In her foreword to Elizabeth Jenkins’s 1954 classic, The Tortoise and the Hare, Hilary Mantel reminds us of the unaccountability of love
Apart from a war, what could be more interesting than a marriage? A love affair, though it is one of the central concerns of fiction, is a self-limiting tactical skirmish, but a marriage is a long campaign, a grand game of strategy involving setbacks, bluffs and regroupings — a campaign pursued, sometimes, until the parties have forgotten the value of the territory they are fighting over, or have abandoned their first objectives in favour of secret ones.
I have admired this exquisitely written novel for many years, partly for its focus on a fascinating and lost social milieu, but also because through her close attention to the negotiations between men and women, and women and women, Elizabeth Jenkins has provided a thoughtful and astringent guide to the imperatives of sexual politics — and one which is of more than historical interest.
In 2004, in her hundredth year, Elizabeth Jenkins wrote a memoir called The View from Downshire Hill. It offers graceful and startlingly fresh pictures from a long writing life, concentrating on her earlier years; educated at Cambridge, condescended to by Virginia Woolf, befriended by Elizabeth Bowen, she lived at the heart of English cultural life and published 23 books.
She wrote biographies of Elizabeth I, of Lady Caroline Lamb, and of Jane Austen. She was a founder member of the Jane Austen Society, one of those practical enthusiasts who bought and restored Jane’s house at Chawton, saved it from dereliction, furnished it with impeccable attention to the period, and opened it to the public.
Jenkins’s hypersensitivity to atmosphere may remind readers of Rebecca West. Her eye for colour and texture, her precise descriptions of the civilised surfaces of life, recall Sybille Bedford.
Like both these near contemporaries, she wrote reportage as well as fiction. All three of them were interested in spies and poisoners, in hidden acts and the murky undergrowth of human intention. But more than she is like them, she is like Austen: formal, nuanced, acid. She surveys a room as if she were perched on the mantelpiece: an unruffled owl of Minerva, a recording angel.
The Tortoise and the Hare was the sixth of her 12 novels, first published in 1954. Its characters are recovering some ease in their lives after wartime dislocation; they now have the leisure for emotional discovery. Evelyn Gresham is a distinguished barrister, 52 years old, with all the trappings of success — a gracious house in the Berkshire countryside, a London pied-à-terre, a son about to go to public school, a younger wife who is pretty, gentle and artistic. Evelyn is critical and exacting; Imogen is a natural mollifier. In one elegant opening paragraph, Jenkins charts the course their lives will take. In an antique shop, the pair examine a mug, ‘decorated with a pattern of raised wheat ears, of the kind known in country districts as a “harvester”’. Imogen’s eye takes in the purity of the colour, her fingers learn the details of the moulding. Evelyn sees the chip at its base, from which cracks meander up the inside. Already we grasp the essentials of their story. We know what they have sown and what they will reap.
Imogen lives in an uneasy peace with her husband, one which depends on daily accommodation and adaptation on her part, on constant shifts and abnegation, a retreat from the frontiers of personhood. Evelyn is a conventional man with a flinty intellect. His cerebral self-satisfaction makes few concessions to those more self-doubting or imaginative. Imogen’s soft girlish qualities, which originally attracted him, have melted into an ineffectuality that could be cloying. He receives deference from his courtroom juniors, and expects it from his wife — his expectations may not be reasonable, but we see why he has them. He wants his domestic life to run on oiled wheels, like his professional life, where his clerk waits to tend him when he comes out of court with a cup of hot milk laced with brandy. Driven and self-disciplined, he longs in one area of his life to be dependent, cosseted — to have someone plan his comforts for him.
In this world of half a century ago, men and women are required to play roles that make them more unalike than they actually are. Imogen has been asked to play the ingénue, and has missed the point where her husband changed, and required her to change: ‘He was romantic and emotional once, but of course he isn’t now. How should he be?’ Perhaps the marriage has to end, because there is no role for her to step into; what does a tender-hearted ex-beauty do with her time? Part of Imogen’s wistfulness comes from her preoccupation with her approaching uselessness. Gavin — an imperceptive, unlikable child, who already treats her with the practised masculine contempt he has learned from his father — will go to school. Then what will be the use of her? She has a shrewdness in human relationships, though it offers her no protection.
She has anticipated that, a few years into their marriage, Evelyn will want a mistress. She has imagined it would be a younger version of herself. She sees no threat from their country neighbour, Blanche Silcox, with her gloves like gauntlets, her quilled hats, her gruff masculine voice. Modern readers will be dismayed to find Blanche, a woman in her fifties, described as ‘elderly’, but that is how she seems to Imogen.
