St. Aubyn says of his father, “He had a small canvas, but he was as destructive as he could be. If he’d been given Cambodia, or China, I’m sure he would have done sterling work.”
Inheritance
How Edward St. Aubyn made literature out of a poisoned legacy.
BY IAN PARKER
In 1991, as Edward St. Aubyn was about to publish “Never Mind”—the first of five highly autobiographical novels, in which extremes of familial cruelty and social snobbery are described with a tart precision that is not quite free of cruelty and snobbery—he went for a walk with his mother in the English countryside and told her that his father had repeatedly raped him as a young boy. Her response “wasn’t totally satisfactory,” St. Aubyn said, several weeks ago. “She said, ‘Me, too’ ”—meaning that his father had raped her as well. “She was very, very keen to jump the queue and say how awful it was for her.”
St. Aubyn was eating lunch in an almost empty restaurant a short walk from his home, in the Notting Hill area of London. The only other diners, a few tables away, were two of his friends: Lady Antonia Fraser, the writer, who is also the widow of Harold Pinter; and Tristram Powell, a filmmaker who is the son of Anthony Powell, the author of “A Dance to the Music of Time,” a cycle of autobiographical novels centered on the English élite, to which St. Aubyn’s work has been compared. When St. Aubyn had come in—a long cashmere coat over a gray jacket, and his right hand braced and bandaged after a skiing accident—they had asked him to join them for a glass of wine, and for fifteen minutes there had been good-natured talk about the Tony prospects of the recent Broadway production of Pinter’s “Betrayal,” and about a sad decline in the quality of literary feuds.
Then St. Aubyn had moved to his preferred corner, and recalled some of his life’s most fraught experiences with steady irony, and in an unhurried accent of English privilege that—like the paintings that hang in his drawing room, and the tone of amused contempt that sometimes marks his prose—is part of his inheritance from a father who tortured him. Like his father, Roger, he is a member of White’s, the oldest gentlemen’s club in London.
St. Aubyn said that his mother, Lorna, a descendant of American industrialists, “was very keen to establish that she had no idea” about the sexual assaults, and “didn’t even know such a thing existed.” She “really was a person of good intentions, but if ever it was clear that good intentions were not enough . . .”
He narrowed his eyes. St. Aubyn’s movements have a bomb-disposal delicacy. He’ll brush the tips of two or three fingers against his lower lip for half a minute, or he’ll tilt his head slightly backward, as if in response to a tiny surprise. He is fifty-four and the father of two, and has the air of someone who is puzzled, and rather impressed, to find that he is not dead.
The novels that draw on the St. Aubyn family disaster—the fiction and the life both involve a perfect house in the South of France, a brutal English snob, an American heiress with good intentions, and a son who becomes a suicidal junkie—were initially resisted, by some, for their upper-class milieu. But the books, which focus on a family named Melrose, are now widely admired for their forensic and comic variation on the theme of trauma and imperfect recovery. In Britain, the publishing marketplace has become so saturated with nonfiction reënactments of this theme that the genre is known, with brusque mockery, as the “misery memoir,” and bookstores have “Painful Lives” sections filled with such titles as “Tell Me Why, Mummy” and “Please, Daddy, No.” St. Aubyn is seen to have done something remarkable with his balance of wretchedness and wit. For someone who used to think that he had met every reader of his work, the literary recognition has been gratifying. In 2006, the fourth Melrose novel, “Mother’s Milk,” was nominated for a Booker Prize. Rachael Horovitz, a producer of “Moneyball,” is working on a complete series of Melrose films for television, a project that she recently described as “a modern-day, albeit twisted” version of the miniseries adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s “Brideshead Revisited.” St. Aubyn told me that Pinter, not long before his death, took him to lunch in a Notting Hill restaurant a few doors away and sternly praised his work. “He could be very ferocious,” St. Aubyn recalled. “But when that was actually in the form of kindness it was very impressive.”
He is entertaining, teasing company. We had several meetings, at a time of flooding in the south of England. One day, when a London paper’s banner headline was “RED ALERT,” I met him after having just crossed the Thames, and I said something about the river not looking as swollen as I had expected. He later e-mailed: “Someone with a wide variety of extreme-weather channels available to him in America is unlikely to be shaken until several herds of cattle and a large number of cars and houses have been lifted into the air, swirled about and dumped onto exploding power lines or into the corpse-strewn floodwaters of ruined cities.” This is also how he speaks.
He recently finished a novel that, for the first time in more than a decade, does not involve Patrick Melrose, his psychologically fractured stand-in, or the awful senior Melroses. He also gave up his usual work habits—wrenching personal excavations, repeated revisions, and “the tyranny of the artiste maudit cliché”—in favor of a quick attempt at fun. The new novel, “Lost for Words,” describes antics surrounding the awarding of a Booker-like literary prize. “I rather missed out on play,” he told me. (He also missed out on the Booker.) “It’s a bit late in the day, but why not start now? If not at five, then at fifty.”
The irony in the title of St. Aubyn’s third Melrose novel, “Some Hope,” published in 1994, points both to a career-long interest in the idea of psychological deliverance and to a desire not to be mistaken for an artless writer. To read the novels is to watch a high intelligence outsmart cliché (or, to use a more Melrosian word, vulgarity), and so protect his protagonist’s literary distinction. Similarly, St. Aubyn has been careful to protect his own life from the dull tarnish of remembrance-and-release; it would pain him if readers mistook a twenty-year literary project for a therapeutic one. “What he wanted was a very pure success,” Oliver James, an old friend of St. Aubyn’s, and a clinical psychologist, told me.
But the awkward fact is that writing saved St. Aubyn’s life. Years of psychoanalysis, and the controlled fiction that followed, deferred the threat of suicide. St. Aubyn describes Patrick as an alter ego, though there are some differences. Patrick ends up with a day job—he’s a barrister—which St. Aubyn, with a seeming shrug of privileged incomprehension, barely makes convincing. More important, Patrick has no experience of therapy, beyond a group meeting or two in rehab. Instead, he ruminates, and makes sour, studied jokes. The novels enact, and describe, therapeutic progress, but St. Aubyn, led by a literary taste for compression, and by the desire to create “vivid and intense and non-boring” fiction, left out much of the process that helped him survive to midlife.
James, who has known St. Aubyn since childhood, and who once saw him, as a teen-ager, teaching others how to inject heroin, has charted his friend’s progress, and calls him an “extraordinarily emotionally intelligent person.” But the stability that St. Aubyn has achieved isn’t quite calm. The novels can feel like heavy fabric that has been pulled beautifully taut by sweating effort that’s just out of frame, and there’s some of that in St. Aubyn’s wary charm: his equilibrium requires constant monitoring of experience and thought. He said that there are certain words that, in an instant, can raise his blood pressure from a hundred and five to two hundred. He paid almost obsessive attention to the plans we made, and was distressed by any threat to them. In conversation, he’d talk over any attempted interruption but hold the truncated question in his mind and answer it several minutes later. When I arrived, punctually, at his house, he answered the door, in coat and scarf, four or five seconds after I pressed the bell. It seemed important not to disappoint him. Thanks to his unfamiliarity with cell phones—he had just bought his first one—I heard, at the end of a voice-mail message to me, a snatch of peremptory conversation on another line, in which he complained about “one or two villains” who were “not contributing to my peace of mind.” (When I mentioned this to him, he was relieved I could tell that I was not one of those being slighted.)
