From her earliest years, one attribute dominated Bernice Rubens’s life: passion. It fuelled her impressive books, her personal relationships and her reactions to the world around her. It expressed her innate generosity of spirit, but could also deprive her of the ability to consider any viewpoint contrary to her own.
Of such passion there is little in this posthumously published memoir. Instead, the general tone is one of valedictory tenderness. Rubens writes far more about a close-knit and much-loved clan than about her successes, first as a maker of documentary films and then as the author of 25 novels, one of which, The Elected Member, won the 1970 Booker Prize, and many of which were subsequently filmed. When she does write of her career, it is to concentrate too much, albeit in an always amusing way, on the kind of embarrassments and humiliations that every writer has been obliged to endure when asked to deliver a lecture or take part in a bookshop signing or a British Council tour.
Like the Jewish immigrants in her novel Brothers, Rubens’s father, Eli Reuben, arrived in Wales from Latvia after a Hamburg tout had conned him by selling him a ticket to Cardiff instead of to Chicago. Intensely musical, he had brought with him two violins, his only portable wealth. Whereas three of his four children became professional musicians of distinction, Bernice became an amateur one, so enthusiastic that the flats which she occupied in rapid succession (‘Jews are very good at packing,’ she remarks at one point) always contained a grand piano and a cello. Money was never plentiful; but these were people with the determination and the ability to better themselves. Bernice writes disparagingly of her youthful self, ‘I stole, I swore, I lied and I sulked.’
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