GOOD GOLLY MISS MOLLY, YOU HAD A BALL
Molly Keane wanted her life story to read like one of her hit novels
Molly Keane: A Life Sally Phipps Virago €24.99 ★★★★★
Celebrated for charting the demise of the AngloIrish gentry and the era of the Great House, Molly Keane wrote novels and plays as a young woman. As an elderly lady she enjoyed a remarkable renaissance and became a celebrity when after a 30-odd year silence, her novel Good Behaviour was published, turning her into a 1981 Booker Prize contender only to lose out to Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children.
Molly was born in 1904 to Agnes Nesta Higginson, a published writer from Antrim, and to Walter Skrine, the younger son of English nobility who kept a ranch in Canada. She grew up in Ballyrankin House outside Ferns, Co. Wexford.
The upheaval of the Easter Rising and the Black and Tans war when the family pile was torched caused her and her siblings to be sent to relatives in the North.
Molly rebelled against her parents’ strict Victorian values and ran with the hedonistic Anglo-Irish set of the 1930s. The tight-knit circle of upper-crust young men and women followed the same annual circuit of race meetings and hunt balls, riding to hounds during the day while indulging in illicit bedroom antics at night.
In order to keep herself in gowns and finance her passion for hunting on the country estates of east Cork and west Waterford, Molly began writing for Mills & Boon, stealing her nom de plume MJ Farrell from over the door of a public house in Lismore.
She wrote in secret for years for fear that discovery of her less-than-noble trade would spell social death.
Hers was a vanishing world where the trick was ‘to live grandly on a modest income’. The economic stagnation of the post-war years further eroded the ability of many supposedly grand families to supplement their meagre farming income in Ireland with business interests in the Empire.
While many families began to live in a smaller way, others packed up their bags entirely and retreated across the Irish Sea.
If the reader can’t feel too much remorse for the end of an upstairs-downstairs way of life – where, as one journalist acerbically put it, ‘it cost perhaps £2 a week to keep a horse and rather less to keep a groom’ – Molly, although a crushing snob in many ways, saw that her heady world of cocktails, tennis parties and dressing for dinner was doomed and she never flinched from recording the deceit, the nasty secrets and sheer hopelessness of her fin de siècle tribe.
This biography faithfully traces Keane’s long life – she died in 1996 at the age of 91 – but what distinguishes it from other accounts is its author: Molly’s oldest daughter, Sally Phipps, a journalist.
‘Make it as much like a novel as possible,’ said Molly. ‘I trust you completely. The only thing I’m afraid of is that you won’t be nasty enough.’ Perhaps Molly’s fears were justified: while this thoroughly compelling account of one of the Anglo-Irish’s leading chroniclers has the right amount of namedropping and insightful commentary, it is too dispassionate and fair-minded to resemble a novel and it is not nasty in the slightest. Phipps had a ringside seat at the major events of her mother’s adult life, from the sudden death of her dashing husband Bobbie Keane, a gentleman farmer and several years her junior, to her professional ups and downs.
Molly attached huge importance to her social life, to not ‘being a bore’, so her friendships with luminaries such as John Gielgud, Micheál Mac Liammóir and Peggy Ashcroft are described in detail. She seemed to know anyone who was anyone along the Blackwater valley, dining frequently with the Jameson distilling family and with Adele Astaire, sister of Fred and one time chatelaine of Lismore Castle.
Molly was forced to sell her beloved marital home Belleville in Cappoquin as
she couldn’t afford to maintain it when the royalties from her writing dried up.
She always turned her nose up at bungalows but moved into one, which she named Dysert, prettily situated on a cliffside in Ardmore, Co. Waterford. When her fortunes dipped further she let it out during the summer, moving in with old friends, trading her sparkling company for food and shelter.
Molly shines as an immensely resilient and hard-working woman, generous and bewitching with a huge gift for homemaking and cooking, two skills she may have developed in defiance of her mother’s more frugal habits.
Phipps, though, lays bare her mother’s flaws from her vicious tongue which cost her friendships and her unconventional love life where she had the unusual knack of taking married men as lovers while remaining on intimate terms with their wives.
Molly had a lonely childhood, she felt excluded by her parents’ fierce intimacy and their indulgence of their three sporting sons. It scarred her for life and she endured bouts of melancholia as well as bad temper whenever her overriding ‘need for demonstrative love’ was not satisfied.
Right to the end she maintained that she ‘was the unloved, unattractive child and I was often sick. My mother hated me and I hated her’.
But where Molly doesn’t hold back on her anger towards her mother, Sally is more subtle and arguably loyal about her relationship with her mother.
Mother-daughter relationships, as Molly’s best novels show, can be intense and loving but also competitive and fraught with expectation and anxiety.
There was discord between Molly and her daughters but the reasons are recounted with a matter-of-fact detachment and restraint. At one point while noting her mother’s gift for drawing callow young men out of their shells and building up their confidence, Sally muses that sons might have suited Molly better than daughters.
She also recalls how in her dying days, Molly held her hand and said: ‘You and I are such different cups of tea that I think I have sometimes been very nasty and unfair to you.’
Sally writes: ‘It was not easy for her to admit this and I was moved that she forced herself out of the mists she was embracing in order to say it.’
Their differences seemed to play out in polite scenes of barely repressed emotion rather than in stormy mother-daughter conflict.
Sally mentions that Molly bemoaned her daughters having ‘common’ friends from the middle rather than the upper classes, that she had no interest in modern ideas and disapproved of Sally’s approach to men. She was also dismissive of Sally’s ‘introversion and secrecy’.
For all that, she pays tribute to Molly’s devotion to her two daughters, particularly during times of crisis. She paints a picture of Molly nearly 80, laden with groceries and traipsing up the stairs of her daughter Virginia’s London flat to make her wholesome food while she recovered from cancer.
Sally’s balanced eyewitness accounts are a complete contrast to Molly’s wickedly funny and acidic prose style.
As Molly said, they are both entirely ‘different cups of tea’. Perhaps though they shared an important trait – a stubborn determination to do things their own way, no matter what the other thought.
‘The only thing I’m afraid of is that you won’t be nasty enough about me’