What soups, what sandwiches!

Elizabeth Jane Howard, and the delicious significance of food

I remember, some years ago, listening to an episode of A Good Read on Radio 4, in which one of the three novels chosen for discussion was Elizabeth Jane Howard’s Odd Girl Out.

Published in 1972, this is a book about love and the lack of it. It tells the story of a ménage à trois that unfolds during a long summer; minor characters play variations on the central theme. Although not one of EJH’s absolute best (for me that would be her earlier novels: After Julius, The Sea Change, The Long View) it has her defining stylistic virtue, that balance of filigree-elegance and voluptuous sense-awareness. And it abounds in another EJH quality, the absence of moral judgment; aside from one, perhaps two, characters in the 1969 novel Something in Disguise, I can think of none to whom she does not extend her authorial understanding and acceptance. People behave as they do, because they just do.

Well: A Good Read did not approve. Odd Girl Out was excoriated by its two new readers, who seemed deeply unhappy with all this non-judgment, or rather with the fact that it was all being non-expressed within a particular milieu. Their criticisms, as I recall, were that a) the man in the ménage was selfish and frightful and, worse still, a high-end estate agent (boo); b) almost everything was very very very middle-class (as if A Good Read isn’t); c) it was mostly set in Henley-on-Thames.

Give me, as they say, strength.

But what I also remember, from among this outpouring of prejudice (of the acceptable kind), was a remark along the lines of: EJH writes wonderfully about food. And that, of course, is absolutely true. Her supremely sensuous conjuring of weather, gardens, clothes, scent - might one say that she does this better than any 20th century novelist? - extends to gorgeous, response-inducing descriptions of what her characters eat, which - A Good Read suggested - British novelists did not generally do in 1972 (in fact EJH was doing it much earlier). And which as a teenager, when I first read EJH, I found both alluring and alien. Vegetarianism, then pretty restrictive, didn’t really encourage a lustful epicurean plunge into one’s plate; and still, today, the Elizabeth David-like atmosphere that EJH creates around food is not something that I naturally understand. I have no interest in cooking (all that trouble, with lentils, for ten minutes pleasure!). I get quite excited about things like toast. Whatever a ‘foodie’ is, I am the opposite.

However. When I read EJH on food I do feel a real and urgent desire for it: her words render it so flavoursome that I am tempted by things that I would never eat, ie meat and fish. I become like Dan in After Julius (1965) who after a marvellous dinner finds himself unable to sleep: ‘it had been so good that any thought of it brought those fruity juices to his mouth’ (in the end he caves and raids the larder, Nigella-style, devouring a bowl of cold rice pudding with ‘quince jam 1959’). Or even like the cat, Claude, in the tragi-comedic Something in Disguise, another larder-raider, who on a particularly felicitous afternoon finds two cold salmon trout stashed away from a wedding party. ‘He knocked pieces of lemon and cucumber contemptuously aside, settled himself into his best eating position and began to feast. He tried both fish - equally delicious…’ I revel in the enchanting youthful greed of Arabella, catalyst for the extra-marital affairs in Odd Girl Out, permanently hungry for both food and affection, who looks like Botticelli’s Flora and whose rootless, displaced quality is somehow reflected in her ability to absorb huge meals and Mars bars and retain no weight.

EJH gets food. When she writes, one feels her pleasure in it. As a young woman she had studied ‘domestic science’, as her near-alter ego Louise (both born in 1923) does in the Cazalets pentalogy, and this planting of the basics seems to have flowered into a true talent, a blessed accompaniment to her writer’s gift, a part of her very special ability to create a mise en scène, a mood, in life as well as art. It went with her tremendous beauty, her powerful female aura. Because of that, the men in her life (none of whom were easy) sometimes used it against her. In her wonderful memoir, Slipstream, she describes the arduous creation of a pâté for a dinner party hosted by her then lover, Arthur Koestler, and his oblique sadistic attack upon her via public criticism of the dish. Similarly: ‘Bit authentic for me, darling’, was the remark of her third husband Kingsley Amis, after she spent hours on perfecting a tomato sauce.

I am reminded of the scene in that truly majestic 1956 novel The Long View, in which the procuring (during wartime) and cooking of a simple meal - steak and mashed potatoes - becomes the focal point of marital tension.

