The Long View

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Throughout the 1950s Howard lived apart from her daughter. Nicola, now Nicola Starks, a jewellery designer, says she never objected to this arrangement: "She was just a very beautiful stranger who would visit from time to time." Amis had been an extraordinarily vigorous and inventive adulterer for most of his marriage. Hilly had retaliated with affairs of her own. But they had three children and were planning to spend a year in Majorca, close to Robert Graves. One of his secret pleasures was the loading of social dice against himself. He did not seem for one moment to consider the efforts made by kind or sensitive people to even things up: or if such notions ever occurred to him, he would have observed them with detached amusement, and reloaded more dice. Howard's father was Major David Liddon Howard MC (1896–1958), a timber merchant who followed the work of his own father, Alexander Liddon Howard (1863-1946). [ citation needed] Her mother was Katharine Margaret ('Kit') Somervell (1895–1975), a dancer with Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes and daughter of composer Sir Arthur Somervell. [2] [3] (Howard's brother, Colin, lived with her and her third husband, Kingsley Amis, for 17 years.) [4] Mostly educated at home, Howard briefly attended Francis Holland School before attending domestic-science college at Ebury Street and secretarial college in central London. [3] Career [ edit ] Adams, Matthew (3–4 June 2017). "Talent and torment". The Sydney Morning Herald . Retrieved 4 September 2017.

She put together a panel on sex and literature with Joseph Heller, Carson McCullers and the French novelist Romain Gary. Other organisers added Kingsley Amis, whom she accepted after fierce protest. He came down with his wife, Hilly, who went early to bed, and he sat up talking and drinking with Howard, at first as a social duty, until four in the morning. By the winter theirs was an established liaison: Tom Maschler, the publisher, lent them his house. Martin Amis, in Experience, described how his childhood innocence ended when he was told by his Welsh nanny, "Your father's got a fancy woman up in London". No doubt the best conversations are those that never quite occur. I sensed that we both lived in hope, and had frequently lived on it. I always felt there was something I should ask her, or something she meant to ask me. The morning after she died, I was one interviewee among many, talking about her on the radio. I was working in Stratford-on-Avon, so used the RSC’s studio. It was a last-minute, short-notice arrangement and I had only just learned of her death, so I may not have been eloquent. But I saw her face very clearly as I spoke. She had acted in Stratford as a girl, and she would have liked what the day offered: the dark wintry river, the swans gliding by, and behind rain-streaked windows, new dramas in formation: human shadows, shuffling and whispering in the dimness, hoping – by varying and repeating their errors – to edge closer to getting it right. In Jane’s novels, the timid lose their scripts, the bold forget their lines, but a performance, somehow, is scrambled together; heads high, hearts sinking, her characters head out into the dazzle of circumstance. Every phrase is improvised and every breath a risk. The play concerns the pursuit of happiness, the pursuit of love. Standing ovations await the brave. The marriage looked as if it would survive. Amis felt entitled to spend three weeks with Howard in Spain before the family moved. When the couple returned, he was astonished to discover that his family house in Cambridge was deserted. Hilly had taken the children to Majorca without him. He moved in with Howard and they were married in 1965. For the first few years, they were wonderfully happy. Anthony Thwaite (9 November 2002). "When will Miss Howard take off all her clothes?". The Guardian . Retrieved 1 November 2010. Cooper, Jonathan (23 April 1990). "Novelist Martin Amis Carries on a Family Tradition: Scathing Wit and Supreme Self-Confidence". People . Retrieved 15 June 2012.All the bohemian splendour revolved around Kingsley. "I think it was wonderful for everyone but Jane," says Sargy Mann. Howard found herself cooking and running a household of eight or more people and writing less and less. Despite poverty, discouragement, and a seemingly endless succession of brilliant men who regarded her talents as very much less interesting than theirs, she succeeded. Martin Amis wrote in his autobiography, Experience , that "she is, with Iris Murdoch, the most interesting woman writer of her generation. An instinctivist, like Muriel Spark, she has a freakish and poetic eye, and a penetrating sanity." I looked up, his face was lit with intention. He pushed the pencil into my hand and rubbed the slate carefully clean for my reply. I wrote, 'You very kind. Can't marry anybody must learn typing for the war.' He read it, and his face changed slowly, like the sun going in. He shrugged his shoulders very gently and wrote, 'Tuesday. 12s 6d don't get bombed.'

