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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.
