Given her family history, Jennifer Johnston’s publishers must be dying for her to write a book of memoirs. But her new work of ‘fiction’ is probably the closest she’ll ever come. By Bridget Hourican
January 12th, 2010, was author Jennifer Johnston’s 80th birthday and the 100th anniversary of the birth of her stepmother, the actress Betty Chancellor, described by Orson Welles as “the sexiest thing that ever lived.” Welles played opposite her in the Gate in 1931 (he was 16 at the time, she was 21, and he claimed to have had his way with her backstage).
Johnston has the kind of pedigree that makes publishers grow calculating: daughter of a famous actress, Shelah Richards, and a famous playwright, Denis Johnston, who then married another famous actress. Yeats, Lady Gregory, Edwards, MacLiammhóir – all those founding parents – clustered round Jennifer’s cot.
Her publishers have presumably been demanding a memoir for decades. But Jennifer Johnston doesn’t play ball. Now she has delivered a book teasingly called Truth or Fiction? which features characters very like her father, mother and stepmother, but which is not a memoir. At 150 (wide-spaced) pages, it is even shorter than her usual novels.
The narrator, Caroline Wallace, is not based on Jennifer Johnston but is a middle-aged English journalist who seems to have been chosen to tell the story because she is sober, down-to-earth and ordinary, whereas the people she meets in Ireland are bibulous, histrionic, and eccentric.
On the surface this book confirms stereotypes of the English and Irish, but as we dig deeper we find that Caroline Wallace is probably an Unstable Narrator – living with a man for ten years, she wanted to get married and have kids but he never asked and she never said and now it’s too late (for the kids anyway). Is someone who can’t make their basic desires known any judge of ‘normality’?
She is sent to Ireland to interview Desmond Fitzmaurice, “writer of plays, war correspondent, literary giant of the 1930s,” now at the end of his life, and largely forgotten – just as Denis Johnston was. He lives at Dublin’s best address, Sorrento Terrace, with his second wife, Anna. This is the Betty Chancellor character in old age. No longer the sexiest thing that ever lived, she is a “small, angry woman…wearing immensely high heels” who snaps words “out of her mouth like a pistol shot.”
It is not a forgiving portrait and Johnston allows Fitzmaurice murderous thoughts towards her, which is probably more than you’d allow a father in a straightforward memoir. Fitzmaurice and his ex-wife, Pamela, seem equally messed-up, but unlike Anna and unlike the English narrator, they have charm – eccentric, Irish, theatrical 1930s charm, which occasions suspicion but is also life-enhancing. The best scene is when Fitzmaurice sneaks away from the tyrannical Anna to meet Pamela in the Queens bar in Dalkey. They have a wonderful conversation, which sounds exactly the conversation two long-divorced, selfish, charming, once well-known people would have.
More than faux memoir, this book is a study of old age, as the now aged and famous Johnston contemplates the old age of her famous parents. The plot is a bit sketchy and the conclusions a bit obfuscated, but the asides, vignettes and sleights-of-hand are sharp as ever – everyone (including the author) confronts old age with gin in hand and wits intact.
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