Good as her Word: Selected Journalism

LORNA SAGE
Good As Her Word
Selected Journalism

Edited by Sharon Sage and Victor Sage

Dedication

For Olivia

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Introduction

I PRE-WAR LIFE WRITING

Grave-side story, Observer 18 June 1978

Moon in Eclipse: A Life of Mary Shelley by Jane Dunn

Good as her word, Observer 14 December 1980

Elizabeth Gaskell: A Portrait in Letters by J. A. V. Chapple

Flora by gaslight, Observer 24 January 1982

The London Journal of Flora Tristan Jean Hawkes (trans. and ed.)

Life stories, 19 February 1984

A Need to Testify: Four Portraits by Iris Origo

Strategy for survival, Observer 10 June 1984

Secrets of a Woman’s Heart: The Later Life of Ivy Compton-Burnett by Hilary Spurling

Honest woman, Observer 5 May 1985

Selections from George Eliot’s Letters Gordon S. Haight (ed.)

The girl from Mrs Kelly’s, Observer 28 September 1986

Beloved Emma: The Life of Emma Lady Hamilton by Flora Fraser

Half of Shandy, Observer 28 December 1986

Laurence Sterne: The Later Years by Arthur H. Cash

Nothing by halves, Observer 20 November 1988

The Letters of Edith Wharton R. W. B. Lewis and Nancy Lewis (eds)

The bright, ferocious flames of his internal ether, Observer 27 June 1993

The Letters Of Charles Dickens: Volume VII, 1853–1855, The Pilgrim Edition Graham Storey, Kathleen Tillotson and Angus Easson (eds)

II POST-WAR LIFE WRITING

First person singular, Observer 12 August 1979

Sleepless Nights by Elizabeth Hardwick

Client relationships, TLS 5 November 1982

An English Madam: The Life and Work of Cynthia Payne by Paul Bailey

Orient of the mind, Observer 23 October 1983

Profile of Lesley Blanch

Last testament, Observer 17 June 1984

Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre by Simone de Beauvoir

What a frightful bore it is to be Gore, Observer 15 November 1987

Profile of Gore Vidal

Independent, 28 October 1989

Obituary of Mary McCarthy

The deb who caught her muse, Observer 20 January 1991

Necessary Secrets: The Journals of Elizabeth Smart

The Assumption of the Rogues and Rascals

By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept by Elizabeth Smart

Death of the Author, Granta 41, 1991

Obituary essay Angela Carter

The man they mistook for Marcel Proust, Observer 18 August 1991

Obituary of Terry Kilmartin

Boy in a box springs forth, Observer 28 March 1993

Daphne du Maurier by Margaret Forster

The secret sharer, Independent On Sunday 25 April 1993

What Remains and Other Stories

The Writer’s Dimension: Selected Essays by Christa Wolf

In full spate, TLS 17 December 1993

Obituary of Anthony Burgess

Secret agonies and allergies, Guardian 24 April 1994

Elizabeth Bishop, One Art: Selected Letters Robert Giroux (ed.)

Home is where the art is, south of the psyche, Observer 15 May 1994

The Still Moment: Eudora Welty, Portrait of a Writer by Paul Binding

Surviving in the wrong, TLS 4 November 1994

The Silent Woman by Janet Malcolm

Alone in the middle of it all, TLS 9 june 1995

Angus Wilson: A Biography by Margaret Drabble

Living like a poet, or, Hello to all that, Guardian 2 July 1995

Life on the Edge by Miranda Seymour

Robert Graves: His Life and Work by Martin Seymour-Smith

Collected Writings on Poetry by Robert Graves

The culture hero’s vision of sameness, Guardian 16 July 1995

F. R. Leavis: A Life in Criticism by Ian MacKillop

Landlocked, LRB 25 January 2001

Romancing: The Life and Work of Henry Green by Jeremy Treglown

III THE WOMEN’S CAMP

The old girl network, TLS 30 September 1977

Literary Women by Ellen Moers

The heroine as hero, TLS 14 April 1978

Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Aurora Leigh and Other Poems introduced by Cora Kaplan

A contrary Muse, TLS 29 September 1978

Lawrence and Women Anne Smith (ed.)

