March 26, 1923

Novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard (March 26, 1923  to January 2, 2014) exemplified the "cultured bohemianism of her milieu (love affairs with men like Cyril Connolly, Cecil Day-Lewis and Kenneth Tynan – always conducted with drinks before dinner," according to one assessment. This author was described also as the finest woman writer of her time. And, perhaps less appreciated, she cared for cats. We excerpt an article which describes Howard's relationship with her god daughter, the child of C. Day-Lewis and Jill Balcon. This is Tamasin Day-Lewis and we quote them both, rearranging the order of the text in places, to bring out a cat story.

First, the humans in our story: that is Howard on the right, Tamasin in the middle.




Tamasin's words:

'...Jane came into my world as a fairy godmother long before I really got to know her.....

'My father was ill through my teenage years and died months after my 18th birthday. The road-map had run out... Jane, her then husband, Kingsley Amis, and her brother Monkey were the three people who got me through that awful period; our family moved in with them for my father's last few months, but, when I look back, I can see it all started much earlier on. She was always there in the background......

[When Homer arrived...] I was five or six, and my childhood was quite solitary and uninterrupted by events and excitement. Dan and I lived on the nursery floor, four floors up from our father's study, with our nanny and a hectic green and yellow budgerigar called Rupert. We drew, we wrote stories, we read books and were read to, and we devised plays. Not many outsiders entered our small world...'

Elizabeth Jane Howard's words:

'.......When she was about seven I brought her a large cardboard box to open on her birthday. In it was a small black kitten - the child of one of my own cats. Her look of astonishment and extreme joy is with me still. He was called Homer, due to his being half Greek, and, although he was not much liked by the rest of the family, she adored him. By then she was growing fast into a thin, elegant, tense little creature, with a quantity of dark hair and a gaze both penetrating and wary. ...'

I believe those last adjectives refer to Tamasin, not the cat. Tamasin, who recalls:

'He is half Greek, a quarter Siamese and a quarter Paddington,' I seem to remember Jane saying, when I had got over the initial thrill of realising that the soot-black primrose-eyed ball of fur in the box was all mine. 'I smuggled his mother, Katsika, back from Greece under my jumper.' Even now I don't know whether that was true, and I don't really want to know, either. Homer became my friend, my ally, the person I told all my troubles and secrets to throughout my childhood.....'

We all need godmothers, and cats.

January 2, 2014

Love All , (2009) contains, like most of the fiction of Elizabeth Jane Howard (March 26, 1923 to January 2, 2014), a moderate number of cats.

"[T]hey stood in the hall, which had a lot of doors and a staircase on the right-hand side. A large marmalade cat sat on the hall table beside a bowl of cyclamen."

Martin Amis, her step-son, in her obituary referred to, "the kind of writing she did," in a dismissive tone. Not only is that ungracious, it reveals a haughtiness which does not bear scrutiny. They both wrote stories which believe in narrative, in individual integrity, in the power of humans to discern their lives. Those are cardinal assumptions underlying fiction, rarely challenged, and possibly the only meaningful distinctions a critic can legitimately make.

This example from Amis (London Fields, 2010) is what I mean:

"...Nicola stood...wearing a dress the color of a Siamese cat, three of its nine buttons. its nine lives, already unfastened...."

One suspects Howard understood the significance of her writing better than Amis his own.
Entertainment, distraction is the game. The relevant distinction between Howard and Amis is that Howard was not confused about her product.

March 26, 1923

Elizabeth Jane Howard, (March 26, 1923,) is an English novelist. She now lives in Bungay (Suffolk). She was awarded a CBE in 2000. Her autobiography, Slipstream, was published in 2002. One of her many books, is Something in Disguise (1976), and in this book, a black and white cat named Claude, has a major role.

Something in Disguise opens with a wedding. The bride discovers her cat is asleep in the hatbox which supposedly protected her wedding veil.

He was an uneasy combination of black and white; on his face this gave him an asymmetircal and almost treasonable appearance. His pads were the bright pink of waterproof Elastoplast, and between them the thick white fur was stained green. He'd been hunting, she told him, as she lifted him off her veil, and he purred like the distant rumble of a starting lorry. He was heartless, greedy, and conceited, but the thought of going to Cornwall without him made her feel really sad. She had not liked to ask Leslie whether he could live with them in Bristol , and, indeed, it had crossed her mind that even if Leslie agreed, Claude might not. His standard of living in Surrey was exceptionally high - even for a cat- as apart from two large meals a day that he ate primly out of soup plates , he procured other more savage ...[meals] such as grass snakes and rabbits that he demolished on the scullery floor at times convenient to himself. Enough of him, she thought, putting him tenderly on the bed. He got up at once , shook his head, - his ear canker rattled like castanets and chose a better position eight inches from where she had put him .Her veil was quite crushed and spotted with his hairs--he moulted continuously in all his prodigious spare time. 'What on earth am I doing?' she thought as she hung the veil on the back of a chair.'Starting a new life without Daddy, I suppose.'

Later Leslie's view of cats would be described:

After two gins and tonics he was still on the subject of how much worse (worse?) cats were than dogs. 'You've got a nice little pup for company,' he said over and over again. 'You don't want a dirty creature like that.'

Leslie is the husband of Alice, Alice is the daughter of Herbert. Herbert is the serial killer who has poisoned three wives. His last victim is saved by the coincidence of his having a heart attack, and the cat drinking the poison intended as Alice's stepmother's last drink.

Elizabeth Jane Howard demonstrates the faults of her profession in describing ordinary people who say clever and insightful things. Her attempt to describe a granular reality results in mistakes like describing a cat's eyes as of a "lemony" color, which is reaching for originality at the expense of fact. In conclusion, however, we have to stress that Elizabeth Jane Howard is a great storyteller.