LOVERS, LIARS – AND CRUELTY
That’s what novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard told her bed-hopping lover Kingsley Amis... as a tantalising new book reveals SHE was almost as insatiable as HIM
SHE was born with beauty, brains and social grace and men fell for her in droves. Yet celebrated novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, author of the bestselling Cazalet Chronicle, spent her life desperate for affection and, as an acclaimed new biography reveals, conducted romances and affairs with an extraordinary list of literary stars...
ELIZABETH Jane Howard was furious when the novelist Kingsley Amis was added to the panel for a Sunday Telegraph symposium on Sex In Literature that she had organised at the Cheltenham Literary Festival in 1962.Amis had written four novels, including his first and most celebrated, Lucky Jim. But at 40, he was still regarded as one of the Angry Young Men – the group of novelists and playwrights who scorned the Establishment.
Jane, as she was always known, telephoned the Telegraph’s assistant editor Peregrine Worsthorne to vent her anger, but he declined her request to revoke Amis’s invitation. She resolved to make the best of it and asked Amis and his wife Hilly to stay at the house she had taken in Cheltenham.
After the evening event in October and a late dinner, Jane and the Amises were driven to the house. It was after midnight and an exhausted Hilly immediately retired.
Amis said he would have a nightcap. Jane agreed to keep him company. The truth was that neither of them wanted the evening to end. ‘We talked and talked until 4am,’ she wrote, ‘about our work, our lives, our marriages and each other… when he kissed me, I felt as though I could fly.’
Amis did not remember it quite so rapturously. ‘I sort of threw a pass at Jane,’ he told a friend. ‘Which was sort of accepted.’ JANE thought it would be a grave mistake to fall in love with Amis, who was married with two teenage sons and a daughter, and about to move to Spain. She was married, too, to the broadcaster Jim DouglasHenry. An affair, she thought, would put her back in the mistress role she had so often endured – which not only made her miserable, but made writing impossible.
However, when Amis rang Jane soon after her return to London, her resolve evaporated instantly. They met in a bar near Leicester Square. ‘Before we even have a drink,’ Amis said, ‘I have to tell you something.’
He had booked a room in a nearby hotel. He knew he was pushing his luck and quite understood if she didn’t want to sleep with him. Some might regard this as presumptuous but, to Jane, the point was that he wanted her urgently: a reaction that made her feel so alive that she could never resist it.
Jane was once described as ‘a bottomless pit of neediness’. This was why she lived her life at such an emotional pitch, rushed headlong into things without considering the risks, and could not control her impulsive imagination. It made her the novelist she was but she wrote: ‘It took me a long time to grow up. I seemed destined to make the same mistakes again and again.’ Or, as she put it another time, she was ‘a tart for love’.
Jane was violently attracted to Amis and did not want to disappoint him. In bed, she pretended that sex with him was the best she’d ever had. He was also undoubtedly one of the funniest and most brilliant man she had ever met.
As for Amis, he was bowled over by Jane’s beauty and elegance, her intelligence, her sexual responsiveness and delight in everything he said. There was also a thoroughbred quality to her that was new to him; Jane had grown up in Notting Hill with a governess and a host of servants, but she assured him that she wasn’t as posh as he thought.
When their affair began, Amis had been married for 14 years.
He had met his wife, Hilary Bardwell, in 1946 while finishing his English degree at Oxford. He was 23 and she a 17-year-old art student: a pretty, unpretentious girl with a rebellious streak.
When they married in January 1948, ‘Hilly’ was already pregnant with their first child, Philip, and by the end of the year she was pregnant again with their second son, Martin.
Although Hilly never doubted Amis’s fondness for her, she was wounded by his unquenchable desire for other women. There were frequent rows, but he made no effort to change his ways.
When he was teaching at Swansea University, they moved in a rakish, bawdy circle of young dons, journalists and postgraduates. Hilly drank and smoked and flirted. Who can blame her for feeling that, if Amis was going to behave like that, she was going to have some fun too.
However, her son Martin feels that she was ‘a reluctant swinger, a swinger by default: her heart wasn’t in it’.
Everything changed with the publication of Lucky Jim in 1954. From then on Amis had a lot more money and fame.
He accepted a lectureship at Peterhouse, Cambridge. There were more trips to London, supposedly to see friends and editors, but also for parties and affairs.
Hilly and the children remained the bedrock of his life, but in 1956 he nearly lost them when Hilly fell in love with an irresponsible charmer. Amis saw him off with a blistering letter. By the end of 1962, a plan had evolved: they would move to Majorca for a year. Hilly was all for it. A quieter life with fewer temptations might begin to repair the cracks in their marriage.
Then came Cheltenham and the momentous meeting between Amis and Jane. Each was not just a lover but a rescuer, making the other feel better, brighter and stronger.
‘If I were living with you,’ Jane wrote on February 6, 1963, ‘we would stop drinking brandy and we would try and design life around you writing more.’
The letter ends: ‘Sorry I kissed you so much in the restaurant… I love you more than I have loved anyone else. Had to wait to be sure it was true. It is.’
Although Amis was always admiring (‘I love all of you, not just your beauty and brightness and tenderness and funniness,’ he wrote), Jane could not stop worrying that she might bore him.
