Emma Tennant has written a number of novels, the most famous her latter works which are pastiches of Jane Austen and have brought her a fond following. Perhaps the effort of keeping that Austenian tone of elegance and restraint has been just too much, for in her memoir Girlitude Tennant bursts forth like a cork out of a champagne bottle at one of her 1950s society balls, spluttering and arcing in unpredictable directions.
It struck me forcefully when sitting through the Rugrats Movie with two children on school holidays that the Girlitude experience was being repeated: who are all these people, what's the plot and why can't I understand a thing they say? In Tennant's autobiographical work there is the same confusion, with John the family butler popping up in the midst of the uppercrust roller-coaster every so often to laugh manically and disappear again.
Her starting point is her coming-out ball in the 1950s, and the cover picture shows her, a lovely young woman in a frankly hideous dress, posed in an elegant drawingroom by Tony Armstrong-Jones, later Lord Snowdon. That was Tennant's world, with characters like Princess Margaret, later a close friend of her brother Colin, lurking on the fringes. She insists that her ilk were not of the first water, although obviously pretty damn rich (not the author's phrase). We are jerked pinball-like around a number of parties (here's John laughing again), visits and love affairs, although any physical consummation is so obliquely referred to as to become invisible.
Eventually she marries for the first time, to Sebastian Yorke. Tennant is unpardonably dismissive of Yorke, referring to him always as "the young man I was to marry" or "the young man I had married" without doing him the service of putting any flesh on his bones. Perhaps he was a colourless character, but there is no indication that she was forced to marry him.
At one point Tennant describes a sojourn in Barcelona with some expatriate literati types. Among the other guests was the American writer Terry Southern who later co-wrote Dr Strangelove. Listening to the conversation between Southern and his host, novelist Henry Green, Tennant is transfixed, "drinking in the at times malevolent magic of a writer to whom words appeared to descend, like the visitations of the angels in Florentine paintings, straight from the sky above on to his head". Her words often seen to come straight from the sky all right, but in a shower rather than a visitation.
A few well-known names pop up subsequently, Gore Vidal, a jaundiced Bruce Chatwin, Alexander Cockburn, but none as fascinating as butler John and his inexplicable - and unexplained - sense of humour.
Clarity only arrives with the last part of the book and at last a coherent sequence on a peripheral character, her friend Mick and his obsession with a drug-addicted girlfriend.
The book's most clear message, which is perhaps inadvertent, is that the girl Emma was terribly, terribly spoiled. Faced with the proofs of her first novel, The Colour of Rain, to examine, and tired of the cold flat her single-mother status then decreed, she airily checks into the Ritz for a couple of nights so she can read in comfort. Determined (briefly) to educate herself, having insisted on ending her conventional education at 15, she persuades Daddy to buy her a little place in the country and fill it with worthy books. She then admits she scarcely looked at these.
Girlitude is a splendid word to describe a state of innocence and frivolity, but "Skimmoir" would better describe the skimming sort of memoir this is, dancing across the top of a couple of decades without giving away anything of what was actually going on inside the writer and inside the society she inhabited. Perhaps a new Jane Austen is needed to arise and put Emma Tennant's memoirs in order.