The Swan in the Evening by Rosamond Lehmann – #ABookADayInMay Day 20

Crossing Day 20 feels like we’re on the home stretch, and I am still really enjoying doing A Book A Day in May – certainly finding it much easier than last year, when my eyes were still pretty ropey eight months after Covid. And there’s something I particularly like about reading books that have been on my shelves for ages – such as Rosamond Lehmann’s The Swan in the Evening (1967), which I bought in 2011.

The subtitle of this book is ‘Fragments of an Inner Life’, and fragments is the word. The first section is a fairly impressionistic take on her childhood – stray memories coming together to form some sort of image, however imprecise. Or, rather, she goes for very precise scenes that flow into other precise scenes, without really trying to cohere into anything very detailed. Some of it is in the present tense, giving it a childlike immediacy.

I am in the Parish Hall; it is a Sale of Work. I circulate among the visitors with a trayful of lavender bags which I proffer to the long lean sallow nurse in a grey uniform. I know her: she looks after a little boy with a squint and a funny way of talking, who is said to have tantrums and beat his head against his nursery wall, who once presented me with a letter that said, in grimy reeling print: ‘Dear Rosy sprinkel me with kisses if you want my luv to gro yore everlasting Joey.’ The nurse bends down to me, smiling, and says in a low confidential voice: ‘I’m stony broke.‘ At once such terror grips me that I almost swoon. Why? How was it that this harmless if unfamiliar slang phrase took sinister form as she uttered it and dropped on me with the chill weight of granite! Absurd, morbid child… Mad, like all children…: or so very little madder.

Among the memories given their sudden spotlights is one that a longer-lasting impression: the death of the six-year-old daughter of a man who works on the family estate. Without being able to truly understand the depths of this tragedy, young Rosamond sees its impact. It lingers with her as an incomprehensible sadness – and, later, becomes something all too comprehensible for her.

The second section of The Swan in the Evening tells us about the death of Lehmann’s daughter, Sally. Or, rather, the death is focalised through Lehmann’s own absence – her daughter is fairly newly married, in a distant country, and Lehmann is innocently going about everyday life. There are hints at a premonition, understood only in retrospect, and a veil drawn over the shock of the phone call – and the days and weeks after that.

But she picks up some time later, where she starts trying to communicate with Sally beyond on the grave – explained in no more metaphysical terms than that Sally is still alive, though not in the way such things are usually considered. From here, Lehmann goes through a curious mix of sharing how she believes Sally is communicating with her – and a defence of this belief. I’ll be honest, the combination was quite confusing. Lehmann is adamantly not part of any traditional religion, but she does piece together her beliefs from various different writers and influential figures.

It’s clear that her real reason for writing The Swan in the Evening is to relay her experiences and explain why they are reasonable. How could it be anything other than poignant. But it’s also quite abstract, even when she seems to be mounting her defence. This is from earlier in the book, but it’s a good example of the style I mean. Fluid, flowing from one thought to another, quite hard to pin down. Rather less firmly constructed than her novels, from my limited reading of them.

Myself in extremis, floored; myself saved, rejoicing: each of these opposed conditions deemed while it lasts, to be perpetual; yet even then a shadowy third, an onlooker, watching, recording, in the wings… Perhaps this is an abstract of anybody’s childhood. But of course it is only one aspect of the truth, or of illusion.

I think perhaps the most interesting part of my edition was the afterword she wrote when Virago Modern Classics reprinted it – highlighting bits she would have liked to phrase differently, and sharing some of the public and private responses she got to the initial publication. The Swan in the Evening is an interesting addendum to the life of a very good novelist, and of course a grieving mother is unlikely to be able to express that level of sorrow to anybody who hasn’t experienced it (and yet should certainly be allowed to try). I’m just not sure what the book is trying to be, and so it ends up being a jumble of different things that are not limited enough for memoir or wide enough for proper autobiography. I would, for example, have liked a lot more about her writing career. I hope the book was helpful for her to write, and it’s diverting to read, but it certainly earns the word ‘fragments’ from the subtitle.