Sex and Silliness and Sorrow

I was at the Dartington Festival in the very early 1990s with Esther Freud and Elspeth Barker, whose first novels I had published at Hamish Hamilton. We knew that Barbara Trapido was appearing and we filed into the Great Hall and sat at the back, giggling at the school-like atmosphere. Barbara walked on to the stage, sat down and in a throaty voice began to read from the beginning of what was to become her fourth novel, Juggling (1994). We stopped giggling and leaned forward, trying to catch every word, transported – as if we’d been led through the wardrobe and into a new land. We were in the hands of a magician, a spinner of spells, and afterwards we crowded up to her. We knew we wanted her in our lives.

Not long after that, I devoured her first three novels – Brother of the More Famous Jack (1982), Noah’s Ark (1984) and Temples of Delight (1990). Then Barbara decided to jump ship from Michael Joseph to its sister company at Penguin, Hamish Hamilton – and join me. And so I became the publisher of Juggling and every subsequent work. When she joined me, she was being published as a popular woman’s novelist, a writer of delightful social comedies. The complexity and darkness, the dazzling bravura of her writing were too easily overlooked. Now she is published in a literary imprint, and the public’s perception of her has changed. We began a relationship that has been at the heart of my professional life, first at Hamish Hamilton, then as her agent for a few years, and then for twenty-three years at Bloomsbury Publishing. Last year Bloomsbury brought out a fortieth anniversary edition of Brother of the More Famous Jack and reissued all the subsequent novels in the ‘Jack’ series – Temples of Delight, Juggling, The Travelling Hornplayer (1998) and Sex & Stravinsky (2010). I call them a series because while they are not sequels they do share characters who dance in and out of them, and while Sex & Stravinsky does not share characters, it does share the same wild plotting and themes of coincidence, adolescence, happenstance. Maggie O’Farrell wrote,

I am wildly jealous of anyone who hasn’t yet read Barbara Trapido. They have yet to discover the joy of her often hilarious and always profound world; they are about to meet her intricate cast of recurring characters; they will soon have those glorious moments of Trapidean epiphany when they realize – oh! – the boy in this book is the child of a woman in that book.

