Elizabeth Jane Howard looks back on learning, love and her marriage to Kingsley Amis
The late English novelist and memoirist spoke to Eleanor Wachtel in 2003
As Writers & Company wraps up after a remarkable 33 year run, we're revisiting episodes selected from the show's archive. This interview originally aired Feb. 9, 2003.
English novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard is best known for her Cazalet Chronicles, an account of England during and after the Second World War that follows a single family — over three generations and five books.
She's also famous for her marriage to renowned writer Kingsley Amis and for her influence on his son, Martin Amis, who credited her, in part, for his own literary success.
Ending after 18 years, Howard's relationship with Kingsley Amis was widely discussed — by Amis himself and by his biographers. In her 2002 memoir, Slipstream, Howard gave her side of the story for the first time.
In the book she also reflects on romances with other notable writers — such as Cyril Connelly, Cecil Day-Lewis, Romain Gary and Arthur Koestler — and on her upbringing in London in the 1920s and '30s by a disapproving mother and a father who abused her.
Howard died in 2014, aged 90. She spoke to Eleanor Wachtel from London in 2003.
The truth about memoir
"I feel I've made rather a mess of my life. I wanted to examine that and see whether it was as bad a mess as I had thought or whether I could have done better with X, Y or Z — how much it affected me and had I learned things?
"I think in some ways [it was] absolutely as big [a mess as I'd thought]. In other ways I realized that I have changed and I have learned things, so it hasn't been a total washout, I'm glad to say.
"Because I'm a slow learner, you don't realize what you've learned or how you've experienced something until afterwards. That was one of my problems — I kept making the same mistakes because the message didn't get to me.
"I feel I've very much lived in the slipstream of my own experience. I don't know if it's good or bad, but it's true. And I think there's no point at all in writing a memoir, an autobiography, unless you at least try to be scrupulously honest — try, you know?
"I'm very tired of the autobiography where the person is bending over backwards to be very charming and entertaining and ingratiating. There are a few sort of acceptable faults that you're allowed to have, and they have them.
"Well, I don't. I used to be a martyr.
"People have a curious view that adolescence is a finite state. I think an awful lot of people are adolescent at the age of 50. Things happen to them and they're not really responsible for those things. They are victims or they're unlucky. I certainly spent a long time being an adolescent.
"I think you should say that's how you are, because it's only a part of you."
Learning to forgive her mother
"She once told a cousin of mine that she'd never liked little girls. She had a daughter a year before me, whom she also had called Jane, who died, and I think she probably didn't want to get pregnant again so soon. So I think I had a bad start in that way.
"She made me feel not good enough in almost every respect all my life. She made me feel very plain and very clumsy. [She was] always putting me down and making me feel disgusting. My body was disgusting. Everything to do with the body, to her, was revolting and not mentioned or talked about.
"I don't know why [my parents] inculcated the plainness so firmly, but they certainly did.
"I look at pictures of myself young now. I think, goodness, I might have enjoyed looking like that. I wish I had got something out of it at the time. But I didn't. I didn't agree that I was beautiful.
"I felt extremely sorry for my mother. I'm very grateful not to have been born when she was, because it was an age where, in her sort of situation, she had to choose between her career and marriage. Absolutely. There was no question of it.
"But marriage was not satisfactory to her. She married somebody who was deeply unsuitable to her in many ways. So it seems to me that she made the wrong choice and suffered for the rest of her life about it. I think she was very lonely and very frustrated and those sort of chronic feelings don't do people any good. They don't come out of them better.
"And I think she felt awful about not loving me. I'm sure it was difficult for her. Because I think she must have been aware of it and felt guilty about it. But love isn't something you can reason yourself into, is it?
But love isn't something you can reason yourself into, is it?- Elizabeth Jane Howard
"The trouble is we always see our parents only in their relationship to us and part of growing up is when you start to see them as people. And I think that you can't start forgiving or seeing parents clearly until they become people for you.
"And it took me a long time for that to happen. Longer than it should have."
Her side of the story
"It was difficult when Kingsley went about saying what a bad thing it was he'd ever met me. That was sad, that he felt he had to do that.
"What newspapers say about one is up to them really. I think you know yourself what the situation is.
"I had to leave. I just had to leave. Because I felt that it was actually improper to live with somebody who disliked you. I could live with somebody who didn't love me, but I really couldn't live with somebody who disliked me. And it became clear to me that he depended on me in a way, but he also very much disliked me. And I was withering under it. I was just not able to function at all.
"And I don't think there was anything I could have done that would have changed things. I think that's where it gets very tricky. People have very unreal ideas of what their powers are or might have been about something. You can't be responsible for a whole situation with another person — it's two people's responsibility. So I don't feel bitterly and wrong about it.
"Basically now, I just feel … I feel sad about it.
"And people always think that if you've chosen to [leave], why should you be sad? They don't recognize that sometimes you have to choose between two very painful things. It's not just simply choosing between black and white, you know?
"So it's been a hard time. In a way, I felt I wanted to write my own account of us. I just said it for the record, really."
Elizabeth Jane Howard's comments have been edited for length and clarity.
