Jameson Journey from the North

A Memoir
1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-80533-045-5
Verlag: Pushkin Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 800 Seiten

'When Storm Jameson set out to write a memoir... she found literary gold' VIVIAN GORNICK 'A fascinating life story, told with passion, clarity and a fierce intelligence' SARAH WATERS After decades of writing a novel every year, Storm Jameson found her form in the memoir. With stringent, witty self-scrutiny, she wrestled with the great events of her life: childhood struggles with her tempestuous mother; an early, unhappy marriage; repeated flights from settled domestic life; and a hard-won career in writing and politics. In a voice of electric immediacy, Jameson recounts the great shocks of the twentieth century, from losing her brother in the First World War to tirelessly helping refugees escape Nazi Germany during the Second. An arrestingly candid account of a rich life, this is one the great literary memoirs.

Margaret 'Storm' Jameson (1891-1986) was an English journalist and author. Born and raised in Whitby, she gained a scholarship to study English at the University of Leeds. After graduating with a First-Class degree, she moved to London where she became active in politics and began to write. Jameson remained committed to politics and literature throughout her life: she published a total of forty-five novels, as well as criticism, short stories and innumerable political articles; she was also the first female president of the British section of International PEN. In later life, she turned to writing her memoirs and produced the two volumes of Journey from the North, initially published in 1969 and 1970. Jameson died in 1986 at the age of ninety-five.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Jameson, Storm

Leseproben

‘If Only I Could Begin Again!’

The mystery of a writer’s métier

Vivian Gornick

My mother, a high school graduate with no recourse to a critical vocabulary, was a romantic reader, mainly of novels. Whenever I asked her how she was liking the book in her hand, she’d narrow her eyes, look steadily at me, and say, ‘Powerful. Really powerful.’ Or, conversely, ‘Not powerful, not at all powerful.’ One day I gave her Journey from the North, a two-volume autobiography written by Storm Jameson, a prolific English novelist at work throughout the first half of the twentieth century. A week later I walked into her apartment and there she was, lying on the couch, reading the first volume. I said, ‘How are you liking that book, Ma?’ She sat up, swung her legs over the side of the couch, and narrowed her eyes, as always, but this time she said, ‘I feel as though she’s just in the room with me.’ And then she said, ‘I’m going to be lonely when I finish this book.’ I remember thinking, What more could any writer ask of a reader?

Ten days after she had finished Journey from the North, I gave my mother one of Jameson’s many (forty-five, to be exact) novels to read. Her eyes lit up and she accepted the book eagerly. But a week later, I saw that it had been tucked into a small shelf above the telephone table and I had the distinct impression that it had been laid aside. Yes, my mother confirmed, it had been. ‘I don’t know why,’ she said, ‘but this book is nothing like that other one.’ And then she said, ‘Not powerful, not at all powerful.’

I nodded my head at her. You’re not alone, Ma, I thought. Over the years, a few thousand other readers have been faced with the same discrepant feelings about Jameson’s autobiography on the one hand, and her fiction on the other. For that matter, they have felt the same when puzzling over other writers of fiction or poetry whose significant work turns out to reside in a memoir. There is Edmund Gosse, for instance, a mediocre Victorian poet who secured a place in English letters only with the publication, in late middle age, of his masterly memoir, Father and Son; then there is the colorful journalist Thomas De Quincey, whose fame rests entirely on the unforgettable Confessions of an English Opium-Eater; and, of course, our own James Baldwin, who wrote novels, plays, and poems but will be remembered chiefly for the sublime personal essays that are, in effect, his memoir.

I myself have something of a vested interest in this mysterious matter of a writer’s natural métier. When I was young, everyone under the sun was writing a novel because the novel was the form of imaginative writing respected by high- and low-minded alike. Only through the novel, it was felt, could one achieve a work of literary art. So I, of course, like every other young person who dreamed of becoming a writer, labored intensively from earliest youth at writing one. By the time I was in my late twenties, I had to face the fact that while I was forever telling stories to friends, colleagues, relatives, nearly all of whom would crow at me, ‘That’s a novel, write it down!’—and here I was, writing it down, somehow, within the framework of a fiction—‘it’ refused to come to life.

It slowly dawned on me that I could tell stories effectively only when I was composing them in my own storytelling voice, out of my own lived experience, not in the voice of an invented narrator settled in a made-up situation. I was well into my thirties before I understood that I was born for the memoir. One can only wonder what Storm Jameson would have produced had she come earlier to the genre in which she wrote most naturally.

