Collecting reviews from three decades has brought me face to face with several strangers who went by my name. Jane Austen was right when she wrote, 'Seven years ... are enough to change every pore of one's skin, and every feeling of one's mind.' I started my working life in publishing with only a vague sense of where I was going or what I wanted to do. This changed as I was launched into journalism and literary editing, where I felt I found my natural habitat and friends. I moved to the Sunday Times, and it turned into a battlefield. Finally I became a full-time writer, solitary and obsessive as most writers are.
The thread that has persisted through these separate lives has been reviewing. The first books I chose for myself were connected with women's history and domestic themes. I got the books mostly because no one else wanted them. Since then the sideline has moved closer to the centre. At the time my own first book appeared, in 1974, a publisher friend said with weary condescension, 'Not another book about the bluestockings?' He was a man, of course. Today both sexes are running publishing firms, and male historians are as interested as women in marriage, divorce and children, and in the interaction of public and private lives. Women's history has stopped being a sideline.
Looking up old work has meant thinking back over my career, and made me realize how inseparable work and personal experience have been. I was thirty-five - half way through life, we used to think - when I wrote the earliest review in this collection. What held me up for so long? And how did I ever start? The introductions to the reviews offer answers to these questions, and give some account of how a woman of my generation found herself embarked on a literary life.
I was twenty-one when I took my degree at Cambridge and found a room in London. It was a basement in the house of the artist Roger Hilton, in Shepherd's Bush, for which I paid £2 a week. My walls were hung with his abstract paintings; the sound of his wife Ruth's violin filtered down, and I babysat for their two small children. There was also a good deal of wild life. My kitchenette in the old coal hole was haunted by giant spiders, and when the cat gave birth to kittens in the back room a ferocious tom, their father we supposed, came in through the window and tore the little ones to shreds. But neither spiders nor murdering cats dented my happiness for long. I was in love with Nick, also just down from Cambridge, and he was living in a room round the corner, in a house belonging to another artist, Patrick Heron.
This was the summer of 1954. I had gone through three years reading English without much thought of the future. I was an innocent, dreamy, not to say dozy, and there was full employment. I had been writing poetry from the age of seven, and although some of my verses appeared in undergraduate magazines, and one poem in Karl Miller's Poetry from Cambridge, I did not connect this with the world of careers. I meant to find myself a serious job, but knew I did not want to be a teacher, a civil servant or anything in the theatre. I could not imagine writing fiction, and did not even think of journalism then, because newspapers seemed so masculine, and I had a low opinion of women's magazines.
My father pronounced that shorthand and typing were always useful to women, and offered to put me through a secretarial training course. I took it, and afterwards applied to the BBC: I was bilingual in French, with good secretarial skills, and a First, but the response was a short letter informing me 'that the competition for General Trainees is confined to men'. (I still have the letter.) I wrote to Time and Tide, was interviewed and turned down again, quite rightly, because it was obvious I had not read the magazine. Then my father mentioned me to someone he knew in publishing, and I found myself invited for an interview with an editor at Heinemann.
The Heinemann offices were at No. 99 Great Russell Street, a steep-staired Georgian house almost next door to the British Museum. Three flights up, through an outer office and I was in a very small room where a thin fair-haired man with a quizzical face just fitted behind his desk. His name was Roland Gant, and he would be my boss if I got the job. A few minutes into the interview a younger man, thick-set and wearing heavy glasses, came in without a word and put a piece of paper on Roland's desk. He was James Michie, the poet, and he had been in the outer office as I walked through. Later he told me he had been awarding me marks for my looks. Seven out of ten, he gave me, just enough for the job of secretary/editorial assistant, at £5.10S. a week. This was how things were done in 1954.
My desk was in the outer office, where sacks of manuscripts were dumped every day. Roland and James looked through them and decided who should read what. One of my tasks was to pack them up again for Mrs Tegan Harries, a reader who never appeared in person. From her rasping telephone voice I imagined her as a county lady down on her luck, cigarette dangling over the typewriter as she tapped out her reports in triplicate. The other reader was Moira Lynd, who did come in, from Hampstead, and took books away with her. She was a charming woman, combining political opinions of the extreme left with a good nose for a best-seller. She had refused to learn to type for fear of being given the sort of work I was expected to do, and she wrote out her reports by hand in the office on Wednesdays. Each line sloped more sharply as her pen travelled down the page, so that there was always a large gap in the bottom right-hand corner. Some of the novels that came in were still hand-written too. They were not viewed with favour, but we read them.
