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.
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