Practical ecstasies, Observer 28 January 1979

St Teresa of Avila by Stephen Clissold

Hearts of stone, Observer 27 October 1985

Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form by Marina Warner

Sisters of Sisyphus, Observer 26 January 1986

Beyond Power: Women, Men and Morals by Marilyn French

Staying outside the skin, TLS 16 October 1987

Intercourse by Andrea Dworkin

Women by Naim Attallah

Woman’s whole existence, Observer 28 February 1988

Women and Love: The New Hite Report by Shere Hite

Forever black suspenders, Observer 24 January 1993

Divine Decadence: Fascism, Female Spectacle and the Making of Sally Bowles by Linda Mizejewski

Right but Romantic, TLS 25 June 1993

Romanticism and Gender by Anne K. Mellor

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

News from the revolution that never was, Independent On Sunday 26 September 1993

Sexing the Millennium by Linda Grant

TLS 21 December 1993

Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing by Hélène Cixous

Farewell Lady Nicotine, Observer 2 January 1994

Cigarettes are Sublime by Richard Klein

The women’s camp, TLS 15 July 1994

Article on critical theory

Paean to gaiety, LRB 22 September 1994

The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture by Terry Castle

A record of honourable defeat, THES 17 February 1995

No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, Volume 3, Letters from the Front by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar

They lived for their work, Los Angeles Times Book Review, 7 January 1996

Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives by Natalie Zemon Davis

The Goddess of More: Parallels between ancient novels and the new womanism, TLS 9 August 1996

The True Story of the Novel by Margaret Anne Doody

Learning new titles, TLS 17 March 2000

Critical Condition: Feminism at the Turn of the Century by Susan Gubar

Mother’s back, LRB 18 May 2000

What Is a Woman? and Other Essays by Toril Moi

IV CLASSICS

Daringly distasteful, TLS 26 April 1974

Keats and Embarrassment by Christopher Ricks

Gay old times in Greece, Observer 1 October 1978

Greek Homosexuality by K. J. Dover

Victorian fun and games, Observer 24 December 1978

No Name by Wilkie Collins

Observer Magazine 24 June 1979

Villette by Charlotte Brontë

When two melt into one, TLS 22 February 1980

Sexuality and Feminism in Shelley by Nathaniel Brown

A Scribbler comes of age, TLS 23 January 1981

Lord Byron: The Complete Poetical Works Jerome J. McGann (ed.)

Weaving, deceiving and indecision, TLS 5 March 1982

Heroines and Hysterics by Mary R. Lefkowitz

Links in a mystic chain, Observer 23 May 1982

Lull and Bruno by Frances Yates

Ravishment related, TLS 24 December 1982

The Rapes of Lucretia by Ian Donaldson

From our spot of time, TLS 9 December 1988 Review of several books on Wordsworth including

Wordsworth’s Revisionary Aesthetics by Theresa M. Kelley

Dorothy Wordsworth and Romanticism by Susan M. Levin

Peace with a vengeance, Observer 21 November 1993

Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law by E. P. Thompson

V CRITICAL TRADITION

The gay protagonist, Observer 20 Apri1 1980

The Homosexual as Hero in Contemporary Fiction by Stephen Adams

Seminal semantics, Observer 10 January 1982

Dissemination by Jacques Derrida

Men against women, Observer 19 December 1982

The Rape of Clarissa by Terry Eagleton

Cavalier and roundhead, Observer 24 August 1986

Essays on Shakespeare by William Empson

Valuation in Criticism and Other Essays by F. R. Leavis

TLS 14 April 1989

Harold Bloom: Poetics of Influence John Hollander (ed.)

