During their early years together Kingsley and Jane practised a curious ritual. Before dinner they would in turn read out to each other the results of their day’s labour. I always found this incomprehensible: after all, the prose is unrevised, raw, contingent; and besides fiction is there to be read, not listened to. I once rather snidely asked my father if he had yet regaled Jane with the penultimate paragraph of Jake’s Thing (1978). He looked furtive, and this is why:
Jake did a quick run-through of women in his mind, not of the ones he had known or dealt with in the past few months or years so much as all of them: their concern with the surface of things, with objects and appearances, with their surroundings and how they looked and sounded in them, with seeming to be better and to be right while getting everything wrong, their automatic assumption of the role of injured party in any clash of wills, their certainty that a view is more credible and useful for the fact that they hold it, their use of misunderstanding and misrepresentation as weapons of debate, their selective sensitivity to tones of voice, their unawareness of the difference in themselves between sincerity and insincerity, their interest in importance (together with noticeable inability to discriminate in that sphere), their fondness for general conversation and directionless discussion, their pre-emption of the major share of feeling, their exaggerated estimate of their own plausibility, their never listening and lots of other things like that, all according to him.
The blanket condemnation became outright misogyny in Stanley and the Women (1984). In that long sentence I can see glimmers of Jane; but I can see nothing of Hilly, whose presence in the house cured Kingsley of his aversion, and thereby rescued his artistic sense, which was in the end redoubtable. In 1986 he won the Booker Prize for his longest and most satisfying novel, The Old Devils.
After Jane separated herself from Kingsley, it never occurred to anyone that I should separate myself from Jane. But I naturally saw far less of her. She wanted more from me – more than I felt able to give. It was always that way. From the very start I sensed emanations of love from her. I was very grateful and very attached and very admiring. But your father’s ‘other woman’, I fear, is doomed to love her stepson without full requital. The blood tie to the blood mother is simply too potent and too deep.
With a secretive look Jane said to me in 1965, just after she and Kingsley got married, ‘I’m your wicked stepmother.’ And it was true: she was wicked in the sense of ‘exceptionally good’. In my last letter to her, written in December 2013, I saluted Jane for her artistic longevity (she had just published All Change, volume five of the Cazalet Chronicles, at the age of ninety); and I cited the example of the skilled historical yarner Herman Wouk, who had just published The Lawgiver at the age of ninety-seven. I hoped and more than half expected Jane to duplicate Wouk’s feat. But she died on January 2, 2014, barely a month after her younger brother Colin, an unsung hero of this saga (charming, witty, not very happily gay, universally adored, and one of the most sweet-natured people I have ever known), who lived with Jane before Kingsley and went on living with her through the lion’s share of the Kingsley years.
For reasons that no doubt go back to a dismal childhood (with a cold mother and an intrusively intimate father), Jane was always restless for affection; and at the same time she remained a calamitous chooser of men. Indeed, my father – by any standards a mixed blessing – was probably the pick of the bunch, standing out (there were other, briefer exceptions) from a ghastly galère of frauds, bullies, and rogues. One of Jane’s finest books was a collection of stories called Mr Wrong. So maybe in the end it is Colin – always known by everyone as Monkey – who will have to serve, and serve honourably, as the love of Elizabeth Jane Howard’s life.
Postscript
I spent that Christmas and New Year with my wife and younger daughters in Florida, where I heard of Jane’s death and wrote the first version of this personal obituary. On the plane back to New York I said to my wife, ‘I wonder if Jane answered my letter.’ And she had; the envelope, eerily, with her slightly shrunken but unmistakable hand, was waiting on the mat in Brooklyn (postmarked December 16). Inside it were two single-spaced typed pages. She included a resilient account of Colin’s funeral, a stoical (and amusing) catalogue of the sort of disabilities you’d expect as you enter your tenth decade, some kind remarks about my last novel, and news about her work in progress (she was a third of the way through). There was not the slightest hint that she felt herself to be fading or ailing. Indeed, she approved my suggestion that we resume the quite diligent correspondence we kept up during my years as a student, half a century ago.
Jane’s authorised biographer, Artemis Cooper (and at that stage hers was another work in progress), told me that Jane had a full and active Christmas (she was always a generous and ingenious buyer of presents), and duly answered all the letters lamenting her younger brother. With that done, her appetite began to fail, and her body seemed to be ‘shutting down’. Medical science has only recently recognised the condition – but we have all seen it at work. The spouse, the companion, the close relative goes, and often with terrifying speed the soulmate follows. With good reason did Saul Bellow entitle one of his later novels More Die of Heartbreak. Jane’s final morning came on January 2; and she ‘serenely’ ceased to be in the early afternoon.
Post-postscript
Telling a dream, we all know by now, impedes a novel
