The Long View

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Howard published five additional novels before she embarked on her best known work, the five-volume Cazalet Chronicles. As Artemis Cooper describes it: “Jane had two ideas, and could not decide which to embark on; so she invited her stepson Martin [Amis] round for a drink to ask his advice. One idea was an updated version of Sense and Sensibility … the other was a three-volume family saga … Martin said immediately, “Do that one.” [6] a b c Wilson, Frances (30 December 2012). "Elizabeth Jane Howard: interview". The Telegraph . Retrieved 18 April 2014.

For a long time, the household had the confidence and humorous liberality that gathers itself around a dynamic marriage," Martin Amis wrote in Experience. His meeting with the fancy woman had not been propitious: a couple of weeks after the family break-up, when the lovers were still living in a rented flat in Baker Street, he and his brother Philip had arrived at midnight. The Beautiful Visit. Jonathan Cape. 1950. ISBN 978-0-224-60977-7. Winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize Slowly, the fairytale castle transformed, until the princess began to look like a witch, and the prince who had rescued her turned ogreish. Sargy Mann says, "I don't like admitting this but one of the reasons I wasn't more help to Jane was that I was too busy staying on the right side of Kingsley. You had to be sycophan tic around him. And if he was happy, it was great. It is very easy to give Kingsley a bad press because he was a sod in lots of ways, but he was also tremendously marvellous in lots of ways." a b Brown, Andrew (9 November 2002). "Profile: Elizabeth Jane Howard". The Guardian . Retrieved 17 February 2018. During those years she wrote a number of witty novels, full of the pleasures of life, while enduring periods of deep misery. Her husband was making money and collecting applause, but she kept faith with her talent. Well-bred people did not make a fuss or make a noise, her mother had told her, even when having a baby. That is a prescription for emotional deadness, not creative growth. But if pain can be survived, it can perhaps be channelled and put to work. In her novels Howard described delusion and self-delusion. She totted up the price of lies and the price of truth. She saw damage inflicted, damage reflected or absorbed. She had learned more from Austen than from her mother. Comedy is not generated by a writer who sails to her desk saying, “Now I will be funny”. It comes from someone who crawls to her desk, leaking shame and despair, and begins to describe faithfully how things are. In that fidelity to the details of misery, one feels relish. The grimmer it is, the better it is: slowly, reluctantly, comedy seeps through.

It's difficult to imagine any other famous beauty writing unsqueamishly about a colostomy. Arthritis means that she must rise from her chair with a jerk that, for an instant, makes her face leonine with self-control. She can no longer do much gardening. But, like her books, her house conceals a wealth of vivid delights behind a conventional façade. The arrangement was largely practical, but after Peter Scott remarried and Nicola went to live with her new stepmother, Josie Baird fell seriously ill with TB and Howard started visiting her in hospital. David Howard had enlisted in the Machine Gun Corps in 1914 aged 17, and survived four years on the western front. He told his daughter once that he had won his second military cross by peeing on a machine gun to cool it down so it could keep firing. Otherwise he never talked of his wartime experiences. Above all, she strongly dislikes the idea of a comic novel: "The best novels have comedy in them; in Jane Austen there are some very, very funny moments, in situation and in character and dialogue. But they're not comic novels. I think the best comedy is always generated by very depressed people, very sad people, who have an acute awareness of death and suffering, and are using that to make you laugh. Kit Howard gave her daughter two strikingly unhelpful pieces of advice: "Never refuse your husband - however you feel", and "People of our sort never make any fuss or noise when they are having a baby."

