Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (125 page)

This is the ‘good life’?

Yates entered into divorced middle age on his ‘second bachelorhood’. It was followed by a second doomed marriage. During these years, and for the rest of his life, he freelanced. For a period in the 1960s he was a speechwriter for Attorney General Robert Kennedy. He hated being a hireling, and even if Dallas had never happened he would have drunk himself out of what, for less driven artists, would have been a dream job. That he was Lee Harvey Oswald was one of his delusions in late-life mental breakdowns. By mid-career, Yates was a full-blown alcoholic and regularly hospitalised. He obstinately drank through whatever drugs were prescribed, with disastrous physical effects – and, on the positive side, a powerful ‘drinking novel’,
Disturbing the Peace
(1975). His manias became increasingly florid. A display of self-crucifixion at the 1962 Bread Loaf conference has become, as Bailey drily records, ‘part of the permanent lore of the place’. A man of limited cultural interests, Yates was a passionate lover of a few books – most passionately
The Great Gatsby
, which was for him ‘holy writ’. One wonders whether a crack-up was, as for Fitzgerald, a creative necessity.

A decade and a half after his death, with an irony which would have amused him (what good was fame to him then?), Yates enjoyed huge posthumous celebrity with the publication of Bailey’s bestselling biography and the success of the 2008
DiCaprio–Winslet, Oscar-nominated, text-faithful movie of
Revolutionary Road
. ‘Nearly’ no longer – but too late.

I shall never succeed in saying what I want to say.

Dawson has left little lasting mark on the annals of literary history. Although she worked for Oxford University Press, there is no entry on her in the
ODNB
, or in the
Oxford Companion to English Literature
. The facts of her life are readily summarised. She was born one of five children to a Fabian couple – veterans of the Left Book Club – and she was educated at the local girls’ grammar school in Camberwell. There were slums all around this quarter of south London and the world, as she grew up, was in the grip of the Great Depression with another great war looming. That war brought rationing, austerity and universal ‘shortages’. Depression, in one form or another, was the climate of the first forty years of Dawson’s life.

A bright girl, Jennifer went on to read history at St Anne’s College, Oxford. As Polly Pattullo recalls, Dawson ‘had, she said, few clothes and little money and was suddenly confronted with upper-class students at ease in a rarified social milieu’. She was not cut out to be a class warrior. As one of her heroines quaintly puts it, ‘in my adolescence and my school I had never really been
au fait
’. ‘My greatest passion in life,’ Dawson later wrote, ‘has always been music. I regard writing as a last resort, a
faute de mieux
for me. In a world where language has been eroded, gutted (“preemptive strike”, “take-out” for the murder of eight million civilians, etc.) all art “aspires to the condition of music”, which cannot be exploited, interpreted, which explores the lost places of the heart, which makes all things new.’ Music was, in other words, an ‘asylum’ – a place of peace and refuge.

One cannot, alas, live in music. In the third year of her studies, Dawson had a serious breakdown and spent six months at the Warneford Hospital on the outskirts of Oxford. Mental health was an area which the NHS, on its foundation in 1945, had resolutely ignored, and Dawson’s treatment was little different from what a Victorian patient would have received – with such modern embellishments as ‘maintenance ECT’ and ‘insulin shock treatment’. None the less she recovered sufficiently to
return and take her degree in 1952. She went on to work for Oxford University Press as an indexer and researcher on the
Oxford English Dictionary
and – on a voluntary basis – undertook some work in mental hospitals. Elizabeth Mitchell, her friend at the Press (and later a collaborator on a book they wrote together), recalls Dawson in her mid-twenties: ‘She … was vivid and clear-cut, both in appearance, with her expressive dark eyes and short, shiny black hair; and in temperament, suffering disconcertingly abrupt shifts between exuberance and bleakest misery. For her, as for the young Wordsworth, the very shadow of the clouds had power to shake her as they passed.’

