Men – and more men

VALERIE GROVE Elizabeth Jane Howard: A Dangerous Innocence by Artemis Cooper John Murray £25

Did Elizabeth Jane Howard need to appoint a biographer? In 2002 she published her own candid memoir,

Slipstream, boldly exposing her fallibility as a mother, her hapless vulnerability with lovers. Luckily, she chose Artemis Cooper, who takes the candour further, subjecting Howard to her piercing intuition under a cool objective gaze.

The Howards – mother a Diaghilev dancer, father a decorated soldier – made a handsome couple on the tennis court, the dance floor and at Cowes. The family timber business flourished; their life was charmed. Even in childhood, Jane (never Elizabeth) bestowed love with a devouring intensity – on her baby brother, her music teacher and her mother, who ‘could not understand Jane’s tendency to cling, her pleading eyes’.

Cooper instantly diagnoses emotional neediness and arrested maturity. Jane, aspiring actress, grew into a striking beauty with a patrician profile and notable cheekbones, but she was bruised in adolescence by her mother’s frosty disapproval, her father’s gropings, her lonely days at boarding school.

Almost the first men thrown her way by their doting mother, ‘K’, widow of Scott of the Antarctic, were the naval hero Peter Scott and his younger half-brother Wayland, whom Jane preferred, but it was Peter who proposed. It is astonishing, says Cooper, that Peter had survived his mother’s devotion – ‘I worshipped the two of them, father and son,’ she said – with his easy charm and common sense intact. K insisted that Jane produce an immediate son, ‘a Peterkinlet – no shirking.’ (‘If she ever hurts him,’ K wrote, ‘I will kill her.’)

Jane knew that at nineteen she was not ready for a child. Naturally the baby was a girl, consigned to Jane’s mother and the sterling Nanny Buss. When Jane bolted from Scott – the monstrous K safely dead – her femme fatale period began. Every man she met – brother-inlaw, agent, shrink – prostrated himself before her. (‘Need was inseparable from love for Jane, and she often confused the two.’) ‘Everyone loves you, and why wouldn’t they, poor things,’ wrote ex-husband Peter.

After just one dinner at L’etoile with the banker Michael Behrens, she gained a mistress’s perquisites: jewellery, weekends in Paris. (Behrens became Conrad Fleming in her novel The Long

View, 1956.) Jonathan Cape, before chasing her around the table, handed her a strong Martini: ‘Very good for ladies who are menstruating.’ The host at a summer holiday villa declared love. All these men were married, as they were in her novels, which contained ‘nothing but sex,’ sniffed her mother.

Never feeling quite respectable, always the mistress, became tiresome. But in one year, 1955, she was swept into ‘enraptured surrender’ over and over: ditched by the dreadful Arthur Koestler after another abortion, swept off to Paris by Romain Gary, taken to Spain by Laurie Lee, she began seeing ‘more of C Day Lewis than was wise’. How, Cooper asks, could someone who wrote with insight about people, get so unwisely entangled? As Martin Amis put it, her ‘penetrating sanity’ on the page became ‘not that clever’ off it. On she went, cutting a swathe: Cyril Connolly, George Weidenfeld, Ken Tynan (she disliked the spanking) – and then she fell for a rogue called Jim, husband no 2, later excised from records.

The coup de foudre for Kingsley Amis happened at a symposium on Sex in Literature at the Cheltenham Festival which she ran in 1963. Somehow she already foresaw that one day he would grit his teeth when she entered a room. But first, she salvaged Martin Amis’s education and saw him into Oxford, for which he was grateful.

Her last homes with Kingsley – the hospitable Lemmons at Hadley Wood and Gardnor House in Hampstead – were privately laden with misery, and excruciating to witness. She, always exhausted by domestic perfectionism; he, a bottle of Scotch a day man, preferring the company of men.

Writing the Cazalet saga with such conspicuous success was a compensation after she left Amis – when she had to watch the first wife, Hilly, a negligent housekeeper in Jane’s view, moving into her territory. In her last decades, at a lovely house in Suffolk which reflected her elegant style and gardening creativity, friends flocked. Yet her eyes still brimmed with piteous tears at the prospect of an evening alone; she depended on her therapist, later on group therapy. And however aware she was of self-deception in her fictional characters, she failed to identify a dangerous conman who schmoozed himself into her life and bed when she was 72. It is terrible to read of her buying frothy undies and mascara: no wonder she felt a fool after he was uncovered as a wife murderer who sailed blithely on to his next victim. She had admitted her humiliation in Slipstream: Cooper adds detail, plus a level-headed understanding, to this enthralling life story. And even a dash of humour: Jane told Cooper that sleeping with her last dog, Eddie, a lurcher, was ‘like sharing the bed with a set of golf clubs’. Hatchards price: £22.50