She spurned Cecil Day-Lewis, divorced Kingsley Amis and was duped by a conman lover. But it was as a single woman that Elizabeth Jane Howard flourished as a novelist. And now she has written part five of her revered Cazalet series…
Last month, Elizabeth Jane Howard turned 90. At an age when most of us might celebrate with a warm whisky and warmer slippers, Howard was handing in the manuscript of her 15th novel to her publishers. The next day, she was at her computer promptly at 10.30am, writing a new one.
"Well, it's the thing that makes me get up in the morning," she says when I express surprise at her work rate. "Otherwise, there's not really an awful lot of point to my life any more – except very nice friends and things."
We are talking in the study of Howard's lovely, sprawling house in Suffolk. Outside, the walls are painted a surprising turquoise. Inside, the shelves are filled with books, all neatly alphabetised, including copies of the Cazalet novels for which she remains most famous. An Apple MacBook is propped up on the desk.
"I hate it," Howard says, looking at the computer and sounding like a 1950s nanny telling off a naughty child. "We don't get on at all."
The four Cazalet books form a tightly constructed and beautifully written narrative charting the shifting fortunes of an upper-middle-class English family during and after the second world war. Since their publication in the 1990s, they have sold more than a million copies. Howard has just written a new instalment due to be published in November, much to the excitement of diehard Cazalet fans, and Radio 4 is currently running a 45-episode dramatisation of the saga.
Howard is mildly astonished by the resurgence of interest in her work. Any talk of how her reputation as a writer is undergoing a long overdue re-evaluation is greeted with a startled glare. "Gosh, I'm feeling really inflated today, watch out," she says. "My head is swollen and empty."
Despite her (albeit modest) commercial success, Howard has arguably never received the literary acclaim she deserves. Her first novel, The Beautiful Visit , won the John Llewellyn Rhys prize in 1951 and the critics admired her follow-up, The Long View, but she has never won a major literary prize despite counting Hilary Mantel and her stepson Martin Amis among her fans (she was married to his father, Kingsley). Amis calls her "the most interesting woman writer of her generation" alongside Iris Murdoch. Has she read all his books?
"No. I've read about half of them," she says firmly. "I don't like some of them… We don't sort of talk about each other's books really much."
In contrast to Amis's glittering literary career, Howard has for years been unfairly pigeonholed as someone who writes nice domestic dramas for the middle classes: not intellectual enough to be a Murdoch or Woolf or sufficiently populist to get to the top of the Amazon bestseller lists.
Being a woman of a certain era was no help either. "I seriously think women are at a disadvantage," she says, looking at me levelly.
Howard has a penetrating stare that she deploys to great effect in conversation: you can see her sharp brown eyes taking it all in, storing up each small inflection or gesture like a squirrel hoarding nuts. "I mean, the literary world is dominated by men, isn't it? They all scratch each other's backs and understandably they like each other's books and write about them and they've got an inbuilt feeling that none of us can really be very much good."
She describes herself as "a sort of seething feminist… I like the company of other women and I feel for them quite desperately". Her writing reflects this: her female characters are given great depth, even when they act in unlikable ways. Howard never writes to show off or to pass judgment. There is no omnipotent narrator in her work, simply a fluent interlacing of viewpoints.
"Novels are for showing people what other people are like," she says. "It's the only way I can write. I wouldn't be any good at deconstruction. I didn't have much education. So I've had to do it myself really, to educate myself by reading. My family wouldn't have thought of sending me to university. In my generation, most girls didn't."
Her favourite author is Jane Austen, whose heroines faced similar dilemmas. In fact, it was Howard who first introduced a teenage Martin Amis to the delights of reading when she gave him a copy of Pride and Prejudice. That turned out all right, I say. She gives a bark of laughter.
"Turned out bloody well really! What I was so pleased about was that he really appreciated her like a grown-up person."
Determined not to be an unhappy Austen heroine herself, Howard got married at 19 to Peter Scott, the 32-year-old son of the Antarctic explorer. The relationship failed and she walked out on her husband and infant daughter to pursue a writing career. A famed beauty, she went on to have a string of high-profile lovers, including Arthur Koestler, Cyril Connolly, Kenneth Tynan and Cecil Day-Lewis, who was married to her best friend Jill Balcon at the time.
Did she feel guilty about that?
"I felt dreadful," she says. "He [Day-Lewis] ended up by being very angry with me because I left and he said, 'You shouldn't have done that, you're a whore' and lot of rather bitter poems came out."
In the 50s, she had a love affair with Laurie Lee, which his wife, Cathy, knew all about.