Mitchell guesses she was already laying foundations in her mind for
The Ha-Ha
(1961). The novel manifestly had its origin in Dawson’s 1951 breakdown, hospitalisation and fragile recovery. The Warneford was a venerable lunatic asylum of early nineteenth-century foundation and in external appearance more resembling a country house than a ‘loony bin’ (as the institutions were commonly referred to in the unregenerate 1950s). It had, and still has, magnificent grounds – including, significantly, a ha-ha. The novel opens with Josephine on the path to ‘recovery’, as the institution defines it. She has been released from the locked ward, although she still suffers full-blown hallucinations, straight out of Mervyn Peake’s
Gormenghast
(monstrous worms, insects and armadillos feature – ‘things of the jungle’). She now has her own quarters, periods of free time, and a therapeutic ‘job’, arranging the library books of a nearby aged couple. She forms an emotionally sustaining relationship with one of the nurses, a German refugee.

Her breakthrough comes when she falls in love with a fellow patient, Alasdair Faber – a medical student who, influenced by the films of Ingmar Bergman, has discovered life wasn’t worth it. She is not experienced in love. ‘A man kissed me once,’ she recalls, ‘but it hurt. I think his teeth were too large.’ They meet, clandestinely, by the ha-ha, a raised grassy bank which blots out dead ground, artfully creating an uninterruptedly beautiful long perspective for the viewer’s eye. It is, of course, an illusion. Alasdair is in the business of destroying illusions: he sees ‘treatment’ as a sham and the asylum as a prison by a kinder name. It does not cure insanity: it creates insanity. He leaves without saying goodbye. Josephine relapses, runs away, and is brought back by the police. ‘Recovery’ will now be on her own defiant terms.

If you could stay away for fourteen days, I remembered Alasdair had told me, they could not reclaim you, so I clambered over the pile of rubble [i.e. the ha-ha] that had been my wall and had enclosed my world, said good-bye to the hill, and ran until I knew for certain that I had not after all been extinguished and that my existence had been saved.

‘The story’, said Dawson with a nice turn of phrase, ‘was really about a girl who did not have the knack of existing.’ Or, as she put it with reference to herself, ‘One feeling that has haunted me all my life is that life, social life as we know it, is a kind of game with correct moves, correct remarks and replies, correct procedures. I don’t know the rules.’ In which case, like Josephine, you must make your own if you wish to survive.

The Ha-Ha
can be seen as a reticent Oxonian equivalent to Ken Kesey’s
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
, which was published a year later, and vastly popularised by the subsequent Oscar-winning film. Dawson’s novel was published in the wake of the radically reforming Mental Health Act of 1959 – a measure which gave the bulk of mental patients the same civil rights as patients in other hospitals with physical ailments. The aim was to destigmatise. Riding the wave of approval for this measure,
The Ha-Ha
won the UK’s premier fiction prize, the James Tait Black, in 1961 (the Booker did not yet exist). It was dramatised in 1967 by Richard Eyre, ran as a radio play, and was a title promoted by Virago Press in the mid-1980s. Dawson doubtless got as much gratification from the fact that
The Ha-Ha
was widely prescribed as recommended reading for mental-health workers.

She met her future husband, the Oxford philosophy don Michael Hinton, on the 1963 Aldermaston march protesting the British nuclear deterrent. It was the period of the Cuban missile crisis when the world expected to be incinerated with four minutes’ warning. On surviving this fate, the couple set up house in the village of Charlbury, on the outskirts of Oxford. Hinton’s academic field – ambiguity and disjunctiveness – may well have chimed with Dawson’s worldview, as expressed in her fiction. ‘The thing that obsesses me most’, she wrote, ‘and which I feel I shall never put into language, is the strangeness of life, its accidentalness.’ The Hintons had no children. Dawson wrote a handful of further novels, none of which enjoyed the success of her first. All have points of interest –
A Field of Scarlet Poppies
(1979), for example, ponders the failure of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Had it been worthwhile? Or was it as pointless as conscientious objection in the First World War? She never made her peace with Oxford, although she lived in its orbit for the rest of her life. Her last published book,
Judasland
(1989), is a satire on the unregenerate character of the university city and its insuperable patriarchy. It tells the story of a laundress in Sanctus Spiritus College who, like Josephine, isn’t going to take it anymore. The allusion in the title is to Hardy’s Jude Fawley – another of Oxford’s excluded.
Judasland
won the Fawcett prize, awarded by the feminist society devoted to ‘closing the gap between women and men’.

