Rosamond Lehmann, Ian Fleming, A Sea-Grape Tree

A Sea-Grape Tree by Rosamond Lehmann

published 1976

 

Ian Fleming The Complete Man by Nicholas Shakespeare

published 2023

 

[excerpt from A Sea Grape Tree]

Their holiday spirits flowed through one another as if their bodies were transparent: as light-filled, as exhilarated as the blue air and sparkling hyacinthine, amethyst-streaked sea. After rounding the Point they came into choppy water. The breeze was stiff, the boat danced over little foamy white caps.

He said: ‘There’s quite a current here.’ Trivial, idly-spoken words … but some trick of his voice, of the turn of his head, set going an unaccountable vibration. I know it all, she told herself. Blue blazing sky and water, rocking boat; another time, remote, remote; another, once-familiar place; a man’s voice drifting on the wind, saying those very words; a nobly proportioned head, dark ruffled hair, a high-bridged nose, full chin seen in profile, a long gold-skinned arm, a powerful-looking hand intent on steering … All as before, as once upon a time.

 

 

comments: I’ve said before that Rosamond Lehmann has not survived, or been revived, in the way that many other women writers of the mid-20^th century have been. Her contemporaries were not taken as seriously as she, back in the day, but are now viewed as having more to offer. I think the women’s books of that era that are more popular now are funny books: Lehmann could be very amusing, but you would not call her a humorous writer, she took life quite seriously, and perhaps this has worked against her.

Every time I reread one of her books, I wonder if I will like her as much as ever, or whether I had an over-inflated view of her. In my 20s I would have said she was one of my favourite writers. Now I wouldn’t say that: but that she wrote a couple of books that are works of genius.

The Ballad and the Source, and The Echoing Grove I think are her masterpieces: wonderful books.

I’ve been reading a biography of blog favourite Ian Fleming which tells us that he had a brief affair with Lehmann, on and off over a few years: in 1951 he invited her to his Jamaican house Goldeneye, forgetting to check whether his established mistress  would be there too. Ann Rothermere (she became Ann Fleming when they married not long after) was there, and was ‘unbelievably rude’ to Rosamond. That’s according to Rosamond - once you’ve read enough about these people, you suspect it was probably a rudeness draw.

Lehmann ended up moving to neighbour Noel Coward’s house, though not before an incident of Fleming putting a squid in her bedroom – special interest to me because one of my all-time favourites of my blogpost titles is ‘James and the Giant Octopus’ for one of Fleming’s James Bond books.

Lehmann is generally seen as having put Fleming into her late novel A Sea-Grape Tree (1976), as Johnny. Fleming himself was dead 10 years by then, but even so – she makes him a war hero, a WW1 fighter pilot who is paralyzed from the waist down. (The book is set in the 1930s). This seems a particularly pointed way of getting back at your dead lover, though the reader spends a lot of time trying to work out if the character Johnny is capable of having sex with her. (answer: yes, apparently)

A Sea-Grape Tree is a sequel to the fabulous The Ballad and The Source, and was meant to be followed by a third book – Lehmann explains this in a note that now follows the text. It has flashes of the earlier brilliance but really isn’t that good. Perhaps the third book would have redeemed it. I am happy to leave Sybil Jardine – the monstrous heroine of Ballad – back in that book. 

Maybe Sybil is the character who resembles Lehmann most. I’m now becoming even more fascinated by Lehmann’s own character and life, and will be writing yet more about her soon, having read an excellent biography.

In later life Lehmann became friendly with the writer Anita Brookner – whose  Hotel du Lac is dedicated to Lehmann – and L’s earlier books are almost proto-Brookner, only (in my eyes) much much better. Another novelist, Angela Carter, once said of Brookner that she wanted to smack her because of all the scenes of women standing in the kitchen scraping meals into the bin because the married lover didn’t turn up. Again. (I’m not sure if Carter named Brookner, but it seems obvious that’s whom she meant). And to be honest, there’s a lot of that in Lehmann. Women are always being let down at the last minute by men who are not nearly as attractive to the reader as they are to Lehmann. What a crew they are: Roddie and  Rollo and Rickie and the unnamed one in Sea-Grape Tree (not the Fleming-esque local lover, a different one).

 And all this was playing out in her own life, she wasn’t exactly making it up out of nothing. Although all of them are awful, she can give you a glimpse as to why the heroines are so in thrall to them: that’s her brilliance as a writer. And then you can try to guess why she was so in love with the men in her own life…

More about her own disastrous love affairs in a forthcoming post.

 

Man and woman in a boat in Montego Bay Jamaica, by Toni Frissell from the LOC

Woman and man on a beach in Montego Baby, same source.  

[pictures are not Lehmann and Fleming, but my choice of pictures to represent the characters in A Sea-Grape Tree]