...because I wouldn't want anyone to get the wrong idea about how good this book is.
I have a vague memory of hearing that Lorna Sage won the Whitbread prize for autobiography for her memoir Bad Blood, probably when the paperback came out later that year. No doubt the story attracted more attention since she died only a week after it won. I see also that a few years later there a posthumous publication of her selected journalism, an honour I think can have been accorded to few academics who aren't Frank Kermode. No doubt her publisher was attempting to feed the interest generated by that memoir for a writer whose other writings were chiefly academic.
I shouldn't sound so snarky. This really is one of the finest books I've read in some time. I'm fairly sure I remember encountering her Women in the House of Fiction during my undergraduate degree. I don't think that will have been the reason why my mother bought her memoir though. In fact, I'm not sure if she ever read it. I've been noticing it on her shelves for a while now.
Almost the first thing which attracted me was brief excerpted the reviews just inside the front cover. They're almost as fascinating as memoir they advertise, and perversely perhaps, it's a few of these reviews I want to address here.
An unnamed writer from the Guardian sententiously opines "Nothing else I have read destroys so successfully the fantasy of the family as a safe place to be...", a sentiment which, as someone who grew up in what was largely a very happy family I can't help but find rather insulting. Of course we had our difficulties, and of course I'm not so naive as to believe that all families are happy or 'safe'. I know several people whose experiences put the lie to that. But this is as insulting a prejudice as the Daily Mail assumption that all families are sacrosanct and special. You can't make such a sweeping a generalisation about an cultural institution which exists in so many different forms, and which everyone belongs to in some way or another. And it's not really the story that Lorna Sage tells. She describes her difficult relationships with her parents and grandparents with scrupulous clarity, but what also comes through is a love for these eccentric individuals. Whatever else they were, they were also her family, and she is equally conscious of what she has inherited from them. There seems very little bitterness, something a few of the other reviewers comment on, although Marina Warner also feels happy to label it a picture of a 'childhood hell'. That 'Bad Blood' of the title seems like a source of pride and creative energy as much as it might be intended as a badge of shame.
Rachel Cusk, writing for the Evening Standard, voices another unexamined prejudice when she claims 'This "memoir" has all the qualities of fiction'. Which is, quite clearly, also rubbish. The qualities it possesses are those of any stunningly written book, but these are not qualities which are the sole purview of fiction. There are a great many works of art found within non-fiction forms. Appropriating a book like this to the category of 'fiction' with Rachel Cusk's scare quotes makes a mockery of literary categories and privilages fiction in a way which is more than a little silly.
More silliness comes from Jonathan Raban, himself responsible for more than a few works of art within non-fictional categories, who wants to make a monument out of Lorna Sage's book: 'What a book for this country now. She makes Hanmer, Whitchurch, the shop, the ailing haulage business, the lightless houses, the mad relations, into the real ancestral England, from which the English have ever been on the run'. It's interesting to think about this quote in the context of recent remarks by the Midsommer Murders producer who claimed that his show was 'the last bastion of Englishness'. The assumption in both cases is that there is a single, easily reducible 'England' that we can all agree on. On the contrary, I think that Englishness, like any national identity, is multiple, and no, that's not just because I'm an academic and 'multiple' identities is a fashionable term. It could be a fashionable term for all I know, but fashionabe or not it just seems to me to be self evidently true. The North is distinct from the South. Town is different from country. London is different from York. The Lake District is distinct from the Cotswolds, which is distinct from the Yorkshire Moors, which are distinct from the East Anglian Fens. Yet all of these landscapes and places are identifiably English to me.
At least Jonathan Raban doesn't try to claim that it is something which should be protected in some way. And Lorna Sage is exceptional at placing her story in its historical context. Appropriately for the literary critic she was, her childhood association with a local farmer leads to a subtle disquistion on Hardy and the farming life and culture which was (is) perenially in decline. Her story is one of post war social mobility, and it doesn't stop at its end, when she acknowledges that it was her daughter who became the future in the 60s. This is a narrative I've heard before, in autobiographical writings from Angela Carter, A.S. Byatt, Alan Bennett, Derek Jarman and others. I imagine that might be what attracted my Mum to it, because it's even, just about, my parents' story. They were born later, in 1950 and 51, and reached university at the tail end of the 60s, but I still feel theirs is a part of that same post war narrative. But each story is distinct, belonging to that person alone. If books were Lorna Sage's passport out of her family and social environment, as Marina Warner's excerpted review suggests, then it was a passport freely given to her in childhood. The changes British culture was undergoing at that point allowed a very clever girl to succeed where previously she might not have done, which is not to deny her agency in her own narrative. It's just to acknowledge, yet again, that we make our own history, but not in the circumstances of our choosing.
It's also a narrative that I feel has now become much harder to occur. For a variety of reasons, education no longer seems to carry the authority it once did. Everything is much more utilitarian now, and many of the post war gains have been eroded over the last 30 years. It's one of the reasons I find this period of British history so fascinating. It was far from a perfect time, because no time is perfect, but there was something positive in the culture then (although I would struggle to articulate just what precisely that is) which I wish hadn't been so willfully discarded.
