Caterson, Simon --- "Moth and son" [1997] LawIJV 56; (1997) 71(2) The Law Institute Journal 86

• Mother and son

Mother and son

Victoria Glendinning is one o Britain's leading writers, but her literary career has happened more by accident than design.

While a student at Oxford in the late 1960s studying French and Spanish, Glendinning married her tutor. By the time she was 25 she was the mother of four sons.

"It was easy I had no idea what else I was meant to be doing. Having four boys was noisy;1 would have loved a daughter as well." She left her husband for Terence de Vere White, an Irish solicitor who gave up the law to become a journalist and later editor at the Irish Times. The family moved to Dublin and she does much of her writing at the family cottage in West Cork.

Having written two novels and four biographies, including highly praised books on Vita Sackville-West, Rebecca West and Anthony Trollope, she has now turned her hand to editing. Sons and Mothers, a collaboration with her son Matthew, is a collection of reminiscences by both mothers and sons. The contributors include Spike Milligan and the Glendinnings themselvesGlendinning, who radiates the easy charm and casual authority of the English aristocracy into which she was born, says she was attracted to the idea for the book because it was territory less explored than the mother-daughter relationship. "When sons start writing about mothers and mothers about their sons, it is extraordinary stuff because women are perhaps more used to talking about the way they feel. On the son's side it is different. A lot of the passion, resentment, anxiety and disappointment goes underground and when it comes out, it can be explosive."

She found writing about her own son "much more of an emotional experience than I thought it would be" and the cause of laughter and some tears. "I didn't mind what he wrote about me, but I found that sons don't like their mothers to be objective about them. I think sons just want their mothers to say, 'Darling, you are wonderful' 24 hours a day. When you start looking at them with clarity, or remembering certain things they'd rather weren't remembered, then it can become difficult for them."

As a writer in many different modes, Glendinning has found that the overlap between them can prove insightful. As a book reviewer she knows that books should be taken on their own terms. "Critics and reviewers often make the mistake of thinking that writers know what they are doing when they are writing fiction." This lack of self-awareness in her own fiction came home to her when she recently re-read her first book, A Suppressed Cry, a biography of her great aunt, a frustrated scholar who died at the age of 22. Twenty years later, after writing her latest novel, Electricity, Glendinning realised that she had continued her earlier story of a woman in the 19th century who was determined to overcome the problems of living in a time when the support society offered to women with inquiring minds was minimal. "What women did then was to plug into the outside world of men and learn what they could from each man they got involved with. I think women still do this a little bit, but then there was no other option."

Although her son describes her in the book as a feminist, Glendinning is not sure she knows what the word means. "If you mean someone who goes out and gets what she wants, then I think that any woman with half a brain is a feminist. I think in the nineties the word has become odd and perhaps out of date, like crinoline or camisole. To some extent we can do what we want, and yet we are different to men and want different things a lot of the time."

For her next book she will return to biography. Her current project is a life of Jonathan Swift, due to be published later this year, which she plans to treat in an original and creative way: "The graph of a life is too boring. You have the antecedents, the childhood, then the growing up, then the success, the failure, the success, the growing old, and you always know that it will end up with a death."

Swift is in many ways a mysterious figure around whom many myths have gathered, and Glendinning is determined to preserve some of that mystery: "I don't think I want closure, 1 don't want to argue a particular thesis. He was such an obsessive man, I want to give time to the things that obsessed him and that obsess me about him." 

SIMON CATERSON

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