Elizabeth Jane Howard, Slipstream: a memoir. Pan paperback, 2003; first published 2002. 493 pp.

As I said in my previous post, I enjoyed Elizabeth Jane Howard’s Cazalet Chronicles enormously. To fill the void that followed I decided to read her autobiography, Slipstream. She explains the title in the Preface:

Speaking as a very slow learner, I feel as though I have lived most of my life in the slipstream of experience. Often I have had to repeat the same disastrous situation several times before I got the message. That is still happening. I do not write this book as a wise, mature, finished person who has learned all the answers, but rather as someone who even at this late stage of seventy-nine years is still trying to change, find things out and do a bit better with them.

The self-deprecating, candidly vulnerable tone is set there, and the lucid, unadorned style that was a strong feature of the Cazalet novels. She’s not being overly modest there either; what follows is an account of her adult life (from teenage years onwards) of a person whose craving for the affection and endorsement never provided by her parents led her into affairs with a succession of unsuitable, usually older married men whose poise she mistook for maturity and sympathy, but who were almost all selfish and controlling.

Many of the details concerning these ill-judged liaisons resemble those in the Cazalet novels. Most notable, perhaps, is the gruesome sexual advances made by Edward towards his teenage daughter Louise, which happened to Jane (the name she was usually known by) with her father. In fact her life parallels that of Louise in many other ways: the disastrous romantic choices, the modelling for fashionable magazines, the failed acting career. Clary’s is the other character into whom she clearly poured much of her own experience.

This shows most glaringly in the affair Clary has with her monstrously self-centred lover and employer, who gets her pregnant then dumps her ignominiously. Jane’s affair with the writer of supernatural stories, Robert Aickman, has many similarities.

Peter Scott, the artist and naturalist she married at the age of 19 is clearly the model for Louise’s Michael (who lacks Peter’s interest in nature). Both have awful overbearing mothers with whom they have cloyingly close relationships.

It’s clear from numerous passages where this ingenuousness and lack of confidence and judgement came from. Jane’s parents brought her up to believe that ‘anything to do with the body was disgusting and that sex in any explicit form was horrible.’ Furthermore:

There was an ethos then that parents didn’t openly admire or extol their children’s behaviour and talent, and my mother certainly subscribed to that.

Later, when she told her mother that she was going to leave Peter Scott because she couldn’t be a writer while married to him, her mother retorted: ‘” What on earth makes you think that anyone would ever publish anything that you wrote?”’

Or there’s this family dictum:

Modesty was uniform: you must at all costs never get above yourself.

Jane took many years to discover that sexual pleasure could be mutual. Because of her inhibitions and hang-ups, she felt she was to blame for the serial failure of her relationships with men, and castigated herself: she was needy and hopeless, she felt: ‘Could I only see myself in the reflection of other people’s lives?’ Because of her ‘ignorance’ in such matters, she felt that she wasn’t learning from her mistakes:

…the less I understood my experiences the more I repeated them, each time becoming less aware of what I was doing.

Her affair with the polymath Arthur Koestler, another self-centred, ‘irascible, obsessive’ man with a ‘high voltage personality’, ended in the usual dismal fashion, her judgement once again letting her down: ‘I was too raw, too inexperienced, and too stupid to understand much of this…I was a small incident in his life.’

Her second marriage was to the author Kingsley Amis. At first this seemed an idyllic situation, then he started to show himself as another of those coercive, belittling monsters: he became a bullying drunk who openly disliked her. It took her years to pluck up the courage to leave him.

In the final few pages, however, she reflects:

I’ve made a good many mistakes, some rather expensive, but I think I’ve more or less paid for them. I’ve slowly learned some significant things – perhaps most of all the virtue, the supreme importance of truth, which, it seems to me now, should be continually searched for and treasured when any piece of it is found. This book has been in search of some of that.

Such disarming honesty and hard-won insight is refreshing and, I feel, touching.