Time to Be in Earnest Read online

  Praise for Time to Be in Earnest

  THE NATIONAL BESTSELLER

  “The much-honoured master of the subtle, literate mysteries proves a fascinating guide to her own life, her craft and beyond. Dry, astute observations about the world she lives in … give way to illuminating glimpses of long ago.” The Hamilton Spectator

  “A wonderful read … an artful book.” Antonia Fraser

  “[James’s] style throughout is every bit as enchanting as it is in her novels.… Time to Be in Earnest is a pleasant wander with an engaging, lively and wide-ranging mind.” Calgary Herald

  “A cornucopia of discernment, judgement and wisdom.”

  The San Francisco Chronicle

  “This addictive volume … will remain on record as a monument to her remarkable working life.… Top marks all round.”

  Anita Brookner, The Spectator

  “A charming, informative and timely memoir … elegantly constructed.”

  Kirkus Reviews

  “Throughout what is subtitled ‘a fragment of autobiography,’

  James provides a leavening of wit that is shrewd, observational and self-aware.… Utterly and elegantly refreshing.” The London Free Press

  “[Time to Be in Earnest] is a rare jewel.” The Times

  “James has succeeded in producing a work of great value, both for casual readers and students of literature.” The Toronto Star

  “A fascinating look at a writer’s life.… It ought to be read for its revelation of a long life well lived. The author’s fans will enjoy it without question, but even those who have never heard of Adam Dalgliesh will find Time to Be in Earnest an engrossing look at one woman’s journey through the twentieth century.” The New Brunswick Reader

  ALSO BY P. D. JAMES

  FICTION

  Cover Her Face

  A Mind to Murder

  Unnatural Causes

  Shroud for a Nightingale

  An Unsuitable Job for a Woman

  The Black Tower

  Death of an Expert Witness

  Innocent Blood

  The Skull Beneath the Skin

  A Taste for Death

  Devices and Desires

  The Children of Men

  Original Sin

  A Certain Justice

  Death in Holy Orders

  NONFICTION

  The Maul and the Pear Tree:

  A True Story of Murder

  (with T. A. Critchley)

  VINTAGE CANADA EDITION, 2001

  Copyright (c) 1999 by P. D. James

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in Canada by Vintage Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, in 2001. First published in hardcover in Canada by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, Toronto, in 2000. Distributed by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Vintage Canada and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House of Canada Limited.

  National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data

  James, P. D., 1920–

  Time to be in earnest: a fragment of autobiography

  eISBN: 978-0-307-36646-7

  1. James, P. D., 1920– —Diaries. 2. Novelists,

  English—20th century—Diaries. I. Title.

  PR6060.A56Z475 2001 823’.914 C2001-930356-4

  www.randomhouse.ca

  v3.1

  To the memory of my parents

  Sidney Victor James

  1895–1979

  Dorothy May James

  1893–1966

  remembered with gratitude and love

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  DIARY 1997 August

  September

  October

  November

  December

  DIARY 1998 January

  February

  March

  April

  May

  June

  July

  August

  Appendix

  Emma Considered as a Detective Story

  Photographic inserts follow this page and this page.

  Prologue

  ADIARY, if intended for publication (and how many written by a novelist are not?), is the most egotistical form of writing. The assumption is inevitably that what the writer thinks, does, sees, eats and drinks on a daily basis is as interesting to others as it is to himself or herself. And what motive could possibly induce people to undertake the tedium of this daily task—for surely at times it must be tedious—not just for one year, which seems formidable enough, but sometimes for a lifetime? As a lover of diaries, I am glad that so many have found time and energy and still do. How much of interest, excitement, information, history and fascinating participation in another’s life would be lost without the diaries of John Evelyn, Samuel Pepys, Virginia Woolf, Evelyn Waugh, Fanny Burney and Francis Kilvert. Even the diary of a fictional Victorian, Cecily Cardew in The Importance of Being Earnest, “simply a very young girl’s record of her own thoughts and impressions, and consequently meant for publication,” would have its appeal.

  I have never up until now kept a diary, largely because of indolence. During my career as a bureaucrat, a working day spent mainly in drafting reports or speeches and writing letters or minutes left little incentive for further writing, particularly the recording of trivia.

  And any writing, if it is worth doing, requires care, and I have preferred to spend that care on my fiction. My motive now is to record just one year that otherwise might be lost, not only to children and grandchildren who might have an interest but, with the advance of age and perhaps the onset of the dreaded Alzheimer’s, lost also to me. It will inevitably catch on the threads of memory as burrs stick to a coat, so that this will be a partial autobiography and a defence against those who, with increasing frequency, in person or by letter, announce that they have been commissioned to write my biography and invite my cooperation. Always after my refusal there is the response, “Of course, once you have died there will be biographies. Surely it’s better to have one now when you can participate.” Nothing is more disagreeable than the idea of having one now and of participation. Fortunately I am an appallingly bad letter-writer and both my children are reticent, but at least if they and others who enjoy my work are interested in what it was like to be born two years after the end of the First World War and to live for seventy-eight years in this tumultuous century, there will be some record, however inadequate.

