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Author finds love on trip into father’s past
BIOGRAPHER Miranda Seymour told an audience at the Heath Library in Hampstead on Wednesday night that writing the story of her father’s life had inadvertently led to her third marriage.
The writer, who was interviewed by fellow author Deborah Moggach as part of a talks series organised by the Keats Grove library’s Friends group, revealed that she found delving into her family’s past so harrowing she had to leave her mother’s house, where she was living, to complete the work.
“I got married again through this book,” she revealed. “I was so upset while I was writing it I had to swap homes, and I fell in love with the gentleman whose house I moved into. He eventually agreed to marry me.”
But her husband, after three months of marriage, had to come to terms with the immense shadow Seymour’s father George was casting over her as she looked back into her childhood.
She added: “My husband said to me: ‘I thought I was the most important man in your life, but now I realise it is your father.’ And this is when he has been dead for 13 years.”
Seymour, whose previous biographical subjects include poet Robert Graves, details her father’s obsession with the Jacobean country home he and the author’s mother bought and lived in. But there was also another side to her father’s life which writing the book, In My Father’s House, has helped Seymour and her mother, now aged 84, to come to terms with.
Her father was gay, and had a number of young male friends who were an important part of his life.
“It was a paradox,” revealed Seymour. “He wanted this wonderful traditional life, being a country squire, being a successful stockbroker, and he also wanted relationships with a series of extremely rough young men.
“The love of his life ended up living with us for 16 years. Strangely, none of us had any idea for a long time that he had any interest in men.”
And her father’s eccentric behaviour towards herself and her mother also made her consider her privileged background in a different light.
She recalled: “He used to make me and my mother wear wigs. He wanted us to have long flowing tresses. I wore them for so long they made my hair fall out.”
And when he lost a fortune through a series of bad stockmarket investments, he still wanted a lifestyle he could ill afford, which meant a heavy burden of domestic work fell on her mother.
“He would have guests to stay and expect 15 people to be served dinner, and then have tea-sets for the morning laid out in the bedrooms,” Seymour said.
“My mother would do all the cooking and cleaning, and then rush upstairs to get changed for dinner, as was expected, and then have to clear up afterwards while my father played backgammon in the drawing room. At times when I was writing this my anger was uncontrollable at how he acted.”
But time breeds understanding, she added. “My mother is 84 and I love her dearly,” she said. “She had a pretty crap time with my father, and I think writing about it has helped.
“We would sit in the kitchen and just chat about the past. Sometimes my mother would say: ‘Do not write this or that’. When I started writing my notes up, my mother became my conscience. She has now read it three times at least and I find her quoting from it.”
In My Father’s House is published by Simon and Schuster, priced £14.99. |
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