That voice-mail accusation could serve as a précis of the Melrose books, if one wanted to contrast the subtlety of Patrick’s self-scrutiny with his tendency to measure others on a simpler, more severe scale—in which someone either is making things better for Patrick or is not. (Most are not.) Patrick is enormously empathic, but largely on his own behalf. Secondary characters can be knocked flat by satire and scorn.
St. Aubyn approached our conversations with good humor, but they were probably not helping his peace of mind. “I couldn’t give a master class on relaxation,” he said, as we left the restaurant. I’d asked about his skiing vacation, in the shadow of the Eiger, with his thirteen-year-old son. We walked back to his house, on a route that gave us a view of the gate over which Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts, in “Notting Hill,” climb into a private communal garden. St. Aubyn’s back garden has a door that leads into the same kind of treasured space. He lives in a neighborhood of handsome and expensive white early-Victorian terraces, although he’s conscious of the fact that his four-story home is less grand than the five-story mansions nearby, owned by princes of finance.
His wistfulness about this is delivered for comic effect, but he has an air of displacement, or exile. St. Aubyn spent much of his childhood in France, on an eighty-acre property comprised of many buildings, along with woods and a vineyard. “My sense of home was lodged there, however disturbed a sense of home that was,” he told me. He expected to inherit that land, but this didn’t happen. His attachment to France remains strong, and when he needs to concentrate on writing he prefers to sit alone in a hotel by the Mediterranean. Watching St. Aubyn walk up the steps to his front door, wearing a long coat from another era, into a nine- or ten-million-dollar house of regret and economic retrenchment, I found it easy to imagine him in the company of one of his relatives, such as his Scottish grandfather, who spent much of the Second World War in Nassau with his friend the Duke of Windsor—the former King Edward VIII—and who drank himself to death in Monte Carlo; or his great-uncle, Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, a first cousin of Tsar Nicholas II, who helped to murder Rasputin, survived the revolution, and later worked as a champagne salesman in Paris. Or his father, a musically gifted sadist who died in New York. We went inside, and St. Aubyn called a technician about a scanner that he couldn’t figure out how to work.
St. Aubyn had been invited to speak at Wolfson College, Oxford, as part of a program in biographical writing. Because of the floods, no trains were running, so the college sent a taxi. For the hour-long ride, St. Aubyn brought water, in the form of a glass bottle of Acqua Panna, and two glass tumblers. He was also carrying a set of his novels, filled with bookmarks. He is an unhappy and infrequent public speaker, although, in James’s description, “he’s the heart and soul of any dinner party—if he decides to be.”
St. Aubyn had been asked by his host, Dame Hermione Lee, the biographer and academic, to sit for a Q. & A. with her, and to read from the Melrose series. The novels are short and condensed, and four of them describe action that occurs in a single day. In “Never Mind,” the Melroses are in France and Patrick is five; the book depicts a dinner party and the first time that his father, David, sexually assaults him. In “Bad News,” the second novel, Patrick is a heroin addict in his twenties, collecting David’s ashes in New York. In “Some Hope,” which was conceived as the final volume of a trilogy, he is thirty, and he attends a society party in the English countryside. St. Aubyn reprised the series with “Mother’s Milk”: Patrick is again in the family house in France, and is now the father of young sons. “At Last,” published two years ago in the U.S., takes place over a few hours on the day of the funeral of Eleanor, Patrick’s mother. St. Aubyn had marked a few pages from “At Last”: Johnny Hall, a friend of Patrick’s, is driving him to a post-funeral party, and Patrick thinks about his lifelong propensity “to flood difficult situations with words,” noting that his conversational ease has masked a “core of inarticulacy.” That phrase illuminates a key part of St. Aubyn’s ambition: it connects self-understanding to high literary effort by echoing a line in T. S. Eliot’s “East Coker” which describes writing as “a raid on the inarticulate.” St. Aubyn treats that phrase as a kind of motto.
As the taxi neared Oxford, the sun shining, St. Aubyn asked me apologetically if he could prepare for the event by reading aloud. In the passage, Patrick recalls a scene from infancy involving his father:
He could remember, when he was three years old, standing beside the swimming pool in France looking at the water with apprehensive longing, wishing he knew how to swim. Suddenly he felt himself being hoisted off the ground and thrown high in the air. With the slowness of horror, when the density of impressions registered by the panic-stricken mind makes time thicken, he used all the incredulity and alarm that rushed into his thrashing body to distance himself from the lethal liquid he had been warned so often not to fall into by accident, but soon enough he plunged down into the drowning pool, kicking and beating the thin water until at last he broke the surface and sucked in some air before he sank back down again. He fought for his life in a chaos of jerks and gulps, sometimes taking in air and sometimes water, until finally he managed to graze his fingers on the rough stone edge of the pool and he gave in to sobbing as quietly as possible, swallowing his despair, knowing that if he made too much noise his father would do something really violent and unkind.David sat in his dark glasses smoking a cigar, angled away from Patrick, a jaundiced cloud of pastis on the table in front of him.
St. Aubyn then reached a dark passage of self-analysis. Patrick recalls a beloved children’s book in which a goat battles a wolf, replays a recent terrifying dream, and arrives at a new understanding of his mother’s complicity in his father’s cruelty: “The deeper truth that he had been a toy in the sadomasochistic relationship between his parents was not, until now, something he could bear to contemplate.”
The chapter ends with Patrick and Johnny pulling up to the party. St. Aubyn kept his eyes on the page for a moment, and looked a little rattled. He then celebrated the fact that such a long reading would eat into the time during which he would be expected to answer questions.
We were a little early, so the car dropped us in the city center, and we went into a pub to drink tea. Then we walked, between buildings of glowing limestone, the mile or so to Wolfson.
Before St. Aubyn went to Oxford, to study English, in 1979, he had spent two years living in hotels in Paris and New York, shattered and paranoid, taking drugs and listening to voices in his head. He had started injecting cocaine and heroin at sixteen, while he was a student at Westminster School, in London. We had begun to talk about this the previous evening, in the American Bar of the Savoy Hotel, where St. Aubyn had ordered a Manhattan, and the wait staff, apparently following a script, kept asking us if we were marking a special occasion. He recalled a hotel in New York where he stayed during his years of addiction: the George Washington, on the corner of Lexington Avenue and Twenty-third Street, “which was twenty-seven dollars a week, and a television was extra, and it had almost no visible picture at all.” The wallpaper “looked like a bloodshot eyeball.”