Oops, a lexical leak, Observer 20 March 1994

In the Reading Gaol by Valentine Cunningham

The First Bacchante, LRB 29 April 1999

The Ground Beneath Her Feet by Salman Rushdie

A Simpler, More Physical Kind of Empathy, LRB September 1999

West of the Sun and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami

VI ITALY

Fighting Fascists in bed, Observer Magazine 18 June 1978

Italian feminists

Displaced persons, Observer 13 July 1980

Flight From Torregreca: Strangers and Pilgrims by Anne Cornelison

Our Lady of the Accident, Observer Magazine 23 November 1980

The shrine of the Madonna of Montenero

Unholy ecstasies, Observer 9 February 1986

Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy by Judith C. Brown

Holy Anorexia by Rudolph M. Bell

The vegetable paradiso, TLS 26 September 1986

Sotto il sole giaguaro by ltalo Calvino

Man who put the cult in occultism, Observer 1 October 1989

Interview with Umberto Eco

From the mind’s balcony, TLS 5 October 1990

La strada di San Giovanni by Italo Calvino

Calvino and the Age of Neorealism: Fables of Estrangement by Lucia Re

Freedom fighter, Vogue November 1992

Interview with Oriana Fallaci

On the seas of story, TLS 7 October 1994

‘L’isola del giorno prima by Umberto Eco

Signs of possession, TLS 19 January 2001

Out of Florence: From the World of San Francesco di Paola by Harry Brewster

About the Author

Also by the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Introduction

LIKE CERTAIN PHOTOGRAPHS, WHICH hint at the gap between themselves and their future, posthumous books often have a slightly thin, accidental irony about them. This effect depends on how much they are designed to render their author’s intentions, how narrowly those intentions are inscribed in the book’s form: the stricter the author’s plan, the more the unfinished nature of the text becomes an issue. Here, there are no ghostly plans left on the desk, nothing was left unfinished. Instead, the work itself – perhaps a million and a half words written over thirty years – is just too vivid and alive to be left merely dispersed. What strikes us now, having made our selection, is how intimate a portrait of a mind and personality it provides, and how unexpectedly fresh, how new, that portrait is. As Lorna puts it in ‘Death of the Author’, her unflinching tribute to her friend Angela Carter: ‘Nothing stays, endings are final, which is why they are also beginnings’.

We have selected Lorna’s journalism to display the sheer range and diversity of her writing. During the seventies and eighties, while making her reputation as a contemporary fiction-reviewer, Lorna was also writing in many of the other newspaper and magazine genres. From the days of The New Review in the early 1970s under Ian Hamilton, she continued this diverse practice all her working life: profiles, short notices, interviews, multiple book reviews, essayistic pieces and, more latterly, obituaries. In the late 1970s, she started writing for the TLS, a long-time ‘home’ (branching out briefly into the New Statesman), and settled at the Observer, with Terry Kilmartin, under whose subtle tutelage she learned the tricks of the trade. In the last years, she wrote for the Independent, the London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books.

In a late essay called ‘Living on Writing’ from 1998, Lorna rebels against what she calls a ‘conspiracy of reflexiveness’ in literary journalism:

Barthes’s famous saying went: ‘The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author’. But the Author’s death has led to the birth of endless lower-case authors. If you want to speak with authority as a reader, in other words, you do it first by saying that you are a writer. I have always preferred to be a hack, it seems less of a mystification.

‘Hack’ is a theatrical double-take: Lorna dressed up in her hack persona to create an outside position for herself, from which she was able to concentrate on the work of other people. She thought of herself as a correspondent, sending in urgent bulletins from the front line of reading, not a ‘lower-case writer’.

