Taken by Storm
Francis King
Company Parade and Women Against Men Storm Jameson (Virago £3.50 each).
Like Ivy Compton-Burnett and Lettice Cooper, Storm Jameson is a woman novelist whose literary abilities have been honed, not blunted, by the passage of the Years. She was already in her eighties when She published what I myself consider to be One of the finest — if, significantly, also one of the briefest — of her novels, There Will Be a Short Interval (1971); and since, at 91, she is still in full possession of all her formidable faculties, it is sad for us, if not for her, that now she should be silent. That that novel was inadequately appreciated Probably had something to do with this voluntary laying down of a burden (as she herself has called it); the death of her belov- ed husband, Guy Chapman, certainly More.
Inevitably, if a writer produces some 45 works of fiction, the quality will be variable. With that bleak truthfulness Which characterises all her writing, whether about others or herself, Storm Jameson has declared: 'My earliest novels are not worth reading. Nor are all the later ones.' These 1,1,vo volumes reissued in paperback by Virago — one containing a full-length novel, Company Parade (1934), and the other three short novels, collected under the title Women Against Men (1932, 1933, 1937) — are both worth reading; but they 'night have been deliberately selected from a vast opus to indicate the division between What is meritoriously workmanlike and What is unassailably first-rate. The full-length novel, first part of a bildungsroman originally planned to extend to five or six volumes but abandoned after the third, clearly has in it a large element of autobiography — as a comparison with Storm Jameson's actual autobiography, Journey from the North, one of her strongest books, at once makes evident. Like her creator, the heroine, Hervey Russell, leaves her baby son in her native Yorkshire and comes south to London in order to make her way in the world. Like her creator again, Hervey becomes a copy- writer in an advertising-agency and subse- quently editor of an obscure weekly magazine (scanning The Spectator, to learn how it should be done). One of her earliest literary associates is a bluff, energetic, am- bitious, no-nonsense novelist called William Ridley — clearly modelled on J. B. Priestley. The book has the grey, grainy quality of monochrome photographs of the period, with the same power of low-keyed evocation. It at once recalled for me a remark of Storm Jameson's to the effect that, so far from being a born writer, she was probably far more suited to being an engineer. It is with the patience and preci- sion of an engineer, rather than with the daring and panache of a born writer, that the whole work seems to have been assembled, part by part. It is an admirable mechanism but it has no life independent of its maker and manipulator.
Of the three short novels, the first, Delicate Monster, perpetually teeters on the border of the first-rate, without ever cross- ing it. Two girls, Fanny and Victoria, grow up as friends in the same bleak northern town and then, making their way to Lon- don, both become novelists. Fanny, with her dour, humourless integrity, has little popular success; Victoria, with her canny, charming promiscuity, has a lot. Victoria has a daughter, whose life she does everything in her power to ruin, while Fan- ny, the girl's surrogate mother, attempts to protect her. Clearly, the 'delicate monster' of the title is meant to be Victoria; but at the close the phrase seems hardly less ap- plicable to Fanny, so delicate in her moral sensibilities and so close to being a monster in the grim pleasure which she takes in the discomfiture of characters to whom she feels herself to be superior. If Storm Jameson had sharpened this irony of a pharisaical narrator being so scrupulous about the faults of others and so unaware of her own, the work might have been the minor masterpiece which it just fails to be.
Minor masterpiece is what each of the other two short novels undoubtedly is. When Storm Jameson is not reworking her own experiences but imagining the ex- periences of others, her work takes on a far deeper, more lasting resonance. The Single Heart is the story of a woman pitiably in- capable of caring for anyone but the man who constantly betrays her. As a young girl, Emily, daughter of a rich ship-owner, falls in love with Evan, the son of one of her father's employees. In due course, she mar- ries into the aristocracy; but when she again meets Evan, now himself one of her father's employees and an aspiring Labour politician, she both starts an affair with him and has children by him — which her corn-
plaisant husband brings up as his own. On the death of her husband, she marries Evan, propels him into Parliament and then wears herself out in his service.
Hardly less remorseless is A Day Off, in which a vulgar, ageing 'kept woman' takes herself off to Richmond Park for the day, while awaiting her lover's weekly letter, with its enclosure of £2 — a sum on which, these days, it would be difficult to keep even a dog. She suspects that he is about to finish with her and, at the close of the day off, the suspicion proves to have been cor- rect. The way in which Storm Jameson presents every event through the coarse mind of this pathetic and yet unlikeable woman — at one point, she steals the hand- bag of an old woman who has been friendly to her in a tea-shop — is a remarkable tour de force. A stylistic audacity, of a kind not to be found anywhere in the long novel, matches the audacity of a theme worthy of Maupassant.
If a writer should be judged not by a whole oeuvre but by what is best in it, then this novelist is one of the finest of her day.
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