Goodbye Rosie, Hello Rose
I am a huge fan of Rose Tremain. She is an author who always writes and observes beautifully, but does not have just one book within her, regurgitated in different ways. She constantly surprises.
So I was interested to read what looked like a remarkably slim autobiography, Rosie : Scenes From A Vanished Life
That ‘vanished life’ is Rosie herself, as she claimed her true identity as Rose
This is beautifully written, but curiously distanced, distancing.
Born into a rather privileged background, at least in terms of status and finance – her stepfather was after all a ‘Sir’ and her real father’s cousin, her childhood was nonetheless curiously lacking in parental attention, encouragement and warm regard. In fact, her mother, referred to as ‘Jane’ by Tremain, and not by any maternal appellation, had lacked love and affection herself as a child, and had also been called by a name she disliked, rechristening herself as Jane.
Rosie’s First Birthday
Children – and the adults they become, sustain damage from absent affection, they don’t have to be actively ill-treated to bear wounds.
I found myself wondering about the kind of distance with which Rose writes about herself. This isn’t a ‘misery memoir’ but it does have a kind of lack of warmth in it. I found this unsettling because she is a writer whose characters are warmly and fully regarded by her. The reader of a Tremain novel is drawn into feeling that they really know her complex and beautifully rounded characters. Yet, the sense here is that Tremain did not really want the reader to know Rosie. Somehow, the child and the young girl sent off to be ‘finished’ in Switzerland, rather than pursue the academic route she wanted are seen through a screen. Which is a curious place to be writing some kind of autobiography from
Rosie, her loving and beloved Nannie Nan, and her sister Jo
This is rather like picking up a collection of faded snapshots, which have intriguing titles, but they are incomplete, part of a larger collection, which probably were mounted in sequence in an album, and told a larger story, but this is missing.
This is probably one which will be most interesting to those who love and know her writing. As she is at pains to point out, she is not an ‘autobiographical’ novelist per se, but certainly small events make their way into the novels and stories, and she references these.
There was one recounted incident where Rose drew me close to Rosie, and I felt great grief for her. Her inspired music teacher at the boarding school she was sent away to, arranged for a concert to be given by her pupils. A prestigious one, at the Royal Festival Hall. Though open to the public, the majority of the most expensive seats would be bought by proud families. Who would then take their children out for a congratulatory tea. Except Rosie’s mother and stepfather did not come. She wrote to her real father (who had abandoned his family for a liaison with another woman) He was a writer, and also a keen pianist himself. Though he did come, he left at the interval, after Rosie had played, and did not come back to take his daughter for tea
In conclusion, I liked this very much indeed, but remain slightly confused as to the purpose of its writing. There is half the sense of a catharsis (perhaps) for the writer – except that the feeling I was left with was an unresolved, and even covert anger and resentment (completely understandable) still within the child inside the woman.
Here is a wonderful excerpt, a moment of epiphany, an ‘aha’ moment, where the idea of writing, as something profound and meaningful, hit the thirteen year old
The perfume of the day, the heat of my body after the tennis game, the sky the colour of coral, the silence surrounding me – all combined to fill me, suddenly, with a profound feeling of wonder, a fleeting sense of the marvellous, which, in its intensity, was almost a visionary experience.
I told myself that if I continued standing still, this moment would last and might even change me in some way that I couldn’t quite foresee. But I stood there so long that the sun almost disappeared and the field became full of shadows. And with the dusk came a feeling of desolation. The desolation was simply a mundane recognition of the fleeting nature of everything, which even teenagers (or perhaps especially teenagers) understand. A moment of happiness as intense as this slips quickly away with the turning of the earth. So I asked myself, there in the hayfield, with the swear of the tennis game drying down my back and making me shiver: was there any way in which the experiences of my life, like this one, could be captured and locked away, not just in capricious, gradually fading memory, but in some more concrete form
Interesting, especially as you say Tremain doesn’t want the reader to know her younger self. I think I have read one Rose Tremain novel I know lots of people love her novels though.
