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New Statesman
07-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New Statesman
Jane Gardam's dispatches from the past
Phoot by GL Portrait / Alamy Stock Photo In Showing the Flag, Jane Gardam's 1989 volume of short stories, the final story, 'After the Strawberry Tea', describes the troubled house move of James and Elisabeth, a couple in their mid-60s who are leaving their family home in Wimbledon for a new life in east Kent. As they load their indignant cat into the car, they have an unsettling encounter with an elderly neighbour, who warns of nuclear catastrophe on the Kent coast. Turning from the motorway into the Kentish landscape of fields and orchards, Elisabeth is overcome with thoughts of impending doom. Not long ago I followed James and Elisabeth's route down the old pilgrim's road from London to Kent. My former home was in south-east rather than prosperous south-west London, but I had lived there for 30 years, raised my child there, and although no dotty old neighbour turned up to warn of nuclear meltdown at Dungeness, I set off for my new house with an equivalent sense of foreboding. The following night, amid a chaos of unpacking, I opened a box at random and found three volumes of Gardam's great last trilogy: Old Filth (published in 2004 when she was 78), The Man in the Wooden Hat (2011) and Last Friends (2013). It was a strangely appropriate discovery: uprootings, changes of landscape and the quest for a home, for love and belonging haunt these novels, set amid the twilight of Empire and punctuated by memorial services. Jane Gardam's own death, at the age of 96, was announced on 29 April. For her admirers, her obituaries made strange reading. They dutifully reviewed her childhood in the seaside town of Redcar in Yorkshire in the 1930s, her post-war studies at London University, her marriage to a barrister, David Gardam, and her writing life, whose early promise was delayed by raising their three children. While her many literary awards were noted, the consensus was that 'she never achieved the literary acclaim of contemporaries such as Margaret Drabble or Penelope Lively' – novelists with whom Gardam had little in common, beyond a vague generalisation that they were all old ladies. But Gardam was, among her remarkable qualities, a great storyteller, whose narratives of apparently remote figures of a postwar era as emotionally distant as the Bronze Age are as plangently resonant as the human dilemmas of love and loss depicted by Chekhov or Tolstoy (when she appeared on Desert Island Discs in 2017, Gardam said she would take War and Peace as her book of choice). Old Filth and its two sequels are often considered Gardam's greatest works. We first encounter the octogenarian Sir Edward Feathers, the 'Old Filth' of the title, as an absence. His inappropriate nickname – he is a fastidiously groomed and distinguished old lawyer – is a hoary legal acronym for ex-pats: 'Failed In London? Try Hong Kong'. Sir Edward had dropped in for lunch at the Inner Temple, but now his chair is empty and the remaining Judges and Benchers are gossiping about its recently-departed occupant. Great advocate, they say. Had a soft life. Made a packet at the Far Eastern Bar. Good to see the old coelacanth… Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe As is usually the case with gossip, some of this is true, and some spectacularly not. Filth's practice in Hong Kong has made him rich, and for decades the former British colony was where he and his wife, Betty, felt a sense of belonging, intensified by the fact that both were born in the far East. But as the end of British rule in Hong Kong approaches, Betty understands that their old age must be spent at 'home' – that term inexorably applied by British expatriates to the place where they believed their values, and their children, were best formed. And so Filth and Betty move to a prosperous village on the Dorset/Wiltshire borders where, Gardam writes, 'They put their hearts into becoming content, safe in their successful lives.' That simple sentence is fraught with jeopardy. If their lives are successful and safe, why must they put their hearts into being content? Filth's safety rests, it seems, on firm foundations: his brilliant legal career and his long marriage to sensible, sturdy Betty. But after her sudden death – planting tulips in the garden, he is unmoored. When a rapprochement with a once-loathed adversary at the Hong Kong bar ends with his death, Filth's careful detachment fragments into a chaotic quest to understand the horrors of his past. The epigraph of Gardam's novel is a quotation from Charles Lamb: 'Lawyers, I suppose, were children once'. An admirer of Charles Dickens, Gardam noted that Dickens wrote on the manuscript of The Old Curiosity Shop, 'Keep the child in view'. It is advice that she takes in Old Filth, whose structure tracks the convergence of appalling childhood experience with desolate late old age, culminating in a moment of transcendent redemption. 'All my life… from my early childhood,' Filth says, 'I have been left, or dumped, or separated by death, from everyone I loved or who cared for me. I want to know why.' Gardam's novel employs many of the devices of the 19th-century novel: the damaged, resilient orphan child; shattering revelations overheard, or revealed in devastating letters; benefactors in unexpected guise; the magic of coincidence and the redeeming (but dangerously frangible) qualities of friendship. Money is an urgent preoccupation, and Gardam vividly depicts the lack of agency that comes with slender means. But her technique is anything but Victorian. In Old Filth, the deforming experiences of childhood are mirrored and intercut with those of old age in vivid, filmic fashion. 