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The title of Artemis Cooper’s biography of Elizabeth Jane Howard (John Murray, 2016) certainly gives a clue to what lay behind Howard’s life. Jane (as she was known) developed childhood insecurities that appear to have stemmed from her need for ‘frequent applause and reassurance’ as well as a fear of being abandoned. Her lack of confidence, combined with giving the appearance by the age of eighteen of being ‘very childish and ignorant’ and her belief that ‘if you loved somebody you must want to please them’, may have laid the foundation of the complex life that Artemis Cooper describes.
This biography gives a very good sense of a life that ‘just happens’. Although Jane was a good organiser, excellent cook, and increasingly productive writer as well as being talented in many other ways, it is easy to have the impression that decisions were made impulsively with no concept of ‘cause and effect’. She had a large number of friends and must have been brilliant company and good fun. Her life was a mishmash and included work, holidays abroad (in groups or with individuals), a social whirl and never-ending hospitality in her own house. She kept up with a huge circle of friends, relations and acquaintances, amongst whom there were some with good reason to drop her because of her desperate need for love, sex and reassurance which led to innumerable affairs.
Cooper makes it clear that much of the time Jane was unhappy, often striving for an unobtainable ideal that led her into situations which optimistically might achieve her heart’s desire (whatever that might be) but more often ended in emotional, complex and disappointing confusion.
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This first-rate anthology Marriage was compiled by Jane in the late 1990s. In Cooper’s words, Jane ‘appreciated the irony — after all, she had never been very successful at marriage herself’. As Martin Amis, Jane’s stepson, said, ‘In fact I’ve always thought that was one of the mysteries about Jane: the penetrating sanity on the page, but when she’s off the page, she’s actually not that clever with people.’
What I like about this biography is that it is so balanced. The story of Elizabeth Jane Howard’s life is told in a straight chronological line (unlike some biographies) and focuses on so many different dimensions. A particularly interesting aspect is the variety of jobs that Jane took on. She needed to earn her living after her marriage to Peter Scott failed. She was writing her first novel and at the same time (through a friend and lover) working for the Inland Waterways Association as well as doing some modelling. Later work included ad hoc typing and editing, reading manuscripts for Chatto & Windus, reviewing and writing for magazines, and being artistic director of the Cheltenham Arts Festival. I was brought up near Cheltenham and as a young teenager I remember the delight with which one of my mother’s friends who was closely involved in the festival announced that Elizabeth Jane Howard had agreed to participate. This friend later described how wonderful it was to see Jane Howard and Kingsley Amis ‘falling in love’ when they were together at Cheltenham.
As well as describing Howard’s liaisons, complex relationships and their unsatisfactory outcomes, Artemis Cooper gives the reader a chance to find out about Howard’s literary output. She shows how the process of writing a book was often fraught with emotional incidents and that Jane had no experience of (or inclination to adhere to) deadlines. We are also given an insight into the way Howard managed her publishers, for example when she insisted that The Long View should be written backwards, a likely explanation for the three-year delay between completion and publication.
Cooper helps the reader by providing relatively long summaries of each book with analysis of plot and characters. She identifies the people on whom Howard’s persona were based, and they were usually from the cast of Howard’s drama at the time. This aspect is one that I find fascinating. I can hardly believe that Howard was not constantly accused of a lack of imagination and creativity in developing characters, or even libel, as she wrote her friends, family and acquaintances into her novels as almost identical matches to the original in everything but their name. Her choice of the name ‘Cazalet’, for the family described in the Cazalet Chronicles, in itself was controversial. Cooper explains that the real Cazalet family resented the fact that their eminently respectable name had been hijacked by Howard, who had gone for its Huguenot origins without researching further. I read the five Cazalet Chronicles before Artemis Cooper’s biography and was astonished to find so much content was the same in both books from the 1920s to the late 1950s, from the numerous abortions, her grandfather’s nick-name ‘the Brig’, the description of Jane’s post-Peter Scott home, to her parents’ broken marriage. I have since read some of her novels and the same has happened to a lesser extent – events, characters and emotions that match Jane’s personal life, culminating in Falling that contains, as her Guardian obituary says, ‘many of the torments of love, betrayal and misjudgement that bedevilled her own life’.
It is very interesting, however, to compare Artemis Cooper’s biography with Howard’s 2002 autobiography, Slipstream, which I resisted reading until recently. Howard’s own account of her life appeared far more reasonable than I was expecting. This may be explained by the fact that I had effectively been introduced to the characters through the Cazalets. Whether biography or autobiography, it is essential (but tricky) for the reader to separate Howard’s fictional characters from their real prototypes, for example the newly married Cressy in After Julius from the newly married nineteen-year-old Jane, Henry Kent in Falling from Malcolm the psychopath, and of course the Cazalets from the Howards.
One hugely positive quality of Artemis Cooper’s biography is that, unlike Howard’s novels, it is impossible to become irritated with the characters, curious, ignorant, manipulating or naïve though they are. The book is very well researched with plenty of incidental explanation to clarify the vast range of characters and events that were so important in Howard’s extraordinary life between 1923 and 2014. The acid test is whether there is an incentive to turn the pages — yes, there is. Cooper’s fascinating and straightforward account of Howard’s long life is an excellent read.
I haven’t read any of Jane Howard’s novels (yet), but I think it’s very unusual for someone whose fictional writing is so closely based on their own psychodrama to go on to write a full-length autobiography as well. I speculate that in both she was desperately trying to create order from the chaos of her life. Perhaps she spent all her life grappling with that in her writing; and from what Martin Amis has said, she succeeded in making sense of her life in her writing (‘penetrating sanity on the page’). There is something heroic about that. It’s not surprising people loved her.