He was committed to heroin—whose effect is described, in “Bad News,” as being “as soft and rich as the throat of a wood pigeon”—but he kept other drugs in the drawer by his bed. “In those days, you could go to a park in New York and buy any number of uppers and downers of various sorts, and acid,” he said. (Nick Ayer, a friend and a former heroin addict, described St. Aubyn’s intake of drugs and alcohol as “astounding.”) “I used to open the drawer when I still had my eyes closed, and reach in, and I’d take three without knowing what they were. And then there was a sense of adventure. If they were three black bombers, I’d probably die of a heart attack; if they were three Quaaludes, I’d probably be a puddle on the floor. And, to kill the time until I found out what I’d taken, I would have a fix, and smoke a joint, and turn on the television, where you could dimly see the Road Runner through the snowstorm.” He laughed. St. Aubyn prefers to tell a dark story lightly, avoiding what one of his characters calls the “obscure and fatuous slang” of a Narcotics Anonymous meeting. His tone also suggested a kind of respect for the young junkie’s outlaw resolve—his willingness to toss himself into deep water.
“That was one thing that was going on,” he continued. “The other was that, on the plastic table, with its cigarette burns, was ‘The Magic Mountain,’ Kafka, Beckett’s trilogy of novels, Camus. Those were books that were influencing me then, as a very disturbed and heavily drug-addicted—but also very serious—seventeen-year-old, who kept flying and crashing. My psychological problems would overwhelm me at a certain point, and I would crash, but all along I felt—absurdly, with no evidence—that I was here to write, that I would either die or I would write.” For several years, he wrote poetry on scraps of paper; he once read a long poem aloud to Oliver James, who considered it astonishingly good. St. Aubyn has lost all his poems. “Part of me still longs for the purity of poetry,” he said. “Without any narrative, and wretched settings.”
On his eighteenth birthday, St. Aubyn came into an inheritance from his maternal grandmother, Lela Emery, who had died when he was an infant. Lela was from a family whose vast fortune derived from Ohio real estate and pig fat. One of Lela’s sisters married Dmitri Pavlovich, the Russian duke; Lela’s older brother, Jack Emery, became a property magnate and a grand man of Cincinnati, building himself a house with twenty-one bathrooms. Lela married two Europeans with status but little money; the first was Alastair Mackintosh, an amusing and well-connected Scot, whose memoirs describe how, when Lela was in labor with St. Aubyn’s mother, their friend Cole Porter was playing the piano in the next room. After a divorce, Lela married the Duc de Talleyrand, for whom she bought Edith Wharton’s former home, Le Pavillon Colombe, near Paris. Lorna spent a part of her childhood there, and in 1957 she married Roger St. Aubyn, a handsome English doctor and a frustrated pianist with an aristocratic sensibility, even though his branch of the St. Aubyn family was not quite the landed, titled branch. The Duc de Talleyrand outlived Lorna’s mother, and, according to St. Aubyn, broke a promise to pass on the bulk of the Emery fortune to his two stepdaughters. Lorna, deprived of much of her inheritance, later disinherited Edward.
The bequest from his grandmother made Edward rich. He wouldn’t tell me the amount—which, “from her point of view, was loose change at the bottom of her handbag”—but it seems to have been several million dollars. He later learned that his parents had already drawn on Lela’s gift to pay for his education, which allows him to say that “there was no point at which I was given anything by my parents—the whole thing came from this dead stranger.”
With the infusion of money, St. Aubyn said, he “suddenly moved from the George Washington to the Pierre, as it were, and from the APEX ticket to the Concorde ticket.” The Pierre is the main setting for “Bad News,” in which Patrick nearly loses his mind while on heroin. (It’s also where, in 1941, this magazine’s Talk of the Town section conducted a skeptical interview with Alastair Mackintosh, “clipped of mustache and speech,” who was acting as a high-end, name-dropping publicity mascot for a new night club in the hotel. He owned three hundred ties.) “I had no expectation of living very long,” St. Aubyn recalled. “I had no self-restraint of any sort, in any department, so of course I rushed through this money.” He added, “It was a ludicrous settlement, because it was given to me with no strings attached. I only really got into the swing of it when I was about nineteen. People were trying to tell me that it would be better to preserve the capital. I had an income that was actually quite a lot, but I would run out, because I was living in the Pierre and having five thousand dollars of drugs a week. And so I tentatively picked up the phone and rang the people who had the money and said, ‘Could you wire thirty thousand pounds to my bank account?’ And they said, ‘It’ll be there tomorrow.’ And I thought, Oh!”—he laughed—“I see! That’s how it works. After that, I made that call every other week.”
During this period, St. Aubyn had the sense to return to London, and to enroll for a few months in a college that pushed derailed young people through the Oxford and Cambridge entrance exams. His tutor was Penelope Fitzgerald, the novelist. A year later, her book “Offshore” won the Booker Prize. St. Aubyn, who is grateful for her teaching, had no idea that she was a writer (and, guided by a friend with a strong aversion, has still not read her books). St. Aubyn was a dyslexic child, and is still a slow reader. “I think that’s affected my prose style,” he said. “I became very interested in the sound of words, and the rhythm of sentences, because it took me so long to get to the end of them.” Today, “if I can find an excuse not to read something, I’m very grateful.” One evening, we attended a panel discussion about Fitzgerald, at which his friend Alan Hollinghurst, the novelist, spoke. Afterward, there was a lottery draw for a set of her novels; it was touching to see the rigid distress with which St. Aubyn faced the prospect of winning, and his joy when he did not.
The writer Francis Wyndham, who is a friend and a sometime travel companion of St. Aubyn’s, and is eighty-nine, told me, “He’s more a writer than a reader. I’m a reader—I don’t mind if what I read isn’t absolutely perfect.” He thought that Joyce and Beckett might be the only two writers he had heard St. Aubyn praise wholeheartedly. St. Aubyn recognizes that he makes frequent reference, in his fiction and his conversation, to works that he studied in the final two years of secondary school, including “King Lear,” “Four Quartets,” and “The Portrait of a Lady.”
After what St. Aubyn calls his “double gap year,” he started at Oxford. He had already bought an apartment in London, and he now bought an Oxford flat, where he rarely slept and to which he never invited anyone. (He later bought a London house. “That’s the only reason I’m not living under a bridge,” he added, explaining that you couldn’t simply exchange “a floor of your house” for drugs.)
He ate alone, in a suit, in Oxford’s most expensive restaurants. He continued taking heroin, sometimes with his fellow-student Will Self, the future novelist, who, like a number of people acquainted with St. Aubyn, did not want to be interviewed for this article. “I was always running away from Oxford,” St. Aubyn said. “I’d go into a tutorial to apologize for not having done my essay, with a taxi waiting outside to take me to Heathrow. I was always having overdoses and being revived in hospitals, adrenaline pumped in.” He was protected from expulsion by some early flashes of literary talent, and by the kindness of the teaching staff. Toward the end of his three-year course, a generous but too hopeful professor suggested to him that, with effort, he could do very well on his final examinations. Not long before this conversation, St. Aubyn had stopped breathing in the back of an ambulance between his London apartment and Charing Cross Hospital, after an overdose. Feeling that he “had to confess,” St. Aubyn said, “Well, there is a problem—I am a heroin addict.” The professor was concerned. “He said, ‘Do you have a television?’ I said, ‘No.’ He said, ‘Oh, do get one, they’re very relaxing.’ ” St. Aubyn laughed. “The Oxford University recovery program. I bought a television and took it back to my Oxford flat, and watched a lot of daytime television.” The university awarded him the lowest possible class of degree: a pass.
