Elizabeth Jane Howard: in search of enduring love

“Why don’t you write about Elizabeth Jane Howard?” asked my mother. She used to stay with Jane at her house in Suffolk every summer, with a group of friends who met to paint in a meadow beside the river Waveney. I dismissed her suggestion instantly. Why do the biography of someone who had already written a remarkably revealing memoir? When Slipstream was published in 2002, critics and readers alike were left gasping at Howard’s courage and candour. But just to see if there was anything left to say, I read it again. The book presented only one side of a very complex story, and there was surprisingly little about her work.

Born in 1923 and always known as Jane, she enjoyed a comfortable childhood in London with holidays in Sussex among a crowd of cousins. Yet she felt her hypercritical mother never really loved her, and she grew up anxious and uncertain. Her father never made her feel stupid or clumsy; but when she was 15 his hugs and kisses became more urgent. He went no further but Jane was terrified, ashamed and alone: there was no one she could tell, least of all her mother.

She wrote stories and plays and wanted to act; but the outbreak of war in 1939 changed everything. Jane was 20 when she married Peter Scott, painter, naturalist and son of the Antarctic explorer. Peter was then in the navy, facing danger and death every day. His mother, keen to ensure the survival of the Scott genes, put pressure on Jane to have a child before she was really even ready for marriage. The birth of Jane’s only daughter, Nicola, left her feeling trapped, and guilty that she couldn’t love her child as she should. She made the break four years later, abandoning her husband and daughter to become a writer.

In the course of the 1950s she wrote articles, edited books, modelled for Vogue and wrote two novels. The first, The Beautiful Visit, won the John Llewellyn Rhys prize; the second was her masterpiece, The Long View. Driven by her hunger for love she became known as a literary femme fatale, with a trophy collection of lovers who included Cecil Day-Lewis, Arthur Koestler, Laurie Lee, Romain Gary and Kenneth Tynan. In Slipstream she revealed not only the abortions and betrayals, but also the loneliness and the lack of respect accorded to women who were considered “fast”. She claimed that she only married her second husband, Jim Douglas-Henry, because she was sick of men thinking they could bed her after half an hour’s acquaintance.

Douglas-Henry was a matrimonial mistake she regretted almost at once; but when she married Kingsley Amis in 1965, they were deliriously in love. Kingsley left his wife and three children for beautiful, brilliant Jane. His novels paid the bills, but she had to manage everything else alone – even his two rebellious teenage sons. Martin Amis credits Jane with getting him into Oxford; yet as time went on she sank into the role of overworked and under-appreciated housewife. Kingsley’s irritation grew into active dislike. But he needed her support, and her presence – he panicked if left alone – and he never forgave her for walking out on him in 1980.

The years that followed were bleak. What saved her was joining a women’s group that gave her the strength to face life alone, and the success of the Cazalet Chronicle: a series of novels based on her own family. Yet she was still, as she put it, “a tart for love”. At 72 she fell for a conman, who was only unmasked thanks to her daughter Nicola.

As I closed Slipstream, I found myself with a question I couldn’t get out of my head: how can someone who writes so perceptively about love and what it does to people make so many mistakes in their own life? Perhaps my mother’s idea wasn’t such a bad one after all.

Over the course of 2013, I had five long interviews with Jane at her house in Bungay in Suffolk. As we talked, her hands were busy with knitting or embroidery and when she looked up, her glance was piercingly direct. I loved listening to her deep smoker’s voice, her rumbling laugh. She enjoyed being interviewed, and I liked the way she would turn a question over in her mind before replying. She helped me in every possible way: giving me copies of her novels, and urging all her friends – including her psychotherapists – to talk to me. But the fact is that exploiting memories, whether in interviews or novels or writing about your own life, tends to harden the images: they become what you have written or said. She could not tell me very much more than I had already learned.

“Haven’t you got some early chapters to show me yet?” she asked, on about our third interview. “I want to read this book of yours before I pop off, you know.” A terrifying prospect, but one I never had to face. That winter, her beloved brother Colin was taken seriously ill. He died in December 2013, and she followed him in early January.

