A Blazing Talent

How well is Pamela Frankau remembered? She was born on 3 January 1908, so last year was her centenary. But . . . no garlands? No memorials? No flourish in the literary pages?

Well, Pamela would be the first to look on this with wry amusement, and without complaint. I am sure of this because she was my first cousin, eight years older than I, and my icon and mentor in every way from writing to life. She made me laugh a great deal: once when I was doubled up with laughter she introduced me as her young cousin and her best audience. When she died – in 1967 of cancer at 59 – a fan wrote to me, describing herself as a typical housewife with five teenage children (this appeared to be offered as a guarantee of sanity, though one may perhaps have doubts). She asked if she might have ‘some small thing that had belonged to her, of no intrinsic value, such as a pencil or rubber’, and went on to write of ‘that especial magic of hers which gets over to ordinary people like me’. That especial magic was a quality not only of her writing but of Pamela herself. (It was Rebecca West, in her Times obituary, who said that ‘good though her books were, and they are better than most, none of them was as good as she was’ – Rebecca and Pamela had a close but sometimes stormy relationship.) She was a person of powerful attraction, dark, slight, with a look of Walt Disney’s Bambi. She had courage, a ready wit and no hint of self-pity, a power of listening with entire concentration to those (and there were many) who brought their disasters to her. She once lamented that ‘listening was a lost art’. (She did add that the lament was perhaps curmudgeonly in one who talked as much as she did.) From the time when at 19 she published her first novel, Marriage of Harlequin, she wrote tirelessly: before she was 32 she had published twenty novels. Except for three of them, she wished them forgotten. (Nevertheless they showed early her originality of mind: Villa Anodyne, a light-hearted story, has a villa in the South of France, a ghost and a horse called Bacon who eats an invaluable clutch of letters.) The last of them was published in 1939, and was lost, as was much else at that time. But then the silence came down – a silence brought about by the sudden death of her great love, Humbert Wolfe, poet and civil servant: ‘a bereavement’, she said, ‘with power to put out the sun’. The silence lasted nine years, years which included flight to America, a return to England in November 1940 at the height of the Blitz, a spell in the Ministry of Food and – to the surprise of her friends – time in the ATS, the women’s branch of the Army, and a change in sexual orientation: her next love was a fellow woman officer. But after that, conversion to the Catholic faith, marriage and America again, the loss of her infant son, and the foundering of the marriage. Her ‘writing arm’, as she called it, was quiet. Then after tortuous try-out with a novel called, appropriately enough, Shaken in the Wind, she came back to England with the manuscript of The Willow Cabin. If there comes a time in a writer’s life when all the bells chime together, this was the moment for Pamela. Drawing on her early fluency, her idiosyncratic way with words, and on painful experience, The Willow Cabin took her to the top. With a first printing of 30,000 (a large figure at any time), and a Book Society Choice, it brought high praise in the press, and a mass of fan letters. Writing for the Book Society, Compton Mackenzie said it was ‘written with passion, which is rare’. Certainly Pamela wrote – as she lived – with passion. Passion in all things; she gambled compulsively and called herself ‘a devoted drinker’. G. B. Stern, another successful writer of the time and a friend, said that Pamela had ‘a rare talent for reaching down to pain and suffering so that vicariously it hurts’. As well as this new power gained over the silent years, the book displayed her accustomed wit and pointed dialogue with its echo at times of Noël Coward (a good friend, who came, as did Rebecca West, to her memorial service). What is it that preserves a book? Well, if we knew that we should all be sitting comfortably. But I think the power to give the reader that authentic jab of recognition, to make him – or her – say ‘Yes, that’s how it is; I knew it but I’d never put it into words’ is one part of the essence. Pamela herself said that she had, in The Willow Cabin, provided two circumstances which every woman who has shared the experience of Caroline, her protagonist, desires: first bravely to face her lover’s death, and second, eventually to make friends with his wife. Caroline is a young and formidably talented actress who falls deeply in love with Michael Knowle, a celebrated surgeon, many years older than herself, and married – though it seems distantly – to Mercedes. Of Caroline it is said that her talent for loving amounts to an artistic gift: she is prepared to sacrifice everything, even her career, for Michael. But he dies suddenly and somewhat mysteriously, and Caroline’s grief is intensified by uncertainty. She fears he has committed suicide, and is so haunted that she goes in search of Mercedes, who has remained the shadow, the person she most fears. Pamela is very good on fear, and overcoming it, so that the climax of the book is powerful and ultimately satisfying. We leave Caroline on stage, all passion spent – or if not spent, used in the interpretation of Shakespeare’s Cleopatra. There were ten books after The Willow Cabin – nine novels and one, Pen to Paper, a highly entertaining ‘do’s and don’ts’ for would-be novelists. Conflict, Pamela said, was at the heart of any story: conflict – ‘a man trying to get through a locked door’. In her next novel, The Winged Horse (1953), Anthony Carey has constructed his own locked door. Commissioned to design a statue in memory of Tobias, the son of a newspaper tycoon, he discovers on his desk the outline of a winged horse, drawn by the cartoonist Harry Levitt. A sharp pencil and thin paper have left a clear imprint. Carey finds himself drawn to the outline, which he uses as the basis for his statue. Yes, yes, of course he will make it clear that this is Levitt’s design. But he does not speak, and the deception grows ever larger in his mind. For anyone in a similar plight, Pamela’s depiction of his journey comes close to pain. ‘Say it now, say it and it will be over, the weight will be gone.’ But the words are not spoken. This is a story of truth and deception; an habitually truthful person, Pamela found the dissembler continually absorbing. It was now that Orville Prescott in the New York Times wrote that she was ‘a blazingly talented writer . . . a shrewd and compassionate student of human nature’. She was, John Davenport wrote in the Observer, ‘witty without being cruel, compassionate without being sentimental’. This was written of A Wreath for the Enemy, a book based on a short story Pamela had contributed to Harper’s Bazaar entitled ‘The Duchess and the Smugs’. Unusually for a short story it had produced fan mail and highly favourable comments in the press. Again it touched on a common human pain, that of failing fully to value people until they are dead. In the short story, 14-year-old Penelope is sitting in the garden of her father’s hotel in the South of France, writing her anthology of Hates. Penelope is deeply embarrassed by the Duchess who, as is her custom, sweeps up on her.

