The House in France by Gully Wells review
Gully Wells's account of her fabulous upbringing leaves you longing for a bit more darkness
Be warned. The publisher of this memoir, anxious not to scare those browsing for holiday reads, has decided that it should wear a baffling summer disguise. Its title and its cover, featuring lavender and a white house with shutters and a red-tiled roof, strongly suggest, do they not, that this is yet another account of how one woman found true happiness in France? And, yes, there is even a puff quote from Mr Provence himself, Peter Mayle.
But open it and you will discover this is not the case. The house in question, a holiday home, appears only irregularly; most of the action takes place this side of the Channel, in liberal north London. A more honest jacket would feature an image of an early Victorian, stuccoed terrace, tall and narrow. There would be rain andpossibly buddleia sprouting from a wall.
Oh well. I suppose such nervousness is understandable. How to get readers interested in a story whose main characters are a now almost forgotten American journalist Dee Wells (the author's mother) and the Oxford philosopher AJ Ayer (her stepfather)? Gully Wells is fascinated to the point of blindness by both of them; in 300 pages, she makes only two clear criticisms of her raging mother and none at all of her philandering, narcissistic stepfather. But this doesn't mean the rest of us will be so forgiving.
While it's true that in the hands of a good writer, one can find almost anything gripping, dead hacks and dusty dons included, Wells's style, so very plain and unencumbered by insight, predicates against this forcefully. Even when her first love, Martin Amis, struts on to the page, resplendent in velvet strides and diaphanous cheesecloth, the narrative fails to spark. (What is it, I wonder, with these women who must go on about how they slept with Martin Amis? I'd feel sorry for him if it wasn't for the suspicion that he enjoys watching their hands shoot up in the air.) The disco! very tha t as a student he liked to drink Mateus Rose with his curry hasn't exactly turned my world upside down.
Wells cannot remember a time when her parents were still married; her memoir begins in London, where Dee is making a living writing book reviews following her divorce from Gully's diplomat father. The defining event of both women's lives occurs in 1956 when Dee meets Freddie Ayer at a party (he was 15 years her senior and already in possession of an ex-wife, two children, and at least one mistress). "I have fallen madly, madly, I tell you madly in love for the first time" she writes to a friend. "He's about 100 years old and is everything I've ever wanted."
Thereafter, Dee goes into campaign mode, quite determined to bag Ayer, in spite of his obvious reluctance to marry again. Why? Her daughter never gets to the bottom of Ayer's bewildering attractiveness to a certain kind of woman, perhaps because she was so doting herself; she writes almost droolingly of his "Coca-Cola eyes" and later describes how thrilled she was to hear that he could once again perform sexually, in his 70s, following a prostate operation. But whatever her reasons, once the deal was sealed, Dee joined a large and moderately glamorous club: We Who Love Freddie New Members Always Welcome.
Lucky, then, that her daughter would remain throughout her life calmly indulgent of her stepfather's extramarital activities. "As a concept, fidelity made very little sense to Freddie," she writes. "He was, after all, the Wykeham professor of logic, and a great admirer of Jeremy Bentham, who came up with the 'felicific calculus', a spendidly logical system for measuring the moral status of any action the connection between morality and sex had always eluded him."
Unsurprisingly, it isn't too long before the marriage is in trouble. It's not only that Freddie's emotional unavailability and general hopelessness drive his wife nuts ("Oh dear. I don't imagine you are up to cooking. I suppose I had better dine at my club," he tell! s Dee, w elcoming her home after a week in hospital). He has a new distraction: by now up at Oxford, Gully catches Vanessa Lawson, the Nefertiti lookalike wife of Nigel and mother of Nigella, visiting the professor at his rooms in New College. Soon after, Dee began comforting herself with a distraction of her own the American fashion designer Hylan Booker.
Between 1965 and 1975, though, the Wells-Ayer house in Primrose Hill, north London, was "the place to be", for all that by the end of this period they were effectively living separate lives. The couple's social circle included Roy Jenkins, Kenneth Tynan and Iris Murdoch. For Gully, the knock-on effect was possibly not unhelpful. The only person she knows prior to going up to Oxford is presto! Martin Amis, whose stepmother, Elizabeth Jane Howard, is a pal of her mother's (he eventually dumps her, the better to swot for his first).
After Oxford, she swiftly gets a job doing publicity at Weidenfeld and Nicolson. And when, having married among the guests were Christopher Hitchens and Anna Wintour and moved to New York, she is at a loose end, Harold Evans offers her a job as an editor at his new magazine, Cond Nast Traveler. I kept waiting for some setback. But, no. Wells's life is fabulous and she isn't afraid to tell you so.
There is no background darkness or none she is willing to concede. She seems, for instance, almost amused by her mother's snobbish loathing of her new husband, Peter, a BBC producer. Worse, when Dee moves to New York and Freddie marries Vanessa, thus all but abandoning their teenage son, Gully's brother, Nicholas, she hesitates to express her anger. There is one moment Vanessa dies of cancer at the age of just 48 and Dee refuses even to fake any sympathy when you sense something bubbling beneath the surface. But Gully soon turns her distaste back on herself: how stupid to expect something so conventional!
It's as if she is suffering from a form of Stockholm syndrome; perhaps she is. It strikes me that he! r mother insecure, rude, vengeful, tough was one of those people who built her own mythology as she went on; you get a strong whiff of this when she remarries Freddie shortly before his death in 1989 (Dee died in 2003). Again, he was reluctant; again, she was proprietorial. She had decided. Wells's problem, as a memoirist, is that she has never been able to wriggle out from under this gilded and airless narrative; she can only perpetuate it.
For the reader, this results in a puzzle. She tells us, over and over, how amazing, how funny Dee and Freddie were. But the evidence for it feels, at times, remorselessly thin. As portraits go, they are as indelible as chalk on a rainy pavement. You feel first mild dislike and then nothing.
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