The real-life SEX on the camomile LAWN
Mary Wesley’s erotically charged affair with a married man is laid bare in a collection of racy letters
DARLING POL: THE LETTERS OF MARY WESLEY AND ERIC SIEPMANN, 1944-1967 edited by Patrick Marnham (Harvill Secker £20)
WHeN Mary Wesley shot to fame as a bestselling novelist in 1983 at the late age of 71, some were shocked that a septuagenarian could dare to write colourful sex scenes and have her characters use the f-word — and equally shocked that she dared to describe couples in their 70s enjoying sex.
reading this revealing collection of love letters between her and her wartime lover eric Siepmann, you can see where some of her heightened vocabulary came from.
Would she have written (in the Camomile Lawn) ‘In her mind she saw herself and Max making love under a blue sky surrounded by golden daffodils, ecstasy in the middle of war…’ if she had not experienced illicit ecstasy with eric on the night after they met at the ritz in 1944?
Would she have dared to use all that vocabulary of eroticism and love if eric had not got her used to it in his constant flow of letters that oozed desire?
‘Your photographs console and torment me…your eyes at two-inch range when they smile and when they don’t…’ ‘I long to hold you by the hip bones…’
‘I would like to do things to you that would surprise the military censor and even you…’ (And those are some of the less graphic ones.)
She responded, ‘My love, I felt numb for an hour before you left and in violent pain the instant I left you at the station’ and ‘Physical love and missing sets in later than the mental, which begins even before you have left’.
the two of them recklessly broke taboos, and 40 years later the reckless taboo-breaking habit would work its way into Wesley’s novels.
In that first heady week of 1944 they actually made love not in a daffodil field but at the De Vere Hotel overlooking Kensington Gardens. the ecstasy was clearly unlike anything either of them had ever known — and they were both married to other people at the time.
Mary was married to Baron Swinfen, with whom she had one son, roger. A wartime affair with a Viennese emigre professor had given her another son, toby, whom Baron Swinfen was graciously bringing up as his own. Swinfen had agreed to a divorce as the marriage had broken down.
Mary’s own relations were horrified by her brazen behaviour. When she saw them at a family wedding shortly after she and eric started their affair, she wrote to eric: ‘So many people went out of their way to be pleasant to me that I realised just how greatly in family disgrace I am.’
eric, nine years older than Mary, was unhappily married to Phyllis Morris who had married him solely in order to secure the widow’s pension that would be hers if he was killed in the Middle east with the royal Marines.
Her plan went wrong when eric wasn’t killed. As soon as she got wind of his affair with Mary, Phyllis became a raving, jealous madwoman, making it her business to wreck eric’s career.
She started a campaign of stalking and persecution. She stormed into the newspaper offices where eric worked, telling his colleagues that she was in need of money and if she didn’t get it she would create a scandal.
When eric and Mary were staying at a hotel on Dartmoor, Phyllis wrote to a random hotel guest saying: ‘the woman posing as Mrs Siepmann is not married to Mr Siepmann’, and that Mr Siepmann
was ‘a violent, adulterous, alcoholic, wife-beating child-molester’. She tapped on the hotel windows denouncing the proprietor, Mr Hughes, for running a hotel ‘being used for illegal purposes’.
It sounds quite funny — in their love letters Eric and Mary refer to Phyllis simply as ‘the madwoman’ — but actually the strain almost gave Eric a nervous breakdown, and he was sacked from three different postwar journalistic jobs because Phyllis’s mad and aggressive intrusions caused such trouble and raised doubts about him in the editors’ minds.
It took until 1951 for divorce to be granted on grounds of cruelty — Phyllis’s cruelty, not Eric’s. At last, in 1952, Eric and Mary married. ‘Mrs Siepmann’ became the genuine article.
If you’re hoping to fall in love with Eric while reading these letters, you might be disappointed.
At first he comes across as glamorous and attractive, writing ardently to Mary from Paris where he’s working for the Psychological Warfare Unit, asking her which kind of scent she’d like him to bring back for her. (‘Bourjois Soir de Paris’ is her choice.) ‘My past has been a succession of first chapters,’ he writes to her. ‘I want you to be an epic.’
But as the correspondence goes on into the Fifties and Sixties, Eric becomes an increasingly pathetic figure. Not only is he sacked from two jobs thanks to Phyllis’s crazed behaviour, he also loses two jobs through his own incompetence.
Working as a foreign correspondent in Berlin, he fails to report in time on both a major German election and the lifting of the Berlin blockade. Then, in Damascus working for another paper, he drinks whisky with pills and makes an indiscreet remark in the British Embassy, so he’s sacked again.
He’s always broke. His main aim is to write a bestselling novel, and he spends whole summers away from Mary. He writes to her: ‘I really believe that I shall be better as a lover, husband and companion when I have achieved a little belated recognition.’
That recognition clearly isn’t going to come. Eric does manage to get a book published ‘to mixed reviews’, but he keeps abandoning his novels half-way, and the situation becomes increasingly bleak and hopeless.
He spends the whole lonely summer of 1957 in a boarding house in London, trying and failing to get on with his novel. ‘I’m going for a trot round the pond while they make my bed,’ he writes — and that glimpse sums up the dismalness. ‘I sit in Clapham, in total obscurity,’ and later, ‘All my books are written, except for the prose.’
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begin to wonder what on earth Mary sees in him. He’s no good at all as a breadwinner and his libido seems to plummet along with his self-esteem.
But Mary remains devoted to him. oddly, considering all the living-insin they’ve enjoyed, they both convert to Catholicism, and seem to take delight in going to confession.
Eric appears to find all this Catholicism lark quite sexy: ‘ You must be delectably brown,’ he writes to her from Clapham while she’s enjoying a scorching summer on Dartmoor, ‘so prepare yourself for mortal sin.’
Mary, by contrast to Eric, comes across as increasingly impressive and resourceful. In the tumbledown cottage they lease on Dartmoor, she starts a small residential language school for French, German and Swiss teenagers, and writes to Eric (who’s in London, not progressing with his hopeless novel) describing the cooking, the washing-up and the antics of her paying guests. It’s Mary who keeps everything going.
We now know that this resourcefulness would come into play again, years later, when Mary pulled herself out of deep depression after Eric’s death by imagining and writing her way out of despair.
She went on to write ten bestsellers in quick succession, selling 3 million copies of her books.
In the year up to her death in 2002, she told her whole racy life story to her biographer Patrick Marnham, on condition he wait till after her death to publish it.
She also handed him the two shoeboxes of letters that comprise this highly readable volume.