On our walk through Oxford, we passed Keble, his college, and he mentioned that, in 1982, during the vacation before final exams, he had attempted replacing heroin with whiskey and Valium. Waiting in a pharmacy to fill his Valium prescription, he met Nicola Shulman, the daughter of well-known journalists. Shulman became his partner until the end of the decade. She was having a sunnier experience at Oxford. The election of a Conservative government, in 1979, and the success of such period dramas as “Brideshead Revisited” had made it newly fashionable for students to participate in moneyed, black-tie frolics. (Hollinghurst’s “The Line of Beauty” captures the moment.) Shulman’s extended circle, which St. Aubyn joined, included Hugh Grant and Nigella Lawson, whose father was one of Margaret Thatcher’s ministers. The previous summer, Lawson had been photographed dangling a croquet mallet out of a sedan chair carried, on poles, by four young men.
St. Aubyn could play the part. He was not quite an aristocrat; an English peer, when recently asked to identify St. Aubyn’s place in the country’s upper classes, paused for a long time and then said, “Well, he’s upper-middle-class, isn’t he?” But St. Aubyn said “huff” for “have,” and “orf” for “off.” Oliver James is sure that St. Aubyn has never worn a pair of jeans: “He always dressed like, and had the manners of, a toff.” And St. Aubyn was attractive, thanks, in part, to his mixture of vulnerability and predatoriness. One observer described him as a “golden lamb” with “very beautiful soft skin and wonderful wavy hair.”
St. Aubyn remained a drug addict, but he said that Shulman civilized him: “It was good to have some care.” For the next few years, his heroin binges—injections spaced twenty minutes apart—were interrupted by more sociable patterns of drug-taking and swanning around, although, as Nick Ayer put it, “his more normal times would kill most people.” St. Aubyn said that he ached to return to his former life, but “there was a beautiful girlfriend, there was a party to go to.” (Shulman, who declined to be interviewed, became a well-regarded journalist and author, and is now married to a marquess—below a duke, above an earl.)
By the time that St. Aubyn and I reached Wolfson College, he had become agitated by the thought that we would arrive less than an hour before he had to speak. He was greeted by a member of the college staff, who asked, chattily, if he was related to the Cornish St. Aubyns, whose ancestral seat is a castle atop a small rocky island. “Uh, yes, cousins,” St. Aubyn said, in a way that discouraged this line of small talk.
Soon afterward, he was reading on a stage in a modern hall lined with pale wood. When he finished, Hermione Lee asked him how one writes about what can’t be spoken, and St. Aubyn drew a distinction between inarticulacy and repression. “I think trauma, during the period of our lives we can remember, doesn’t lead to repression,” he said. “I never understood that theory. It leads to splitting and fragmentation. I never had any trouble remembering what were the most outstandingly violent and life-threatening events in my childhood. Why would you?”
When St. Aubyn overdosed in his London apartment, Oliver James called the ambulance and rode with him to Charing Cross Hospital; after an adrenaline shot brought St. Aubyn back to life, he shuffled off into the rain without his shoes, looking for more drugs. Today, James is well known in Britain for his broadcasting and his writing, including a book whose title bleeps Larkin: “They F*** You Up: How to Survive Family Life.” He is several years older than St. Aubyn, and has at times been a surrogate big brother—and, to some extent, he’s Johnny Hall, Patrick Melrose’s kindest friend, although James, unlike Johnny, was never very interested in hard drugs. When James encountered Chilly Willy—a Lower East Side drug dealer who became a character, Chilly Willy, in “Bad News”—it was because St. Aubyn, in a double-breasted pin-striped suit, went directly to score after picking up James at J.F.K.
James met me in London. Within a few minutes, he said, “I have an odd relationship with Teddy, because he has never, ever been, in any way, cruel to me.” He described going with St. Aubyn and Shulman to a weekend party held by “the Earl of somebody or other,” at which the flirtation between St. Aubyn and a fellow-guest was painfully obvious. James also recalled how St. Aubyn sometimes reacted, at dinner parties, to a stranger’s careless remark: “A not terribly bright girl might say, ‘Ooh, that’s fun,’ and he would play with her use of language in a way that humiliated her.” He added, “It was like a wolf savaging a sheep. It was absolutely terrifying, and difficult to interfere with.” I later spoke with a woman who had had exactly this experience, in France: “I said something about a book I didn’t really know. He made me feel very young, and very stupid.”
James placed this behavior in a generational setting. “That’s what Teddy’s father used to do,” he said. In the fifties, James’s parents, both psychoanalysts, had a second home in Cornwall. David Astor, the owner of the Observer and a family friend, encouraged them to visit Arthur Koestler, who was staying nearby “with this person called Roger St. Aubyn.” (“Such was the ‘Dance to the Music of Time’ nature of things,” James said.) Roger, in his early fifties, a qualified but inactive doctor, had by this point divorced his first wife—Baroness Sophie von Puthon, an Austrian—and married St. Aubyn’s mother. Alexandra, Edward’s older sister, had just been born. “My mother described it as an incredible situation in which you had this sadistic, horrible man being vicious to his young heiress wife,” James said. “She was looking after this baby, in this doomy, bleak Cornish place, with Arthur Koestler being intellectual and not particularly nice.”
A friendship nevertheless developed between the James and the St. Aubyn families. Not long after Edward was born, in 1960, the St. Aubyns moved from England to a house in Provence, just inland from Toulon; a few years later, Lorna bought a nearby property, referred to by the family as Le Plan, which included a seventeenth-century convent, a chapel, a collection of seven houses on a hill, and a view of mountains. The St. Aubyns spent most of the year at Le Plan, but sometimes lent it to the Jameses, and one of Oliver’s sisters stayed there one summer, as a babysitter. “Roger gave her the creeps,” James recalled. “He was an intimidating presence, and this man, who wished he’d become a piano virtuoso, would sit there playing with incredible passion, keeping everyone awake.” When James was in his early teens, and Edward was seven or eight, the two families stayed together at Le Plan, and the boys shared a room. “Every evening, Teddy would get the Encyclopædia Britannica before he went to sleep,” James recalled. “I said, ‘What on earth are you doing?’ And he said, ‘I have to read six or seven entries of the Encyclopædia Britannica every night, and my father is going to test me in the morning.’ ”
James now assumes that the behavior was enforced with “the ultimate deterrent” of a sexual act. “Teddy wasn’t a wet—he wasn’t someone you’d want to cross, even at that age,” he recalled. “But Roger was really clever, and would have been able to find ways to humiliate him, make him feel terrible, such that it wasn’t worth it—it was much better to just get on with learning the seven things.”