At the same time, she was such a mass of new sensations that she wrote: ‘I’m not known to myself any more, so have nothing much to rely on in that respect. My whole body feels different: breasts so sharp with feeling it hurts to put on a brassiere. Perhaps people in love shouldn’t wear clothes?’
Amis had already begged her not to go on apologising. ‘I repeat that you didn’t come within two miles of boring or annoying me… everything you do is better than all right with me,’ he wrote.
Towards the end of March, they managed to escape for a few days together. Amis wrote: ‘Those three days were the most wonderful time I’ve ever had… I can’t describe how wonderful I found you. More than anything else I was moved by
you as a young bride – this is where love and sex meet: I was sexually excited by it in all possible ways but also felt so full of love I would have cried, if crying were possible while making love.’
Zachary Leader, Amis’s biographer, writes that his letters to Jane ‘are unlike any other letters of his I have seen. The emotional openness is striking, as is their happiness, optimism, gentleness, willingness to try new things and confidence.’
On April 24 Amis wrote: ‘Darling, take no notice of this if it makes you feel shy, but I thought it would be very lovely if when you let me in you were wearing less than you usually are. In fact as little as possible. In fact – well nobody can see you as you open the door, and I’ll ring 4 times as usual, and since I’ve asked you it won’t look “forward” on your part.’ He added: ‘I reproach myself rather for my insensitivity in not realising much sooner that you liked making love better when it was all gentle. I want you to know how supreme it is for me to make love to you and how utterly your pleasure transports me. Your joy is literally my joy. I always thought that was just a figure of speech, but it’s a solid fact. I’ve never been so close to anyone’s body before. You haven’t a square inch of coarse skin anywhere on you.’
Jane tried to keep their relationship secret, particularly at home, where her husband would still appear from time to time.
Amis, meanwhile, had no intention of leaving Hilly and the children, even after she found a letter from Jane in his pocket.
The rows became louder and more hurtful: Amis told Hilly that he would not give up Jane and announced he was taking her on a three-week holiday in Spain. At the same time he made it clear to Hilly that he still intended to move to Majorca with her and the children, from where he would make occasional forays to London.
Jane wrote of her anxieties: ‘The more I love you, and feel about you, the more I feel that all my disadvantages would annoy you, and the more difficult they are to manage.’
As an anxious person himself, Amis was sympathetic. Yet Jane’s fears were uncannily prescient. When she wrote this letter he was completely infatuated with her, yet within a few years he would be gritting his teeth every time she came into the room. IN July 1963, Amis’s marriage deteriorated still further. He and Hilly were at the Festival of Science Fiction Film in Trieste, where, after one drunken lunch, Hilly got out her lipstick, and on her sleeping husband’s back wrote, in mockery of his work in progress One Fat Englishman: ‘1 FAT ENGLISHMAN. I F*** ANYTHING’.
Later that month, Amis embarked on his ‘working’ holiday with Jane – he had promised to deliver his book to his publishers by mid-August.
Jane and Amis travelled to Sitges, an elegant seaside town south-west of Barcelona, and moved into a tiny flat. There, they worked for most of the morning. They ate lunch at a little restaurant nearby, before going back to the flat for leisurely sex, a siesta and a bit more work, and then as the light faded, strolling down to the waterfront for drinks and dinner.
With his book completed and their month-long holiday coming to an end, Amis knew he faced some hard decisions.
But when he returned to Cambridge on September 8, it was to a locked and empty house. Hilly had walked out of her marriage without even leaving a note. Amis felt shaken and desolate, but the decision had been made for him.
He took the next train back to London and Jane. They married in 1965. BY the mid-1970s, what had begun as a passionate affair had long since deteriorated into a bitter and acrimonious marriage. Amis was not the philanderer he had been, but he and Jane made love less and less – a development Jane, for whom a healthy sex life was the wellspring of a good relationship, found both humiliating and inexplicable.
Martin Amis said that by 1975, ‘[Jane] was telling me more about my father’s growing remissness in that area than I really wanted to know.’ He later observed their life together was built on ‘a massive foundation of resentment’.
In November 1980, Jane, who said she ‘now began to realise [her husband] not only didn’t love me but actually disliked me’, announced she was going to a health farm in Suffolk for ten days.
When she said goodbye, Amis was reading the paper and barely looked up to see her go.
On the day he expected her back, a letter arrived from her solicitor. It read: ‘This is to tell you I’m leaving… there isn’t the slightest hope of things getting any better. You are not going to stop drinking and I cannot live with the consequences.’
‘Not a word from the old bitch yet,’ Amis told the writer Brian Aldiss a month later. ‘By God she was hard to live with but living without her seems altogether pointless. I had no idea she meant so much to me.’ © Artemis Cooper, 2016
Elizabeth Jane Howard: A Dangerous Innocence, by Artemis Cooper, is published on September 22 by John Murray, priced £25. To get your copy for £18.75 (25 per cent discount) with free p&p, pre-order at www.mailbookshop.co.uk or call 0844 571 0640 until September 25, 2016.
Your pleasure transports me – your joy is also my joy