Hardly anyone has a good word to say for Jane Howard's mother Kit, the former ballerina so humiliatingly abandoned by her husband. Martin Amis, Howard's step- son, thought Kit "a snob and a grouch" at the end of her life, especially towards her "sweet-natured" son, Colin, who now designs and makes hi-fi speakers. The journalist Angela Lambert has asked why The Long View is not recognised as one of the great novels of the 20th century. One might ask why Howard’s whole body of work is not rated more highly. It’s true her social settings are limited; so are Jane Austen’s. As in Austen’s novels, a busy underground stream of anxiety threatens to break the surface of leisured lives. The anxiety is about resources. Have I enough? Enough money in my purse? Enough credit with the world? In various stories, Howard’s characters teeter on the verge of destitution. Elsewhere, money flows in from mysterious sources. But her characters do not command those sources, nor comprehend them. Emotionally, financially, her vulnerable heroines live from hand to mouth. Even if they have enough, they do not know enough. There was another marriage, a brief one, to a fellow writer. Then she became the second wife of Kingsley Amis, an acclaimed and fashionable novelist. Jane wanted love, sexual and every kind; she said so all her life, and she was bold in saying so, because it is always taken as a confession of weakness. The early years of the Amis marriage were happy and companionable. There is a picture of the couple working at adjacent typewriters. It belies the essential nature of the trade. Howard was strung on the razor wire of a paradox. She wanted intimacy, and writing is solitary. She wanted to be valued, and writers often aren’t. The household was busy and bohemian. She kept house and cooked for guests, some of them demanding, some of them long-stayers. She was a kind, inspiring stepmother to Amis’s three children. The marriage was, as Martin Amis has said, “dynamic”, but the husband’s work was privileged, whereas Jane’s was seen as incidental, to be fitted around a wife’s natural domestic obligations.Married: 1942-1951 Peter Scott (one daughter, Nicola, born 1943); '57-60 Jim Douglas-Henry; '65-82, Sir Kingsley Amis. The best part of the day came after the formal interview. We walked in her wonderful garden, which merged into a meadow that ran down past the River Waveney. I made notes that evening:

Green Shades: An Anthology of Plants, Gardens and Gardeners. Pan Macmillan. 2021. ISBN 978-1529050738. All the bohemian splendour revolved around Kingsley. "I think it was wonderful for everyone but Jane," says Sargy Mann. Howard found herself cooking and running a household of eight or more people and writing less and less. Howard worked briefly as an actress in provincial repertory and occasionally as a model before her writing career, which began in 1947. Cooper, Jonathan (23 April 1990). "Novelist Martin Amis Carries on a Family Tradition: Scathing Wit and Supreme Self-Confidence". People . Retrieved 15 June 2012.The manners were one way of approaching Howard's excellence as a writer. It was built on close attention. I was of interest primarily as someone who could help her to sell books – and she did send me a treasured note after the piece was published – but there was a sense in which her interest was not entirely instrumental. She wanted to know about people because they mattered. In 1975, the household at Lemmons broke up, and the Amises moved to Hampstead, where there was no room for the extended household; it was also too small for their burgeoning resentments. In 1980, she finally left Kingsley by way of a lawyer's letter sent from a health farm whence she had retreated for a week with the quarter-written manuscript of a novel called Getting it Right.

Artemis Cooper tells the story of how a friend remonstrated with the elderly Elizabeth Jane Howard after she published her autobiography, Slipstream – there was too much of her life in it, and not enough about her work. “I didn’t think it would interest people,” she replied. Howard was hopelessly unfaithful, first with Peter Scott's half-brother. Within five years the marriage had become stranded in antarctic latitudes of distant courtesy. In 1947, she left Scott and their infant daughter Nicola to become a writer. She moved into a flat in a run-down 18th-century building off Baker Street: "I remember my first night there, a bare bulb in the ceiling, wooden floors full of malignant nails, the odour of decay that seeped through the wet paint smell and the unpleasant feeling that everything was dirty except my bedclothes. Above all I felt alone, and the only thing I was sure of was that I wanted to write." Adams, Matthew (3–4 June 2017). "Talent and torment". The Sydney Morning Herald . Retrieved 4 September 2017.In 1950s London, Antonia Fleming faces the prospect of a life lived alone. Her children are now adults; her husband Conrad, a domineering and emotionally complex man, is now a stranger. She says, "So long as my books didn't sell they were very well received, but as soon as they started selling I became instantly unfashionable." In 1982, on the advice of Martin Amis, she started work on a series of novels, based on the experience of her own family, about the transformation of English society in the second world war.