The process also had its intimacies. One day, early on, she presented me with a reading list: Austen, Dickens, Scott Fitzgerald, Waugh, Greene, Murdoch, Golding, Spark. I began, leerily, with Pride and Prejudice. After an hour or so I went and knocked on Jane’s study door. ‘Ah Mart,’ she said, taking off her glasses and leaning back from her desk. I said, ‘Jane, I’ve got to know. Does Elizabeth marry Mr Darcy?’ Jane hesitated, looking stern, and I expected her to say, ‘Well you’ll have to finish it and find out.’ But she tenderly relented and said, ‘Yes’ (and in addition she put my troubled mind at rest about Jane Bennet and Mr Bingley). Long afterwards we agreed that this was the simple secret of Austen’s narrative force, and of the reader’s abnormally keen desire for the happy ending: she slowly unites heroes and heroines who are literally made for each other, and made with all her intelligence and insight and art.
In the early years at least, Kingsley and Jane seemed made for each other. It was an unusual and unusually stimulating ménage: two passionately dedicated novelists who were also passionately in love. Their approach to the daily business of writing formed a clear contrast, one from which I derived a tentative theory about the difference between male and female fiction. Kingsley was a grinder; no matter how he was feeling (sickly, clogged, loth – or plain hungover, if you prefer), he trudged off to his desk after breakfast; there was a half-hour lunchbreak, and that was that until it was time for evening drinks. Jane was far more spasmodic and compulsive. She would wander from room to room, she would do some cooking or some gardening, and plenty of smoking as she stared out of the sitting-room window with arms folded and an air of anxious preoccupation. Then she would suddenly hasten to her study, and you’d hear the clatter of her typewriter keys. Quite soon she would shyly emerge, having written more in an hour than my father would write in a day.
The great critic Northrop Frye, in a discussion of Milton’s elegy ‘Lycidas’, made the distinction between real sincerity and literary sincerity. When told of the death of a friend, poets can burst into tears; but they cannot burst into song. I would very cautiously suggest that there is more ‘song’ in women’s fiction – more real sincerity, and less tradition-haunted contrivance. This is certainly true of Elizabeth Jane Howard. She was an instinctivist, with a freakishly metaphorical eye and a sure ear for rhythmically fast-moving prose. Kingsley once ‘corrected’ one of Jane’s short stories, regularising her grammar. All his changes were technically sound; and all of them, in my view, were marked disimprovements (and later on I privately said so).
Later on, because by this time mutual hostility was clearly building; and an attentive reader of Kingsley’s novel, Girl, 20 (1971), could feel pretty sure that all hope was already lost. At the outset, one of the qualities that attracted my father to Jane was her well-travelled (and twice-married) worldliness, her confident social presence – her class, in a word. England in the sixties and seventies was stratified to an extent that now seems barely credible; and it is naive to expect artists or intellectuals to be immune, in the living of their lives, to the stock responses, the emotional clichés, of their time.
The daughter of a prosperous timber merchant, Jane was educated by governesses and grew up in a large house full of servants in Notting Hill. The son of a clerk at a mustard manufacturers, Kingsley was a South London scholarship boy and the first Amis to attend university (he was also a card-carrying Communist until the ridiculously advanced age of thirty-five). That gulf in status was part of the attraction, on both sides; there is bathos as well as pathos in the fact that in the end it proved unbridgeable.
Kingsley would later write that many marriages adhere to a familiar pattern: the wife regards the husband as slightly uncouth and ill-bred, and the husband regards the wife as slightly over-refined and stuck-up. And it was as if Kingsley set himself the task of broadening that divide.
To take a relatively trivial example (while remembering that marriages are measured by relative trivialities), among her other accomplishments Jane was a culinary expert who expended a lot of time and trouble in the kitchen; Kingsley did not go so far as to smother her soufflés with HP Sauce, but with increasing frequency he reached for the pickles, the chutneys, and the jams, muttering that he had to make this or that venison terrine or smoked-fish mousse ‘taste of something’. In a well-meaning marriage the principals soon identify each other’s irritabilities and seek to appease them. Jane and especially Kingsley did the opposite. As he got coarser, she could not but seem snootier. The antagonisms proliferated and ramified; it became a cold civil war.
Jane was a self-confessed ‘bolter’. Maybe, in her two earlier marriages. But no one was even mildly surprised when, in 1980, she did a medium-paced runner on Kingsley. Nicolas called me and said, ‘Mart. It’s happened’; and I knew in a heartbeat what he meant. Her disappearance seemed punitive, and certainly gave rise to great complication, due to my father’s lavish array of phobias (he couldn’t drive, he couldn’t fly, and he couldn’t be alone after dark). This necessitated a system of ‘Dadsitting’ by his three children – until we hit upon an unlikely arrangement involving my mother and her third husband, which to everyone’s consternation lasted till Kingsley’s death in 1995. A man who abandons his first wife and is then himself abandoned by her successor loses everything: he becomes an amatory zero. But as soon as Kingsley was reunited with Hilly (though only platonically and prudentially) he stopped ‘feeling cut-up about Jane’. And thereafter, it still pains me to report, he never had a good word to say for
