Several Strangers

by Claire Tomalin

  A friend’s mother said to me, ‘You didn’t go to Cambridge to spend your life crying. Find yourself proper work.’ A tough woman, she did not think reading for publishers was proper work. Her husband was a BBC executive, and an interview was arranged. Before I went, she warned me, ‘Don’t mention the fact that you have children when you go for the interview. Pretend you haven’t any, or you won’t even be considered for a job.’

  In fact the first job I was offered outside publishing was on the Evening Standard. Charles Wintour took a risk in giving it me, and it was a crucial step, that move from the sedate world of the reader into the alarms and excursions of newspaper life. This was in October 1967. Suddenly I was doing things I had never imagined I could do, talking to politicians on the telephone from the deafening din of the newsroom, running after Jennifer Jenkins round Ladbroke Square for a comment, scribbling copy in a taxi and dictating it from a call box. Routine to journalists, frightening for a beginner, but when I realized I could do it, just about, I almost began to enjoy it. I stopped being a heap of misery, and found a life and friends of my own. With this things changed between Nick and me; but our marriage remained precarious.

  I was now reviewing novels for Ian Hamilton at The Times Literary Supplement and for the Observer, where Terence Kilmartin became my mentor and friend. His touch was light, his speech hesitant. ‘Oh, and by the way…’ he would start, and pause. You waited happily, pleased to be asked to write anything at all for him. I began with shorter notices, my highest ambition to review novels. That seems unbelievable now, since reviewing novels in batches is the worst paid and least rewarding critical job there is. Still, it was more bearable doing it for Terry than for anyone else. He teased me and criticized my work, and sometimes my behaviour, without ever giving offence. He was never solemn, but he believed that literary pages have an educational aspect, and that the odd difficult word that sends readers to the dictionary is part of the process. He’d grown up in Ireland, gone to be a tutor in a French family in his teens, acquiring perfect French and a wide knowledge and appreciation of literature, music and painting in the process. He was in the Special Operations Executive during the war; at the end of his life he was translating Proust. Brave and loyal, he remains for me the model of a literary editor and a much missed friend.

  About this time another friend from Cambridge, Julian Jebb, then working for the BBC, invited me to take part in a books quiz programme on television. He used some celebrated figures – Cyril Connolly, Lord David Cecil, Mary McCarthy – alongside unknowns like me. I was in several programmes, and my confidence grew. When the job of assistant to the literary editor of the New Statesman, Anthony Thwaite, came up, I put in for it and was appointed.

  Three days a week at Great Turnstile, between Holborn and Lincoln’s Inn Fields, seemed ideal. My daughters were at school, and I had four days at home. This was just as well, because even as I was due to start, in April 1968, Nick made one of his more spectacular bolts, disappearing abroad for several months with a new love. But also that summer, Anthony Thwaite went on holiday, leaving me in sole charge of the back half of the Statesman for four whole weeks. It was the most generous gift he could have given me. For a month I had a headache, and for a month I was the happiest person in the world. My pages, my writers, my decisions.

  The Statesman, like Heinemann, was lodged in tall, narrow premises, with the back half of the paper – books and arts – at the top. Critics and book reviewers came at their various speeds up the stone stairs to the big room in which the presiding genius was Melaan Bunting, a secretary of the old kind, meaning she could well have run the back half of the paper herself. She sat surrounded by reference books and poetry collections, she knew the quirks of all the contributors, she could sub copy and had an eagle eye for a literal. We laughed a lot together. Her parents were Australian -English-born mother, Chinese-born father – and her son was John Williams, the guitarist. I’ve never known anyone quite like Melaan, and I admired her greatly, and mourned her when she died too young of emphysema.

  For the first time I began to review books I selected for myself -this is when the pieces collected in this volume start. The Journals of Claire Clairmont, published in 1968 in the American scholar Marion Kingston Stocking’s beautiful edition, sparked my interest in the Shelley circle, which had been off limits at Cambridge. Ida Baker’s memoir of Katherine Mansfield started me thinking about that extraordinary life which I was later to write, and make into a play. I picked out volumes of Virginia Woolf’s letters, and feminist books by Mary Ellmann and Eva Figes. There were Byron’s letters, and lives of Dorothy Parker, Zelda Fitzgerald, Horatia Nelson. I read, I wrote, I subbed. One afternoon, working through a deep pile of poems submitted to us, I came on some so good I burst into Anthony’s office saying, ‘Here’s a real poet!’ They were Douglas Dunn’s, and became his Terry Street.

  I learnt from the Statesman’s regular contributors. V. S. Pritchett’s copy, typed by his wife Dorothy, then worked over again by him in minute inky scratches, rendered up, when you’d struggled with it half the afternoon, language that seemed as natural as breathing, yet always surprising too. Then there was David Cairns on music, Charles Fox on jazz and Philip French on theatre, all passionate for their subjects. Our art critic, Robert Melville, first made me look properly at Bonnard and Balthus. He was rumoured to have Picassos stacked up in his flat in Gower Street Mews, although I never saw them; and he was a gentle and humorous presence in the office. One day a contributor came in with his copy, blustering, ‘Not a single word is to be cut or changed.’ Robert, the old pro, sitting quietly by with his impeccable script in his hand, murmured, ‘You can change anything you like in my copy, Claire.’

