Sometimes, even truly bad books can be gripping, and Ivana Lowell's Why Not Say What Happened? is one of them. Clunky, repetitive and disorganised – you will search in vain for a single date among its pages – her prose is also fatally hamstrung by the weird incontinent blankness that is so typical of those who have spent too long in rehab. In the therapy room, Lowell, a Guinness heiress, has learned to be unflinching: to face up bravely both to her own failings, and to those of people close to her. Coy she is not. But the more appalling the events she describes, the more inadequate and cliched her prose starts to seem. She quotes the best-selling novelist Josephine Hart – "Damaged people are different" – with a reverence you or I might reserve for Shakespeare; she kills her funniest anecdotes at 100 paces; her metaphors are so bad, they make you cry out in pain. And yet I could not put her book down. Never before has so much bad behaviour by people who should have known better been crammed into so few pages. To fall back on a cliche myself: you really couldn't make it up.
Even by the standards of the Guinness clan – a family beloved of the tabloids for its higher than average tendency to abuse drink and drugs – Lowell's childhood was toxic. Her narrative is dominated by two women: her spoilt grandmother, Maureen Guinness, the late Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava, and her mother, Maureen's eldest child, Caroline Blackwood, the gothic novelist and noted muse. Maureen, a Dame Edna Everage lookalike who enjoyed a close if somewhat competitive friendship with the Queen Mother, was a vacuous snob; her idea of fun was to turn up at the houses of society hostesses wearing a comedy penis nose, a fart machine carefully hidden between her legs. She and Caroline, who had a brain, disdained her mother's snobbery, and was keen to join a more bohemian world, did not get on, and the misery that trails Lowell like a noxious cloud can mostly be traced back to their relationship: Maureen's neglect of Caroline was duly succeeded by Caroline's neglect of Ivana. It is not just that Blackwood, a raging alcoholic, was not one for the domestic arts (though she travelled with garlic in her handbag; most cooks, in her opinion, were apt to stint on this particular allium, cloves of which she liked to chew). Far less forgivable than the Steptoe-like mess of her various grand but rotting houses was the fact that she could not be bothered to tell Ivana the truth about her father.
Blackwood had enjoyed an early but disastrous marriage to Lucian Freud (she is the subject of some of his most famous early paintings). With her second husband, the composer Israel Citkowitz, she had three daughters, Natalya (who died of a heroin overdose at 18), Evgenia (now married to the actor Julian Sands), and Ivana; with her third husband, the manic-depressive American poet Robert Lowell, she had a son, Sheridan. Ivana was fond of Lowell, with whom the girls lived until his death in 1977. She felt sure he would have been furious had she told him that the family odd-job man, Mike, was sexually abusing her (only she never told anyone), and when, at the age of six, she suffered third-degree burns over 70% of her body having accidentally collided with a boiling kettle, Lowell devotedly slept on the floor outside her hospital room until it was clear she would survive. But she always felt sure that her father was Citkowitz. Only after her mother died of cancer in 1996 did she discover that Caroline had led two other men to believe that Ivana was their daughter: Robert Silvers, one of the founders of the New York Review of Books, and Ivan Moffat, the Hollywood screenwriter. There followed the humiliation of DNA tests, and Moffat was established as Daddy. Granny, who died in 1998, was gleeful. A non-Jewish granddaughter would have a far better chance of getting married. Ivana was despondent. She preferred Silvers.
Lowell takes the reader through a chaotic childhood and then on into an even trickier adulthood (she is now 43). Among other piteous humiliations, when a boyfriend is alarmed by the effect her burn scars have had on her body, she agrees to undergo a pubic hair transplant. It fails save for "a few lonely sprouts". Later, when she is dating Bob Weinstein, the Miramax movie mogul charmingly asks a hotel employee to set about Ivana's new Galliano gown, which he dislikes, with a pair of scissors. She ends up attending the Oscars in what looks like a "shapeless black pillowcase". When she eventually marries, she chooses – what else? – a junkie, and their wedding at the Rainbow Room in New York is ruined by a workers' picket line outside, a demonstration that Ivana's brother, by now some kind of beret-wearing communist, duly joins once the vows have been exchanged. She and Moffat try to forge a relationship, but she can't help herself: she is mean to him. By the time remorse sets in, however, it is too late: Moffat has had a stroke, and is on his deathbed.
Those who want the full dish on Caroline Blackwood should probably read Nancy Schoenberger's unauthorised biography, though I relished Lowell's description of Marianne Faithfull's visit to her deathbed ("Surabaya Caroline, we all love you Caroline," sang Marianne croakily, before making a swift exit: "I really can't bear long goodbyes, darling."). But there is, as yet, no biography of Maureen, whom Cecil Beaton once described as the "biggest bitch in London" – and for the batty marchioness alone, I would buy Lowell's memoir. Truly, they don't make them like her any more. I'm sorry for the coastal shelf of misery she helped to carve, but I laughed out loud at the letters she wrote to guests who broke her house rules. Among these "guests" was her own granddaughter: "It really is too path [pathetic] that you have grown up to have such bad manners, just like your poor mother. Love from a broken-hearted and sad Maureen." Ivana gamely tries to stick up for her, but the truth is that Granny was a monster in a tiara. Now she has it all down on paper, her granddaughter should get on and enjoy whatever money she inherited from her with alacrity and a clear conscience.( Rachel Cooke)
Aucun commentaire:
Enregistrer un commentaire