By the mid-1970s, drink or middle age had eroded Amis's capacity in bed, Howard has said. She was resentful and he resented her resentment. While she wrote nothing literary he wrote bitter novels to rid his imagination of her - Jake's Thing and Stanley and the Women. In 1975, the household at Lemmons broke up, and the Amises moved to Hampstead, where there was no room for the extended household; it was also too small for their burgeoning resentments. In 1980, she finally left Kingsley by way of a lawyer's letter sent from a health farm whence she had retreated for a week with the quarter-written manuscript of a novel called Getting it Right. In the late 1950s Howard learned, she says, to work properly, despite the distraction of brief affairs with Cyril Connolly and Kenneth Tynan: "I can plough on with books through feelings of frightful anxiety, when I feel that they aren't any good. But I can't think very well. I think probably it's a bit late to start learning how to now, when I am nearly 80. I feel uneducated. There are a lot of things I can't do at all, and don't know anything about. I would very much like to have gone to university and had a course of English literature. I read madly to catch up, but I am still not well-read in the sense that my stepson is. With it goes a greater ease of expressing yourself. I haven't written essays for people and I haven't been told to do this or that; I think that would have been very good for me."

Two large chub lurked under the wooden footbridge. She fed a widower swan which approached us very slowly up the narrow stream. She knew, of course, the bird's past history. The apple and willow trees that overhang the stream often hid the body of the swan in its journey, so we could only see the reflection float slowly towards us, upside down. She says, "I think Kathy probably did mind being left behind. She knew we were lovers. We were all friends together; and we've always been friends. Laurie was steadily unfaithful to her. But I think she recognised, as a lot of people do, that that's not really the most important thing about a marriage. I don't think it is, either. What matters is what you've got with the other person, not what you haven't got. I think she had, like most people who marry some kind of artist, a tough time. I know Mr Blair would not like my saying this, but artists are not like other people. Other people like to feel that they come first and when it comes to an artist that isn't so." When he was exploring genre fiction, in a way it suited him best. I don't admire them. The bad ones are pretty bad, really, though there were always marvellous bits in all of them. This was not good preparation for Jane's marriage to the talented, honourable and charming Peter Scott. She was 19, he 32, and she soon knew that she did not love him. He was not practised at intimacy with women, though he had no trouble seducing them. She was lonely, spendthrift and oppressed by her brilliant and dominating mother-in-law, the sculptor Kathleen Scott, who had married Lord Kennet after her first husband died. The following year it won the John Llewellyn Rhys prize for the best novel by anyone under 30. Cape tried to claim 10% as her agent and she squashed him. She had become a professional, but for most of the next decade she could not make a living from her novels, however highly they were praised.

She is the godmother of one child of the marriage, Tamasin Day Lewis, the cookery writer, who was also at one stage the girlfriend of Martin Amis. Laurie Lee took Howard to Spain to recover from an unhappy affair. What had his wife made of that? Howard published five additional novels before she embarked on her best known work, the five-volume Cazalet Chronicles. As Artemis Cooper describes it: “Jane had two ideas, and could not decide which to embark on; so she invited her stepson Martin [Amis] round for a drink to ask his advice. One idea was an updated version of Sense and Sensibility … the other was a three-volume family saga … Martin said immediately, “Do that one.” [6] The Alteration (a science fiction novel) is a remarkable book. And I think that Ending Up is also a remarkable book. The Green Man is very good, too." For a long time, the household had the confidence and humorous liberality that gathers itself around a dynamic marriage," Martin Amis wrote in Experience. His meeting with the fancy woman had not been propitious: a couple of weeks after the family break-up, when the lovers were still living in a rented flat in Baker Street, he and his brother Philip had arrived at midnight.

Howard worked briefly as an actress in provincial repertory and occasionally as a model before her writing career, which began in 1947. Hardly anyone has a good word to say for Jane Howard's mother Kit, the former ballerina so humiliatingly abandoned by her husband. Martin Amis, Howard's step- son, thought Kit "a snob and a grouch" at the end of her life, especially towards her "sweet-natured" son, Colin, who now designs and makes hi-fi speakers. Anita Brookner, pictured in 2001, shows that ‘it is possible to win a major prize, be widely read and still be undervalued’. Photograph: Karen Robinson/The Observer