Diana Holman-Hunt—“My Grandmothers and I”
Diana Holman-Hunt’s “My grandmothers and I” is thoroughly enjoyable.
As her name suggests, she is the grand-daughter of William Holman-Hunt who has given us iconic and beloved images like Light of the World. She was also, on her mother’s side, the great-niece of Millais.
Nothing guarantees happiness, of course, not even the most exalted Pre-Raphaelite lineage.
Diana’s father is young, adolescent and absent, in India. She is farmed out between two families–her very wealthy, self-absorbed, coddled, absent-minded maternal grandmother who lived a life of Edwardian privilege in what sounds like the most amazing, romantic and dreamy country house, and her equally wealthy but psychotically stingy paternal grandmother, Mrs. Holman-Hunt.
Mrs Holman-Hunt was a character. She was the painter’s second wife, and bitterly jealous of his first. When things are demanded of her, survival money for instance, she gets tearful thinking of her husband cavorting in heaven with her sister, who again got him first!! Her life is dominated by clever and ingenious shrifts to save money.
Mrs. Holman-Hunt suffers from the mental illness of extreme parsimony, which particularly inflicts the old. (This is perhaps not a well-recognized or diagnosed mental illness, but it should be!!). Her house is full of priceless paintings and precious treasures, all unguarded. Meanwhile, she shepherds her considerable wealth, crying if Diana requires pocket money from her.
Diana invents a style of her own in narrating this charming memoir. First person, present-tense, novelistic techniques (techniques which are commonplace in our generation, of course.)
It reads well, is absolutely winsome and charming, partly because she narrates her poor little rich girl story dispassionately, without self-pity but which much humour.
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Father and Son by Edmund Gosse: a Memoir of Science and Faith
Father and Son by Edmund Gosse, a Memoir of Science and Faith.
Father and Son by Edmund Gosse is a deeply moving Victorian memoir, full of Devon, the sea, tidal pools, and religion!
Gosse’s father Philip was a distinguished naturalist. (One finds traces of Gosse as Oscar in Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda, while Oscar’s father is most certainly modelled on Philip). He had a childhood split between two enthusiams–tidepooling, and the Devon beach, and Christianity, a narrow, sectarian, relatively joyless version of it–that of the Plymouth Brethren.
Gosse was a type of a Eminent Victorian, who lives in and for science, science and faith. He writes in his journal of his beloved wife–“E. delivered of a son. Received green swallow from Jamaica”—an amusing conjunction which Edmund described as demonstrating only the order of events: the boy had arrived first.
Gosse movingly describes the rapture with which his father greeted Charles Darwin’s newly published theories. They made perfect sense to his mind, and his scientific instincts. It was like all the pieces of a jigsaw falling into place. But then he realizes the contradictions with Genesis. He decided if what there is a contradiction between what his knowledge of science tells him is true, and what his knowledge of scripture tells him is true, the former must be wrong. Making himself the laughing stock of the Royal Society, he argues against the theory of evolution.
Gosse, a sensitive, literary teen and his father are increasingly at odds as it becomes clear that Gosse will never follow in his father’s steps and become a lay preacher. Gosse eventually becomes a distinguished literary critic, while, movingly, maintaining cordial relationships with his father, obeying the ancient law of that the bonds of close family relationship are not lightly to be broken, as he puts it.
A charming memoir, and the first psychological memoir to be written, where the main action and drama is within. As such, it is still a very interesting exemplar of the genre of the memoir, the genre of little things lovingly backlit (as opposed to the autobiography).
Mary McCarthy, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood
Mary McCarthy, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood
I really enjoyed the spare elegance of this memoir. It is a New Yorker style memoir, much like Nabokov’s “Speak Memory,” and I must say there are worse things than New Yorker style memoirs.
Each chapter was originally a self-contained (and well-paid) essay published in the New Yorker. Together they tell the story of McCarthy’s life. She was orphaned early, and brought up by her mother’s uncles and aunts. They were odd, abusive, particularly disliking the articulate Mary. She describes being framed by an sadistic and weird Uncle, and then being strapped by him.
Finally, a “health and safety issue” leads her Seattle grandparents to rescue her, and she moved from a claustrophobic, loveless controlling world in Minneapolis to an elegant, affluent home in Seattle. Love is still missing; however, she goes on to an elite boarding school she finds stimulating, and where she comes to life.
Mary McCarthy is a brilliant woman (Randall Jarrell’s totally hilarious portrait of Gertrude from Pictures from an Institution is based on Mary McCarthy) and this memoir is probably her best work.Clear, elegant writing, like a well-sanded bit of wood, an unself-pitying story-telling style, lots of telling detail, well-honed sentences which make you sigh, they are so perfect. A lovely glimpse into a vanished world
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“My Grandmothers and I” A Memoir by Diana Holman-Hunt
“My Grandmothers and I” A Memoir by Diana Holman-Hunt
Diana was the granddaughter of the Pre-Raphaelite painter, William Holman-Hunt,and the great-niece of Millais. A more interesting lineage than most, and one which provided her a more rarefied childhood than most.
Rarefied, not necessarily happy. She was abandoned into the care of these grandmothers by a childish, selfish father, who does suddenly appear from governing the Empire, and rescue her from the boarding school at which she was desperately unhappy–then vanishes again. Her paternal grandmother was entirely selfish, and stingy to a psychopatic degree, dissolving into tears when money was demanded of her, so that Diana often lets her off. Her other grandmother was too absorbed in her pleasant country life to take much notice of Diana.
But notice things Diana did, and little of Edwardian country life, or her grandmother’s manipulations, pretensions and little stinginesses escapes her eagle eye.
Though she escaped somehow, not unscarred, but free.
Her memoir is written in little vignettes, building up detail by detail, through significant and well-remembered episodes. Its construction is brilliant–a memoir that reads as charmingly as a novel!