Rose Tremain is the author of two short novels, both remarkable exercises in imaginative identification with aging characters, the mystery of whose lives appears to elude them, until, at the end, they mark a quiet triumph for some fundamentally human capacity for both acceptance and transformation. She is also an accomplished writer of radio drama who recently has begun work for television. A third novel, The Cupboard , is scheduled for publication in 1982.
Rose Tremain was born in 1943 to Keith Nicholas Thompson, a writer, and his wife, Viola. She received a diploma in literature in 1962 from the Sorbonne and graduated with a B.A. in English Studies at the University of East Anglia in 1967, where she met and took classes with novelist Angus Wilson. After working for two years as an elementary school teacher and for two years as an editor at British Printing Corporation Publications, she began writing full time. Separated from her husband of seven years in 1978, she now lives with her two children in Suffolk. She does not regard her life as an interesting or significant one, and wonders what it would be like if she were not a writer. Such a disarmingly modest admission may partly account for the special quality of extended compassion for the otherwise unlikely protagonists of her fiction. She describes them herself as, in some respects, "alien territory."
Her first publications were two pieces of popular history: an illustrated account of the women's suffrage movement, Freedom for Women (1971), and a biography, Stalin (1974). Both of these are hitherto available only in the U.S. Her first novel, Sadler's Birthday, appeared in 1976. It is the story of an elderly retired butler who, after years of uncomplainingly efficient service, has inherited the home of his former childless employees, Col. and Mrs. Bassett.
It is a novel of distances and repressions in human relations, but gradually Sadler's fitful memories well up inside him and spread outwards as though to fill the deserted echoing rooms of the East Anglian mansion, where he now lives alone and virtually disregarded. They are not only his memories but include those of his mother (he is an illegitimate only child) and his employers. If indeed the novel is slightly flawed it is through the absence of any controlling perspective between these different elements. Sadler's life spans almost the whole century, but it has been a marginal one, lived in the interstices of others. Even access to books and music at an earlier employer's has to be abandoned because of his mother's delicate position in service as the mother of a bastard. His most potent memory is that of a young cockney boy, Tom, who was evacuated to the house during the war and for whom he took responsibility largely through the inertia of the colonel and his wife. These were five years of love, spent largely in a fascinated watching of the boy, but also eventually including a physical relationship. Less through guilt at his own homosexuality than through Tom's insouciant failure to reciprocate his affection, Sadler finds it difficult to recover the full significance of this experience or even adequately recall it. This is, however, the result of a general forgetfulness in which all memories are fragile, and it is for its presentation of such a state of mind that the novel is so remarkable. At the end, just at the point where Sadler appears to have recognized that his condition of lovelessness and failure was shared by his employers (he remembers moments of unexpectedly intimate confession from both just before their deaths), he appears to be himself about to die. He returns to his old bedroom, shut up for years, and discovers it in a state of total neglect enabling him to make some comparable spiritual discovery. The "little central cell around which his life had arranged itself, he had let die," he reflects, and he is thus not ready for death yet. This is not quite a final stocktaking, and we are left on a note of resumed hope and subdued optimism. The absence of any clearly articulated strong feeling creates a rather chilling atmosphere not unlike that met in certain poems by Philip Larkin. Rose Tremain also acknowledges a debt to V. S. Naipaul, the Trinidadian novelist, and the note of internal exile so insistently sounded in his work seems to be heard both here and in the next novel.
Letter to Sister Benedicta (1978) solves the problem of unified point of view by taking the form of an intermittent letter-journal written by the fat, middle-aged, materially prosperous Ruby Constad to an old teacher of hers, a nun in India, where she was born and educated. Sister Benedicta may well be dead, but it is a measure of Ruby's aloneness that the sister is her only suitable addressee. The daughter of an army colonel, Ruby rejected the cold formality of her family and married an ambitious young Jewish solicitor, Leon, who is now a divorce lawyer of international repute. He has just been admitted to a hospital after a stroke induced by learning the totality of their children's rejection of them, which only gradually emerges from Ruby's "letter." Their daughter, Alexandra, has begun a lesbian affair at art college, and Noel, who it was hoped would follow his father into the law, is last heard of bumming around Europe. The ultimate turn of the screw is Alexandra's admission that she and her brother have been lovers, paradoxical evidence of the closeness of the family (although Ruby does not see it as such) as well as of the depth of their complicity against their parents. Ruby's empty life is lived now on a narrow axis between the private clinic where she visits her silent husband, resisting the temptation to accuse him of the family's troubles; Brompton Oratory, where she is incapable of prayer; and Harrods Department Store. These sites mark out her social world. Sister Benedicta is addressed as an image of illusory wholeness and peace. Round her memory Ruby tentatively reconstructs her life and marriage, Leon's adulteries, and her own single, but tender, excursion into infidelity.
Like Sadler's Birthday it is a meditation on a very specific case of lovelessness and failure, even as Ruby reveals a thwarted capacity for love, surprising the reader by the range of her compassion, not merely for her children but for some of their unlikely friends. It is indeed one of the latter, a causal acquaintance of Noel's, who unwittingly inspires her decision at the end of the novel to overturn her restricted life and, after her husband's death, to return to India. This recovery of moral energy is another image of renewed possibility, a quiet acclamation that the inhibitions of aging are more illusory than real.
Such is the range of incidental characters introduced in the course of each novel's account of its central character that one suspects Rose Tremain has the capacity for a more expansive mode of fiction. As writer-in-residence at the University of Essex, 1980-1981, she completed what she describes as a long novel. Again it focuses on a single character, another elderly one, but its secondary theme is war: "which war must I fight in, and which oppose"" This theme suggests a greater intellectual depth too. If it is successful in its attempt to relate "private" and public warfare, it should prove a distinctive contribution to that tradition of the liberal humanist novel in which she has already produced exciting work.
Like many novelists she finds the experience of working for radio and television an exhilarating one creatively. It not merely affects the plays themselves, but it is a cooperative enterprise lending support to the often rather isolated activity of writing fiction. She sees her work in these media as not only sharing the novel's concern with love and lovelessness but also, perhaps, enabling her to develop more fully a comic detachment necessary to counter the occasionally restricting tendencies of that remarkable sensitivity which characterizes her two novels to date.
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