5 - Aftershocks

Summary

PSYCHOLOGY AND THE NOVEL

‘Everything I think I have discovered about the jungle of the human heart has gone into it’, wrote Rosamond Lehmann to Bernard Berenson about her new novel. The Echoing Grove was completed during the period of fallout from Lehmann's long affair with the poet, Cecil Day Lewis. Throughout the 1940s, Rosamond and Cecil, handsome, gifted and successful, were the golden couple of literary London. Although their private life was frequently under strain, largely stemming from Day Lewis's refusal to divorce his long-suffering wife, Mary, it was also joyous and mutually satisfying, both intellectually and emotionally, and the pair were accepted everywhere as an established union. When in 1950 Day Lewis, without warning, went off with the actress, Jill Balcon, whom he subsequently married, Lehmann was reduced to a state of shock, insisting, until she could no longer ignore the fact, that his defection was a temporary neurotic lapse, ‘a far more acute form of the psychopathic state I've seen him in at intervals for 9 years’. She remained adamant that the break-up was too traumatic for her ever to write about but despite her denials, the lasting anguish and bitterness resulting from what she referred to as ‘the biggest disaster of my life’ inevitably shaped the predominant mood of The Echoing Grove, the final novel of her artistic maturity. ‘It is one of the most unmitigatedly painful books I have ever read’, commented John Lehmann, always her most astute reader. ‘It is terrific and terrible; because such writing could only come out of the most terrible suffering’.

Lehmann had begun work on the novel shortly after the publication of The Ballad and the Source but it had been re-drafted extensively over the years, and revised further after the break with Day Lewis, at which point Lehmann reported that ‘picking up this novel again was a spiritual torment for which there are no words’. It took her two more years to finish. Set in the present day, the book gives voice to that ‘spiritual torment’ as it delineates the destructive power of an erotic triangle over a twenty-year period. The story, told mostly in flashback and switching between the consciousnesses of the main characters, reviews the lives of two sisters, Madeleine and Dinah, and their relationship with Rickie, the husband of one and lover of the other.