More on Rosamond Lehmann

Rosamond Lehmann by Selina Hastings

biography, published 2002

 

 

So  much to say. I started on Lehmann in a post earlier this week, and was planning to post again later, but there was so much interest in her life in the comments that I am doing the followup straightaway.

Selina Hastings’ book is a model biography, hugely impressive: knowledgeable, fair-minded. There was a big surprise for me at the end – something that many people will already have known – which was that Hastings had known Lehmann well, their families were connected and they were great friends. (Hastings’ father’s first wife had gone on to marry Lehmann’s second husband, yes really). Hastings and Lehmann almost sound like Sibyl and Rebecca in The Ballad and the Source.

So many biographers today insert themselves in the story – something that can go either way – that it is amazing to find one where the biographer most certainly could have, but chose not to.

Hastings was Lehmann’s appointed biographer, though only after a previous candidate had been sacked. Rosamond had a tempestuous and important affair with the poet Cecil Day Lewis: the biographer made a note to himself to check details with Day Lewis’s widow (Jill Balcon, the woman for whom he left Rosamond). RL caught sight of this note, and that was the end for him – she had never got over CDL, and nourished an operatic hatred for Jill Balcon.

The account of her affair with Cecil Day Lewis is spectacular – he managed to sandwich her in while married to someone else (with children) and dumped them both for Balcon. As a keen reader of his NicholasBlake books, I wonder if Lehmann is portrayed.

Later in life, Rosamond haunted friends’ deathbeds, obsessed with them, very much finding a home there. According to his widow, Day Lewis literally realized he was dying only because Lehmann suddenly decided to come and see him (having avoided him as much as possible). You couldn’t make this stuff up.

I have also read an unpublished biography of Lehmann’s second husband, Wogan Philipps. They were probably as badly suited as a couple could be. He remarried after they divorced, and when that wife died, Rosamond became convinced that they would get back together again, even though this really wasn’t going to happen….

Laurie Lee, a good friend to her, speaks gently of her ‘self-deception on such a moving scale’. She was always convinced that everyone was in love with her. According to Rosamond’s account, when Jim Lees-Milne (who would of course always feature in any biog or memoir of the era – along with Violet Hammersley, Lytton Strachey and Carrington, all here) met her he became instantly enamoured, a version of events of which Jim himself had no recollection. ‘I don’t believe that I so fell for her that I exclaimed, Too late, too late!, having just married A[lvilde],’ he wrote in his diary. ‘Can it be true?’

RL with her brother John, and Lytton Strachey

Hastings has this wonderful description: “As a novelist she was subtle and perceptive, but in reality she never learned from her tumultuous adventures, driving through her personal dramas high on a sense of injury and injustice, pursuing her perfidious lovers like an avenging Fury.”

And Hastings describes Olivia (Invitation to the Waltz) as vulnerable, passive and eager to sacrifice everything for love, and that sounds like Lehmann too. But you have to factor in Lehmann’s ‘irresistible lustrous’ beauty. Men did fall for her, in droves. She was beautiful, larger than life, badly-behaved, over-privileged, spoilt. As time went on, the beauty faded and she was seen as less charming. The stories from her life make wonderful anecdotes, and she almost ends up as Lady Montdore from Nancy Mitford’s books.

She had two children, Hugo and Sally, and her daughter became the centre of her life. Sally was by all accounts a  nice normal young woman, pretty and lively and smart, but Rosamond thought of her as exceptional, very special, a genius. When Sally died unexpectedly, very young, her mother was devastated and turned to spiritualism to try to reach her. She became obsessed with this and it dominated the rest of her life. Laurie Lee would again see Lehmann’s capacity for self-deception in her whole relationship with Sally. For instance RL was convinced Sally’s life had been devastated by Cecil Day Lewis’s departure, but that really doesn’t seem to have been the case.

RL with her daughter Sally

Like all women in the public eye, Lehmann’s looks are important: she did become a big blowsy woman, but would that be a big deal if she were a male writer? Cecil Day Lewis was no oil painting as the years wore on, either. (Her nickname from horrid old Maurice Bowra was the Meringue-Utang, which weirdly fits her exactly and is not even particularly insulting.)

Her life was a rollicking farrago of affairs and nonsense, the books jewels among this setting.  As with people who can never get on with those they work with, there comes a point where you no longer have sympathy for her, there was something that invited all these unreliable men. It’s also true that with most of these relationships, it’s a help that you don’t have to feel sorry for either side as everyone behaves so badly.

But as well as her beauty, it’s important to remember that she was a great, literary writer. I’m quite the one for Tosh of that era, but she was not in that category. She had massive success in her day, literary and popular, was a huge bestseller. I’d love more people to read her now.

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Occasionally I will see The Ballad and the Source on someone’s bookshelf, and be delighted to find another fan, but then they say gloomily ‘you gave it to me and I couldn’t finish it.’

The novelist Jonathan Coe, another fan, has had the same experience (discussed here). He also has this fantastic, enraged bit of criticism:

A subeditor at the New Statesman felt entitled to sum up the life and achievement of this great, wise and compelling novelist in a three-word headline: ‘Fat and Posh’. The terms of the dismissal may have changed… but still, people will always find a way of belittling writing which challenges their deepest assumptions.

Lehmann is like someone you know, that difficult friend, alarming and annoying, whom you quite dread hearing from, as for sure she will have a tale of woe. Prone to disaster yet supremely self-confident and self-centred.  The one who takes life and herself very seriously, and makes portentous and pretentious statements, but who occasionally redeems herself by not minding being teased, and suddenly roaring with laughter at it all…

And you can forgive Rosamond Lehmann almost  anything because of the very best of her writing.

Rosamond Lehmann, drawing from NYPL.

Rosamond Lehmann with her brother John and with Lytton Strachey, Wikimedia Commons 1920.

Other pictures from an album Rosamond Lehmann published of her own photos.