Two of Barbara’s novels, Noah’s Ark and Frankie & Stankie (2003), sit outside this series of intertwining lives: the first because it shares neither characters nor themes with the ‘Jack’ novels; the second because it is an account of Barbara’s childhood in South Africa. The latter is such an accurate rendition of her life that she and I sat in my office discussing whether it should be published as a novel or as a memoir. In the end, we decided to classify it as fiction. There is a thread of British and American fiction that I would call ‘The Bohemian Girl on the Loose’ novel. A good example of this is Margaret Kennedy’s The Constant Nymph – an early Lolita story about a girl-child falling in love with a much older man, her bohemian family based on that of Augustus John. It is sharp, witty and sexy, though today it is questionable because it deals with underage sex and has the casual anti-Semitism that is prevalent in so much fiction of the 1920s and ’30s. Even so, the Jewish characters, like Trapido’s, are actually the sexiest and most colourful characters in it. Alongside this are Edith Wharton’s The Children, Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle, Rose Macaulay’s The World My Wilderness, Pamela Frankau’s A Wreath for the Enemy, Elaine Dundy’s The Dud Avocado and Muriel Spark’s The Girls of Slender Means. Barbara’s first novel, Brother of the More Famous Jack, was published in 1982 and is set in the 1970s. The Boho Girl tradition continued with Raffaella Barker’s Come and Tell Me Some Lies and Esther Freud’s Peerless Flats. Today Meg Mason, Miriam Toews, Maria Semple, Lauren Groff and Meg Rosoff carry on the tradition, and they are all admirers of Barbara Trapido. So enamoured is Meg Mason that she wrote, ‘The first time I read it, I knew . . . that Brother of the More Famous Jack was going to become my favourite novel. The second time, that this brilliant, funny, intensely moving work is everything I aspire to as a writer. Every reading since, that devotion to Barbara Trapido is my only true requisite in a friend.’ Barbara’s ‘Jack’ novels are among the best of that Boho Girl genre. Her heroines are brainy and unworldly, they fall in love and get trapped with boring men but they have their sexual awakenings at the hands of foreign or Jewish or Catholic, dark and dangerous and sometimes bullying men with wit and enormous appetites. Her heroines read Homer and Shakespeare, listen to Mozart and Schubert and love mime and ballet. They paint walls and sand floors, are good at hemming sheets and conjure up beautiful clothes from curtains, and curtains from pillow ticking. Terrible things happen to them – they get raped, get AIDS, get pregnant. They have babies that die or inherit babies from friends who die. But mostly they survive. In Juggling, Christina writes about survival in Shakespeare’s comedies, saying: ‘Survival is admirable. It is more difficult than death, since it takes more energy and guile.’ As the books unfold, the world changes from one in which characters smoke on planes and use phone boxes to the modern world of the Internet. Even so, characters disappear, lose contact with one another, find false identities and reappear as if by a miracle. Katherine Rundell has written about the plot of Juggling that it ‘takes liberally and explicitly from Shakespeare: misplaced fathers, orphan children, identical twins parted as babies, accidental killings, unlikely couplings, sudden entrances and exits, reversals of fortune, galvanic revelations . . . There are coincidences so outrageous, and so impeccably orchestrated, that they provoke your joy at the bravado of it.’ This is true of all Barbara’s ‘Jack’ novels. Detail is another joy of her novels. House furnishings, food and clothing are described lavishly and intricately. Reading her descriptions is like peering at the illustrations in Beatrix Potter’s Two Bad Mice, with its tiny dolls’ house furnishings, or The Tailor of Gloucester, with those heavenly teacups on a dresser. Barbara is both highbrow and lowbrow. Her novels are stuffed with books and music and paintings and dance, but they are also stuffed with slang and sex and silliness and sorrow. Barbara Trapido was born in South Africa during apartheid and moved to London in the 1960s with her husband Stanley, who became a professor at Oxford. She taught in rough schools and became a mother. She says she did not think of becoming a writer until in her forties:

Somewhere around the early 1970s, I was regaling a hugely motivated friend with some wild story pertaining to my recent life experience. She said, ‘You know what drives me crazy about you? You dissipate all this talent talking out stories over the kitchen table. I want you to start writing it down. Go on. I dare you. Stop being so lazy.

So when her husband’s students had left their supper table and her family had gone to bed, Barbara drank strong coffee, and from 2 a.m. until daybreak she dreamed up the Goldman family. During the day, ‘looking like death and feeling hung over, I’d recite episodes to myself as I pushed swings or stood in supermarket queues or went on country walks, so that by the time I’d finished it, I could quite literally recite the whole book by heart.’ Barbara’s writing method is magical. I have heard her describe how she lies on the floor to speak out loud in her characters’ voices, how she stands in front of a mirror and pulls the faces of her characters at herself, how she wakes in the night and scribbles down the names of characters she’s just found in a dream. Her composition comes from deep within her. She’s as brainy as her brainiest heroine but knows how to let the subconscious flow through her fingertips. She writes in long hand, then speaks her novels into a recorder and has them transcribed. On the surface her prose is deceptively easy and chatty, but each sentence is crafted and modulated, rising and falling like a song. She can reproduce the staccato rhythms of adolescents’ speech or conduct a duet between schoolgirls in the lavatories of the Barbican in which they use the word ‘fuck’ in one form or another no fewer than thirty-nine times. Christina in Juggling reflects on Shakespeare’s comedies, ‘How terrible they were, how raw, how wild, how red in tooth and claw. All that tempest and treachery. All that torture and prison. And how bravely the characters wisecracked as they waited to fall through the air.’ She remarks that while the tragedies are about Establishment people, mainly men, ‘the comedies are about the you-and-me people; the young people, single people, street people, people with free spirits to celebrate and wild oats to sow.’ These are Barbara Trapido’s people. They live in these novels which wait to be read over and over again. Barbara is as good as it gets.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 81 © Alexandra Pringle 2024