  I have a friend who assiduously keeps a diary, recording merely the facts of each day, and seems to find satisfaction in looking back over, say, five years and proclaiming that “This was the day I went to Southend-on-Sea with my sister.” Perhaps the reading of those words brings back a whole day in its entirety—sound, sense, atmosphere, thought—as the smell of decaying seaweed can bring in a rush the essence of long-forgotten summers. The diaries capturing adolescence, I suspect, are mainly therapeutic, containing thoughts that cannot be spoken aloud, particularly in the family, and a relief to overpowering emotions, whether of joy or sorrow. A diary, too, can be a defence against loneliness. It is significant that many adolescent diaries begin “Dear Diary.” The book, carefully hidden, is both friend and confidant, one from whom neither criticism nor treachery need be feared. The daily words comfort, justify, absolve. Politicians are great keepers of diaries, apparently dictating them daily for eventual use in the inevitable autobiography, laying down ammunition as they might lay down port. But politicians’ diaries are invariably dull, Alan Clark’s being a notable exception. Perhaps all these motives are subordinate to the need to capture time, to
have some small mastery over that which so masters us, to assure ourselves that, as the past can be real, so the future may hold the promise of reality. I write, therefore I am.

  Perhaps some compulsive diarists write to validate this experience. Life for them is experienced with more intensity when recollected in tranquillity than it is at the living moment. After all, this happens in fiction. When I am writing a novel, the setting, the characters, the action are clear in my mind before I start work—or so I believe. But it is only when these imaginings are written down, passing, it seems almost physically, from my brain down the arm to my moving hand that they begin to live and move and have their being and assume a different kind of truth.

  A diary, by definition, is a daily record. I very much doubt whether this proposed record of one year in my life will be a diary within the proper meaning of that word; certainly I can’t see myself recording the events of every day. I feel, too, that many social events can’t properly be mentioned since I have no intention of betraying confidences and some of the most interesting things I learn are said to me in confidence. I love gossip in other people’s diaries, while recognizing that its interest is in inverse proportion to its truth, but I suspect that this record will have little to offer in the way of titillating revelations. And to look back on one’s life is to experience the capriciousness of memory. When I was very young and leaving church with my mother, she told me that the hymn we had sung, “Blessed Are the Pure in Heart,” was sung at the funeral of a friend of hers who had died in childbirth with her baby during the great flu pandemic which followed the First World War. Now I can never hear it without thinking of that young mother and her child, both dead before I was born. No effort of will can banish a vague unfocused sadness from my thoughts every time that hymn is sung. And the past is not static. It can be relived only in memory, and memory is a device for forgetting as well as remembering. It, too, is not immutable. It rediscovers, reinvents, reorganizes. Like a passage of prose it can be revised and repunctuated. To that extent, every autobiography is a work of fiction and every work of fiction an autobiography.

  So tomorrow, on 3rd August, I shall write the first entry in a record which I propose to keep for one year, from my seventy-seventh to my seventy-eighth birthday. Will I persist with this effort? Only time will tell. And will I be here at the end of the year? At seventy-seven that is not an irrational question. But then is it irrational at any age? In youth we go forward caparisoned in immortality; it is only, I think, in age that we fully realize the transitoriness of life.

  There is much that I remember but which is painful to dwell upon. I see no need to write about these things. They are over and must be accepted, made sense of and forgiven, afforded no more than their proper place in a long life in which I have always known that happiness is a gift, not a right. And there are other matters over which memory has exercised its self-defensive censorship. Like dangerous and unpredictable beasts they lie curled in the pit of the subconscious. This seems a merciful dispensation; I have no intention of lying on a psychiatrist’s couch in an attempt to hear their waking growls. But then I am a writer. We fortunate ones seldom have need for such an expedient. If, as one psychiatrist wrote—was it Anthony Storr?—“creativity is the successful resolution of internal conflict,” then I, a purveyor of popular genre fiction, and that great genius Jane Austen have the same expedient for taming our sleeping tigers.

  DIARY 1997

  August

  SUNDAY, 3RD AUGUST

  I am writing this sitting in an almost empty first-class compartment of the 3:32 train from Newton Abbot to Paddington, and staring out at the red Devon countryside, now blurred and seeming to dissolve in rain; even the eagerly awaited stretch of coast at Dawlish and Teignmouth failed in its usual magic.

  But it has been a happy weekend despite the continual rain today. I have been at Paignton to help celebrate the Golden Wedding of Dick and Mary Francis. Their son Felix arranged it, at the hotel where they have stayed annually with their family for over forty years, and about sixty relations and friends gathered to rejoice with Dick and Mary on their wonderfully happy and productive partnership of half a century. Fortunately the rain stopped yesterday for the main event, the evening dinner-and-dance, and we were able to wander out from the dining-room to the terrace and drink our champagne looking out over Tor Bay.