I did type letters, but very few, and I can remember only one occasion when Roland dictated to me in French to test my foreign shorthand skills. My impression was that it was more of an ordeal for him than for me. He was a sweet-natured man, a writer and a book lover, and he saw that I liked reading better than typing. My first Reading Room ticket at the British Museum was arranged by him; in this way he was responsible for a great deal of happiness in my life.
It was a cheerful office. One of my jobs was forwarding mail to authors. Roland had been in intelligence during the war, and when he noticed an elaborately formal letter addressed to Graham Greene he said, 'Let's steam it open.' So we did, with the office kettle. The letter was offering Greene a knighthood. Two weeks later an official rang to ask if all letters to Greene had been forwarded, because he had received no answer to an important one. They had indeed, I answered firmly. He said he would post a duplicate in any case. Later I found the original on one of the filing cabinets; and later still we knew that Greene had refused the knighthood, and we thought all the better of him.
Soon I was helping out with reading and reporting on novels. I remember Moira recommending the first volume of Anthony Burgess's Malayan trilogy, and everyone enthusing about Dodie Smith's Hundred and One Dalmatians. My reports were neatly typed, but I made no discoveries. Wanting to prove I was not a blinkered highbrow, I wrote a favourable report on a steamy love story about a concert pianist which I thought might sell; Moira damned it, and she was right. Editorial jobs came my way too. I was asked to work on the Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence. I sent the chairman, A. S. Frere, a note asking if I should restore the word 'fuck' where earlier editions had printed a dash. I was told he showed my memo round, amused by such brazen behaviour in a young female employee, but I never met him.
In September 1955 Nick and I married. He was now working for the Daily Express. We found a two-room flat on Primrose Hill and I spent a week's honeymoon in his aunt's cottage in Suffolk. Soon I was pregnant; we planned to have six children. I worked through most of my pregnancy, and translated a book in the evenings to improve our finances. Translating and nausea have gone together in my mind ever since, because I translated two more books during my next two pregnancies. There was no maternity leave. But I was invited to return to Heinemann. 'Only you'll have more children, I suppose,' said the director, who spoke to me gloomily, and I agreed that I would.
My second daughter was born less than eighteen months after my first, and by then I was working at home as a reader. Nick's career as a journalist was going well, and Lord Beaverbrook sent him to New York. He instructed him to go alone, taking the view that a wife and children were an encumbrance to a young reporter, but Nick insisted on my joining him with Josephine and Susanna. He flew out, I followed with the babies on a listing French liner. The next year was the only one of my adult life in which I have not worked. I saw little enough of Nick, but I was happily absorbed in the children.
We arrived back in 1959. London was preparing to swing. I was pregnant again, and at once found work reading for several publishers. My career, such as it was, took second place to the demands of husband and children. I no longer wrote poetry, and it still did not occur to me to try my hand at journalism. But one day Katharine Whitehorn, who had been at my college just before me and whose column in the Observermade her one of the most admired journalists of the time, held out a friendly hand and asked me to write a couple of pieces for the Observer. I was surprised - no one had invented the idea of an old girls' network then - and I'm still grateful. All I remember of the articles is that one was about baby clothes; perhaps they both were. I managed to irritate older women in the family when my confident pronouncements, which seemed a good thing at the time. Katharine then got me a column in a magazine called the Motor. I was 'Woman at the Wheel', and wrote a monthly piece on topics such as how to keep children amused in the car, how to avoid creasing your evening dress when driving to a dance (you sit on tissue paper) and so on. Since I could barely drive at the time, I didn't last very long on the Motor. My next patron was a male Cambridge contemporary, Ronald Bryden, who offered me children's books to review for the Spectator. My daughters were precocious readers, and they appreciated them even more than I did. In one fat batch of books came Ted Hughes's Meet My Folks!:they loved the poems, I declared it a classic.
By the time I was twenty-eight I had had four children. The work I was doing was precious to me because it gave me something to exercise my mind while allowing me to stay at home. You can breastfeed and read at the same time, and write reports and reviews when the children are asleep. But it was the lower end of Grub Street. What changed things for me was disaster and sorrow. My third child, a boy, was born with many things wrong. He never came home from hospital, but died when he was a month old. I wrote something about that experience, and began to think I might write more. I also determined to have another baby at once, and my third daughter, Emily, was born on her missing brother's first birthday. But as that sorrow passed, another came. Nick - my charming and successful husband - became a bolter. He fell for the office vamp, and that started him on a series of affairs. I learnt not to be surprised if he did not come home at night. One day he would insist that our marriage had been a mistake, and that a divorce would be the best solution. A few weeks later he would change his mind, bombard me with flowers, rings and letters insisting that he was really happy in the marriage, and wanted more children. For a while all would be well, until another irresistible girl appeared. So it went on. Looking at an old diary reminds me what a heap of dejection I let myself be reduced to.
