GOOD AS HER WORD EPUB ED EB

Lorna Sage, Sharon Sage, Victor Sage, Sharon Sage, Victor Sage

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780007292325
• eBook ISBN: 9780007391011
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

A sparkling collection of journalism from the critically acclaimed author of BAD BLOOD and MOMENTS OF TRUTH.

This selection of the work of Lorna Sage spans the years 1972-2001, when she wrote for the London and New York literary papers and journals, and contains some of her very best pieces. From carefully worked interviews and profiles to the snappiest and deftest of weekly reviews, we can trace the often surprising development of that very distinctive voice and follow its sharpest critical reactions to the important authors and landmark publications of our times.

From George Eliot, Laurence Sterne, Charles Dickens and Mary Shelley to Sylvia Plath, Angela Carter, Umberto Eco and Salman Rushdie, Sage's unmistakable voice is here: clever, hilarious, anarchic, sly, wise, kind, courageous, genial and serious.

II
Post-War Life Writing

First person singular

Sleepless Nights
ELIZABETH HARDWICK

THIS IS A FICTIONAL autobiography – an autobiography of just such a scrupulous, reticent, cunning kind as one might expect from Elizabeth Hardwick. All her critic’s experience and discrimination, all her scepticism about making life over into stories and people into characters (‘People do not live their biographies’) has been turned on herself. And the result is an impressively personal book that manages to fit none of the formulas.

In looking back over a life that led from Kentucky (religion and racehorses) to literary/artistic New York, and many worlds between, her point of view is dictated by a sense – a conviction, even – of her own present aloneness. This seems to have worked back on the past so that she recalls other people too as fundamentally and vividly alone, their lifelines broken into fragments.

So the book is populated by isolates, people encapsulated in their own settings and idioms from suave literary bachelors to exhausted Irish cleaning ladies, and from Billie Holiday seen in Harlem to careful, saving senior citizens in country retreats. It is a lone person’s life, outlined through friends, acquaintances and neighbours, the outer circle. As for the inner circle, the attempt to cure loneliness with love, or with marriage – that has slipped away. ‘I was then a “we,”’ she writes, referring to her marriage to Robert Lowell, doubly broken by their divorce and his death – as if to say that the ‘we’ could never have written this book, and so can’t really appear in it.

Homes seem to have turned into hotels, people into hotel-dwellers, ‘undomestic, restless, unreliable, changeable, disloyal’. And yet there is a regard, and a generosity, in her portrayal of them that make even the saddest or most brittle seem possibly heroic. Miss Cramer, for instance, once a music teacher, a snob, a genteel traveller, now a derelict in ‘dreadful freedom’, with her ‘dress of printed silk, soiled here and there with a new pattern of damage and no stockings to cover her bruised, discoloured legs’. Or a survivor of another sort, spoiled, desiccated, once-promising Alex who suddenly ‘is radical again and has the beard of a terrorist. The students like him and the faculty does not. He lives in a dreadful house and mows the lawn – starting over, poor, on time as it were.’ The breaks and new directions in people’s lives don’t at all point one way (there’s a very good section on variegated 1940s Marxists trying to cope with this, in their personal histories). Miss Hardwick is scrupulous always to tell other lives, that add up differently.

Thus, New York’s savage divorces are balanced comically (it’s often a very humorous book) with the way they arrange things in Amsterdam:–

There, first husbands and first wives are always at the same dinner parties and birthday celebrations with their second husbands and wives. Divorces and fractured loves mingled together as if the past were a sort of vinegar blending with the oil of the present.

The care she takes with this salad simile is characteristic too. It’s often said, sometimes rightly, that critics write fiction badly, because they’re hopelessly self-conscious. Elizabeth Hardwick, however, has contrived to turn her critic’s virtues – a generous interest in others, a sharp sense of the boundaries between literature and living – into novelistic assets.