Margaret Ethel Jameson was born in 1891 in the northern English port town of Whitby. The family included a number of sea captains—one of whom was Margaret’s father—and they had lived there for generations on both sides. They were a people of ingrown endurance, pragmatic to the bone, and possessed of the brusque, no-nonsense speech laced with sardonic irony for which Yorkshire men and women are still famous. In Jameson’s time especially, a dread of emotional exposure seemed to haunt the entire population. To be seen caring about anyone or anything in Whitby was to put yourself at risk; you were made to feel vulnerable in a world that, once your guard was down, would show no mercy. Thus, an isolated, weather-beaten town carved into an irregularity on a rugged coast bred, as Jameson wrote in her autobiography, ‘a crop of eccentrics, harmless fools, misers, house devils, despots, male and some female, who behaved toward their families with a severity’ that the normally socialized rarely allowed themselves.

Childhood for the Jamesons was an extremity of delight (unearned) and punishment (undeserved). On the delight side, there was Whitby itself and the sea, a world of natural beauty in which to experience the sheer bliss of being alive:

Endless days on the shore in summer, from nine in the morning until six or seven at night… three children on the edge of an infinity of sand and water—enclosed in a boundless blue world, steeped in light, in a radiance of sun and salt.

On the punishment side, they had a father who was away at sea for months at a time and very nearly mute when at home, and a hot-tempered mother, a shockingly bored romantic who hated her husband, beat her children, and lashed out regularly at the bitter disappointment of life. This mother—whose thwarted spirit made Jameson’s heart ache—became dramatically imprinted on an impressionable young psyche, and was responsible for locking the girl into a personality as angry, defensive, and yearning as her own. Not a single person in Jameson’s long, eventful life was ever to supplant her mother’s emotional influence; nor was any other place in the world to eclipse the memory of Whitby’s piercing loveliness as she experienced it in her youth.

In all probability, Jameson would have married a Whitby man, had half a dozen children, and lived out her mother’s life if, in 1908, she had not won a scholarship to the newly created University of Leeds. The school, at that time, was filled with the children of northern England’s working class—people like herself whose eyes were being opened to the excitement and promise of a life they could not have previously imagined. It was there that Jameson began to see herself as a woman with a literary gift and as a person stigmatized by a class system that placed her very close to the bottom. She found both discoveries exhilarating; in no time she was writing stories and had become a red-hot socialist determined on a political as well as a literary life.

The heady self-assurance that Jameson and her university friends felt while still at school became both a shield and a sword. ‘In those early years,’ she wrote,

I had no consciousness of being shabby, I thought I could go anywhere, into any company… We emerged from our three starveling years with a lighthearted confidence that we were conquerors.

But a few years out of school and the corrections of worldly judgment caused a penetrating self-doubt to set in. At university, Jameson had been considered a brain and a talent and nobody noticed what she wore. In London, she learned that she was seen as an intellectual provincial and that she dressed badly: ‘It was only later that I began to covet an elegance I had discovered I lacked.’ There and then, the alternating influences of incredible brashness and equally incredible insecurity stamped her personality for good and all.

The affliction of urban sophistication, however, was hardly Jameson’s first experience beyond student life to reveal itself as formative. While still in school, she had fallen desperately in love with a ne’er-do-well, slept with him, and in 1913, at the age of twenty-one, was forced to marry. Then, before she knew where on earth she was, she had a baby—not they had a baby, she had a baby—and that, as it was with most women, might have been that, except that Margaret Jameson wasn’t most women.

For a good five years, she and her husband, imagining themselves free spirits in a new world, lived marginally, wandering from pillar to post, always up north (Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds), vaguely seeking and finding jobs that led nowhere. She didn’t mind this gypsy existence, but as time wore on she came to realize that she was unhappy with her husband, that she loved the baby but hadn’t bonded with him, and that she hated, hated, hated domestic life. Within herself she began to drift and soon thought she would die if she didn’t get out of the house. It was only then,

at a time when I was tempted to knock my own head against the wall, [that I understood] the fits of rage in which [my mother] jerked the venetian blinds in her room up and down, up and down, for the relief of hearing the crash.

She had to find a real job, she said; had to make a living, she said; had to help save the marriage, she also said. So in 1918 she stashed the baby in Whitby,...