Philip Hensher

A mind going to waste

Once a powerful figure in postwar literary London, Johnson is now largely forgotten. Are her novels worth reviving?

The revival of interest in mid-20th century novelists is one of the most positive and valuable developments of our time. This has particularly brought about a reconsideration of the work of women. Beginning, perhaps, with the creation of the Virago classics, female authors have been brought back into print and given the sort of serious treatment they rarely received in their lifetimes. The Virago list of classics is not what it was, but the excellent Persephone Press has carried on the task of rediscovering out-of-print authors. Occasionally, other mainstream presses have wondered whether a new readership might be found for names from the past, and Hodder is now trying its luck with five novels by Pamela Hansford Johnson.

She was an immensely influential and powerful figure in the world of literature, plugged into the British Council’s networks and much relied on in official circles. Those circles no doubt valued her efficiency and productivity. She was Dylan Thomas’s girlfriend, and in the 1950s married another writer of very high official esteem, C.P. Snow.

The two of them were a formidable presence to writers of the time, dispensing approval or censure through book reviews, lectures and public patronage. Many authors frankly loathed either or both of them. Elizabeth Taylor, whose place among the rescued novelists of the period now seems assured as supreme, suffered a good deal at Johnson’s hands. A chilling photograph shows Taylor and Johnson attempting to smile at each other at a cocktail party. After Snow’s death in 1980, his (to me) almost unreadably pedestrian roman-fleuve Strangers and Brothers sank rapidly out of view, despite a lengthy television dramatisation; after Johnson’s death, less than a year later, she too more or less disappeared. Is she worth returning to?

The career bears some interesting comparisons to Anthony Powell’s faintly dogged character Ada Leintwardine, whose imagined novels have precisely the same dustily tawdry titles as Johnson’s, the scandals of long ago; and as Johnson did, Leintwardine marries a dispenser of cultural values.

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