The Sea Change

This book is in good memory of

David Liddon Howard

my father

INTRODUCTION

W
HEN
it was first published over two decades ago,
The Sea Change
was saluted by the critics of the day as what it is, a beautiful and unusual
novel. It is also one of the most
interesting
novels I have ever read.

The theme, indicated by the title, can be seen as stated – glancingly though with startling rightness – in the words of a principal character. It is towards the very end of the book:
he is standing in the sun at Athens airport, he has been watching the take-off bearing away two people close to each other and himself; now their aircraft is up ‘glinting and small’ in
the sky. ‘Now, although they would be unstrapping themselves from their seats, they could not leave the aircraft’:

This balance of what is inevitable and what can be changed
– the theme then is the possibility of moral change: change in perception, feeling, subsequent behaviour.
In
The Sea Change
a man and a woman are able to achieve, at some catalytic points, a measure of such change against – and with – the odds of the given framework of their natures,
antecedents, past events. The theme of choice, of limited free will, a theme that can never be quite absent in any novel of enduring stature; here it is treated very subtly and with utmost realism.
Which includes hope. Plausible, realistic hope that lightens the burden of individual tragedies, inadequacy and muddle. Elizabeth Jane Howard’s talent is as complex as it is original. I would
call her a romantic realist of immense literary intelligence and range of insight (psychological, without taint of jargon or received ideas), who exercises classical disciplines – form,
elegance, concision, wit – in the language and construction of her work.

The action of
The Sea Change
takes place in a spring and summer of the late 1950s, moving after a few days in London to New York, to Athens and to Hydra, the Greek island. These changes
of scene and the transitions that affect them, the night flight to America, the boat trips to and from the island, are intrinsically linked to the flow and development of the narrative. There are
four protagonists, two men and two women; their story is deployed turn by turn and turn again by themselves. Four people – four voices: living and reflecting on what is happening to them at
that hour, on that day, each according to her or his modes of thought, feeling and expression. (A narrative device Miss Howard also uses in her novel
After Julius
, and which is tricky to
bring off; in her hands it works: the symmetricality conveys the variations, pace and flexibility of musical composition.) To begin with we are concerned with three characters – Emmanuel
Joyce, a playwright, ‘and a good one’, in his early sixties; his wife, Lillian, some twenty years younger; Jimmy Sullivan, Emmanuel’s disciple, manager, dog’s body, who
shares the Joyces’ life and home (except that they have no home; they live at Claridge’s, in rented flats, in houses in the country lent to them so that Emmanuel ‘can work’,
out of suitcases which with Lillian means numbers of large trunks: at every move Jimmy spends hours at the airport getting them through customs). The focus of attention appears to be Emmanuel, a
man half Irish, half Jewish, who escaped from a desperately poor and brutal childhood by his talent (the word genius is used by entourage and public) and is now a public figure engulfed by fame,
money, adulation, and by the demands of fame, money, adulation and an artist’s work. The most constant and wearing demands on him though are made by his wife. Emmanuel is not seen in his best
light at once. The book opens with a squalid melodramatic episode for which he must be held responsible. Within pages we find him making amends with gentleness and imagination; we begin to see him
as the man he is, tender, tender-nerved, irascible, living on the brink of emotional exhaustion, controlled if not always, generous, open to temptations, snatching at escapes: a man held by his
conscience; a good man, like and not like a Graham Greene character, a man moved unbearably at times by pity.

He has been married for some twenty years; she fell in love with him, had artistic longings, was getting bored, stifled by her world (country gentry, philistine, well-connected, parents dead,
childhood home, a beloved house, sold, gone, pulled down by the developers, the loss resented for ever). For him, she was a beauty, a token of the barriers he had crossed – a feather in his
cap. They had one child, a girl. She died at the age of two in hideous agony from meningitis. Lillian, who has a serious heart disease, can never have another child. Such a death is one of the
hardest things to accept: it remains, after those long years, a lingering sadness for the man; for the woman it is a tragedy in the present. She has
not
accepted it. Her loss, plus her
precarious health (when her heart acts up, she might in fact die at any moment), have been forged into a perpetual claim on her husband’s attention and love, a rival to his work and fame. He
has responded with years of steady care, infusing her with life and the courage to live it, a task punctuated for him by almost hourly apprehension (her moods, her heart, her tears), by irritation
and his concealed disappointment in what she has become; punctuated also by his frequent infidelities, rarely serious, never lasting, always bringing some degree of disaster to all concerned (Jimmy
picking up the pieces, as he puts it). Lillian has remained the priority. At the time we enter the story, Emmanuel’s stamina and patience have worn thin; he is uncertain whether he can or
even wants to write another play. We feel the weight of his tiredness and strain dragging through the pages.

