Hungry for love

Love All, by Elizabeth Jane Howard

Love All is a dreadful title — sounds like the memoirs of a lesbian tennis player — for an elegantly old-fashioned novel. It is set in the late 1960s; but there is little to anchor it to this period: the occasional references to the Beatles, or to Mary Quant, give a temporal specificity so at odds as to seem perversely anachronistic.

This is not because Elizabeth Jane Howard’s settings lack physical specificity. Love All is set partly in Maida Vale (indeed, in the very house, with its marble-floored conservatory, where Howard lived with Kingsley Amis in the Sixties) and partly in a village in the West Country: details of interiors, landscapes, food, clothing, gardens, cats, are as ever evoked with intimate and loving detail. Howard’s sheer personal enjoyment in these particulars is infectious — communicative enjoyment.

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The themes that dominate this book are equally personal. In her autobiography Slipstream, Howard wrote perceptively of her own insecurities, which prompted her to sleep with men for whom she felt no desire: the chasms of neediness that arise from ‘a great hunger to love, and to be in love’. Love All explores the forms this hunger can take.

It begins in the aftermath of an affair. Persephone (Percy) Plover has just been dumped by her married lover, and realises, to her chagrin, that it is not only her ex-lover who has been dishonest. She was never more to him than a bit on the side; but she too has been full of ‘craven pretence’. ‘She hadn’t even wanted him very much. She’d wanted other things she thought could be exchanged for sex.’

But Percy’s distorting longing for ‘a romance of heroic proportions’, with accompanying youthful doubts about whether she is capable of ‘true’ love, is only one of the forms of yearning for missing warmth.