Edward St. Aubyn has described two forms of snobbery. One is aspirational, driven by the illusion that access to power or privilege will make you more powerful or privileged; the other is the “snobbery of contempt,” an assumption that those outside your tribe can be treated as if not fully human. Roger St. Aubyn, an old Etonian and a former lieutenant in the 4th Queen’s Own Hussars, was the second type, and, in his son’s description, his sadism was emboldened by a sense of social grandeur, and by the pleasure he took in ignoring convention. In “Never Mind,” after David Melrose beats and rapes young Patrick one afternoon—and Patrick allows his mind to escape into the body of a lizard he sees on the wall—David wonders, facetiously, if “he had perhaps pushed his disdain for middle-class prudery a little too far.”
Edward St. Aubyn said that his father’s assaults on him began when he was three and a half and ended when he was eight. Nick Ayer knows a woman who was also abused by Roger, when she was a girl. In “At Last,” when Patrick revisits aspects of his family’s history of sexual violence—a history that St. Aubyn said I could regard largely as “straightforward reportage”—there are references to victims besides Patrick, and to a letter sent by one of them to his mother.
Recalling this period, St. Aubyn described the arrival of a new Spanish nanny. “She said, ‘I’m your new nanny, and now it’s time to have a bath. Go and get ready.’ And I went into my bedroom, and I put on a suit and a tie and some shoes and socks, and went into the bathroom. And she said, ‘What are you doing?’ And I said, ‘You’re a complete stranger, I’m not taking my clothes off in front of you.’ And I climbed into the bath, in my suit, and sunk under the water, and just stared at her. So she left. But you can see why I’d do that.”
In “At Last,” Patrick is in his forties, and his father is long dead. Patrick recalls a story that David sometimes told to guests late at night; Roger St. Aubyn used to tell the same story. On a hunting trip in India between the wars, far from a hospital, a member of Melrose’s party developed symptoms of rabies. The patient was trussed up in an improvised hammock. That evening, “it was challenging, even for these hard men, to enjoy the sense of deep relaxation that follows a day of invigorating sport with this parcel of hydrophobic anguish dangling from a nearby tree. The row of lanterns down the dinner table, the quiet gleam of silver, the well-trained servants, the triumph of imposing civilization on the wild vastness of the Indian night, seemed to have been thrown into question. David could only just make out, against a background of screams, the splendid tale of Archie Montcrieff driving a pony and trap into the Viceroy’s ballroom.” In David’s telling, he got up, shot the man in the head, and then rejoined his “dumbfounded” friends, saying, “Much the kindest thing to do.” As Patrick explains in his icy narration, his father boasted that the men of the hunting party felt, by the end of the evening, that he “had done something exceptionally courageous”: “David would almost smile as he described how he had brought everyone at the table round, and then in a fit of piety, he would sometimes finish by saying that although at the time he had not yet set eyes on a copy of Gray’s Anatomy, he really thought of that pistol shot as the beginning of his ‘love affair with medicine.’ ”
It’s a fine passage: a tale of murder, an after-dinner story, and an Oedipal duel, in which the urbane disdain of Patrick is wielded against the urbane viciousness of his father. The anecdote also conveys Roger’s charm, at least to certain men. Oliver James said of Roger, “He engaged with me. He took what I said seriously.” Roger also taught him the secret of scrambled eggs, which is “an enormous amount of butter.” (When asked to consider Roger St. Aubyn diagnostically, James referred to regressed pedophilia, and to what some psychologists call a Dark Triad personality: a mixture of psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and narcissism. St. Aubyn said that his father’s sexual behavior was “more complex and polymorphous” than suggested by the character of David Melrose, and included adult homosexual affairs.)
Gully Wells, the editor and writer, spent her childhood summers in a house a few miles from Le Plan, with her American mother, Dee Wells, and her British stepfather, A. J. Ayer, the philosopher—both models for characters in “Never Mind”—as well as Nick Ayer, her half-brother. She remembers the nearby beach, filled with kids running around and women in bikinis, where Edward and Alexandra, known as Minky, were kept clothed and shaded by a nanny “dressed up like some mad nurse in the Crimean War.” Wells is almost certain that her family was ignorant of Roger St. Aubyn’s sexual violence, but he was clearly a bully. “One had the impression that Lorna was terrified of him,” she said. And yet A. J. Ayer, who took camping and motoring trips with Roger St. Aubyn, had an attitude that Gully Wells summarized as “Roger? Splendid fellow!” Nick Ayer said, “My parents were vile to one another—all my friends’ parents were vile to one another. So Lorna and Roger being vile to one another was no different.”
Roger and Lorna divorced in 1968, when Edward was eight, and Roger moved to an airless modern house, not far away, that Gully Wells remembers as a bunker. Lorna welcomed Oliver James and his friends at Le Plan, and while there he would drop in on Roger. “Let’s face it, Roger was pretty fun,” he said. “He was very well read, and some of what you have”—in Edward—“is attributable to Roger.” Like David Melrose, Roger instructed his son to “observe everything.”
One evening in 1985, when Nick Ayer was a student at Bard, he visited his mother’s Manhattan apartment. “There were Minky and Teddy, sitting in her living room, and they looked up and told me that Roger had died.” He’d had a heart attack. “I had always loved Roger very much, and I said, ‘I’m terribly—’ ” He wasn’t allowed to finish. “They said, ‘Look, we know how you feel, and it’s not how we feel, so don’t bother saying anything.’ And that was the first inkling I had that there was some terrible darkness there.”
Within months of Roger’s death, Edward St. Aubyn had begun to write about him. He was twenty-five. He had started a few novels, and was contributing occasionally to Tatler, a magazine, then having its day, that allowed middle-class readers to eavesdrop on a version of smart, funny talk between toffs. He wrote best when confronting powerful men. His first published paragraph contains a snooty sketch of a cleaner who inconvenienced him, at Heathrow, on his way to a luxurious vacation in India. But when he later profiled William Waldegrave, a titled Conservative politician, he had expert control of the kind of ceremonial mockery that is valued in the House of Commons and at the Oxford Union. Waldegrave, he wrote, “gives the impression that it is lonely at the top before he has even reached the top. Some people just carry the top around with them; it is the medium in which they move and they only relax when they have a place that corresponds to it.”