In Lillian, Miss Howard has faced us with a dilemma. There she is, nursing her grief (the dead child’s photograph goes on every journey, is stood on every dressing-table) with her chic,
the care for her clothes and looks, the devouring self-regard, her need to be soothed or entertained or both at every minute. One could kick her; then one remembers.
Also
– she
is
beautiful (those large eyes . . .), and intelligent, and she can be nice, and is sensitive about at least some aspects of the outer world – landscapes, good food, flowers,
paintings. She is articulate; nor is she devoid of self-knowledge. It is the application of it that falls short.

Jimmy is of an entirely different breed – born in an English slum, orphaned, transplanted to America by emigrating relatives, abandoned to be raised in a dim, bureaucratically benevolent
institution against which he tries not to nurse too big a chip, he’s been helped in this by Emmanuel whom he loves and sees plain. Jimmy is a stray; he has served with the US Army, speaks
‘with a kind of American accent’ but clings to his English birth as one thing of his own. He is a very nice young man – sometimes a little stern: he has principles –
stage-struck, perfect at his job of assistant director, mediator, peace-maker, indispensable to Emmanuel who is the centre of his life – Jimmy has none of his own, except for the occasional,
quickly discarded, girlfriend – he is often furious with Lillian (when he sees her effect on Emmanuel and his work), but also often charmed; he looks after her too. These three are a
family.

Now comes the fourth character, the outsider, the catalyst. She comes by way of a suddenly required new secretary – the Joyces are about to leave for New York to cast a play – a
clergyman’s daughter fresh from Dorset, new to life, in a shapeless camel-hair coat with a copy of
Middlemarch
in her pocket, all of nineteen years old, Alberta, as original and
enchanting a creation as one may ever hope to find. I will not spoil her impact by giving anything more away.

In Elizabeth Jane Howard’s novels her men and women have always been equally convincing. With Emmanuel here she has brought off a rare double, a man and a credible first-rate artist; with
Alberta, a girl who is spun out of goodness, truth and fun, and a brand-new child-clear intelligence, she has wrought a literary miracle.

That is the cast; the story must be left intact for the reader to approach in the intricately structured order built for it by the author.
The Sea Change
is a long book but there is
nothing in it that is garnish or indulgence. Every dazzling detail – conversations, encounters, flashes of wit, an angle of stage-craft, the colour of sea and skies – is related and
relevant to the deployment of the whole. The control throughout never fails. We enjoy the parts as the whole becomes revealed as the complex, entertaining and at the end deeply moving tale of four
people’s lives. We have been made to feel as well as see.

One cannot write about Elizabeth Jane Howard without saying something about that
seeing
, about her extraordinary power of description, her sense of place, of the look, the sensuous feel
of landscapes, animals, objects, houses; how
much
she has seen and how exquisitely she evokes it with appropriate magic or precision. She can make us see anything from a goat to a table laid
for dinner by the sea, the expression on a face to an ashtray the morning after. She
has
the Flaubertian eye.

I must mention the existence at least of assistant characters as the book is alive with them. Some are off-scene like Alberta’s saintly and eccentric father, and the poignant Friedmanns
(E.J.H. has a way of getting to a core through grotesque exteriors); we have – on-scene – the small boy on Hydra, an infant prodigy, who speaks of himself as a critical statistician,
walks about with H. G. Wells’s huge
Outline of History
, and does not wish to meet Emmanuel Joyce because ‘the Greeks wrote far the best plays and it might hurt his feelings if
this fact were to emerge’. And we have the Greek kitten . . .

The Sea Change
is a novel that can be read all too easily at an expectant gallop; there is ever more when one reads it, and rereads it, with slow alert attention. Let me end by quoting a
few lines here and there almost at random. At a London party of the well-known and successful,

An expression of man’s fatal ability of living beyond the present. Alberta is facing an impending ordeal, and the dread of it ‘keeps bouncing towards me and away
again – it has just come back like a tiresome ball that seems both unerring and silly;’

And when the sea change comes it is precarious . . . There is no facile optimism in that hope. The resolution is ‘like a new-laid fire with the paper burning before the
paper becomes black ash and the fire has to live on its own’.

Sybille Bedford, 1986

CONTENTS

1 Jimmy

2 Lillian

3 Emmanuel

4 Alberta

1 Lillian

2 Jimmy

3 Emmanuel

4 Alberta

1 Emmanuel

2 Lillian

3 Alberta

4 Jimmy

1 Alberta

2 Emmanuel

3 Jimmy

4 Lillian