The urgency of her dialogue with books is one of the distinctive aspects of her voice as a reviewer. She liked the commitment deadlines forced. She also increasingly wrote for money, needed to work, and was proud of the way her pen could supplement her income. Lorna began as an instinctive reader (voracious, indiscriminate) and this trait never left her throughout her life: during the fine contempt of adolescence, the prentice years of scholarship in the Renaissance and seventeenth century, the later years of teaching and constant reviewing, and even finally the last, hand-over-fist period in which she started to edit and write books herself, the curiosity, the primary thrill of the reader, never left her – that what she had in her hand was new; even Don Quixote felt to her passionately curious eyes like a tract of snow that no one else had walked upon. She was able rapidly to read one book after another, without pauses for assimilation, ritual movements or changes of place. Her attention was absolute. She did not appear to digest books at all. She read like this late into the night and began again early in the morning: she simply picked up the next volume, whether it was the Corpus Hermeticum or Tarzan of the Apes, propped it in front of her, her thin, long-nailed thumb creasing down the top three inches as she turned the page, and sped away in a trance of rapid eye-movement, dog-earing the leaves as she went whenever something was memorable. When laid aside, paperbacks, in particular, always had a subtly pot-bellied aspect, as if somehow they had more in them: the persistent creasing at the top caused their pages to bell out slightly. They looked as if they had been filled with reading.

To write your reading was equally direct. Lorna’s habit of accuracy was like a religious devotion and her unusual memory, into which books sank, apparently whole, not a feather of their print disturbed, combined with a jesuitical kind of mischievousness, meant that she was a formidable opponent indeed in a literary discussion. She positively wielded quotation and was very canny about lines of argument. So: this very ‘directness’ is a paradox. When she was young, one of Lorna’s favourite quotations was Polonius’s ‘by indirections find directions out’. To represent your reading so directly is certainly a craft and a pleasure, to say nothing of the service it performs for your authors and readers. But that directness is the product of much meditation, a labour of indirection. When reviewing a book, Lorna would usually read the rest of the author’s works and whatever she could find (often whatever there was) of biography and criticism. Marina Warner has spoken of what it felt like as a writer to receive a Lorna Sage review. Before starting to stab, hunched and one-fingered, at the old Olivetti, or later, the little Toshiba, whose keyboard was transformed into rows of letterless cups by the furious battering it had taken, she liked to make sure she had an intimate grasp of the text. This meant picking out the one-liners she made emblematic of the whole. She often did this by ear, not eye; reading out loud with the special emphasis she put into even the smallest of phrases. The quality of her attention, witnessed by the letters and cards she used to receive from writers, came from the detailed work she put in, to represent not only that intimate grasp but also its logic, where it was heading, its implications in a wider context. Many reviewers, of course, work in this way, but what is different about Lorna’s writing is precisely what was different about her reading: a rare combination of warmth and sophistication, in which she mimes with strange fidelity the act of reading a text, while tactically holding it at arm’s length at the same time. The details eventually click to make an unexpected drift of argument that was, if you look back, there all along. There is always a lot more going on in a Lorna Sage review than the ostensible, but she is always uncannily faithful to the ostensible.

The fact that her directness is also a rhetorical performance is what makes a lot of this writing so eerily coherent and readable. The articles and essays we’ve chosen seem not to develop, but to spring into print, fully fledged from the beginning. Lorna was a seasoned teacher and scholar by the time she started seriously writing for the papers in her late twenties. The development of her voice does not really take place in these pieces – it takes place offstage, earlier. It was curiously literal: a struggle against the lapidary written style of male academics – a kind of Attic dialect – which all students, regardless of gender, still had to acquire by the early sixties. You can see faint signs of that rebellion in the earlier pieces from the late seventies; the need to put the limp mandarin gesture in brackets as she speaks. When she began, Lorna would write out scripts for her voice. It was not long, however, before that’s how she spoke. The brackets were in her speech, often indicated by a switch of the gaze or a fleeting rise in pitch, to throw away the important point. This voice was the one she wanted, the one that did for all purposes, including public speaking, and writing became a staging of her own mercurial speech. When that happened, she rapidly developed the capacity to make a discussion out of an account.