He lived with Nicola Shulman in the London house that he had bought, in an expensive and unbohemian part of Kensington. Oliver James remembers that “there was wallpaper that took about three years to make, and individual worms that had been hand-fed organic caviar in order to produce the silk.” St. Aubyn’s friends were grand, as they largely still are. (Mick Jagger attended the London party for “At Last.”) Remembering this period, St. Aubyn murmured, “Adam Shand Kydd, who’s now dead. Jasper Guinness, who’s now dead . . .” He and Shulman spent time at Le Plan. In England, he was committed to high-society parties in a way that seems to have mixed novelistic detachment, sexual avidity (“He has always been a shagger,” James said, affectionately), and an instinct to take possession of his class inheritance, perhaps in fortifying defiance of his father. He didn’t retreat at all from the place where his father set him down. “It’s one part of what he was coerced to do that he hasn’t chosen to change—I suppose that’s how I’d look upon it,” Oliver James said, and he referred to Earl Spencer, Princess Diana’s much married brother, whose older son is St. Aubyn’s godson: “Charles Spencer’s quite an interesting man, but you couldn’t really say he’s the nicest person.”
“I thought about suicide constantly during those years,” St. Aubyn said, one day at lunch. “It was like a heartbeat, from adolescence through to my late twenties: ‘I want to live,’ ‘I want to die’; ‘I want to live,’ ‘I want to die.’ ” We were in a semicircular booth in a restaurant on Portobello Road. Even before his skiing accident, he was injured. During a writing stint in a French hotel, a masseuse had, “like a Bruce Lee villain,” jabbed him violently in the shoulder. He asked for my understanding if he couldn’t always manage to turn fully my way—although he sometimes found the fortitude to track the path of one or another slim woman as she took her seat in a nearby booth.
In the mid-eighties, St. Aubyn sometimes tried to break from heroin by renting a country house and declaring it drug-free. Under the terms of his treaty, relapses were burdensome, and required a long drive back to London; he had to finish consuming the drug before returning. While on the highway, still full of heroin, he kept himself awake by burning the back of his hand with a cigarette.
During one of these rentals, in Oxfordshire, he kept a fire burning day and night, read all of “In Search of Lost Time,” and tried to write about bringing his father’s ashes back from New York. (As Patrick observes, in “Bad News,” it was “the first time he had been alone with his father for more than ten minutes without being buggered, hit, or insulted.”) Then, on a drug break in London, St. Aubyn recalled, “I just thought, Actually, it’s all too complicated, and I’m going to kill myself.” He filled a syringe with a deadly amount of heroin but passed out before he had fully pressed the plunger. “It wasn’t a cry for help or anything like that,” he said, keeping his narrative clear of banality. “I was actually saved by the sincerity of my suicide attempt.” He woke up a day and a half later, with the syringe still in his arm.
“At that point, I was completely sure that later that day, or the next day, I would try again and I would succeed,” St. Aubyn said. “I thought, Or I could tell someone the truth. Nobody knew the most important facts about my life. So really my self was a false self, it was a working self for dealing with the world, and behind that wall was total chaos, just this sort of swirling blackness, and I just found it totally unbearable, second by second, being me. So I thought, I have to stop it or get some help.”
He called Oliver James, and asked if James’s father, the analyst—whose own psychoanalyst had been Anna Freud—would see him. “The next day, I went into psychoanalysis,” St. Aubyn said. In the first session, he told Dr. James about the sexual abuse. St. Aubyn saw him five times a week for several years; under the conventions of analysis, he and Oliver cut off contact during that period.
In 1988, St. Aubyn took heroin for the last time. (He later gave up alcohol, for a long while, largely in response to a liver crisis; subsequently, he started drinking to excess. He now seems to drink in an amiably social way. “Self-destruction is obviously a defeat,” he said. “But terrorized abstinence is also a defeat.”) That year, he started a new novel, under an extreme contract with himself. “It was ‘Either I write a novel which I finish and get published, and is authentic, or I’ll kill myself,’ ” he said. The thought was not melodramatic, or hysterical, he explained. “It was just ‘If I don’t, there’s nothing so far in my life that I’m not ashamed of, and horrified by. But if I wrote a decent novel, that would change the game.’ ” The contract, “written in blood,” stayed in place for twenty years.
Even if St. Aubyn’s memories of his earlier life, shaped by trauma, are not perfectly accurate, he seems to take care to transmit his memories accurately. But he was drawn to fiction, not memoir. He imagined a trilogy, whose third-person narrative would center on an alter ego but have access to the minds of others. “I wanted the freedom and the sublimatory power of writing a novel,” he told me. “And I wanted to write in the tradition which had impressed me most.” Nabokov’s “Speak, Memory” was the only impressive memoir he could remember reading. “I don’t know if you’ve tried reading Rousseau, but that’s pretty unbearable,” he said.
He wrote a first chapter: on a September morning in the South of France, an Englishman drowns ants with a garden hose, while his wife anticipates “the sticky, awkward cubes of ice” in her day’s first cocktail. He then stopped for a year. “I thought, It’s impossible, I can’t tell this story.” The abuse seemed unmentionable. In the eighties, “no one else was talking about it. And, for all I knew, it might not have happened since ancient Greece.” St. Aubyn added, “It would be very different now.” Patrick appears in the second chapter, carrying a toy sword, reflecting on the texture of squashed snails. The narrative that follows—a rape, then a dinner party—has the sprung control of a prosecutor’s steady summing up. St. Aubyn’s metaphors can be ornate, but his writing generally has a retaliatory steeliness; it seems to keep a promise to Patrick, who, awake at night, resolves that, one day, he’ll “play football with the heads of his enemies.” If the prose can read like a speech that he has become impatient to make, this seems to reflect a psychological truth. His mind had long been filled with imagined conversations in which he triumphed with “marvellous ripostes” and aphorisms. “I’m sure that I translate my thoughts into sentences more insistently, and associate them with words more readily, than a lot of people,” he told me. “Even as a child, I used to sit around staring into space for ages, thinking—thinking in sentences. . . . Even if I’m walking down the street on my own, I’m narrating the experience. It has to be described before it convinces me that it has happened.”
The writing remained painful. St. Aubyn and Shulman had married in 1987, but they separated before the end of the decade. A new girlfriend, Ana Corberó, a Spanish artist, encouraged him. “I lovingly bullied him,” she recently said, though she disputed St. Aubyn’s memory that she had taken his handwritten pages and typed them up in another room. Nick Ayer said that St. Aubyn “hated every minute of it. He’d wrap himself in towels, he was sweating so much.” In the months before publication, in February, 1992, St. Aubyn placed a call each day to his publisher, with the aim of withdrawing the novel; he’d hang up when someone answered. “I thought I would be shunned, and that people would be disgusted,” he said. “I projected my sense of shame onto everyone else. It was a great surprise that people were rather sympathetic.”
At a moment when the emerging British fashion was for spikily vernacular Scottish and Irish writers—Roddy Doyle, James Kelman, Irvine Welsh—the response to St. Aubyn’s elegant prose was muted. Alan Hollinghurst, like many readers, caught up with St. Aubyn’s novels only a few years later. “I had been slightly put off them before,” he told me, in an e-mail. “There was a lazy assumption in some quarters that, because they were written by an upper-class person about his own world, they must be trivial or snobbish or somehow irrelevant—such a person, it was thought, ‘didn’t need to write.’ In fact, of course, Teddy needed to write more urgently than most.”
