so she went back to the children for the night, worried but not really frightened. During the night the telephone rang. It was the hospital matron, who said: ‘Mrs Keane, you must be brave. Your husband is dead.’ Molly had friends in London, but they were busy theatre friends, and she was seized at once by the thought ‘I must not be a nuisance. I must not make scenes’ – the quintessential Good Behaviour reaction. And some time during those terrible first days her eldest daughter, Sally, who was six, clutched her hand and said: ‘Mummy, we mustn’t cry, we mustn’t cry.’
And Molly never did cry. Forty years later, telling me that, her voice took on a tone of forlorn incredulity. There was, indeed, nothing she didn’t know about her tribe’s concept of good behaviour, in all its gallantry, absurdity and cruelty.
The part of the novel which calls most directly on her personal experience of clamping down on pain is so quietly handled that I believe it sometimes escapes quick readers. On their way back to Cambridge in Richard’s car the boys are involved in a crash and Hubert is killed. It is easy to see that when the news comes his stricken parents behave impeccably according to their lights: no scenes, not a tear – the deep chill of sorrow evident only in the rigidity of their adherence to the forms of normality. But there comes a day when Aroon can’t resist pretending to her father that Richard truly was her lover and he says ‘Well, thank God’ which puzzles her a little; but his leaving her rather suddenly to visit the young horses down on the bog (so he says) ends their talk. And on that same day her mother has gone out, carrying a little bunch of cyclamen, and Aroon has wondered where she is off to. And it never occurs to her that both parents are slipping off to visit Hubert’s grave in secret; that only guiltily can they allow their broken hearts this indulgence. That her father is felled by a stroke in the graveyard, not the bog, and that her mother, who comes screaming back to the house in search of help, was there with him . . . in the commotion and horror of it all Aroon makes no comment on this, and again it is left to the reader to understand.
*
It is impossible for someone of great natural charm to remain unaware of the effect he or she has on others, which makes the gift a dangerous one: the ability to get away with murder demands to be exploited, and over-exploited charm can be less attractive than charmlessness. Molly Keane was remarkable in being both one of the most charming people I ever met, and an entirely successful escaper from that attendant danger.
Of course she knew how winning she could be. She once said to me: ‘When I was young I’m afraid I used to sing for my supper,’ meaning that when she first met people more interesting and sophisticated than her own family she won herself a warm welcome, in spite of being neither pretty nor well-dressed, by her funniness and charm. She needed to do this because she was too intelligent for her background and her mother had made her feel an ugly duckling, and a delinquent one at that (probably, like many unloved children, she did respond by being tiresome from her parents’ point of view). Being taken up by people who were charmed by her was her salvation, and winning them over did not end by making her unspontaneous or manipulative because her clear sight, sensitivity, honesty and generosity were even stronger than her charm. By the time I knew her, when she was in her seventies, she would occasionally resort to ‘turning it on’ in order to get through an interview or some fatiguing public occasion, and very skilfully she did it; but otherwise she was always more interested in what was happening around her, and in the people she was meeting, than she was in the impression she was making, so even on a slight acquaintance it was the woman herself one saw, not a mask, and the woman was lovable.
In spite of liking her so much I have to consider my acquaintance with her as less than a friendship, properly speaking. Someone in her seventies with two daughters to love, a wide circle of acquaintances and an unusually large number of true and intimate friends of long standing, hasn’t much room in her life for new close friends. I see that only too clearly now that I have overtaken the age Molly had reached when we met: one feels almost regretful on recognizing exceptionally congenial qualities in a newly met person, because one knows one no longer has the energy to clear an adequate space for them. When Molly and I exchanged letters about her work I was always tempted by her image in my mind to run on into gossip and jokes, while hers were quick scrawls about the matter under discussion; and enjoyable though our meetings were when she came to London, they didn’t much advance the intimacy between us, and I sometimes thought I discerned in them a courteously disguised distaste for an important aspect of my life: the fact that I live with a black man. Molly was well aware of how others could see attitudes belonging to her background and generation, such as disliking left-wing politics and mixed marriages; but an attitude is not necessarily quite expunged by knowing that it is not respectable.
