Edited By Patrick Marnham Harvill Secker, £ 20
really am… I want you badly and I believe in you.” She was never unfaithful again, despite no shortage of temptations. “To be unfaithful would spite my face. And faith.”
The next few months set the pattern for their relationship, sizeable chunks of which would be spent apart. While Mary waited for him on her Cornish clifftop “in a state of violent impatience”, Siepmann in France slipped back into his former habits: a repeated narrative of easy entrées into goodish jobs, thanks to his Winchester and Oxford connections, followed by sharpish exits, due to what his eldest brother described as “your reputation for bringing calamity with you”.
Siepmann’s behaviour mirrored the mood that he found in post- war Toulouse — “self- conscious, touchy, aggressive”. Quite soon he was reporting to Mary about an “atmosphere trouble” around him. “I am accused of antagonising Frenchmen, breach of confidence, drinking too much and even bad debts.” Not long afterwards, the Royal Marines dispensed with his services.
The same thing happened at Portals, a company making banknotes, where he worked as the foreign sales representative — until one night in Damascus in 1954, after drinking too much, he ventilated his opinions on the Middle East; and then again, three years later, at theTimes, where he briefly subbed on the foreign desk ( under my much younger father, another Old Wykehamist, who, interestingly, does not recall him). “I cannot pipe down,” he admitted to Mary after a “brisk exchange” in the Times canteen. “I tease these idiots.”
If he lost several plum jobs through his own enterprise, he was let go from two more — at
Sunday Times and Observer — because of Phyllis, who refused to divorce him. Driven to “malice and hatred” when Mary changed her name by deed poll to Mrs Siepmann, Phyllis conducted an extraordinarily determined seven- year campaign of persecution and stalking. She turned up at his respective offices to advise Siepmann’s employers that he was “a violent, adulterous, alcoholic, wife- beating child molester” and claiming that “no little boy in Cairo had been safe there during the war”. She tracked him to the Chagford hotel where he was trying to write a novel, biting the hotel owner in the leg, and once hitting Mary over the head with an umbrella. Another time, Mary told me, Phyllis broke into their rented home.
“What do you want to give him?” Mary asked her.
“Absolute hell.”
By the time Siepmann gained his divorce, in July 1952, he was ground down by insomnia, colitis, poverty and despair. He married Mary nine months later.
A friend of hers for almost 20 years, I was intensely curious to learn more about a man she always spoke of with such tender fondness. Hag- ridden by what he acknowledged, finally, to be an illness and not a symptom of his genius — “I am, of course, mentally diseased” — Siepmann comes across as an irresponsible hummingbird, abandoning manuscripts at the same peremptory and unsettling rate as his lack of income forced the Siepmanns to leave one nesthome after another. Instead, Mary is the revelation. Vivacious, quick and independent minded, with the courage and allure of a natural radical, her letters are shot through with life, humour and generosity.
When Eric died, “I was cleaved in half like a carcass at the butcher,” she told me. “We were part of each other.” To fill in what he had left behind, she returned to the craft they had picked at in their 26 years together — her earliest words in print were those she penned under his name for the TLS. I now understand her laugh when she said how swiftly she found out that “writing is much easier to control than a husband”.
By arrangement with the Spectator