Privately, people were kind and concerned, although one friend of his father’s—a former secretary to Winston Churchill, and a war hero—never spoke to St. Aubyn again. Sophie von Puthon, Roger’s first wife, was sympathetic, but went on to say, “I still love your father, I’ll always love him.” In our conversations, St. Aubyn was understandably careful about speaking for Alexandra, his sister, but he recalled her supportive response: “If anyone ever asks me about my childhood, I’ll just give them a copy of your book.” Alexandra St. Aubyn, who has no analogue in the novels, declined to be interviewed; she lives in England, and is on friendly terms with her brother and his family. In Nick Ayer’s description, “part of her was pleased that Teddy wrote the book, that the story could be told and that she didn’t have to say anything. But it did make life difficult, because she’d then be questioned about it, and she’s a very private soul.”
Lorna St. Aubyn’s pride in her son’s bravery was “impeccable,” Edward said. But, not long after publication, he received a letter from a Frenchwoman who had been one of his nannies, and who now worked at a publishing house in Paris. “She said, ‘I’ve been haunted all my life. I’ve wanted to apologize to you. I used to hear you screaming down the corridor, day after day. I knew something was terribly wrong’ ”—but she didn’t dare confront Roger. “I thought, Mm, so she was nineteen, and she wasn’t my mother, and she wasn’t there for the whole of my childhood, and she knew beyond any doubt that something absolutely appalling was happening. But my mother’s story, when I told her, was ‘How could I have known?’ I now had some important counter-evidence.”
Spanish editions collect the first three Melrose books as “El Padre,” and the two others as “La Madre.” Before devoting his full attention to his mother’s story, he finished his trilogy. In “Some Hope,” Patrick makes a disclosure: he tells Johnny that he was abused by his father. Later, they attend a party at which Princess Margaret, the vain and toxic guest of honor, tells stories “about ‘the ordinary people in this country’ in whom she had ‘enormous faith’ based on a combination of complete ignorance about their lives and complete confidence in their royalist sympathies.” (When I asked St. Aubyn a question about the Queen, he said, in a barely audible voice, “I really enjoyed my meetings with her. Unlike her sister.”)
In 1994, when “Some Hope” appeared, St. Aubyn gave his first interview. Asked if Patrick’s experience of sexual abuse described his own, he said, “Yes. Why not say that?”
He told me, “This whole journey is toward the truth, or toward authenticity, agency, and freedom. How could it possibly help to plant a lie in the middle of it? On the other hand, by telling the truth, I’ve distorted the message.” And a process of “turning something horrible into something that, I hope, is well made and beautiful” might be put into reverse. “The truth for me is the truth in the books,” he said. “And the truth in the facts is a derelict ruin.”
Lorna St. Aubyn was the author of several books, including a memoir of her previous lives, one of which was lived alongside Christ. She also wrote a study of alternative therapies—in which she argued that doctors were worthless, and pharmaceutical drugs cause disease—and a manual, “Rituals for Everyday Living,” published in 1994, that describes possible ceremonial responses to life transitions, including one to assist someone recollecting sexual abuse. It involves two chairs, four candles, a bowl of water, and a photograph of the abuser, to which one should address a soft chant: “It is healing that he needs, not hatred. Healing, not hatred. Acceptance, acceptance, acceptance.” She goes on, “Try at this juncture simply to accept that what you have undergone has a meaning and purpose which you may one day understand.”
Thanks to the Duc de Talleyrand, Lorna did not have a dynastic level of wealth. But there was money—her house in Kensington, where Edward spent his school years, was later owned by Dustin Hoffman—and a desire to do good with it. Edward recalled that, when he was a boy, Lorna supported such causes as Save the Children. Later, she embraced New Age ideas. By the time that Edward left Oxford, Le Plan was being used for residential courses in the mandala and in near-death experiences.
In the late eighties, Lorna told her son that she intended to give up ownership of Le Plan, and help turn it into a permanent New Age center. As Nick Ayer put it, St. Aubyn would be “disinherited for a bunch of loons—for her cat, almost.” St. Aubyn was appalled; he spent much of his time in France, and wrote there, and felt that his sanity depended on access to the landscape. “I said, ‘This is my home—go and do it somewhere else,’ ” he recalled. “And she said no, and I fought and fought and fought.” It was a betrayal and an indignity: his own pursuit of self-knowledge would be thwarted by a New Age parody of that idea. And his mother couldn’t see the irony in this plight, while he was built out of irony. (Patrick, referring back to the lizard on the wall, defines irony as “that deep-down need to mean two things at once, to be in two places at once, not to be there for the catastrophe of a fixed meaning.”) St. Aubyn now regards her behavior as a reënactment of her own disinheritance: “She was sleepwalking her way through a repetition syndrome, while thinking she was going to raise the world’s consciousness and inaugurate the Aquarian age, and there would never be any more war, or hatred, or challenging novels.”
In the mid-nineties, Lorna offered to sell him Le Plan, and he recognized the sympathy in that act. He had then just sold his Kensington house, in order to acquire a larger place in Notting Hill. He never moved in, and instead sold it to pay for Le Plan; his mother, in association with an expert in Holotropic Breathwork and fire-walking, moved to Ireland to establish a shamanistic center. St. Aubyn knew that the cost of running Le Plan would make living there unsustainable, unless—against all indications—his mother decided to leave him some money rather than give it all to her cause. “You’ll regret it,” she said of his decision to take over the property. “But I didn’t,” St. Aubyn told me.
He knocked together two of the cottages to make a space that he considered a perfect “writing machine.” In the mornings, he took his notebook to the Mediterranean, five miles away, and moved from café to café. Here, in the late nineties, he wrote two non-Melrose novels. “On the Edge” satirizes Californian New Age foolishness in a snail-squashing way, but allows a troubled Englishman to find a path to a bespoke form of enlightenment, which includes Tantric sex. “A Clue to the Exit” is more striking, and resets Melrosian questions about consciousness and agency in a neurological context: a screenwriter tries to write a serious novel after being told that he’ll die of liver disease within six months.
Early in the new century, St. Aubyn began working on a novel that he was slow to recognize as a continuation of the Melrose series. His protagonist was initially named Mark; St. Aubyn has described performing a global search-and-replace on his draft that introduced such typos as “superPatricket.” In what became “Mother’s Milk,” Patrick, now married, is beset by parental worry, and, at the beach, by drunken lust: “Oh, God, why was life so badly organized? Why couldn’t he just hoist her onto a hot car bonnet and tear off that turquoise excuse for a bikini bottom? She wanted it, he wanted it. Well, anyway, he wanted it.” In dispute with a rashly philanthropic and ailing mother, Patrick makes weary fun of her New Age comrades as well as his children’s nanny and some British acquaintances vacationing in Saint-Tropez. This mockery is sometimes awkward: the novel doesn’t quite vouch for Patrick’s scorn, but the absurdity of his victims is a given. The Saint-Tropez household is out of Roald Dahl: a woman blathers to her personal chef in awful French while her fat and stupid son watches a cartoon and munches vacantly on cheese puffs. Such moments verge on the “snobbery of contempt.” When asked about this, St. Aubyn said that he could hear a cruelty in the voice of the first three books but not in “Mother’s Milk.” “If I write about a three-year-old child, the fact that he hasn’t read the Iliad isn’t unkind, on my part,” he said.