There is a sense of strain in Sleepless Nights, of tight-strung, nervous energy, but that’s essential to its effect of individuality and honesty. It’s also, curiously, a hopeful book, because it suggests that aloneness, the absence or loss of intimacy, doesn’t mean the loss of humanity.

Client relationships

An English Madam: The Life and Work of Cynthia Payne
PAUL BAILEY

‘MADAME CYN’, SHOUTED THE headlines: ‘luncheon vouchers’, ‘Streatham’. It was somehow obvious from the start that Cynthia Payne’s ‘disorderly house’ was not the usual kind: that it was, on the contrary, bizarrely orderly. As details of Cynthia’s domestic economy emerged the curious subculture of ‘Cranmore’ looked, in fact, so exactly an inversion of the banalities of middle-class existence that legal outrage seemed absurd. It wasn’t just a matter of the 10p and 15p vouchers clutched by the queue of middle-aged-to-elderly clients on the stairs (though these puzzled the police); nor of the clients’ own professions – church, civil service, politics, the bar. As Cynthia’s trial and appeal (plus her recent confessions in the News of the World) have revealed, her Streatham brothel was not a house but a Home, a place where the repressions of everyday life were reflected in a fun-house mirror. And she herself was that most English of institutions, a ‘character’. Hence Paul Bailey’s splendid study, An English Madam, which removes Cynthia (with her willing cooperation) out of the commercial underworld, and installs her in a niche in the Dickensian tradition of social fantasy.

There is after all, Mr Bailey insinuates, a certain similarity between Cynthia’s role and that of, say, Mrs Todgers in Martin Chuzzlewit. She is the landlady as comic genius loci, the ‘hostess’ restored to matronly dignity. Consider the management skills involved: the house, for instance, was cleaned by ‘Philip’, who paid Cynthia a modest sum to stand over him with a switch and complain when he (always accidentally) missed a tiny corner. Roughly the same arrangement, with ‘Rodney’, took care of the large garden. Drinks were served by the ex-Squadron leader, disguised as the butler or (judging from his photograph) Theda Bara as the mood took him. Sometimes a noted political commentator helped out as ‘Tweeny’, and was spanked by Theda Bara for answering back. ‘Gregory’ provided an advice-sheet on the apparatus of domination (‘WIG: as most dominants are blonde, a platinum wig or hairpiece worn to show below the helmet, as stated’). Once, the bank manager, a difficult customer who could never be humiliated enough, was brought to the verge of ecstasy when pelted with the contents of the hoover, which Philip had been warned to fill to bursting. More conventional clients watched blue movies, and ‘went upstairs’ when they felt like it. The party atmosphere was maintained by a system of paying (£25) on entry (hence the famous vouchers), with discounts for pensioners and the impotent. It all sounds like an inspired experiment in energy saving, with Cynthia (‘Lady Domina’ as she was known to the help, though the Squadron Leader, an old friend, called her ‘Madam Baloney’) orchestrating the follies like a benevolent deity.

The carnival spirit however, depended – as carnival spirit tends to – on the conviction, shared by Cynthia and her party-goers, that the world outside Cranmore was an alien, bleak, unaccommodating place. If Mr Bailey’s instincts as a writer led him back to the nineteenth century it must have been partly because Cranmore was a kind of time-machine, a refuge from the present where, for example, second childhoods were catered for (again very Dickensian), and where it was taken for granted that your little ways and wants might be entirely out of sync with the greyish person who’d ‘settled down’ or ‘grown old’. It’s not exactly that the set-up resembles a Victorian comedy of humours: a lot of the time it is one, and the intensity of the illusion is a measure of the futuristic bleakness, to Cranmorians, of the supposedly permissive society. What they wanted was the delirious unfreedom – queueing in their socks, with tickets, poached eggs on toast afterwards – of living in the past, not necessarily their own pasts, though some of the fantasies are very specific, but a collective daydream of early life.