  It was a busy, complicated time. In 1969 Nick again decided he wanted to live with me and the children, and, although I was doubtful about the prospect, I agreed. I had kept a dream of family life. We started again. There were still times when we delighted one another. We decided we would have another child. Nick was now on the Sunday Times, and away a great deal on foreign assignments. In effect, I ran the house and the family, while he pursued his brave and dazzling career; he was a skilful and brilliant journalist, winning awards and admired by his peers.

  Dick Crossman became editor of the NS in June 1970. He said I could have maternity leave – my baby was due in September – and come back when it felt right. James Fenton took over as assistant literary editor, and the plan was that I would go on writing for the paper during my leave. My son Tom was born in August, and found to have spina bifida. It meant that he would be paralysed from the chest down, and suffer many other problems. He might need a valve in his head to combat hydrocephalus. For months – well, for years – there were hospital visits, consultations, decisions to be made; my diary is full of notes about his progress. He became a beautiful, lively baby with a large head, who ‘crawled’ by pulling himself around on his arms. I fell in love with my child, as you do, and knew I could not go back to work yet.

  I was still writing for the Statesman, and in May 1971 I produced an article in a series we called ‘Reappraisal’, about Mary Wollstonecraft’s love letters, which had bowled me over when I came across them in the London Library. The day after the piece appeared I had letters from several publishers and literary agents, urging me to write a biography of Wollstonecraft. Nick, who had just published a book himself, was generous and helpful, telling me I had to decide whether I would return to the Statesman job – Crossman still kept the possibility open for me – or try to write a book. He took paper and pencil and made a list of pros and cons. We discussed them, then he said, ‘I think you should write the book.’ I agreed, and Deborah Rogers became my agent. She asked me to prepare a synopsis, which I managed over the next two months. I found a young American woman as a part-time helper with Tom, and made forays to the British Library, the Bodleian and the GLC archives, and a quick visit to the archives in Paris; but mostly I worked at home, using the resources of the London Library, with Tom b
eside me in his basket.

  In the summer of 1972 Theresa McGinley came from Shropshire to be Tom’s Nanny, and quickly seemed more like a fourth daughter in the family. I worked through that year and most of the next and finished writing the book in August 1973, just before Tom’s third birthday. In September we all went to Brittany for a seaside holiday. Tom had a red trolley in which he wheeled himself about, our hotel was on the beach, Nick sailed, the sun shone and we swam and ate enormous French dinners, platters of prawns, steaks, salads, fruit, ice-cream. One day we had a picnic inland; we found a secluded meadow, and in the heat we all stripped off our tops. I have a vivid memory of thinking what an idyll it was, Nick with his little son, surrounded by bare-breasted wife, nanny and three lovely daughters.

  A month later, Nick was killed by a heat-guided Syrian missile on the Golan Heights, where he was reporting on the Yom Kippur War. He was not quite forty-two. For his children and his parents the loss was irreparable. For his many friends and contemporaries it was a black moment, made worse when our fellow journalist Francis Hope died very soon afterwards in an air crash. Two of the brightest lights of our generation had been put out, reminding us all of our mortality. I grieved for Nick and still mourn his terrible death. I wish he were alive now, fulfilling his promise, lighting up the lives of so many who loved him. I should like him as a friend, even though our marriage, begun with such expectations, had gone so wrong. But if it hadn’t, I might not have been pushed into finding the work I enjoyed; and without his encouragement I might not have written my first book.

  The pieces on the next few pages are all taken from the period after I joined the New Statesman in 1968.

  Scott and Zelda

  Save Me the Waltz by Zelda Fitzgerald

  No publisher would have reprinted Save Me the Waltz if it were not the work of Scott Fitzgerald’s wife, and can be read as a gloss on his marvellous novel of the same period, Tender is the Night. Her book appeared in 1932, his was planned earlier and published two years later. Neither was a success at the time.

  Who wanted to read about the twenties during the Depression? ‘A rather irritating type of chic’ is what the New Statesman critic found in Scott’s novel, which he had laboured at from 1925 to 1934, and continued to work on years later. Tender is the Night is, for all its flaws and carelessness, something like a great book, showing us very clearly the power of the artist to change particular personal experience into something utterly different; in the book, he is fair to all the characters and situations, as he couldn’t be in life.

  He himself was well aware of the fact and the cost of such artistry: he’d said to Zelda, when she began to train as a ballet dancer: ‘I hope you realize that the biggest difference in the world is between the amateur and the professional in the arts,’ and he showed some understandable bitterness when she sent Maxwell Perkins her novel without letting him see it first. Perkins was his editor, and Save Me the Waltz covered much of the same ground as what was already written and planned of his novel, which she’d seen. He wrote to Perkins: ‘The mixture of fact and fiction is calculated to ruin us both, or what is left of us, and I can’t let it stand.’ It was indeed revised, more perhaps with an eye to content than to style. A year later, in 1933, Scott told a psychiatrist that Zelda believed anything was possible, and used his material like a mischievous little boy drawing on an artist’s canvas, with no awareness of ‘the enormous moral business that goes on in the mind of anyone who writes anything worth writing’.