This work when put together has all the pleasure and risk of her bracing talk. Dialogue (between pieces, texts, authors, readers, different parts of herself) is everywhere like good sea air. Lorna pioneered for herself an informality of style that she used to translate into clear and accessible terms any form of perversity, jargon, or learned obscurity. She learned this defence of the common space of culture early on from Plato and it continually informs the ‘attack’ of these pieces. For all her tactical agility, that knack she has of seizing the acute angle, she is not to be deflected, always on a search for what is really there in front of her, its particularity.

Our title comes from Lorna’s 1980 review of J. A. V. Chapple’s Elizabeth Gaskell: A Portrait in Letters. ‘Goodness’ was part of the politics of intimacy, a special preoccupation in Lorna’s writing about the lives of women, who can so easily become lost in what she calls, ironically, after George Eliot, ‘the womanly duty to mediate’. Lorna was acutely aware of the mystification of the personal life, something which was for her a spurious self-confirming logic, by which women cast themselves as appendages. She is suspicious in this piece. Gaskell is almost too normal. She must have a hidden, inner life. You can hear Lorna probing for this telltale flaw of self, calling her, cajolingly, ‘an almost infinitely divisible woman’. But in the end Gaskell’s fund of empathy seems to have matched her own, for she concedes: ‘Most good women turn out on closer inspection to be hypocritical, envious or dim (or of course bad), while she genuinely delights in living in and with others.’

As with books, so with people. Intimacy was another paradoxical aspect of Lorna’s character. She disliked formal lecturing, but was a riveting public speaker, converting even her own shortness of breath to an intimate style. She read, wrote and received visitors at the kitchen table, her ear almost imperceptibly turned towards the door. She had a gift for intimacy, a trick of ‘seeing the point’ of people (a favourite phrase of hers in later years), especially outsiders. This was compounded of a genuine curiosity about the lives of others and a talent for benignly picking them up. She liked to keep open-house, sixties-style, often passing the latest apparition at the door a draft of what she had just finished. You were expected to read it on the spot, while she watched your face keenly for reactions. A conspiratorial need for close contact ran through all her relationships – intimacy was her style, but it was a public style, an argumentative style, a performative component of the writing life.

We have split the pieces into six sections, each arranged according to an internal, chronological order of publication: ‘Pre-War Life Writing’; ‘Post-War Life Writing’; ‘The Women’s Camp’; ‘Classics’; ‘Critical Tradition’; and ‘Italy’. These divisions are essentially a shaping device – loose, but inclusive – intended to allow the reader to follow chronological development on one front, or on several at once. In the first two sections we have given prominence to biography, autobiography, memoirs, letters and sketches. From the mid-nineties on, while issuing bulletins from Bad Blood and then editing The Cambridge Guide to Women’s Writing in English, Lorna had been reflecting on the whole question of ‘Life-Writing’. The project she had begun to work on after Moments of Truth was a book entitled Writing Lives. She was fascinated by the links between lives and work; in much of what she writes she traces the cuspid points between inner and outer lives: in Dickens, for example, whose manic ‘busyness’ with people kept them away so that he could work, and Angus Wilson, whose ‘inner life was lived on the outside’. Even in the other central sections, which contain a more familiar range of materials, this theme can often be found surfacing too. Finally, ‘Italy’ collects a number of different pieces Lorna wrote over the years about the culture in which she spent so many springs and summers from the seventies on. A good Latinist from childhood, her familiarity with Italian was another means of subverting binary imprisonment. It gave zest to her Renaissance interests, and with the help of the language she also kept the texts and authors of the modern tradition in view, outside the canonical effect of their English packaging. You can feel this direct contact with the language in her pieces on Calvino, and in the punning connection (‘sapere’/‘sapore’) she spots in the Italian between knowledge and appetite. She’s amused, here, to be outside and inside at once.