Cynthia understood all this so well, apparently, because her own early life (in fact, her first thirty-odd years) had been fairly unrelievedly awful. As the book’s hilarious account of the historic police raid modulates into the story of her experiences before she found her vocation and acquired her house, the party atmosphere is rapidly dissipated. In many ways we still seem to be in the nineteenth century, but now the ambience is less English, more Maupassant. Cynthia’s mother died young, in 1943, and her father, whom she and her sister hardly knew (he’d been a hairdresser on the cruise liners) wasn’t well-equipped to cope alone, though he had to, since potential second wives found his girls too difficult, and his own conscious respectability cut him off from the sort of surrounding support his working-class background might have provided. Each sister reacted in her own way – Cynthia ‘ran wild’, used bad language, and displayed a generous curiosity about sex, Melanie became sensible and ‘posh’ (and married a police inspector). As ‘Cinders’ drifted away from home on the south-east coast and into London (failed hairdresser, waitress, unmarried mother) she seems, by her own account, to have lost control of her life with frightening speed. She semi-starved for a season in a slum basement with a derelict who ‘looked like Christie’, though all he did was, harmlessly, to collect other social casualties into a family of sorts. Her men seem to have been either father-substitutes (though penniless and inept – she only managed one ‘sugar daddy’) or sexy spivs like ‘Sam’, who worked in the amusement arcade, and got her pregnant with nightmarish regularity.

This is a twilight world of female drudgery (waitressing, pregnancies), of more-or-less lost children (for her first son she arranged fostering, her second was adopted), of abortions and sexual fear. Only as she nears her destiny as a Madam does Cynthia seem to be a person at all. Indeed, she never is quite a person; she moves from unperson to personage (via a short and unpleasant spell on the game herself) in a most disconcerting fashion. As a casualty of family life, and an exile from it, she is a self-made expert in the weird, nostalgic fantasies about domesticity that set the tone at Cranmore. Perhaps the point is made most painfully and absurdly when her long-estranged father, lonelier than ever, and now an old man, becomes one of her party-goers, and joins the queue on the stairs. This is, in a way, Cynthia’s moment of triumph, the closing of the magic circle. She provides the home from home, a haven for refugees from the respectable world she couldn’t live in, and becomes herself a motherless Mother Superior. (House rules excluded men under forty – ‘Old men are more appreciative’ – and her ‘girls’ were chosen because they did it for love as well as money.)

And so we return to the domain of Madam Baloney, the hilarity by now slightly shadowed, the humour blacker. Cynthia has preserved letters from her clients specifying their wants, and a selection of the most picturesque of these forms the funniest part of the book. A methodical diplomat describes in enormous detail how the lady of his dreams (‘aged 38–46 if possible, and preferably English [including Jewish], otherwise European, blonde or brunette’) is to create the precise quality that turns him on: ‘a very strong, natural odour coming through her blouse from under her arms’. After instructions about not washing and so on, he continues.

My request is really quite a simple one and not really all that demanding, if you consider that less than 100 years ago, when ladies seldom took a bath and scent was too costly for most people to afford, it was considered perfectly normal for ladies to smell of ‘B.O’ …

And he hints darkly at tortures of the damned on the rush-hour tube of a hot summer’s evening. Others are briefer, and perhaps less sincere:

Honoured Partygiver.

Can you supply a nun at your next shindig? Severe face and Irish accent for preference.

Yours beatificially,

‘Decameron George’

What they all have in common is longing for that lost past, that time before they grew up and became insurance men or vicars or whatever, when women dominated and enveloped them.

Many can only do it when reminded of Nanny (‘Who’s been a naughty boy then?’). Some hanker after housework as the only really exciting thing, like the retired police superintendent who pursues one of Cynthia’s ‘girls’ back home to Somerset to clean her oven in the nude while ‘Agatha’ whips away. ‘Agatha’, in fact, comes dangerously close to enjoying her work: ‘I thought of all those years washing my husband’s socks and underpants, cooking his meals, waiting on him hand and foot, and it suddenly gave me a lovely feeling, punishing that policeman.’ But this isn’t Cynthia’s line: she never married, after all, and is more disinterested, ‘unswervingly loyal’, indeed, Bailey discovers, ‘to the curious notion that the male is the superior of the species’. When they left her house, they returned to their dog-collared or pinstriped adult disguises, and (you realize, with a dazed feeling) to running the society we live in.