"I was very happy with Laurie, whom I loved dearly. And I never had any – I want to make this clear, Cathy knew this – I never had any designs on him. I just took that bit of pleasure as it came and it was wonderful, and we all knew each other and we never had a cross word. I mean, most people would think it was rather shocking I expect but it didn't shock us and we were the people in it."
It seems she never had enough self-belief to say no.
"If a very attractive man makes a dead set at you and you're very lonely, it's very difficult to resist him… I think I was very given to getting ambushed."
Nor did she ever believe she was beautiful. Once, Howard remembers walking into a dinner party and everyone falling silent. At the time, she thought they were angry with her for being late. It's only now, aged 90, that she can admit: "No, it wasn't that. They thought you looked nice."
Her insecurity and ill-advised flings were a legacy, perhaps, of her relationship with her parents. In Slipstream , her raw and honest memoir, she recounts how her debonair father, David, would kiss her on the lips and grope her, while her mother, Kit, a former ballerina, "thought that everything to do with sex was absolutely disgusting". Later, aspects of this difficult upbringing made their way into the Cazalet novels, where many of the characters have semi-autobiographical features.
Howard's relationships tended to overshadow her creative output. In 1965, she married the novelist Kingsley Amis. He had published Lucky Jim a decade earlier and was riding the crest of his own literary success. At first, they were blissfully happy. Slipstream recounts how, on one writing holiday, they swapped typewriters and wrote a few pages of each other's novels.
"Kingsley started chewing his nails and staring into space when he was writing mine," she recalls, chuckling. "I started laughing when I was writing his."
For the 18 years that they were married, Howard kept on quietly producing books but shelved much of her own ambition.
"I think I certainly had to be second fiddle… I really couldn't write very much when I was married to him because I had a very large household to keep up and Kingsley wasn't one to boil an egg, if you know what I mean."
She also found herself looking after Amis's three wayward children from his first marriage ("I had to stop them stubbing their cigarettes out on the fitted carpet") and, in the latter years of their relationship, Amis descended into alcoholism and was given to frequent bouts of boorish and bullying behaviour.
"I decided if I stayed with him, the only way I could would be to become a drunk with him," she says, a touch sadly, "and I really hated the idea of that, and I knew that would put paid to any writing so I really had to go. But I did feel bad about it.
"It was rather like being widowed although in a sense worse because people said, 'Well you left him, didn't you? So it was your fault.' They didn't seem to recognise that you might have to choose between two bad things."
Amis never forgave her.
"He was absolutely implacable. He said the worst thing that had happened in his life was meeting me, which actually isn't true, and he was as nasty about me as he could afford to be in letters to people, in public. When he was dying, I asked Mart if I could go and see him but he said, 'I really don't think it would do any good.' He just would have been very angry or upset and it wasn't fair to upset him."
Again, that tone of regret.
Tellingly, it was only after leaving Amis that she really hit her stride professionally. She wrote all four of the Cazalet novels in a five-year burst of creative activity through the 1990s. But self-doubt and loneliness still trailed her. After she appeared on Desert Island Discs in 1995 (luxury item: a piano), a male admirer wrote to her saying he wanted to be her friend. Slowly, he charmed his way into Howard's life.
At the age of 72, she embarked on an affair with him. She lent him money and he was with her through her treatment for cancer. But Howard's daughter, Nicola, became suspicious enough to check up on him. It turned out the man was an inveterate liar and conman who had inveigled his way into Howard's affections by meticulously researching her life.
Howard was devastated. But, like all good writers, she turned her experiences into one of her most accomplished novels: Falling . When it was published in 1999 the man sent her a chilling postcard from America. He died some years ago, to Howard's intense relief.
"It's very painful, very humiliating," she says of having been taken in. "But it was worth writing."
These days, Howard is never alone, an arrangement that seems to suit her. Arthritis means she can no longer move around without a walking frame or an electric buggy and she has a bustling live-in Bulgarian carer, Teddy, who tries to stop her from smoking too many cigarettes.
In the background, there's a personal assistant called Annabel who looks like one of Howard's beautiful heroines.
"I'm very impatient," Howard says. "Hell to work for, I should think."
Annabel laughs. Teddy brings her a mug of decaffeinated coffee. They are both clearly devoted to her.
Howard says she doesn't mind ageing, apart from the fact that she's noticed a sharp decline in her energy levels, which frustrates her. These days, she can only manage three hours of writing. In the evenings, she relaxes by sewing or watching television: "I'm very addicted to things like Poirot and Masterchef."
How old does she feel inside?
"Now?" She tilts her head to contemplate the question. "Sometimes I don't feel any age at all. I feel quite, sort of, naive and open to things."
It's hard to think of a better quality for any writer than being able, at the age of 90, to maintain such a sense of interest in the world.
via Books: Fiction | guardian.co.uk
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