Elizabeth Jane Howard: 'All your life you are changing'

The pursuit of love brought more pain than gain for Elizabeth Jane Howard. Then she went back to fiction with a renewed passion. Clare Colvin meets a recovered Muse

The dark, intense eyes of the young Elizabeth Jane Howard gaze out from the front cover of her memoir, Slipstream (Macmillan,£20). Turn the book over and on the back are the same eyes, but 60 years on, in a face lined with experience of life. This is the image that readers of her novel sequence, the Cazalet Chronicles, will recognise. The raving beauty with the disturbing gaze is the image her lovers would remember – if any were still alive.

They read like a literary Who's Who: Arthur Koestler, Laurie Lee, Cecil Day-Lewis, Kenneth Tynan, Romain Gary. Of her three marriages, the first was to Peter Scott, the naturalist and son of Captain Scott, and the third to Kingsley Amis. But Howard was not a conscious scalp-hunter. She moved in literary circles because, she explains, she liked the company of her colleagues, as musicians like being with other musicians. It was some time before she realised she was beautiful, for as a child she had been made to feel plain and clumsy. She wishes now she had enjoyed that beauty more, instead of wanting to be loved for other qualities. She still has a distinctive presence. She walks with a stick, as a result of arthritis, but it's a splendid ebony one. She has no intention, at the age of nearly 80, of becoming invisible.

The quest for love remained a constant. She says: "I thought that if I could get love right, everything else would follow naturally." The reason she couldn't get it right had to do with her parents. Her mother, a former dancer with Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, followed the old-fashioned parental practice of undermining a child's self-esteem, and her daughter was made aware that she was not good-looking, clever, or good at anything. Her handsome father was charming, gregarious and kind – until around the time of her 15th birthday, when he remarked how fast she was growing up and sexually assaulted her. She struggled free and, after several other assaults, made sure she was never alone with him.

"My father had a terrible time in the first war," she recalls. "He was 17 when he joined up and suffered four years of atrocious sights and sounds. As a consequence of the shock he had suffered when he was young, he had never grown up. I couldn't leave it out of the memoir, because it had a profound effect on the next 30 years of my life. I didn't blame him, and he would have been horrified if he had known of the damage he had done."

That was one of the more painful episodes to write about, as was her relationship with her daughter, Nicola, a casualty of the break-up of her marriage to Peter Scott. Lady Kennet, Scott's harridan of a mother, made it clear to her daughter-in-law that Peter had only married her to have a son. Married at 19, she left him after five years, during which she had had three affairs, one with Scott's half-brother, Wayland Young. She refused to ask for financial support. In those days, a woman could not get a mortgage, nor was there childcare for working mothers. She left Nicola, aged four, behind in the family home.

"Nicola felt very short-changed, and it might have been better from her point of view if I had accepted financial help, but I didn't feel it was right. Since then, there has been an enormous change for women. It has moved more quickly in this last century than ever before. Men haven't yet settled down to the changes, and they are unsure of themselves. No one likes giving up their powers, and many men feel things were better when they were in control."

A troubled early life is a gift for a novelist, though Howard's first ambition was to be an actress, and she came to novels through writing plays. Her first book, The Beautiful Visit, was written while she was working part-time, living on coffee, toast and kippers. Her then agent, also her lover, sent it to Jonathan Cape. She was invited to lunch, evaded Mr Cape's amorous advances, and was given instead a £50 advance on royalties. The novel, about a girl trying to escape her family, launched Howard at 26. She became a literary It-girl, appearing at a grand evening in a gown designed for her by Victor Stiebel, to the fury of another femme fatale novelist, Rosamond Lehmann.

The second novel, The Long View, traced the break-up of a marriage back to the first meeting. The third, The Sea Change, began with a philosophical question: what can be changed in a person, and what is immutable. "I believe in change," says Howard. "All your life you are changing, no matter how much you may try to resist. At the time, I realised I had to change, that I was making the same mistakes time and again."