She unwrapped the steak. It was a very large steak; she had no onions, and the lack of them seemed suddenly all-important. If she did not warn her husband that there were no onions, everything would be spoiled…

Only when away from her husband does Antonia, the wife in the novel, truly enjoy a dinner: seafood eaten in Marseilles with a man she has just met, who relaxes her, in front of whom she orders a sticky liqueur as digestif, ‘knowing that he would neither blench nor treat her as if she were a tasteless cretin’.

This is the thing with EJH: food matters in itself, in her novels, but it also signifies. What people eat, how they eat, tells us so much. Take Odd Girl Out. The book is about love and the lack of it; alongside this, it is about money and the lack of it, and the way in which these two old frenemies collide. The food eaten at the house in (crucifix aloft) Henley - duck with cherries, crab and champagne, twenty oranges recklessly squeezed, plaice for the cat - is symbolic of a life, a lifestyle, that is affluent and comfortable and that the reader can imaginatively, deliciously, inhabit. Yet sliding in between these scenes are snapshots of a desperate young mother, indirectly connected with one of the principals, for whom supermarkets are war zones (‘One pound of Cheddar, she wrote, and crossed Tampax off her list’) and who feeds her children on past-its-sell-by-date fish paste:

If she scraped the top off, she could fry some of the bread (the electricity bill hadn’t come in again yet) in the marge and put the paste on it…

Then there are vignettes of life among the enervated Eurotrash, too sated to feel any kind of true appetite:

Neither of them wanted lunch, but there was really nothing else to do with the two hours in the middle of the day.

There is more such aridity in The Long View. The meal served at the dinner party that opens the novel - ‘oysters and grouse and cold orange soufflé’ - sounds opulent but, denuded of EJH’s descriptive powers, oddly unenjoyable: a symbol of the expired vitality with which the story (famously told backwards) begins. There is also, in the later novel Getting it Right, a savage portrayal of bulimia: the most direct possible sign, in this food-celebrating oeuvre, that all engagement with life is warped.

As for the Cazalets, that triumphant immersive saga, which may not be EJH at her very finest (again, for me, it is the earlier work) but which finally lifted her from the shadow cast by Kingsley Amis - read Slipstream for the grim details of their relative treatment by the literary establishment… these novels offer priceless details of food during the Second World War, and the attendant shadow of constant hunger: the ‘forcemeat balls’, the ‘rissoles about the size of a trussed mouse’, the ‘Carnation milk pudding’, the cottage pie covered in ‘Pomme’, the ginger biscuits eaten to fill a yearning stomach. Recollections of a delectable precision, but also a perfect means to convey the ongoing, diurnal, ordinary experience of war, which is the subject matter of these novels: the fact that life, even in extremis, goes on.

And then: a final masterpiece, Falling, based upon a strange episode in EJH’s own later life, an account of the relationship between a successful, vulnerable writer and a man with remarkable powers of insinuation and seduction. The protagonists - Daisy and Henry - are in their 60s, which in the publication year of 1999 was older than it is today (nobody then knew how Brad Pitt and Julianne Moore would look a quarter-century on). Yet the book is the most sensual, in fact the downright sexiest, that EJH ever wrote. And the motifs burgeon, abound, overspill.

The plot of Falling is unnervingly convincing. But what rises in my mind, when I think of the book, is an atmosphere: a depiction - as with Odd Girl Out - of a rapturous spring and summer, configurative and eternally idyllic, ‘the suddenness of blossom’ and ‘white cascades of flowering may’; the thick heat ‘crowded with minute flies’, the night smell of ‘tobacco and stocks’; the magical enduring light… echoes, all, of the ripening interlude between Daisy and Henry, which is by no means the whole of the story, but is emblematic of any moment of perfect, or even illusory, happiness.

A happiness that, in EJH, requires beautiful meals. Anchoring, ritualizing, sustaining, transfigured by the herbs planted by Henry in Daisy’s garden; their planning and preparation a symbol of domestic bliss. Of life as a gift.

What soups, what sandwiches, what casseroles!

They would have been wonderful, for sure. Nobody does it better than Elizabeth Jane Howard.

Dear subscribers, weekend posts are usually paid but this is a free and grateful welcome to so many new people - thank you all!