Writing to save your life
I first read Jane Gardam’s short stories, way back when in my early twenties – such a long time ago now! I was so impressed with the edginess behind the quietly deft writing. She was funny. She was surreal. She knew people and loved their optimism, their sadness and their many flaws. She was endlessly generous and compassionate. Like many older writers – and I’m thinking here of women writers like Elizabeth Jolley and Mary Wesley – she seemed to me to be fearless.
And maybe that is a truth held in common by that trio – they all started writing or publishing, at least, at a later age. Elizabeth Jolley was fifty-three before she had her first book published. Mary Wesley was – famously – in her early seventies before her writing for adults was picked up (she had one children’s book out) and was so depressed that she carried a note in her handbag that read ‘Do not resuscitate’. At forty-three, Jane Gardam, was relatively young.
These days there’s such a push for young writers to get their work out there but does this pressure come accompanied by an over-willingness to please, conform and to toe whatever line has been declared the line? Which is not to say that that trio weren’t also ambitious for publication. Mary Wesley took herself to America and bearded an agent at a party and Gardam said candidly that ‘she was desparate to get started’. Still, they are all bold writers committed to investigating the fearful secrets we try to keep from the day’s light with wry empathy.
Since that first foray into the short stories, I’ve read (and re-read) nearly everything Gardam has ever written including a children’s book I adored, Through the Doll’s House Door. That remains the only children’s book of hers I’ve read. Oh, except for Bilgewater – which maybe a young adult novel in theory but which can be read by anyone in practice.
Like most Gardam fans, Old Filth is a definite favourite – the plotting made me exclaim out loud at certain points and I fell a little in love with Edward Feathers – always a sucker for awkward, haunted men. I thought that may have been her last book, but then, of course, she wrote The Man in the Wooden Hat and Last Friends – incredible when you think she was in her eighties.
The book I return to as much as Old Filth, however, is The Queen of the Tambourine. An epistolary novel, Eliza Peabody’s letters to Joan depict a lonely woman unravelling for reasons that gradually unfold as the letters shift from self-righteous to fabulist narratives.
And then, of course, there’s Crusoe’s Daughter – which, now I think about it, very probably was an unconscious influence on my novel for middle readers, Mimi and the Blue Slave.
Underneath the trials and tragedies that befall her characters is a deep vein of resilience – as though Gardam wishes them to share an attribute she has demonstrated in her own life. They discover or rediscover this trait mostly through connections with others, connections sometimes forged by their own small acts of kindness, or by acts of charity and generosity from others.
As Christmas creaks nearer and the world seems further away than ever from embracing compassion as a guide for living I might find solace in plunging again into Gardam’s stories – and the knowledge, too, that she kept on writing even when events in her own world could have felled her. Oh, and I just discovered one I haven’t read, The Hollow Land. Christmas reading sorted!