Possessed by the past
In my father’s house: Elegy for an Obsessive Love
by Miranda Seymour
Simon & Schuster £14.99
Of all the fantastic creatures in the great British bestiary, one of the most fascinatingly cruel is the upper-class brute. This outstanding book is a very funny and very sad portrait of a particularly fine specimen of the species, George Fitzroy Seymour, a man remarkable for little except preserving a great house and causing great pain. “Three obituaries!” a fierce old relation wrote after George died, with the dismissive nastiness he himself was prone to. “What on earth for? Whatever did he do?”
What he did, for all his lack of worldly success, was to feel and to inspire grand obsessions. His own obsession, overshadowing all his other feelings and most of his life, was his overwhelming passion for Thrumpton Hall, a vast and beautiful Jacobean house; through his petty nastiness, his flamboyant cruelty, his fantasist’s charm and his emotional incontinence he inspired a painful obsession with him in his clever daughter. The book’s subtitle is Elegy for an Obsessive Love; that must surely refer to both obsessive loves, hers as well as his.
George’s daughter is the literary critic and biographer Miranda Seymour. Although exceptionally well equipped to write this book, she has clearly found it painful to do so. She refers several times to her mother’s misgivings about it and she thanks her brother for his forbearance. At the beginning, after her acknowledgments and just before a diagram of her extremely grand and rich family tree, she has chosen a striking quotation. “It seems, perhaps, a strange and unnecessary thing to go prowling back into the recesses of the past and to lift the decent curtain which has covered the weary ugly follies.” This, startlingly, was written by Miranda’s maternal grandfather, Lord Howard de Walden, from Gallipoli in 1915 in a letter to his five-year-old son.
What is most striking perhaps is that a man should write in that way to a tiny boy: it suggests an almost autistic indifference to the person he is talking to, which was common, if not quite characteristic of the upper classes, up until George’s lifetime — an inclina-tion to ignore feeling or to deny it or repress it, and certainly not to talk about it; the “weary ugly follies” are to be covered, at least. And yet the author has chosen to lift the damask curtain upon a great deal of sensational ugliness and folly. It is a story of heartfelt love and loathing, told with wit, delicacy and a considerable amount of understated indelicacy as well; it is also a delightful period piece, an evocation of a very recent time that is long gone, a lost world of great houses and ha-has, of servants packing, of great wealth and shabby gentility, of crushing taxes and crushing remarks, and of a brutal idiom that has almost disappeared, replaced by others.
George Seymour was an appalling snob and obsessed with appearances, which is partly why he was obsessed with Thrumpton, to which he was not born. Rather like Sir Walter Elliot in Jane Austen’s Persuasion, who constantly read the Baronetage and worried about freckles and harsh lighting, he was concerned not only with pedigrees but also with persons. In this spirit, and unsatisfied with the quality of his wife’s hair and his daughter’s as well, George made them both wear wigs; he had them painted in wigs in a family portrait, which is reproduced in this book. This he did to an underconfident teenage girl in the 1960s, who had to endure the misery of disguising her guilty wig on beaches and in swimming pools, and her father’s sneering at her shy figure. When later her husband was neglecting her, her father wrote with spiteful false sympathy, “My poor darling, you really are a grass widow now . . . Don’t you wonder what people must be thinking?” He threw one of her early books into a flowerbed in front of a collection of guests and took no interest at all in her career.
On one of her happiest evenings as a young girl with him, when he took her, for the first time in her life, out to dinner, he volunteered the confession that he had had a passionate affair with a family friend; years later, Miranda discovered from the woman herself that this was just one of her father’s many lies and grandiose fantasies. parricide is its comedy and the subtle undercurrents of ambivalence beneath it. These painful stories are funny in their brutal way, when told with this skilful balance of frankness and understatement, and softened by understanding. And after George’s death his daughter finds peace and beauty in the house, and a hint of reconciliation. Like many people, she has discovered that her relationship with her father has improved a great deal after his death. This is a book of “weary, ugly follies”, certainly, but it is far more than that; it is a heavy-hearted but light-handed reflection on love, memory and truth. That must be the writer’s justification for lifting the decent curtain on these tragic-comic scenes.
However the book is only partly about George’s relationship with his daughter; it is also about his unfortunate wife, whom he abused in a series of different ways. Having been flamboyantly unfaithful to her with other women in his youth, he turned to leathers, bikes and boys in his anguished middle age, with tragic results. Miranda more than suspects he married her mother for her money — she was thought to be a great heiress at the time, but, owing to some upper-class vagueness about money and wills, her expected inheritance didn’t materialise. As George lay dying at Thrumpton in 1994, his wife was closeted in a small bedroom in another part of the house; he did not ask for her, and she did not go to him.
It is hardly surprising that his daughter’s first response to his death in the beloved house is to rush outside and scream “Free! Free!” Unfortunately, she wasn’t and isn’t. If this book was an attempt to lay her father’s ghost, it has by her own account failed; George Seymour is a spectre who refuses to lie down and he still haunts Thrumpton, which is now hers.
What prevents this book from being an enraged form of parricide is its comedy and the subtle undercurrents of ambivalence beneath it. These painful stories are funny in their brutal way, when told with this skilful balance of frankness and understatement, and softened by understanding. And after George’s death his daughter finds peace and beauty in the house, and a hint of reconciliation. Like many people, she has discovered that her relationship with her father has improved a great deal after his death. This is a book of “weary, ugly follies”, certainly, but it is far more than that; it is a heavy-hearted but light-handed reflection on love, memory and truth. That must be the writer’s justification for lifting the decent curtain on these tragic-comic scenes.
Available at the Sunday Times Books First price of £13.49 (inc p&p) on 0870 165 8585 and timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst
Miranda Seymour, was 32 when her father took up with Robbie, the unemployed, barely literate teenage boy who was to become ‘the passion of his later life’. For more than a decade, Robbie, above far right, shared George’s bedroom as well as his love of motorbikes. Miranda’s mother never complained — even on her 60th birthday, which she celebrated alone while her husband and his beloved took an overnight bike trip to Scotland.