  What strikes one forcibly about Save Me the Waltz is that most of the best passages are not concerned with the life she lived with her husband. David Knight, the character who represents him – Scott made her change the name from Amory Blaine, hero of his This Side of Paradise – is indeed a nonentity, as Scott complained, adding that he had made Zelda a legend. But he continued for the rest of his life to contribute to that legend, portraying her with a passionate regret for the love they had once shared; the generosity is his, as she acknowledged after his death.

  Save Me the Waltz, written in six weeks during a schizophrenic breakdown, is in form a fairly conventionally shaped story about a Southern girl, Alabama, youngest daughter of Judge Beggs, a rigid, old-fashioned and domineering father. Here is the South, the period (First World War), the excitable sensibility of a young girl with nothing to do but shock her small-town world, and with all the means when a thousand young men in uniform arrive to amuse her. She falls in love with a youthful painter, marries in New York, dances, plays pranks; they’re famous, and c-r-a-z-y about each other. There are terrible bits of purple writing, but we see what Zelda wants us to see. Later, on board ship for Europe and describing the Riviera and Paris world, the book sags: there is a baby, there are flirtations, love sours. Alabama takes up ballet, drives herself beyond all normal limits in her frenzy to succeed; she falls ill, and returns to the States for the death of her father. On his deathbed she frantically questions him about the pain of life; it is too late, he cannot answer. ‘Ask me something easy,’ he murmurs, uncharacteristically.

  It could be claimed that the theme of the book is the presence of Judge Beggs in his daughter’s life; her dreams of escape, her revolt against his authority and traditions, the failure of her husband to provide an equivalent moral presence: all relate to him. Alabama suffered cruelly as one of a generation of girls uneducated for anything but marriage, precipitated into a world their parents could not have foreseen. Her turning to ballet, which consumed time and energy and even her body with its physical demands – she was too old to start, too proud not to go at it like a tigress – expresses perhaps a belated respect for her father’s belief in hard work, integrity and moral imperatives.

  In plot, Save Me the Waltz (the title refers not to romantic memories of Scott but to her ambitions in the ballet) is almost entirely autobiographical, and it is part of the evidence of her ability and arresting personality. That she was jealous of Scott’s fame and talent she acknowledged; that she wrote the book partly out of that jealousy, partly (as she took up painting and dancing) out of loneliness caused less by his work than by his compulsive gregarious-ness and drinking – and partly to give her version – this is true.

  She was, after all, still the same Zelda Sayre who had spent her last night in Alabama before her New York wedding lying awake and plotting with a friend ways to attract attention in New York, such as sliding down the banisters of the Biltmore; the same Zelda who’d inspired one of Scott’s friends to write in his diary on first meeting her: ‘Temperamental small town Southern belle. Chews gum – shows knees.’ Exactly a year later he was writing: ‘She is without doubt the most brilliant and most beautiful young woman I’ve ever known.’

  She was both, but she became incurably (though not all the time) insane, and she and Scott drove one another to self-destruction. In her mad bouts she dwelt on his drinking, so that the doctors asked him to give it up as part of her cure, but he would not or could not; a fact Hemingway might have pondered before writing his malicious letter to Mizener in 1949 in which he suggested that Zelda drove Scott to drink out of jealousy of his work. But then Zelda had called Hemingway ‘bogus’.

  In Tender is the Night she appears as Nicole, also beautiful, mad and spoilt; curiously, Scott makes her experience literally the classic Freudian fantasy of rape by her fictional father. (Judge Sayre, it’s worth noting, did not approve of Scott, calling him ‘fella’ with fine Southern scorn.) He attributes to a minor character, in a notable scene, the dreadful attack of eczema that was one of Zelda’s symptoms; and at the end, of course, he delivers Nicole, healed, to another man who embodies some of the qualities Fitzgerald himself would have liked to have had in relation to her, had he not been a writer.

  Her book is a furious, brave and typical gesture, like a flawed piece of glass thrown glittering up into the air; his book is in no sense an attempt to work out his personal problems, but a marvellous using of those problems, his and hers. I’m very glad to have read Save Me the Waltz, but
there’s no doubt that it is in his art that she endures. ‘Zelda and I were everything to each other – all human relationships. We were sister and brother, mother and son, father and daughter, husband and wife,’ he said; he might have added, ‘and Muse and artist’. As everyone knows, he died of drink; and she was burned to death later in a lunatic asylum.

  New Statesman, 1969

  Newfoundland

  Words for a Deaf Daughter by Paul West

  A child with brain damage is one of the most intolerable gifts life can offer; to write a book celebrating such a child is a triumph of man’s power not merely to accept and endure but to find order and beauty in whatever is. For this Paul West deserves all our thanks, since most of his readers must be potentially like the people who turn reprovingly away from his daughter Mandy in the street: ‘they don’t like a universe that’s absurd’.