Jane had sold her archive to the Huntington Library in California, and that spring I spent four weeks going through her letters. Swarms of questions that I would never be able to ask her buzzed round my head. I found that she had written her memoir from memory, without consulting her papers. For example, in Slipstream she wrote that when she ended her affair with Day-Lewis, “he was bitterly hurt, resentful, called me a whore”. But reading the letters he wrote at that time, it’s simply not true.

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I came nearest to understanding Jane when talking to those who knew and loved her – and there were many, for she was a much better picker of friends than she was of men. One of my earliest interviews was with Nicola, who had moved to Bungay to look after her mother. Jane, so demonstrative and dramatic, probably never fathomed Nicola’s quiet reserve; but how did the four-year-old Nicola feel, I asked, when her mother abandoned her? “I’m not going to be a part of Mum’s guilt trip,” she said firmly. “I wasn’t abandoned. I had my father, and my stepmother who was wonderful, and my pony. My mother was very elegant, but she wasn’t part of my life – she was doing her own thing.”

This makes Jane sound very much in control, but she felt the opposite, and the more I talked to people the more she emerged as a mass of contradictions. I sometimes despaired of ever making sense of them, and I think Jane did too. Some found her haughty, others were surprised by her diffidence. She took little part in Nicola’s upbringing, yet no one writes better about the experience of childhood. She was equivocal about sex, yet she could not separate it from the affection she craved. And although an ardent feminist, she was at the mercy of any man who expressed desire and admiration for her.

This was why she was drawn to the figure of Malcolm Shane (not his real name), who began his courtship of her by letter in 1995. He had fallen in love with her voice, he said, and had read all her books. The letters came thick and fast, and she responded. Her friends described him a burly man in his 60s, potty about Jane but otherwise dull; but they were alarmed by her fluttery excitement, which was that of a schoolgirl rather than a mature woman. When she found out the truth about him she was devastated; yet by then she had experienced his violence, and had still taken him back the following day. The first time I asked her about it, she said he had come just short of hitting her. When I came back to it again later (one should always ask the important questions more than once), she said he did hit her: that felt like the truth, because she sounded ashamed to admit it.

The person who best explained Jane’s insatiable thirst for love was Jenner Roth, who led the women’s group that Jane had relied on so much. She only agreed to see me because Jane had asked her to. Jane wrote that a therapist had once described her as “a bottomless pit” of neediness: why was that? After a long pause Jenner said: “To receive love you have to have something to put it in,” and she brought her hands together into a bowl as though she were holding water. “But if you don’t know how to make that bowl, or if it’s broken, when love comes along you have nowhere to put it – it just trickles away. That’s why Jane could never have enough love, and why she was constantly searching for more.”

All Jane’s books are about love in one form or another, and about herself. “I write to find things out,” she wrote, “as much as, and sometimes more than, to tell them to other people.” Her stories are always beautifully constructed, the writing clear, the plot lines firm – even when, as in the Cazalet novels, she is handling decades of time and a huge cast of characters. She has two self-portraits that reappear throughout her work: one is a naive girl at ease with herself, and the other a restless femme fatale who can’t bear to be alone. Jane felt that if she could find someone who really loved her, she would recover a kind of innocence. She never doubted that enduring love heals the spirit and makes it whole.

In her novel After Julius, she dramatises the tension between the innocence she longed to regain, and the experience in which she was trapped through two sisters: Emma and Cressy. At one point Emma (the innocent one) asks Cressy if she would like to get married and Cressy replies, “It’s the one thing I really want in the world. If I could find the right person, I’d do anything to keep things good … I feel wrong all by myself: you don’t. I suppose that’s why I have affairs and you don’t?”

Jane never found the love and companionship she craved; but she left behind a body of work that is enduring far better than she expected. For much of her life, she saw her books eclipsed by those of Amis. But women’s voices have grown stronger over the years, and if you go into a bookshop now, you are likely to find more novels by Jane than by him. As for that question that haunted me – how can someone get it so right on the page, so wrong in their own life? – I see now that it only makes sense the other way round. It was because Jane lived at such an intense emotional pitch; because she rushed into things without considering the risks, because she could not control her impulsive imagination – all these were what made her the powerful novelist she was.