January 11, 2024

Penelope Mortimer: About Time (Too)

“Of all the Penelopes, Mortimer is my favourite,” I wrote in 2018, though I don’t think I’ve read her since then, and need to refresh my memory, especially now that I’ve just read her two memoirs, ABOUT TIME and ABOUT TIME, TOO. Penelope Mortimer is a standout in my library for being the only author whose books I own in editions from Virago Modern Classics, Persephone AND NYRB (plus two regular old orange-spined Penguins, even though THE HANDYMAN has fallen to pieces). I first learned about her from Carol Shields’ and Blanche Howard’s collected letters, in which they raved about THE HOME, which I loved so much. I actually have no recollection of reading DADDY’S GONE A_HUNTING, a 1958 novel about a mother procuring an abortion for her daughter. I took THE PUMPKIN-EATER, perhaps her best-known book, on a beach side holiday about ten years ago and found it wholly unsatisfying for the occasion, but I think I will appreciate it better now having read its author’s memoirs, for this novel—like all of her novels—was borne of her experience, and that context might just be essential.

In ABOUT TIME, TOO, she writes about looking back on her childhood as a kind of Eden, though it doesn’t read like that me in her first memoir, instead a middle-class English experience of sexual abuse and emotional deprivation, but she recounts it all so jollily that one might just be convinced. The second paragraph of ABOUT TIME begins, “Fortunately I know nothing about my ancestors, and see no particular reason to find out,” and I actually LOVE that, but it’s also emblematic of Mortimer’s refusal to engage with the heart of things, even if such refusal is why the memoir is a pleasure to encounter. The pain in ABOUT TIME, TOO is much more visceral, immediate (a lot of the book is taken from Mortimer’s journals), mostly surrounding the breakdown of her marriage to playwright John Mortimer, her second husband. In between the two husbands, she had two children with two more different fathers, having six children in total, and between the lines one might read some regret about how her children might have suffered by their parents’ unconventional choices, but not too much, and I admire the way Mortimer never apologizes for her sexual appetites, or for her creative impulses, her need to be writing and creating. “The only way to love it all is to cling to it too fiercely. I don’t want to let anything else, anyone else, in. My comfort is the idea of writing this novel. My aim is to keep alive.”