A friend's mother said to me, 'You didn't go to Cambridge to spend your life crying. Find yourself proper work.' A tough woman, she did not think reading for publishers was proper work. Her husband was a BBC executive, and an interview was arranged. Before I went, she warned me, 'Don't mentionthe fact that you have children when you go for the interview. Pretend you haven't any, or you won't even be considered for the job.'
In fact the first job I was offered outside publishing was on the Evening Standard. Charles Wintour took a risk in giving it me, and it was a crucial step, that move from the sedate world of the reader into the alarms and excursions of newspaper life. This was in October 1967. Suddenly I was doing things I had never imagined I could do, talking to politicians on the telephone from the deafening din of the newsroom, running after Jennifer Jenkins round Ladbroke Square for a comment, scribbling copy in a taxi and dictating it from a call box. Routine to journalists, frightening for a beginner, but when I realized I could do it, just about, I almost began to enjoy it. I stopped being a heap of misery, and found a life and friends of my own. With this things changed between Nick and me; but our marriage remained precarious.
I was now reviewing novels for Ian Hamilton at The Times Literary Supplement and for the Observer, where Terence Kilmartin became my mentor and friend. His touch was light, his speech hesitant. 'Oh, and by the way ...' he would start, and pause. You waited happily, pleased to be asked to write anything at all for him. I began with shorter notices, my highest ambition to review novels. That seems unbelievable now, since reviewing novels in batches is the worst paid and least rewarding critical job there is. Still, it was more bearable doing it for Terry than for anyone else. He teased me and criticized my work, and sometimes my behaviour, without ever giving offence. He was never solemn, but he believed that literary pages have an educational aspect, and that the odd difficult word that sends readers to the dictionary is part of the process. He'd grown up in Ireland, gone to be a tutor in a French family in his teens, acquiring perfect French and a wide knowledge and appreciation of literature, music and painting in the process. He was in the Special Operations Executive during the war; at the end of his life he was translating Proust. Brave and loyal, he remains for me the model of a literary editor and a much missed friend.
About this time another friend from Cambridge, Julian Jebb, then working for the BBC, invited me to take part in a books quiz programme on television. He used some celebrated figures - Cyril Connolly, Lord David Cecil, Mary McCarthy - alongside unknowns like me. I was in several programmes, and my confidence grew. When the job of assistant to the literary editor of the New Statesman, Anthony Thwaite, came up, I put in for it and was appointed.
Three days a week at Great Turnstile, between Holborn and Lincoln's Inn Fields, seemed ideal. My daughters were at school, and I had four days at home. This was just as well, because even as I was due to start, in April 1968, Nick made one of his more spectacular bolts, disappearing abroad for several months with a new love. But also that summer, Anthony Thwaite went on holiday, leaving me in sole charge of the back half of the Statesman for four whole weeks. It was the most generous gift he could have given me. For a month I had a headache, and for a month I was the happiest person in the world. My pages, my writers, my decisions.
The Statesman, like Heinemann, was lodged in tall, narrow premises, with the back half of the paper - books and arts - at the top. Critics and book reviewers came at their various speeds up the stone stairs to the big room in which the presiding genius was Melaan Bunting, a secretary of the old kind, meaning she could well have run the back half of the paper herself. She sat surrounded by reference books and poetry collections, she knew the quirks of all the contributors, she could sub copy and had an eagle eye for a literal. We laughed a lot together. Her parents were Australian - English-born mother, Chinese-born father - and her son was John Williams, the guitarist. I've never known anyone quite like Melaan, and I admired her greatly, and mourned her when she died too young of emphysema.
