Searching for a 12-month stretch in the life of Elizabeth Jane Howard (1923–2013) that might illuminate the kind of person she was and the circumstances of her fraught and chaotic career, I settled on the year of 1955. Our heroine, then living in a maisonette flat in Little Venice and reading manuscripts for the publishing firm of Chatto & Windus, was hard at work on her well-received second novel, The Long View (1956). She was also having an affair with Arthur Koestler, who, when they entertained, her biographer tells us, expected her to ‘produce a three-course meal, look demurely beautiful and say as little as possible’.
And so the year winds on. Koestler dazzles her with his volcanic temperament, gets her pregnant and then fixes an abortion. Laurie Lee takes her to Spain, tells her that no one as beautiful as she is could ever be any good at writing and then returns to his wife. With Lee out of the running, the gate gapes invitingly for the French novelist Romain Gary, who squires her off to the south of France, introduces her to Camus and plans to set her up as a high-class geisha. These having fizzled out, she slides into the fervid embrace of the poet Cecil Day-Lewis, who, seeing her in a Russian hat, declares that now he knows what Anna Karenina looked like.
After this, one doesn’t really need to be told that Howard spent most of her long and eventful existence in a state of desperate unhappiness, forever being let down by people from whom she sought affection and struggling to balance her emotional needs with the peace of mind required to write her books. What makes the particulars of this seven-decade-long entanglement with Grub Street even worse, perhaps, is her awareness of the Catch-22 in which she spent most of her working life.
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