Her search for change took her down various paths. She seriously considered a proposal from Romain Gary, who had met her only once when she was with Arthur Koestler, to join him as maitresse en titre when he was appointed French Consul in Los Angeles. There were esoteric movements like the Ouspensky Society, where she met her second husband, Jim Douglas-Henry – another mistake – and meditation with the Maharishi.

After this, her life did change dramatically. She was appointed director of the 1962 Cheltenham Festival of Literature. Kingsley Amis was asked to speak at an event called "Sex in Literature". He rang her when she was back in London to suggest they had a drink in Leicester Square. When they met, he told her that he had booked a room in a nearby hotel for them to spend the night. If she didn't want to, he must cancel the room, or it wouldn't be fair on the hotel. She agreed to spend the night with him.

Kingsley, like most of her lovers, was married, but "I don't feel I interrupted a good marriage. It was extremely rocky, and I was the last straw". They set up home in London, then bought a large house on Hadley Common. Here, her third marriage began to crack. "I wrote very little in those years. I had a block, which came from being over-tired. Kingsley was one of the most disciplined writers I've ever known. Sometimes I envied him because he didn't have to organise the food, or other household matters, but that was part of the deal. He didn't stop me writing, and was encouraging about what I wrote. It's simply that I didn't have the time."

At weekends she would cook Sunday lunch for 12 or more, while Kingsley, his sons Martin and Philip, and guests adjourned to the pub. Her doctor discovered her crying over the sink one Sunday and prescribed quantities of tranquillisers, which didn't help the tiredness but stopped her crying.

She left Amis because of his drinking. "I don't think it's easy to live with someone who drinks too much, but in the end I couldn't live with someone who disliked me so much, as well. You can go on living with someone who doesn't love you, but what is really killing is someone who dislikes you. My sense of survival got me through that, and I was also helped by psychotherapy. If you want to be a better person, you take any opportunity that comes your way and I was lucky in having good psychotherapists, who introduced me to a women's group."

After she left Kingsley, for which he never forgave her, she got back to writing. The Cazalet Chronicles coincided with a new climate in publishing. She wanted to write about how Britain changed domestically during and after the war, and used her own family background. The successful trilogy expanded to a quartet, and was televised.

She now lives in Bungay, Suffolk, in a house she bought ten minutes after first seeing it. Houses have always been important to her: this one is her harbour after a stormy life, including recent ill-health and another emotional misjudgment when she was duped by a con man. She used that experience in her recent novel, Falling.

Elizabeth Jane Howard has been hard on herself in her relentless search for honesty. Looking back over her life, what has she most regretted? "I regret very much not having had more children. I would have liked Nicola to have had more siblings. Also, if I had realised I was getting arthritis I would have done more about it earlier on, and paid more attention to my body. I don't mind being old at all – I find it quite interesting – but I do mind bodily pain."

Clare Colvin's novel 'Masque of the Gonzagas' is published by Arcadia

ELIZABETH JANE HOWARD: BIOGRAPHY

Born in 1923, Elizabeth Jane Howard was educated at home, and trained as an actress at the London Mask Theatre School. She married Peter Scott in 1942, with whom she had one daughter; James Douglas-Henry in 1959; and Kingsley Amis in 1965 (divorced 1983). She won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for The Beautiful Visit (1950). Other fiction includes The Long View (1956); The Sea Change (1959); After Julius (1965); Something in Disguise (1969); Odd Girl Out (1972); Mr Wrong (1975); Getting It Right (1982). Her Cazalet Chronicles – The Light Years (1990); Marking Time (1991); Confusion (1993); Casting Off (1995) – were recently televised on BBC1. Her most recent novel is Falling (1999), and her memoir, Slipstream, is just published by Macmillan. In 2000, she was awarded a CBE. Elizabeth Jane Howard lives in Bungay, Suffolk