Miss Silcox, Evelyn says with admiration,
practically runs the neighbourhood...
Blanche is on the Board of Management of the Home for Incurables at Silverpath, and she’s the Treasurer of the New Turning Club that takes in girls who are having an illegitimate baby — she’s done any amount of voluntary work.
The reader has seen and heard enough of Blanche to imagine her tipping the incurables out of their bathchairs, and making the ‘girls’ wish that they, as well as their babies, had never been born. Blanche believes the newly founded NHS is a charter for malingerers. Money-minded, severely practical, she is a ‘countrywoman’, in the sense that she enjoys shooting animals. These days, she would be a leading light in the Countryside Alliance. She can, on occasion, be considerate, even show vulnerability; but it is only when Evelyn is around that her voice adopts a low note, a note of intensity which Imogen hears but cannot account for. In Blanche’s dogmatic opinions we hear the sour, abrasive tone, the vicious generalisations, of what Jung called the ‘animus- ridden’ woman.
The times have allowed no outlet for Blanche’s abilities or for her assertive character. Her dowdiness makes her a figure of fun, until Evelyn — whose feminine aspect is on the loose, looking for a counterpart — discerns her strong, suppressed sexuality, and realises that here is a woman, rich, generous and omnicompetent, who will give him a rest from domestic pressures and emotional demands. Imogen’s friend Paul asks her, ‘Are you sure you know what men fall in love with?’ She doesn’t.
Elizabeth Jenkins describes her characters with remarkable even-handedness. She is remorseless with their pretensions, pointing out that one thing that prevents Imogen from expressing her needs is her own touchy pride, the pride of a fading beauty. Dismayed, the reader watches the erosion of Imogen’s self-esteem, till she is ‘run ragged’, and unable to defend her position. It is the older woman who reads the emotional logic of the situation. The tortoise overtakes the hare.
Exiled in defeat, Imogen has become a pensive woman who eats alone in the corner of a hotel dining room. Evelyn is the battered prize. Blanche is the sated winner, ‘feet up on the sofa, eating a marron glacé with a meditative air’. How exactly is it done? Where is the psychological tipping point? Trying to locate it draws the reader back and back to the narrative, with a mixture of fellow-feeling and fascination and dread. Most women readers today will feel they are like neither of the rivals, but if they are honest they will see a bit of both in themselves. The author has separated the two types, drawn a clean line between them, so that the drama has free play. But neither woman is a stereotype; they are warm, human, contingent. Like all the most convincing characters in fiction, they seem to have free will.
The minor characters are expertly, swiftly drawn — the melancholy London doctor with whom Imogen has an old romantic friendship; his cold, shallow, beautiful wife; and Evelyn’s professional colleagues. There is a superbly malicious glimpse of a successful authoress en fête, and satirical sideswipes at the local property developer and his pretentious wife, too ‘busy with her ballet-work’ to keep her children clean and fed. Their son Tim is a sad little scrap, the only being who truly admires Imogen, even in defeat.
Elizabeth Jenkins never married — no doubt she had seen how the odds were stacked — and had no children, but she writes about them with tenderness and is keenly observant of them, showing even the obnoxious Gavin to be damaged by his parents’ break-up, though the effects may take years to show. Just as she is grounded in people — their physicality easily evoked, their dress, their manner — so she is grounded in place; her descriptions of the countryside are both luminous and exact. The surfaces of the story, as well as its depth, give the reader pleasure. When we close the book we are left with the rustle of Imogen’s muslin dress, the chink of fine china, the scent of white geraniums.
Elizabeth Jenkins describes in her memoir how when the book came out there was some
severe, personal criticism from readers who felt that the interest of the book was too much confined to one class, not to say to one income bracket. I was told by a young man, a student in a university society... that what was wrong with the book was that it wasn’t about anything that really mattered. As I felt that the suffering caused by the break-up of a marriage was something that did matter, I asked him, in surprise, what were some of the things that really mattered? After a pause, he said, ‘Well, trade unions.’
You wonder what the undergraduate knew about trade unions. He knew, or thought he knew, that the private sphere is inferior to the public sphere, and that emotions are for girls. Closer attention to the book might have spared him some uncomprehending misery in later life; no doubt he learned the hard way that the personal is political.
The way we run our lives has changed vastly since Elizabeth Jenkins wrote, but this does not make her insights obsolete. People are ‘run ragged’ in relationships all the time, though they are just as likely to be men. What she offers us does not date: descriptive grace and narrative pulse, dry humour and moral discrimination, tempered elegance and emotional force.