Bill Kupersmith's Reviews > Elizabeth Jane Howard: A Dangerous Innocence

Though twentieth-century British fiction is my passion and principal amusement, I’ve never read much of Elizabeth Jane Howard. Family sagas like the Cazalet saga rarely attract me. I enjoyed her Getting it Right, especially when Gavin’s mum is thrilled rather than scandalised by finding Minerva in the house, mistakenly imagining she is an aristocrat. But Howard’s personal life involved some of my very favourite people. Most importantly she was the second wife of Kingsley Amis, the funniest writer in the English language. She was also the first Mrs. Peter Scott, whom I recall fondly as the stiff-upper-lipped skipper of the unfortunate America’s Cup challenger Sovereign in 1964. (I know it’s judgemental, but Jane’s feeling neglected as a war-time spouse because Peter was more interested in Oerlikon guns and fitting out the destroyer he commanded than in her strikes me as awfully selfish. Hadn’t she seen In Which We Serve?) Her lovers after Scott and before Amis seem to have included much of literary London, including Laurie Lee (Emma Smith was smarter to resist him), Arthur Koestler, and C. Day-Lewis. Amis was a semi-alcoholic (I write “semi” because if an “alcoholic” is someone who cannot give up drinking, Amis was one of those – I knew a number of them in my ocean racing days – to whom it never crossed their minds to try). He also seems to have been a total slob and a spoiled child who left all the household tasks to Jane. But his absolute devotion to the discipline and craft of writing hilarious stories redeems him, at least for me as a reader.

Artemis Cooper, along with her spouse and sometime collaborator Sir Anthony Beevor, is surely one of England’s best contemporary nonfiction writers, and this biography is fascinating.