If I wrote only one book review this month (that is now looking fairly certain) the book review I had to write was this one. Despite having another terrible month in blogging terms, I have enjoyed what I have been reading, and the highlight of the month has been this long awaited biography of one of my favourite writers. Liz and I had agreed some time ago that she would buy me this for my birthday, so that was why I didn’t read A Savage Innocence when it first came out in March – I think I rather enjoyed having it to look forward to. I actually managed to arrange my reading so that I could start it on the afternoon of my birthday – it felt like a treat in itself.
Barbara Comyns was a unique voice among the legion of twentieth century women writers that I have come to love. She stands out as being completely unlike anyone else, her deceptively straightforward, naive writing style, her childlike narrators who gradually reveal chilling realities, her sense of the macabre and the absurd. She has a delicious wry humour, delivered in a deadpan voice that disarms the reader, but also shields them from too much horror. Her life equipped her to understand the difficulties faced by women, the reality of poverty and child bearing. I have read all her books, and have come to love that uniqueness. I was looking forward to finding out more about the woman who wrote those books, and I wasn’t disappointed.
Barbara Comyns own life was every bit as extraordinary as her books – her life informed her writing as we see in this brilliantly researched biography. Avril Horner shows where we can see the parallels with Comyns’ own life in her fiction – using extracts from the books, her letters, diaries and tantalisingly some unpublished works to prove her links. It is a thorough, detailed and completely absorbing read for the Comyns fan. Horner is careful to only draw parallels with fiction and life where she can prove it, and is also clear to point out where Comyns’ work is wholly fictional. The many extracts throughout the biography are a complete delight, there is so much of Barbara’s own voice in this biography, it feels like a really truthful but affectionate portrait.
Barbara Comyns was born in 1907 in Bidford-on-Avon in Warwickshire, one of six children. Her father was a self made man, a Birmingham brewer who married a woman who was his social superior – at least according to her family. The family home was Bell Court, a manor house on the banks of the river Avon. Like many women of her class and generation, Barbara’s education was rather haphazard spending very little time in school, her education was mainly left to one of a series of governesses. As a young woman Barbara saw herself as an artist, setting out to study art and particularly sculpture. Writing was to come into her life much later – and she didn’t publish her first book until she was forty. As a young woman she was surrounded by artists and married to her first husband, a young artist – she enjoyed surrealism – which shows in her writing, and lived in grinding unromantic poverty, just like Sophia in Our Spoons Came from Woolworths.
Horner explores Comyns’ personal relationships which were rather complicated, she was married twice, had at least two other partners and her second child born while she was married to her first husband was not his child. While living with her partner Arthur Price she even sailed pretty close to the wind – legally speaking in some of her money making schemes – if nothing else we see Barbara as a survivor. Artist, dog breeder, piano restorer, antique dealer, housekeeper, landlord and writer and a woman who moved house continually – I lost track of the number of houses, and flats she lived in both here and in Spain (where she lived for eighteen years). We also meet Diana – a woman who Barbara had a long and volatile friendship with – she was married to one of Barbara’s former lovers, the man who was the father of her daughter Caroline.
Barbara’s second husband was Richard Comyns Carr, an MI6 officer who was good friends with Kim Philby – and may have lost his job because of that friendship. However Horner also makes some fascinating suggestions about Comyns’ Carr and the possibility he was still doing some work for MI6 while he was living in Spain with Barbara in the 1950s and 60s.
Horner examines how Barbara became the writer she was – she was first and foremost a voracious reader. Her writing life had many ups and downs. Her first book evolved out of telling her children stories of her own childhood to entertain them. She had her supporters, her husband and the writer Graham Greene among them, but she didn’t always find publishers for her novels. She divided opinion, and her book sales even when reviews were glowing weren’t huge. It was frustrating and led to Barbara doubting her own ability – and meant some books appeared only several years after they had first been written. Money was still often tight – and it was partly because of that, that she and Richard left England for Spain. There was some success later when Virago started to reissue her novels in the 1980s, it was the first time that Barbara felt successful – but how sad that it came so late. It seems to have been Barbara Comyns fate to fall in and out of fashion over the decades, I think all her novels should be in print – those of us who have struggled to find copies of The Skin Chairs and Out of the Red, into the Blue – know the pain of trying again and again to find reasonable priced copies of books we are desperate to read. I’m certain if they were all in print, then people would read them. Hopefully this biography will renew interest in Barbara Comyns which has grown over the last few years as other novels became more available through publishers like Virago and Daunt.
Barbara Comyns lived a hugely eventful and turbulent life and Avril Horner explores it with honesty and affection – this is a brilliantly compelling biography and I loved spending time with it. Of course it has made me want to reread all my Comyns books too.
heavenali 