'I suppose you know,' says one character, 'that there are those who believe that endurance of cruelty as a child can feed genius.' 'I have no genius,' Filth replies, bleakly. As the memorial services of major characters accumulate, the minor characters ('There are no minor characters,' said Gardam) take centre stage in a trilogy whose theme is, as Gardam put it, 'The way that what happened to the child… shapes the adult forever.' 'Nobody in the swim is ever really interesting,' Gardam once remarked. But even now, when a social media presence is a prerequisite for many authors, mere name recognition is little gauge of literary worth. The value of Gardam's writing rests in less perishable qualities: her fine observation and psychological acuity, her remarkable gift for storytelling and her unforgettable depiction in these three late, great works, off how fate, chance and the tectonic shifts of world politics bruise and sustain the human heart. Related
New York Times
29-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
The Unsentimental, Acerbic and Deeply Compassionate Fiction of Jane Gardam
The work of the British novelist Jane Gardam, who died on April 28 at 96, was frequently described as 'strange' because, despite her long and prolific career, she eluded easy categorization. And people are, as she well knew, essentially lazy. Lazy is one thing Gardam was assuredly not. She did not begin writing until she was in her 30s — she claimed to have started the morning she dropped off her youngest child at his first day of school — but went on to publish 22 novels, some for adults and others for children and young people (although she regarded the distinction as arbitrary), 10 story collections and one nonfiction book, to say nothing of reams of criticism and essays. When she came to many Americans' attention with the publication of the 'Old Filth' trilogy, she was in her 70s. But in her native Britain, she had been shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1978 (for 'God on the Rocks,' a subtle story of family tensions between the wars, which lost to the more pyrotechnic Iris Murdoch classic 'The Sea, the Sea') and won a slew of other awards, including the Whitbread twice (for 'The Hollow Land' and 'The Queen of the Tambourine'). It would not be too strong to say she was regarded as something of a national treasure, although she would most likely have raised an eyebrow at both the coziness and the cliché. About Gardam's vast body of work one can make few generalizations, save that whatever one's taste, it would be nearly impossible not to connect to something. Readers who loved 'Old Filth' (which stands for 'Failed in London, Try Hong Kong' and was based in part on her husband's legal career) might have been either delighted or puzzled by its two sequels: 'The Man in the Wooden Hat,' which is devoted to a deliberately unsympathetic protagonist; and the spare, unsentimental 'Last Friends,' about the only people left standing after the first two volumes. 'Faith Fox' is set in a version of the 1990s and tinged with religion. 'Crusoe's Daughter' concludes with a few mysterious pages of stage dialogue; 'The Flight of the Maidens' is a straightforward historical. She paid no attention to literary fashion, but to call her a holdover from another era, or nostalgic, would be reductive, too. Gardam was not an English novelist, a women's novelist, an experimental novelist or a traditionalist — although at times she was all of these. Born Jean Mary Pearson in 1928 in North Yorkshire to a respectable but not rich family (like the protagonist of 'Bilgewater,' she was the daughter of a headmaster), Gardam spent her childhood writing and reading. She was often alone; 'Robinson Crusoe' was one of her favorite texts. After reading English on scholarship, she went to work for a London magazine, and while she dabbled in the literary scene, had neither the time nor the budget for bohemian excesses. After marrying the barrister David Gardam, she moved to Kent, where she raised three children. 'A Long Way From Verona,' a succinct autobiographical novel about a 13-year-old girl's coming-of-age, was published in 1971. Fierce sympathy for the child's point of view, and the frustrations and passions of youth, were some of her few constants, and arguably the main thrust of the 'Old Filth' trilogy. Although she dealt with sadnesses and loss, the lack of drama in her personal life, and the combination of openness and reserve she showed in interviews, may be part of the secret to her relative privacy and her attendant productivity. Her iconoclasm was quiet; her modesty was real. I met Gardam on what turned out to be a difficult day five years ago. I had been sent by The Paris Review to conduct a long-form interview with her, but upon landing at Heathrow Airport, I turned on my phone and found the screen covered in missed calls and urgent text messages. By the time I arrived at her yellow stone house in the postcard-pretty village of Sandwich, I had received some very sad personal news. After a few minutes absorbing the shock and grief, I decided to stay and complete the assignment. Gardam was 90; I might never have the chance to talk to her again. I half-settled into a local inn, which had been modernized just enough to rob it of charm, and not quite enough to provide comfort. I splashed my face with