Dawson published no fiction in the last ten years of her life, although reportedly she was meditating a novel, revolving around her daily bus ride from Charlbury into
the city and the characters she encountered on the journey. Her friend Elizabeth Mitchell recalls a poignant last encounter: ‘She had been committed to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament from its early days. Two days before she died, one of her sisters found her old CND badge and brought it to her in the hospice. With it pinned to her night-dress, Jennifer Dawson said, “Now, I’m properly dressed.”’ Her husband died a few weeks later.

A blowtorch aimed straight at the collective groin of Man the Master.
Libby Purves

‘This Novel Changes Lives’ was the shoutline emblazoned across the front cover of the paperback edition of
The Women’s Room
(1977). There is a story behind the slogan, as Fay Weldon records: ‘One morning in 1977, the manuscript of
The Women’s Room
came through my door, with a request for a quote from her publisher. I sat riveted while I read. The phone rang. It was a friend complaining of the way her husband misused her – and he had. “You must read this book,” I said. “It will change your life.”’ The title was the best thing about the novel. The primary allusion was to Woolfian woman’s room of her own – but French did not want the writer’s solitude: leave that to Garbo. She wanted to be part of a movement, which is why ‘women’ was pluralised (and damn the problem with the possessive apostrophe) – and, of course, ‘Woman’s Room’ is one of the many American euphemisms for lavatory. It is the one room which men cannot, under any circumstances, enter, and where a woman can be alone with her vagina.

The novel has sold, one is told with that PR airy indifference to statistical accuracy, some 20 million copies. It is one of the two major
romans à thèse
produced after Betty Friedan’s excoriation of the feminine mystique in 1963, and the formation of the National Organization of Women. Erica Jong chose as her weapon in
Fear of Flying
(1973), the let-it-all-hang-out sexual explicitness of
Portnoy’s Complaint
. French took the full-blooded melodrama of
Valley of the Dolls
. For a man reading
The Women’s Room
at the time, it was like being whipped to death with discarded wire-framed brassières. French published this, her first novel, when she was closing on fifty. It tells the story of Mira Ward: an unhappy girl in the 1940s, a desperate
housewife in the 1950s (her husband Norm does the dirty on her), and a divorced and liberated ex-wife in the 1960s – having put herself through Harvard and discovered ‘the movement’. The novel’s other most quoted line is uttered by one of Mira’s friends after her daughter is gang-raped: ‘all men are rapists, and that’s all they are. They rape us with their eyes, their laws, and their codes.’ It is not, it should be noted, uttered by the heroine and certainly not – as French pointed out time and again – necessarily endorsed by the author, but none the less it is uttered.

Marilyn Edwards was born in Brooklyn, New York, from a distantly Polish immigrant background. Her family was blue-collar, barely getting by in the Depression. Largely by her own efforts, Marilyn did a degree in English and Philosophy at Hofstra College, graduating in 1951. While still a student, she married Robert French Jr and there were two children born shortly thereafter. ‘I saw my mother’s life,’ she said in a 2007 interview, adding ruefully, ‘and I ended up in the same trap.’ She drudged through a series of stultifying secretarial jobs to put her husband through law school and, part-time, did an MA herself at Hofstra. Her marriage was, she recalled, ‘absolutely horrible’, though it was the institution of marriage itself, as defined in the 1950s, which was principally to blame. It was not until 1967 that she escaped the marital trap, with divorce – nowadays, thanks to liberal pressure, easier than it had been for women like her mother. She won herself a place at Harvard to do a Ph.D. (on James Joyce – a version of her dissertation was published at the same time as
The Women’s Room
). She was on her way – out and up.