A lyric on idleness
Susanna Johnston
THE COLOUR OF RAIN by Emma Tennant
Faber, £3.95
The Colour of Rain, when it first came out in 1963 under the pseudonym of Catherine Aydy, caused a curfuffle. The use of a nom de plume may have fooled the public but most surely did not hoodwink Miss Tennant's circle of intimate friends, said to represent the book's cast. Storms raged in many a brittle teacup, injunctions were threatened and there were even those, including, I think, one of the au- thor's husbands, who were reputedly pained by having been omitted from the narrative. I myself was said to have been personified in Sylvie (fat, foolish and easily outwitted by the sybaritic clique with which she strove to keep pace). Twenty-five years later it is unnerving to find (assuming that I was the model for the part) matters not much altered.
Now that the hubbub has died down and the particular situations have largely been forgotten, these supposed victims might well be justified in failing to recognise themselves, since the pitiless treatment on paper of the characters shows minimum insight, allowing for no decent qualities. The original edition of this comic bauble of the Sixties had a lively Osbert Lancaster cover with a frieze of nannies and prams passing before a handsome London house. This gave an apter prelude to the contents than the oddly misaligned 'Spirit of the Beehive' image on the cover of the paper- back.
In her somewhat disingenuous introduc- tion to the new edition, Miss Tennant tells us that the book, when entered for the classy Prix Formentor, was 'held aloft' as an example of the decadence of the con- temporary British novel and was then rumoured to have been hurled into a wastepaper-basket. The hurler may have lived to regret his action, since, I lately read, a first edition of this uncooked book is now worth all of £50. A flawed stamp for the album.
What The Colour of Rain really embo- dies is a lyric on idleness but the author, again in her recent introduction, refuses to admit this, preferring to represent it, in retrospect, as a polemic against inherited wealth. She goes on to say that The Colour of Rain was written in homage to Henry Green (her father-in-law, though she does not tell us that). She has certainly adopted his way of unfolding a story, very largely through conversation, but in this book it is the twists of plot which are thereby re- vealed and not the characters themselves.
It is fair to remember, however, that Miss Tennant was in her early twenties when she wrote the book, which in parts is rather funny and gave, and will give, a number of people the doubtful pleasure of having been caught peeping. Examples of the private language of the 1960s sophisti- cates are sorely embarrassing. For caviar read 'little black lumps', for a walk in the garden read 'a subtle bound' — as screeched by a handful of almost inter- changeable idiots.
Although there is an atmosphere of general malevolence in these 115 pages the novel, at its birth, emerged alive and showing promise (subsequently borne out by the development of Miss Tennant's greater talent) as it shone an unsteady torch onto the spoilt ways of upper-crust high-livers. Today it commands an element of 'period pieceness' (unremitting absorb- tion shown by two of the male characters in their hi-fl sets evokes a certain 1960s nostalgia) which could excuse any reader for putting aside approximately one hour and five minutes of their time in which to read it.
I could give you the complete key to the cast, but I won't.
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