cold water. Someone had left a basket of windfall apples next to a back door, with a sign offering them to passers-by. There was a town crier in full regalia sitting in the pub; the weather was perfect. Gardam's house — parts of which dated back to the Middle Ages — was filled with character and looked out on a well-tended back garden bordered by gnarled fruit trees. The horsehair wig that belonged to Mr. Gardam, who died in 2010, sat on a table near the front door. Gardam herself was wonderfully gracious, as was her assistant, who offered me sherry. We sat down by firelight in chintz-covered wing chairs, and I answered questions about my journey. I turned on my recording devices and took out my notebook and pen. I asked an opening question — Was she read to as a child? — and promptly started sobbing. She let me cry; she listened to my apologies and then my explanation; she said, 'I'm sorry, but I must give you a hug.' And then we talked steadily: about life, and loss, and the escape of writing, and ghosts and Gardam's quiet spirituality. It was a strange interview, appropriately. And all I can say is that anyone who is in extremis should have the luck — and more than that — to be met with such intelligent, unfussy sympathy. I can't tell people which book of Gardam's they should read, however much I truly love the humanity of 'Crusoe's Daughter' (which is about a young woman who is, yes, emotionally marooned) or 'Last Friends' (which proves that there really is no such thing as a minor character). It is too tied up for me; my judgment is compromised. What I will say is this: The late commercial success of the 'Old Filth' trilogy — a gently acerbic meditation on the varieties of human frailty and the painful joy of living — is very Gardam-like. We can always surprise with kindness, itself so strange and unexpected.
The Guardian
29-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Jane Gardam, author of Old Filth and The Hollow Land, dies aged 96
Jane Gardam, author of books for adults and children including Old Filth and The Hollow Land, has died at the age of 96, her publisher has confirmed. The Yorkshire-born novelist's career spanned 50 years, and she was awarded an OBE for services to literature in 2009. Her books were also nominated for the Booker prize, the Orange (now Women's) prize and the Folio (now Writers') prize. She remains the only person to have won the Whitbread prize (latterly the Costa) in two categories: she won the children's book category in 1981 for The Hollow Land and the best novel category in 1991 for The Queen of the Tambourine. Old Filth was named as one of the BBC's 100 greatest British novels in 2015. Gardam was much admired by fellow authors, with Ian McEwan calling her 'a treasure of English contemporary writing'. Describing Old Filth when it came out in 2004, fellow novelist Maggie Gee said Gardam's writing 'crackles with energy, variety, sensuous richness. It is the writing of a 25-year-old with the wisdom and subtlety of a razor-sharp 100-year-old.' Born in 1928, Gardam was raised in the seaside Yorkshire town of Redcar by a maths teacher father and a stay-at-home mother who was passionate about writing. 'She wrote all the time, endlessly. She'd just say to any child in the street, excuse me, could you just take this letter to the post. And she was always writing sermons,' Gardam told the Guardian in a 2005 interview. Her 1985 novel Crusoe's Daughter, about an isolated woman who is obsessed with books, specifically Robinson Crusoe, was partly inspired by Gardam's mother, she said. It 'has a lot to do with a girl not being educated, when if she had been a boy the money would have been found'. Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you after newsletter promotion After the second world war, Gardam moved to London for the education her mother never had, attending Bedford College (part of London University). After completing her degree in English, she had a number of book-related jobs, including a stint as a Red Cross travelling librarian, and then a career as a journalist, first as a subeditor on the Weldon's Ladies' Journal and then as assistant literary editor at Time and Tide. She married a barrister, David Gardam, whose career partially inspired her most famous novel, Old Filth, a tragicomedy about a retired judge grieving his wife. The couple had three children, and it was only when the youngest had started school that she began her first book. 'I think I would have died if it hadn't been published,' she said in a 2011 Guardian interview. 'I was desperate to get started – I was possessed.' Gardam and her husband moved to Sandwich in 1987, where she remained after his death in 2010, before moving to Oxford in her final years. Her last book was Last Friends, published in 2013 and shortlisted for the 2014 Folio prize. The finale to a trilogy that began with Old Filth and continued with The Man in the Wooden Hat, Last Friends was described as 'exuberant and funny and dizzy and a little bit frightening' by Guardian reviewer Tessa Hadley. Gardam was one of the first novelists published by Abacus, an imprint of Little, Brown. A spokesperson from the publisher said the novelist was 'hugely loved by us all. Her warmth, humour and wisdom are quite irreplaceable.' 'I discovered that writing was very nice indeed when I was very young, and I never changed,' Gardam told the Telegraph in 2013. 'I don't think my style has changed very much at all – though I hope what I say is a bit more interesting. It's about getting to know a character and loving them, I think.'
