On a summer afternoon fifteen years ago, I went to hear Jane Gardam at the South Bank Centre. She does not often appear in public, indeed she has been withering in her fiction about the idea of an author meeting her readers. ‘It must be like discussing your marriage with strangers,’ thinks Betty in Old Filth (2004), and there is a devastating portrait of the perils of authorship in The Queen of the Tambourine (1991).
However, there she was, sharing the platform with Georgina Hammick. The room was packed, the readings brilliant, the audience perhaps less so. What, demanded one chap rather testily, was the meaning of the story she had just read? In it, an elderly couple driving down Devon lanes turn a corner and disappear. ‘Well,’ said Gardam with bemused patience, ‘I suppose it’s about death.’ The sun shone through the dusty plate glass behind her, and it felt all at once like a moment from one of her own books: a clever woman in a difficult encounter; the collision of the quite unlike; death – ‘the serious act of life’ as Eliza Peabody puts it in The Queen of the Tambourine – never far away.
That dusty sunlight, too, made of the moment something otherworldly and surreal – like the ghosts and apprehensions which haunt so many of Jane Gardam’s short stories: the African bishop in ‘Waiting for a Stranger’ who stays the night in a North Country B&B though he has been killed in a car crash on the way there; the beloved dead dogs in ‘The Latter Days of Mr Jones’, frolicking in the snow as their old master dies of loneliness and sorrow. These come from The People on
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Subscribe now or Sign inOn a summer afternoon fifteen years ago, I went to hear Jane Gardam at the South Bank Centre. She does not often appear in public, indeed she has been withering in her fiction about the idea of an author meeting her readers. ‘It must be like discussing your marriage with strangers,’ thinks Betty in Old Filth (2004), and there is a devastating portrait of the perils of authorship in The Queen of the Tambourine (1991).
However, there she was, sharing the platform with Georgina Hammick. The room was packed, the readings brilliant, the audience perhaps less so. What, demanded one chap rather testily, was the meaning of the story she had just read? In it, an elderly couple driving down Devon lanes turn a corner and disappear. ‘Well,’ said Gardam with bemused patience, ‘I suppose it’s about death.’ The sun shone through the dusty plate glass behind her, and it felt all at once like a moment from one of her own books: a clever woman in a difficult encounter; the collision of the quite unlike; death – ‘the serious act of life’ as Eliza Peabody puts it in The Queen of the Tambourine – never far away. That dusty sunlight, too, made of the moment something otherworldly and surreal – like the ghosts and apprehensions which haunt so many of Jane Gardam’s short stories: the African bishop in ‘Waiting for a Stranger’ who stays the night in a North Country B&B though he has been killed in a car crash on the way there; the beloved dead dogs in ‘The Latter Days of Mr Jones’, frolicking in the snow as their old master dies of loneliness and sorrow. These come from The People on Privilege Hill (2007), a collection with which I spent the whole of a happy New Year’s Day in bed; but there are plenty more such shivery moments in her work. Something of Jane Gardam’s blend of the solid and surreal comes from her own childhood. Brought up in north Yorkshire, a Catholic, she often explores ideas about goodness and God: from the splendid/desperate missionaries in Malaya and Hong Kong in Old Filth and The Man in the Wooden Hat (2009), her end-of-Empire novels, to the chaotic but kindly vicarage life in The Queen of the Tambourine. ‘I stand watching the rain and contemplating the silence of God,’ says Eliza in that remarkable trompe-l’oeil novel, written entirely in letters to a woman we are never certain is real or the product of a mind in disintegration, craving a confidante. ‘With me the idea for a novel has always arrived with an image,’ Gardam once wrote in an essay about The Queen of the Tambourine: its origins, the way it went into the dark, was reborn in an epiphanic moment, and finally found its form. ‘Angels & Daemons: TheAnatomy of a Novel’ (1993) is something which every aspiring novelist should read: I have given it to students for years. Her image ‘has often been the same one, of a child walking alone on a beach . . . always full of light. The light is the seaside of my childhood and it is not surprising for the beaches of the north-east coast are famous.’ When Gardam once wandered off on those sands as a little girl, she returned to pandemonium. ‘My mother said, “You must thank God that He looked after you,” but I don’t think I did. I believe something happened to me on the beach that day, now quite buried . . . some sort of freedom . . . Something eternal.’ The image of the child on the beach is, says Gardam, often disguised in her novels, even if they begin there. In The Queen of the Tambourine it becomes, dramatically, a baby and a pond. But in God on the Rocks, a runner-up for the 1978 Booker Prize, she appears directly: as Margaret Marsh, daughter of Kenneth, the leader of the congregation of Primal Saints in a northern seaside town. Almost in spite of herself, Margaret knows much of the Bible by heart, and recites it freely, but in this coming-of-age novel, set between the wars, her questioning of the adult world leads her into terrible danger on those rocks, and it is her dreary, repressed little father who in a Christ-like act of redemption saves her life. All the threads of this tightly plotted novel, and there are many, are drawn together in an astonishing piece of back story at the end. It’s a technique which in lesser hands could fail utterly, but Jane Gardam has said that ‘Every serious novel must in some degree and unnoticeably carry the form further. It may fail, but better to be sorry than safe.’ The fact that I did notice may be because Gardam is so much a writer’s writer: formally intriguing, her prose gloriously exact and quotable. But if ‘writer’s writer’ can imply ‘but not a reader’s’, with her this is never the case: she is vibrantly engaging, funny and touching, even the most minor character unforgettably commanding his or her space. Her descriptive writing, whether of a Burmese jungle, a dim Brussels church or a post-war London street is original and strong; she’s good on light and weather – ‘splashy rain’, ‘hectic sunlight’, ‘water from the canals flashing yellow across the walls’ – and very good on physicality: sex – good, bad or absent – babies, lost babies. In The Queen of the Tambourine, the miscarriage which we eventually learn broke Eliza Peabody’s heart takes place in a scene which must be one of the darkest and strangest in literature. There’s another miscarriage in The Man in the Wooden Hat, also central to the novel, but the woman enduring it could not be more different. Where Eliza is one of Gardam’s sad, yearning, unravelling women, Betty – Elisabeth Macintosh as she is before her marriage – is young, strong, clever and independent. Her parents perished in the Japanese internment camps; now she is working in Hong Kong, where Edward Feathers – soon to become a QC, then a judge, eventually Sir Edward – has asked her to marry him. Edward Feathers – Filth, as he is known (Failed in London, Try Hong Kong) – is crème de la crème. He first appeared to an adoring readership in Old Filth: in his eighties, tall, distinguished, elegant, bereaved. Everything about him, from his Harrods socks to his black silk umbrella, speaks of his wealth and good taste: Hong Kong made him very, very rich. ‘He had been in Commercial Chambers. The construction industry. Bridges and dams.’ Magisterial, every detail at his command, determined to win the Case (Gardam’s capitals are always a joy), he was terrifying in court. But Betty has died, planting tulips in their Dorset garden, and without her he becomes unhinged. ‘Looking back, Filth knew that beneath his apparent serenity the years after Betty’s departure had been a time of mental breakdown.’ The novel explores his long journey into the past, revealing at last the real old filth which blighted his childhood and impelled him to an act of desperation. Filth is a child of Empire. The novel is dedicated ‘to Raj Orphans and their parents’ – those families who, as in Kipling’s case, sent their children Home, away from the heat and the natives, to receive an English education. What they often endured, of course, was neglect and loneliness. ‘Never leave me,’ he tells Betty, when they become engaged. He is brilliant, he is much admired – but he is also deeply damaged. Nothing has truly healed that long-ago severance from love. Striking images mark this wonderful novel. One is of his Dorset gardener, hacking off the ivy on the house after Betty’s death: tearing away that which clings, like Filth’s nightmare childhood, and will ultimately destroy. The other comes right at the end of the book, when he decides to return to the Malaya of his infancy. As the plane descends, ‘he looked down on a fat carpet of clouds and saw something he had never seen in his life before. Two suns stood side by side in the sky. A parhelion. A formidable and ancient omen . . .’ He cannot remember of what, but they surely stand for his two lives in East and West – as well as reflecting the two-way structure of the novel, which cuts continually between the present and the past. The Man in the Wooden Hat has a largely forward momentum. Retelling the story of Filth’s life from his wife’s perspective, it gives a revelation of something which in the earlier novel is only hinted at: Betty’s deep involvement with Filth’s lifelong enemy. Terry Veneering is married, to a Chinese wife with ‘a face of perpetual ennui’. They have a son, Harry, at prep school in England. Veneering is everything Filth despises: jumped-up, brash, on the make – the other side of the colonial coin. Largely through Elisabeth – Oxford-educated, working with a missionary in the slums before her marriage – Gardam vividly delineates the teeming streets and exclusive clubs, the glitter and squalor of Hong Kong in the Fifties, as Empire begins its long decline. Almost alone among the colonial wives, Betty/Elisabeth is able to understand the true nature of British rule: its blindness as well as its gifts. But the novel’s exploration of the passage to modern life after the war is played out through her relationship with these two quite different men: the one upright, pukka to his spotless fingertips, sexually reticent, the other a parvenu who gives her a single, unforgettable night of passion. And though she grows to love Filth deeply – madly, even, in the early days of their marriage – it is children she has always hoped for, and these she will never have. Veneering’s son Harry becomes a beloved surrogate son, but her future, in Hong Kong and Dorset, is simply as a useful Englishwoman – though she does her good works so well she’s awarded an OBE. These two novels make a marvellous diptych – there’s a triptych, even, when you include the little panel of ‘The People on Privilege Hill’, the short story where the widowed Filth and Veneering (now, ye gods, become Dorset neighbours) meet at a lunch party. (In the author’s true style, the chief guest, a monk, never turns up.) They show Jane Gardam at the height of her powers, sweeping through decades of personal and political change, and through several countries, swinging round the picture to reveal the other side, in prose which is never, ever showy, but which reveals the psychological truth of every moment. Somewhere in The Queen of the Tambourine is a line about Coleridge working with ‘the full flow of the deep, true, creative imagination’. Gardam might have been writing about herself.Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 28 © Sue Gee 2010
About the contributor
Sue Gee is the daughter of an Indian Army officer, the subject of a new novel. Her short-story collection, Last Fling, will be published by Salt Publishing next spring.