The readerly pleasures of these pieces are many and they are tied to Lorna’s personality. Her hawk’s eye for detail and her almost Dickensian penchant for the grotesque turn up some wonderful things. On St Theresa: ‘her ecstasy was contagious. And not only to artists … General Franco carried her left hand around with him for 40 years.’ Or take this brisk paraphrase of Lawrence’s disgust at the thought of Shelley: ‘A fairy slug is at once unmanly, irrational and grossly slimy: or, in short, a bit of a woman.’ Byron’s attempts to slim: ‘I wear seven Waistcoats, & a Great Coat, run & play at cricket’, which becomes a metaphor for the mawkish ghastliness of his juvenilia. Giantess Emma Hamilton who could ‘impersonate Goddesses because she was nobody, or worse’ declined, apparently, into ‘a Juno lumbering among sceptics’. And of Flora Tristan, she writes: ‘Who else (except a Sterne) would have a chapter on pockets? Or report on a mud-splashing service for huntsmen too poor to hunt? Now there’s an idea for a small business.’

The world of these writings is a generous, but not a frictionless one. Lorna is sceptical of both puritanism and realism in just about equal measures. Both overlap with the claustrophilia of women’s personal lives. The point of writing is not to reproduce the world, but to change it. Women, she argues, have enough problems with reproduction without being locked into it as an aesthetic mode as well. And she is also suspicious of the exclusionary mechanisms of canon-making. She champions outsiders, writers who (as she used to put it) ‘have no reason to exist’, who invent themselves. The most important task of criticism for her is the act of finding a vocabulary for the value of those who are awkward and hard to define, like Elizabeth Smart, for example, whose writerly career, says Lorna, safety-pinning two reproductive functions in one phrase, ‘came to a sticky end in low mimetic prose, and babies’. Yet she still feels, despite the slenderness of her œuvre, that Smart’s prodigal, high lyricism, her offence to the quotidian, has a chance of being read when other, more plausible writers are not. Outsiders count.

Lorna’s critical prejudices embrace anything writerly that she feels gets women out of the jails of biology, sex and gender. She’s on the watch for ‘stickiness’, reproduction, fake authenticity, false being, instrumentality, and bad faith. The positive values that support this running critique come in various forms, but are usually performative, theatrical versions of ‘inauthenticity’: camp, pastiche, carnivalesque, perverse, decadent, even self-destructive or contradictory gestures. She was attracted by the idea, long before Queer Theory, that all women ‘are’ female impersonators.

Agency in the world, above all, is what she is committed to in these writings, and a resistance to myths of propriety and self-absorption. All writing for her was a form of ‘doing’, not talking about it. Or talking about the possibility of talking about it. The postponement of the object of knowledge, she observes in her pieces on Shere Hite and Linda Grant, has infected the space of mediatised culture: ‘privatised emotions [lead] further into therapy-speak, and oral and masturbatory culture, of which the Hite reports are themselves a part’. Before all, she abhors ‘loss of nerve’. The test of theory is the production of real (i.e. particular, different) things – they always bite back the theoretical hand.

The consistent feature of Lorna’s proliferation of roles between Grub Street and Academe is her knowingness about her own potentially divided position. She writes for what’s left of the common reader in us. She mimes, performs, re-presents the manoeuvres of her authors, not to ‘reproduce’ them, but to expose them for contemplation. Her convictions cross the line between authors and readers, and all theory to her, even the most shrinkingly narcissistic, is a form of (political) practice, which conforms to the same rules as any other species of persuasive writing, including fiction, where much of the thinking gets done. Cultural space is not like physical space: in writing you can (and need to) be in more than one place at once. There’s always more room than you think. She’s instinctively against identity politics from the start, because it literalises cultural space. Her appreciative piece on Susan Gubar’s 1999 Critical Condition demonstrates the nature of this retreat: ‘Has “What is to be done?” been replaced by “Who am I?” she asks, and the answer must be partly yes.’ Her response to Gubar’s remarks about the factionalising of women in the academy is characteristic of what Lorna stands for: ‘There is room to live intellectually, in other words, without having to compete over who’s more marginal than whom.’

Like many another thought in this heartening body of work, it’s a good place to start.

Sharon & Victor Sage, 2003