For the first time I began to review books I selected for myself - this is when the pieces collected in this volume start. The Journals of Claire Clairmont, published in 1968 in the American scholar Marion Kingston Stocking's beautiful edition, sparked my interest in the Shelley circle, which had been off limits at Cambridge. Ida Baker's memoir of Katherine Mansfield started me thinking about that extraordinary life which I was later to write, and make into a play. I picked out volumes of Virginia Woolf's letters, and feminist books by Mary Ellman and Eva Figes. There were Byron's letters, and lives of Dorothy Parker, Zelda Fitzgerald, Horatia Nelson. I read, I wrote, I subbed. One afternoon, working through a deep pile of poems submitted to us, I came on some so good I burst into Anthony's office saying, 'Here's a real poet!' They were Douglas Dunn's, and became his Terry Street.I learnt from the Statesman's regular contributors. V. S. Pritchett's copy, typed by his wife Dorothy, then worked over again by him in minute inky scratches, rendered up, when you'd struggled with it half the afternoon, language that seemed as natural as breathing, yet always surprising too. Then there was David Cairns on music, Charles Fox on jazz and Philip French on theatre, all passionate for their subjects. Our art critic, Robert Melville, first made me look properly at Bonnard and Balthus. He was rumoured to have Picassos stacked up in his flat in Gower Street Mews, although I never saw them; and he was a gentle and humorous presence in the office. One day a contributor came in with his copy, blustering, 'Not a single word is to be cut or changed.' Robert, the old pro, sitting quietly by with his impeccable script in his hand, murmured, 'You can change anything you like in my copy, Claire.'
It was a busy, complicated time. In 1969 Nick again decided he wanted to live with me and the children, and, although I was doubtful about the project, I agreed. I had kept a dream of family life. We started again. There were still times when we delighted one another. We decided we would have another child. Nick was now on the Sunday Times, and away a great deal on foreign assignments. In effect, I ran the house and the family, while he pursued his brave and dazzling career; he was a skilful and brilliant journalist, winning awards and admired by his peers.
Dick Crossman became editor of the NS in June 1970. He said I could have maternity leave - my baby was due in September - and come back when it felt right. James Fenton took over as assistant literary editor, and the plan was that I would go on writing for the paper during my leave. My son Tom was born in August, and found to have spina bifida. It meant that he would be paralysed from the chest down, and suffer many other problems. He might need a valve in his head to combat hydrocephalus. For months - well, for years - there were hospital visits, consultations, decisions to be made; my diary is full of notes about his progress. He became a beautiful, lively baby with a large head, who 'crawled' by pulling himself around on his arms. I fell in love with my child, as you do, and knew I could not go back to work yet.
I was still writing for the Statesman, and in May 1971 I produced an article in a series we called 'Reappraisal', about Mary Wollstonecraft's love letters, which had bowled me over when I came across them in the London Library. The day after the piece appeared I had letters from several publishers and literary agents, urging me to write a biography of Wollstonecraft. Nick, who had just published a book himself, was generous and helpful, telling me I had to decide whether I would return to the Statesman job - Crossman still kept the possibility open for me - or try to write a book. He took paper and pencil and made a list of pros and cons. We discussed them, then he said, 'I think you should write the book.' I agreed, and Deborah Rogers became my agent. She asked me to prepare a synopsis, which I managed over the next two months. I found a young American woman as a part-time helper with Tom, and made forays to the British Library, the Bodleian and the GLC archives, and a quick visit to the archives in Paris; but mostly I worked at home, using the resources of the London Library, with Tom beside me in his basket.
In the summer of 1972 Theresa McGinley came from Shropshire to be Tom's Nanny, and quickly seemed more like a fourth daughter in the family. I worked through that year and most of the next and finished writing the book in August 1973, just before Tom's third birthday. In September we all went to Brittany for a seaside holiday. Tom had a red trolley in which he wheeled himself about, our hotel was on the beach, Nick sailed, the sun shone and we swam and ate enormous French dinners, platters of prawns, steaks, salads, fruit, ice-cream. One day we had a picnic inland; we found a secluded meadow, and in the heat we all stripped off our tops. I have a vivid memory of thinking what an idyll it was, Nick with his little son, surrounded by bare-breasted wife, nanny and three lovely daughters.
A month later, Nick was killed by a heat-guided Syrian missile on the Golan Heights, where he was reporting on the Yom Kippur War. He was not quite forty-two. For his children and his parents the loss was irreparable. For his many friends and contemporaries it was a black moment, made worse when our fellow journalist Francis Hope died very soon afterwards in an air crash. Two of the brightest lights of our generation had been put out, reminding us all of our mortality. I grieved for Nick and still mourn his terrible death. I wish he were alive now, fulfilling his promise, lighting up the lives of so many who loved him. I should like him as a friend, even though our marriage, begun with such expectations, had gone so wrong. But if it hadn't, I might not have been pushed into finding the work I enjoyed; and without his encouragement I might not have written my first book.
The pieces on the next few pages are all taken from the period after I joined the New Statesman in 1968.