And I am one of them!
I have read and very much enjoyed a number of Tremain’s novels over the years. The local library has Rosie so I think I will read it sometime. I am interested in how she made her way through her childhood, even if some of that information is conveyed as much by how she wrote about her life as in what she wrote.
It is, as ever with Tremain, always an invitation to further reflection
I love Rose Tremain’s writing and I love memoirs. I didn’t know about this book but will seek a copy.
From what you’ve said about the relationship with her mother (and father), it sounds like she has some unresolved attachment issues! Perhaps this book is the first step to sorting those out. I often read memoirs and think that while the author thinks they have revealed all, something is held back, and that something isn’t revealed until much later, after the memoir has been received by an audience.
I do know that some other readers did not feel the distance and the gaps that I did, and that, as well as Tremaine’s layered writing anyway, also made me reflect on how each reader also brings something of themselves to the encounter. I shall be very intrigued to see how she speaks to others
Interesting review Lady F, and it does seem unusual to have that distance between the author and her own life. You mention catharsis and I wonder if creating that distance was the only way she could deal with whatever issues she had with her past. Certainly, it seems like much is missing from the account.
In some ways I wonder whether being a literary fiction writer may shape an autobiography more than, for example, someone else writing (or having ghosted) their autobio. I can definitely see a literary mind at work here. She has in some ways chosen specific images to view. However….my read has left me unsettled and pondering upon the book in an unresolved fashion. And I quite like that, when a book continues to talk to you after you have put it down
I’ve never read Tremain but have always meant to. Are there any novels you would recommend?
Oh! So many – I particularly liked a remarkably early look at being born ‘in the wrong body ‘ Sacred Country, written in the early 90s and taking the story of a young girl who knows she isn’t, . It goes through the 50s to the 80s
Then there are some wonderful historical novels, Music and Silence is wonderful, set in Denmark in the seventeenth century . And she created, I think 10 or more years apart the story of a wonderfully rich character, Merivel, a doctor to Charles II, and follows his story and that of Charles II and his times, too. I have reviewed Merivel on this site, but read the younger man first, Restoration.
I’ve been following her writing since I think the late 80s, but certainly by the early nineties, long before I began reviewing, so I have no gushing records and excerpts to steer you towards, though if you click the Rose Tremain tag you’ll find 3 or 4 books reviewed on my blog.
If i had to choose ONE it would probably be Sacred Country. That’s one I have re-read at least once, and possibly twice
I wonder why she decided to publish this and not keep it to herself, if she was going to hold back. But then, maybe originally she didn’t intend to hold back and then got cold feet in the telling. Or, maybe the only way she can truly go deeper is by allowing the film of separation that occurs when writing fiction.
I suspect the intention anyway is a less than linear autobiography, more of a kind of series of snapshots. I have read a couple, not dissimilar, where other fine writers take certain snapshot jumps through their own lives. Tremain just seemed less revealing of her soul from the inside. Or maybe has a mien which is more stoic, a kind of not go there into the revelation of her own soul, laid o it for others to stare into. I do think your last sentence is a telling one, too.
The more I think about her book, the more ‘successful ‘ it becomes, in a certain level, as I think about it, and feel about it. It could be said to perhaps inhabit a place of more old fashioned English reserve, rather than the kind of Oprah show you my wounds, let you out your fingers inside and dabble with them, confessional we have all become used to.
There is something to be said for maintaining a little reserve.
This does sound curious, and as you say, probably best read after I finally get to reading some of her novels. That story about the piano recital is heartbreaking though.
I can’t stop thinking about that one, Madame Bibi, and it just breaks my heart. Perhaps, here ‘s a thought, MORE because the writer, in her style, here is not beating her breast, rending her clothing and manipulating my response. Maybe her refusal to display the obviousness of how she must have been lacerated by the event at the time, or her ability to hold to some steely centre in herself, makes this reader weep, in part BECAUSE she is not obviously soliciting for that