Paul Bailey, I think, relished his task because he saw in Cranmore’s alternative economy a satire on normalcy, and more specifically on the family as an institution. Cynthia provided a place where ‘earnest obsessionists’ could painlessly (unless they insisted) act out their quirky emendations on the family scenario, and thus unwittingly proclaim (as it turned out) the quiet insanity of English life and manners. The satiric effect is, however, in the end overlaid with a rather different one: a sense that this particular comic subculture is autonomous, endemic, changeless. Cranmore’s world reflects remarkably few of the things that are supposed to have happened to relations between the sexes in the last hundred years. Except of course that they can be written about – something Bailey here does marvellously well. For the rest it’s as though the only testimonies to a century of hectic change are roll-on deodorants, Philip’s hoover, and assorted electronic gadgets, littering a family mansion still really inhabited by our great-grandfathers in short trousers, or, possibly, skirts.

Orient of the mind

Profile of Lesley Blanch

LESLEY BLANCH HAD JUST returned to the south of France from a visit to Turkey. ‘I’m at home anywhere and nowhere,’ she’d said, and I saw why when I climbed through the jungly tunnel of foliage in her steep little garden and stepped through the looking-glass into her Persian parlour, all latticed windows, low divans and overlapping rugs. ‘The Orient of my mind,’ she announced jokily, with nonetheless something of the air of a satisfied magician – a small, ageless, quicksilver woman in a striped cotton jellaba, who reclined leaning on an elbow to answer my questions.

These were, first, inevitably, about her style of living. She must be a ruthlessly practical dreamer, I realised, to have stamped her desires so clearly on everything surrounding her. So we started with gardens. The romantic green twilight, she said, is achieved by concentrating not on flowers but on leaves – ‘leaves of every kind, mimosa, cypress, fig, jasmine, thickets of bamboo, oranges and lemons and datura … If you sleep under the datura it’s supposed to send you mad for love, but, she added with an air of gallant regret, ‘there’s no one sleeping under mine.’

She has lived here alone now for 10 years, but it’s not the first house she’s ‘made Turkish’: there was an earlier one up the hill in Roquebrune village which she shared with her husband writer-diplomat Romain Gary 30 years ago. After their divorce she tried Paris but hated its greyness so settled again for the south. ‘I craved the sun. I never feel the need for people, or much else, if it shines on me …’

Her love of sunshine is not the only reason, however, why she has not returned to England. (She became a French citizen on marrying dashing Gary in 1946.) Animal quarantine regulations of ‘pig-headed rigidity’ (I’m to make sure to put this in my piece) also keep her pets and hence herself out. She loves animals – ‘but for my travels there’d be a menagerie’. Indeed, pictures of animals are everywhere: an Indian painting of a tree-bear, a pathetic Victorian spaniel needing a home, stray naïve paintings, taken in, ‘out of charity’.

And it seems to be true that her things are her pets, as it were. The room is furnished with fetish-objects; everything has a story, a sentimental footnote, a personal ‘point’ – ‘I prefer things to people, you don’t have to entertain things, they keep you company and they’re loyal …’

She’s not, of course, a mere armchair traveller herself, but she knows how they tick. That was the secret of her first book and surprise best-seller The Wilder Shores of Love in 1954, with its shamelessly romantic evocation of the lives of French and English women who turned...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• I: Pre-War Life Writing
• II: Post-War Life Writing
• III: The Women’s Camp
• IV: Classics
• V: Critical Tradition
• VI: Italy
• About the Author
• Also by the Author
• Copyright
• About the Publisher