Look
back with clarity
June 9, 2006
How
did your family make you feel when you were growing up? And
what judgments would you pass on them now? Victoria Neumark
finds hindsight is a tricky business
The Sunlight on the Garden
By Elizabeth Speller
Granta £14.99
The Glass Castle
By Jeannette Walls
Virago £7.99
Stone Cradle
By Louise Doughty
Simon and Schuster £12.99
Memory is the trickiest mine for a writer. As a literary
agent once said to me: "Your heart sinks when someone
writes in a covering letter, 'All my friends tell me I've
had such an interesting life'."
"The sunlight on the garden/ Hardens and grows cold,/ We
cannot cage the minute/ Within its nets of gold," wrote
Louis MacNeice in his poignant poem, the title of which
Elizabeth Speller has borrowed for her memoir of life with
mental illness. MacNeice was writing about the
impossibility of pouring real life into fixed narratives,
the difficulty of forming final judgments on ourselves or
other people: "When all is told/ We cannot ask for pardon."
Speller, in scrupulously trying to avoid punishing
judgments about what seems to have been a horrific
mother-daughter relationship - and one, moreover, which
left the writer herself prone to terrible depressions for
which she has been hospitalised - sadly leaves most of the
emotional flavouring out of her account of growing up in a
middle-class English family in the 1950s and 1960s. It was
a family life permeated with loneliness, but never
explicitly so, as it staggers from accounts of ancestors
who ran early London department stores to Hungarian
countesses, suffragettes and country manor houses, swimming
in flooded gravel pits and bringing up children in empty
Lincolnshire.
By contrast, American Jeannette Walls's rackety account of
her rackety family whizzes and jolts and rumbles along, all
emotions firing. Her parents were hippies; dad from an
abusive hillbilly family, mother from a posh western
dynasty. For years they and their four children lived on
the lam all over the south-west US, always starting off
well, and always leaving with debts unpaid and dad's
alcoholism and gambling out of control.
But there was lots of love, constant supplies of art
materials, books and maths problems in candle-lit slums,
immense determination among the siblings to pull through,
and a kind of salvation as one by one they left their
parents to come to New York and make their fortunes.
Three out of the four of them managed; one has disappeared.
Whereas scenes were rare in Speller's upbringing, they
exploded across the landscape of Walls's infancy with
cataclysmic regularity. Her father always set about
destroying any settled happiness that the family found,
whether because he had been abused himself or because he
couldn't live with a family, couldn't live without one. He
stole money for food from the children's savings boxes.
Inevitably, their admiration turned to despair and fury,
though surprisingly slowly to contempt and rejection. "How
could he?" the reader says repeatedly as the father pulls
another fast one, ruining months of work at a drunken
stroke.
The kicker to the story, one which Walls pulls off with
charm and steely resolve, comes when the feckless parents
follow their offspring to the big city. They live on the
streets, despite increasing health problems. Even though
the mother is heiress to millions, she prefers to live
rough; even though it kills her husband, drawing him ever
back, fatally, to drink, she still chooses it. It's a story
which turns the American dream of the personal quest inside
out and upside down.
The gypsy family in Louise Doughty's latest novel is
rackety in a more traditional way, with the man, Eli, going
his own sweet way whatever the women in his life - tough
little mother Clementina and soft, sweet, sad wife Rose -
want. Rose is "gorjer" (non-Romany), but although Doughty
is herself of Romany ancestry, she portrays all her
characters in the round.
The narrative interweaves the memories of mother and wife
in an elegy for a vanished way of life, clear-eyed about
its beauties - the countryside, the companionship - and its
horrors - the oppressive gossip and social mores,
persecution by the authorities, illness.
The novel has
flashes of wisdom. "It's a relief when you stop trying to
fill the gaps," observes Clementina, an understanding which
MacNeice shared: "We are dying, Egypt, dying/ And not
expecting pardon/ Hardened in heart anew/ But glad to have
sat under /Thunder and rain with you/ And grateful too/ For
sunlight on the garden."
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