She cried, ‘Oh, my love, my love,’ and I was swept into a complicated embrace, scratched by her jewellery, crushed against her stays . . . Changes from last year and for the worse . . . Her hair now dyed bright red . . . She had new false eyelashes of great length that made her look like a Jersey cow.

But the Duchess has the divine essence in her, the force for good, and when she dies suddenly Penelope weeps, saying to her father, ‘If only she would come back again I would be nice!’ He offers comfort, but she says, ‘Doesn’t one ever value people until they are gone?’ ‘Rarely,’ he replies. Pamela extrapolated this into a compelling novel though the first episode still stands above the rest of it. She cared much for words and, like all such people, she loved poetry; quotations appear aptly and often. ‘The Lyke Wake Dirge’ with its haunting chill occurs in A Wreath for the Enemy and other books as well – ‘This ae night, this ae night/Every night and alle/Fire and sleet and candlelyte/And Christe receive thy saule.’ Another favourite, signifying courage, was Patrick Shaw-Stewart’s ‘I will go back this morning/from Imbros over the sea/Stand in the trench, Achilles/Flame-capped and shout for me!’ This, together with Browning’s ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’, she would class as a spine-stiffener. Courage implies something dark or fearful to overcome, and to my mind this shows most clearly in Ask Me No More. This was written some eighteen years after Humbert Wolfe’s death, and ten years after the publication of The Willow Cabin. In the playwright Geoffrey Bliss, whose love-life has a cat’s-cradle complexity, we see the unacceptable face of Humbert – Alex Wharton loves Geoffrey, but it is an older and wiser love than Caroline’s in The Willow Cabin. When Geoffrey meets his death in wartime Italy – not in battle but in visiting a one-time mistress, whose husband, unexpectedly present, takes his revenge – Alex mourns him, but not with anguish. In the last part of the book she becomes close to the outrageous young man Ludo who, though he doesn’t know it at first, is Geoffrey’s son. Like many disturbed people he causes chaos until he too meets his death at the hands of a grubby and hard-drinking girl he finds in a Hampstead pub. Here Pamela is drawing on familiar ground; she lived the last ten years of her life on Christchurch Hill, almost within sight of the pub. (When a package arrived addressed to ‘55 Christ Churchill’ she remarked, ‘With those two characters on our side, how can we lose?’) In Ask Me No More we find the darkness of two violent deaths, but at the end of the book a quiet – the calm, you might say, of absolution. With her last novel, which she started when she was often in much pain from cancer of the bone, and which she was unable to finish, she embarked on a new genre. Colonel Blessington is a thriller, a whodunit, with a complex plot dealing with sexual identity. How successful was it? It’s hard for me to say, for after Pamela’s death I was given the formidable and poignant task of completing it. The book sold well, and Rebecca West said that it was impossible to know where Pamela’s writing stopped and mine began. Since there were many such junctures, I was heartened by this. Had Pamela lived, I believe that with her deep knowledge of the human condition and her faith, she would have returned to stories of human triumph and tragedy. Books, then, of fun, quotations and passion. ‘None of them as good as she was’? Perhaps not – but very nearly.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 21 © Diana Raymond 2009