Elizabeth Jane Howard’s The Long View (1956)
Why writers should read it (and why it’s better than J.B. Priestley and Stephen Sondheim)
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Hello!
The Essence of the Thing newsletter this week is about Elizabeth Jane Howard’s The Long View. In essence: it’s masterly, and I recommend it. Stop reading now if you don’t know it and would like to be entirely surprised by it, as I discuss why I think writers in particular should read it, and reveal its central conceit.
‘They can’t find it [a cigarette-case], but they are looking. If they fail, I shall work steadily backwards over yesterday!’ Leila left the door ajar, and sank into a chair.
Mrs Fleming murmured: ‘It sounds like a play by Mr Priestley,’ and handed her coffee. (pp. 27-8)
If you’ve got this far, then the hilariously Mills & Boon-ish cover (ALERT! WOMEN’S NOVEL!) of my 1985 Penguin reprint has given it away: The Long View moves backwards in time. It has also managed a second spoiler: the protagonist Antonia Fleming’s first name, which Howard deliberately withholds until the story’s midpoint. Until then, she is always Mrs Fleming.
The midpoint here is halfway through the third part of five. To playwrights, of course, five parts suggests five-act structure, and the reason I want to recommend that writers look at The Long View is that, intriguingly, it’s one of the best examples of five-act storytelling I’ve read – and I say ‘intriguingly’ because this happens: the protagonist and her predicaments become more complex (as they should in any well-structured story) as she gets younger.
The quote above, from the first section, set in 1950, suggests that J.B. Priestley’s ‘Time Plays’ are intertexts for Howard. A cigarette-case is central to the audience’s understanding of Dangerous Corner (1932), which plays with time by ending with a variation on its opening scene; Time and the Conways (1937) begins in 1919, jumps forward to 1937, and then jumps back to 1919, so the audience knows in advance of the final act what will become of the characters.
But Mrs Fleming’s line is facetious, both on her part, and, I think, on Howard’s. The wonder of The Long View is how unlike Priestley’s plays it is, and how much richer it is than they are. Moreover, it happens to be richer than other, later plays and musicals like Harold Pinter’s Betrayal (1978) and Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s Merrily We Roll Along (1981), which also move backwards in time. All these pieces are good examples of well-structured three- or five-act stories (interchangeable terms here, three acts having the same essential shape as five), but I’ll try to explain why I think that Howard’s refusal to overplay her time-conceit makes hers the superior work of art – and yes, I realise it’s pointless and invidious to compare a novel with theatre writing, but hey, it’s only a free Substack.
Priestley and Sondheim’s texts rely on recurring leitmotifs. We as audience become like historians or detectorists, collecting artefacts, events, secrets, blunders, lies: things the characters are unaware are connected and resonant, because, unlike us, they can’t see what’s coming.
This is sophisticated dramatic irony, and it builds to manipulative climaxes which allow us to congratulate ourselves on our experience/knowledge in relation to the characters’ innocence/ignorance. In the denouement to Dangerous Corner, Priestley drives us headlong into the significance of the cigarette-case as he steers his characters away from that dangerous corner. In Time and the Conways, he exploits our pity for a young woman who doesn’t know, as we do, how miserable her life will be by having her quote William Blake’s ‘Joy and woe are woven fine’. Sondheim’s finale to Merrily is a nostalgic fetishisation of the innocence of youth: having gathered all the pains of the characters’ future experience, we see them full of hope at the beginning of their lives.
Howard largely resists leitmotifs – and if they happen, they’re subtle. The only one that really stood out to me, in a long novel, concerns bedroom wallpaper, and it precisely encapsulates the condition of the novel’s central upper-middle-class marriage. In 1950:
The Morris wallpaper of green leaves and clear red berries which she [Antonia] had chosen years ago in a determined effort to make this room, at least, uncompromisingly her own (William Morris, her husband had then said, made him howl with laughter), was remarkably satisfying. (p. 49)
Later, in 1937:
Strewn over her and the bed were samples of wallpaper; she dropped a piece as he entered the room: but she turned her head to greet him, ignoring the paper. (p. 147)
Later, in 1927:
Their dining-room became green, their drawing-room white and yellow, and their bedroom (she wanted a wallpaper, but was imperceptibly overruled) a Venetian red with white furniture. (p. 234)
This works exactly like Priestley or Sondheim, because each time we encounter the wallpaper we know more about its future, and about Antonia’s, than Antonia does – and we are led inexorably by the narrator towards Antonia’s innocence (that superb ‘imperceptibly overruled’).
It’s the kind of detail from which Sondheim builds Merrily, and according to one of his mantras, God is in the details. But according to another, content dictates form, and arguably Merrily’s accumulation of leitmotific detail becomes so dense that Sondheim lets his (actually, Kaufman and Hart’s) time-playing form overwhelm his content. On the whole, Howard avoids such dramatic irony, I think because it’s too obvious for her; that is, I think she thinks sophisticated dramatic irony isn’t particularly sophisticated. She doesn’t want her characters to be defined by her readers’ privileged knowledge of what happens to them.
Certainly, she explores the subject of youthful innocence. But The Long View’s view of youth is not nostalgic or sentimental, and Howard’s final ‘act’ is not manipulative but the most surprising and painful of the five because of what happens in the moment, according to a rule of storytelling which says that a character in the fifth act must change by facing not what she wants but what she needs.
In the end, The Long View’s young protagonist is not simply emblematically innocent, but carries the entire weight of the experience she hasn’t in her reality yet had, and her character seems to change accordingly. I’d have to read the book many more times to work out exactly how Howard achieves this, but as I read, I felt as if Antonia had matured according to time’s forward march, though time had marched backwards.
This is probably a simplistic reading of Sondheim – ah, well, he can take the irreverence – and it’s undoubtedly a simplistic reading of Priestley, as it doesn’t consider the importance of the theory of simultaneous time to Time and the Conways (on a related theme, Howard, like Priestley, references Blake to remind us that his contraries of Innocence and Experience coexist).
But I don’t think Priestley and Sondheim quite achieve Howard’s paradoxical character development as time goes backwards (perhaps Pinter achieves it in Betrayal). Her ‘act five’ is superior to theirs because there is so much more for us to chew on and feel than a condescending, ‘Oh, how poignant, how melancholic, how moving: little do the idealistic young people know what’s in store’.
She scrupulously disallows her radical form to dictate her content, and she achieves, consequently, a radical reinvention of traditional five-part structure.
I’ll finish with a quote by Hilary Mantel: the Penguin edition cost me two quid, and I admired the novel so much I bought the more recent Picador for Mantel’s Introduction (without realising that I could have read it for free here). Howard’s moneyed English world, with its tennis parties and William Morris wallpaper, won’t appeal to everyone, but Mantel thinks – and I hope I’ve demonstrated why I also think – that anyone interested in storytelling structure should read The Long View:
For all her late success [with the ‘Cazalet Chronicles’], and perhaps because of it, Elizabeth Jane Howard’s work is misperceived. Her virtues are immaculate construction, impeccable observation, persuasive but inexorable technique. They may not make a noise in the world, but every writer can learn from them. In teaching writing myself, there is no author I have recommended more often, or more to the bewilderment of students. Read her, is my advice, and read the books that she herself read. In particular, deconstruct those little miracles, The Long View and After Julius. Take them apart and try and see how they are done. (p. xvi)
I’ve ordered After Julius.
[Update: I write about After Julius here.]
Must I read the Cazalets?
Until the next newsletter. [Update: on David Malouf’s Johnno.]
Yes, you must read the Cazalets!
This is just fabulous, Sam, from one structure junkie to another. Am about to dive into the novel x