  The hotel is typical of the kind I relish, a mock castle designed by a Victorian colonel in an excess of either alcoholic or imperial zeal, but with comfortable rooms and a staff, most of whom have been at the hotel for years, who give the impression of enjoying their work and actually liking the guests. The portrait in oils of the founder-architect hangs on the stairs, painted, I suspect, by himself. I was given a room with a balcony overlooking the sea and was able to sleep with the windows open, listening to the surf and the call of the gulls.

  On Saturday morning, sitting in the lounge, Mary passed round her photograph album with the wedding pictures, and how they brought back memories of wartime weddings! The cleverly contrived dresses—butter muslin was a popular expedient—since coupons could not be spared, nor was material available for a more traditional dress; the huge bouquets, the small hats of the women guests with the eye-veils, the suits we wore with their over-tailored shoulders, the groom and best man in uniform. It was interesting trying to identify the guests from their photographs of fifty years earlier, the smooth, eager young faces untouched by the depredations of war or the vicissitudes of peace. Only Dick and Mary, smiling into the camera, seem hardly altered.

  On Saturday afternoon I took advantage of a break in the weather and walked alone into the little town, its main street jostling with residents doing their weekly shopping, holiday-makers crowding the shops selling the usual holiday and beach ephemera. But I did find one antique shop and bought a small Doulton jug and bowl as mementos of the weekend.

  As a writer I like small seaside towns best in autumn or winter. There is something nostalgic and slightly melancholy as well as depressing about the slow death of the season that makes the seaside at the end of summer a suitable setting for a crime novel; the windswept esplanade, the last tight shrivelled buds on the rosebushes in carefully planted municipal gardens, the amusement arcades locked and deserted, the peeling paintwork and deserted shelters. I used such a town in one scene in Devices and Desires when the serial killer, the Whistler, kills himself in a seedy hotel, the decline of the year symbolizing his pathetic unlamented end. For me, setting, character, narrative are always interdependent.

  I seldom have a birthday without thinking back to that date which none of us can remember, at least not consciously; the moment of birth. Mine took place at home, as most births did in those days, at 164 Walton Street, Oxford. I was a much wanted first child, arriving three years after my parents married when my mother had had medical treatment to make conception possible. My father would have much preferred a boy but was, I think, grateful to have a child, and to hope for a son in the future. It was a long and difficult labour and the doctor was present—unusual in those days when the family wasn’t rich. I must at some time have been told the time of my birth, but I have forgotten it and, as those present are now dead, it is one of those facts which I shall never know. I can, however, recall my mother saying that a friend had baked and iced a cake for my christening but that the doctor and my father had between them eaten it all during the long night hours of waiting. This suggests that I was probably born in the early morning. I occasionally find myself wishing that I knew the actual hour, an irrelevance which can only be a form of egotism.

  Memory casts a capricious and undiscriminating light. The high peaks may stand brightly illuminated—love, marriage, childbirth, bereavement—but the beam ranges with a fitful radiance over the dark and lost plateaux between. My first memory is of an incident when I was just learning to walk. Perhaps it is this which caused the beam to rest, otherwise there is nothing remarkable about it. I must have been under eighteen months old and my mother had ta
ken me to Winchester to stay with her parents. My grandfather, Edward Hone, was Headmaster of the Choir School, later to become the Pilgrims’ School, and the boys were taught in a special classroom block in the garden. Having broken free of my mother, I toddled into the classroom to be met by a burst of laughter from the boys. I remember that my grandfather was sitting at a high desk in front of them and came over at once to take me by the hand and pass me over to my mother, who came fluttering through the door full of apologies. Mother always spoke of her childhood as a happy time, but I’m not sure how far this expressed reality. She was a woman who believed in appropriate emotions and I don’t think it would have occurred to her to criticize either of her parents or the lives that they led.

  The only information I have about the Choir School comes from A History of the Pilgrims’ School written by John Crook, published in 1981, which was sent to me a few years ago by one of my uncles. I find it interesting, not only because of the light it sheds on my mother’s early life, but because the school must have been typical of not very distinguished boarding schools of its time. My grandfather took over the position of Schoolmaster of the Choristers in 1887. His predecessor was a William Southcott, who was required to resign following a dispute about the voice trials during which he and the organist came to blows. Colebrook House was certainly a beautiful place in which to be brought up. It was, and is, a large sixteenth-century building facing the east end of the Cathedral with a mill stream flowing through its gardens. My grandfather taught the Choristers, virtually unaided except for one assistant, and on occasion also sang solos in the Choir—he had a beautiful tenor voice. My grandmother ran the boarding school. Edward Hone received £15 for each Chorister and £50 as a housemaster’s allowance, to be reduced by £5 for every non-Chorister boarder he received over the number of ten. It seems to have been a complex and far from satisfactory arrangement and money was certainly in short supply. However, things became a little easier in 1905 when Colebrook House was made an all-boarding school and my grandfather’s allowance was considerably increased.