Only once did I spend more than a meal-time with her. We gave a launching party for Good Behaviour in Dublin, I decided to take my car over and stay on for a ten-day holiday, and Molly invited me to stay with her for (I thought) the weekend at the start of the holiday. After the party I drove her to her home in Ardmore, and learnt on the way that she had arranged parties for me on every day of the coming week and had told a friend that she was bringing me to stay with him for two nights at the end of it. At first I was slightly dismayed by this unexpected abundance of hospitality, but I was soon enjoying every minute of it.
Partly this was because of the difference between Counties Cork and Waterford and my native East Anglia. Most of the people we met were the Irish equivalent of my family’s friends: country gentlefolk preoccupied with hunting, shooting, farming, gardening . . . the very people I had escaped from (so I had felt, fond though I was of many of them) when I moved on from Oxford to earn my living in London. Had I been faced with a week of parties given by Norfolk people of that kind who were strangers to me I would have seen it as a grim ordeal by boredom – and it would have been pretty boring because my hosts, given the tedious duty of entertaining a foreign body, and I as the reluctant victim of their hospitality, would between us have erected an impenetrable wall of polite small-talk from which eventually both sides would have retreated in a state of exhaustion. But in Ireland . . . much as I distrust generalizations about national characteristics, there’s no denying that most Irish people are more articulate than the English, appearing to see talk as a positive pleasure rather than a tiresome necessity. I don’t suppose I shared many more interests with my Irish hosts than I would have done with English ones (although I did know quite a lot about theirs) – but they were so much more lively and witty, and so much readier to start or to follow a new trail, than the people among whom I was raised, that whether or not interests were shared didn’t seem to matter. All the parties were thoroughly enjoyable.
They were given an appetizing touch of spice by the stories Molly told on the way to them about the people we were going to meet, which were splendidly indiscreet. If she disliked someone she either kept silent or spoke briefly with indignant disapproval; with the rest she rejoiced in their follies, if follies they displayed, but as a fascinated observer rather than a censorious judge. Perhaps novelists are so often good at gossip because – like God with forgiveness – c’est leur métier.
On one of those drives she gave me a gleeful glimpse of local standards of literary criticism. An elderly neighbour, blue-blooded but rustic in her ways (I gathered that she usually kept her gumboots on and her false teeth out) had said to her: ‘I read your book, Molly, and I absolutely hated it – but I must say that it was very well written. I didn’t find a single spelling mistake.’
The drives, and the time spent alone with Molly in her house tucked into the hillside overlooking Ardmore and its bay, were even better than the parties. She was an exquisitely kind and considerate hostess, but it wasn’t that which made the visit so memorable. It was the extent to which Molly was alive to everything around her – to the daughters she worried abou
t and adored, the people she knew, the events she remembered, her garden, the food she cooked, the problems and satisfactions of writing. And it was also the fact that day by day I became more aware of the qualities she kept hidden: her courage, her unselfishness – simply her goodness.
The chief difference, it seems to me, between the person who is lucky enough to possess the ability to create – whether with words or sound or pigment or wood or whatever – and those who haven’t got it, is that the former react to experience directly and each in his own way, while the latter are less ready to trust their own responses and often prefer to make use of those generally agreed to be acceptable by their friends and relations. And while the former certainly include by far the greater proportion of individuals who would be difficult to live with, they also include a similarly large proportion of individuals who are exciting or disturbing or amusing or inspiring to know. And Molly, in addition to having charm and being good, was also a creator.
I am glad, therefore, that our last exchange of letters was about her writing, and not just one of general well-wishing (as they had been for some years, since she became seriously ill with heart trouble). I had just reread Good Behaviour for some forgotten reason, and on meeting Molly’s daughter Virginia as we walked our dogs, had told her how greatly I had re-enjoyed it. Virginia urged me to write and tell Molly, saying that although the worst of her depression at being weak and helpless had lifted, she still needed cheering up. So I wrote her a long letter about why I love that book so much, and also her last book, Loving and Giving, and said that although I knew she was downcast at not having been able to write another book, she surely must acknowledge that what she had done had been marvellously well done – that her writing had, in fact, won laurels on which anyone should be proud to rest. She replied that my letter had done her good and had lifted her depression about her writing ‘right off the ground’, then went on to say very sweetly how much she valued my opinion, ending with words which I knew to be valedictory, of such generosity that I can only treasure them.