St. Aubyn was by then a father. In 1994, he had a daughter with Alexandra Marr, a girlfriend; they named her Eleanor, in oblique recognition of Lorna St. Aubyn, at a time when Edward was on relatively good terms with her. A few years later, after a tabloid interlude when Jerry Hall was accompanied to an event or two by an obscure novelist with a troubled history—“JERRY’S TEDDY BOY”—St. Aubyn had a son with his partner, Jane Longman, a painter who had posed several times for Lucian Freud, and whose mother was a bridesmaid at the Queen’s wedding. She and St. Aubyn lived together at Le Plan. Later, in London, no longer a couple, they became near-neighbors and friendly co-parents who share vacations. They named their son Lucian.
Oliver James said that St. Aubyn, by his thirties, had lost much of his social acerbity, and was further declawed by fatherhood. (Years ago, St. Aubyn acknowledged that there was a period when he was a “monster of snobbery,” but, when I asked about his former reputation for unkindness, he took the question to be about unrestrained infidelity, which he acknowledged, while rephrasing the idea as people “getting burnt” around him. He then placed his wit and generosity on the other side of the scale.) St. Aubyn described his children as “extraordinarily impressive human beings—they’re funny and they’re interested in education, and they’re open-hearted.” He said, “The art of bringing up my children has been checking the extent to which I’m projecting my own anxiety or paranoia onto them,” adding, “I can be firm, but it takes a long time. I go through a thoroughly democratic process. The imperative tense is a long time coming.”
When Lucian was seven, he came across a journalist who was waiting, in his mother’s apartment, to interview his father. When the journalist asked for advice, Lucian said something slightly eerie: “Don’t try to be clever. Just be clever.” Nick Ayer, recalling a recent encounter with father and son, in the South of France, gave me a gently amused description of Lucian’s rather formal attire, noting, “Maybe there are things from one’s childhood we cannot escape. And dressing up like a real English gentleman on a beach is one of those things.”
St. Aubyn’s quiet, carpeted living room runs through the parlor floor of his house. At the back, there’s a daybed, and other furniture that looks like it was held onto, rather than bought, and two handsome twentieth-century paintings: one depicting an alley, the other rooftops.
Talking there one afternoon, in front of a window that looks out over the communal garden, St. Aubyn described how, at eight, he resisted his father in a hotel bedroom, when they were on “some sort of faux expedition” together. There was, he said, a David-and-Goliath moment. “I thought, He’ll probably kill me but I can’t. . . . I’m going to stop him if I can.” He imitated a small boy in a boxer’s pose, and laughed. He recalled saying a single phrase: “I don’t want to do that anymore.” His father “collapsed,” he said.
Around this time, his parents were divorcing. “That’s probably part of what gave me the courage to do it,” St. Aubyn said. After the breakup, St. Aubyn, now a “delinquent and illiterate” schoolboy in London, was expected to interrupt his Provençal vacations with long visits to his father’s house, whose only windows faced inward, into a courtyard choked with weeds. “It was fucking spooky,” St. Aubyn said. “Poverty and dereliction, and self-neglect, and nobody ever visiting. My father was too depressed to speak, a lot of the time, and if he did he talked about suicide. In a way, he was showing me what I’d done to him, by refusing to continue to be abused. He was reproaching me, saying, ‘Look what you’ve reduced me to—from being this master sadist I’m now this ruin.’ ”
St. Aubyn glanced at the paintings, on facing walls, which were by Loren MacIver, a New York painter who was married to a poet named Lloyd Frankenberg. They wore berets and lived on Perry Street. Roger St. Aubyn knew MacIver, who had stayed with the family in France. A few years after Frankenberg’s death, in the mid-seventies, Roger heard that MacIver was suicidally unhappy; she had stopped painting and was drinking wine from gallon jugs. “And he said, ‘I’m going to go to New York, and I’m going to get Loren to paint again,’ ” St. Aubyn recalled. “And he got out of bed, and shaved, and bought a ticket to New York. He had a project. And this is what was so interesting about him. He was the most destructive person I’ve ever met—he had a small canvas to work with, but he was as destructive as he could be. If he’d been given Cambodia, or China, I’m sure he would have done sterlingwork. But he was also a brilliant musician, and a man with a powerful mind, and someone who could make things, and could help people in the most extraordinary way. And he flew to New York, and he went in and he did his thing: the other side of him. She was a wreck. She said, ‘O.K., I will paint if you play the piano.’ ” Roger hadn’t played for years. His hands had begun to curl up from Dupuytren’s contracture—his son now has the same problem—and he had rheumatism. “It was very painful for him to play, but he had this weird relationship with pain, you know,” St. Aubyn said. “He’d play for six hours, and she would paint. And then Pierre Matisse gave her an exhibition.” His father “resurrected her,” he said. The painting of rooftops was in that exhibition.
At dusk, St. Aubyn closed the shutters and snapped down their metal bars. I asked him if he could show me a photograph of him as a boy; he said that he had none, although his sister had kept some.
In the Melrose series, St. Aubyn touches only occasionally on the period between Patrick’s young childhood and his twenties. St. Aubyn has not described Patrick in class (or David Melrose on Perry Street). I asked St. Aubyn if he might ever write about his alter ego’s student years—a stage in life that he once considered to have been over-mined by coming-of-age fiction. He acknowledged that, when he talked with me about his adolescence, he felt he was “giving away” material that he might later want to deploy. “There are things to be discovered,” he said, adding that he was “certainly not going to write another Melrose book for ages.”
This reply was surprisingly far from no, but it seemed wrong to react with excitement—for fear of seeming blasé about St. Aubyn’s welfare (the towels, the sweat) or unappreciative of the non-Melrose work. But it was cheering. The Melrose books make a literary virtue of self-absorption—to the extent that one even accepts, as part of the shading of Patrick’s portrait, the way in which his young children are depicted as weird satellite Patricks. St. Aubyn has written beautifully from the vantage point of self-preserving self-regard, and habits of mind that might be weaknesses in other fiction—a lack of leniency, a certain unresponsiveness toward the world beyond one’s world—become strengths. St. Aubyn’s most compelling books are “Never Mind” and “At Last,” which have the least dialogue, and the most Roger.
When St. Aubyn is not focussed on Patrick’s struggle, his characterizations can devolve into mimicry. (Americans start sentences with “Oh, gee,” or “Say, Fred.”) “Lost for Words” is, at times, entertaining about what St. Aubyn calls the “poison of comparison,” symbolized by a corrupt literary prize, but his story—which started as a broader farce, and was reshaped after discussions with his agent and editors—can seem more disengaged than carefree. When we met, he drew my attention to an idea that one character has about art’s ability “to arrest our attention in the midst of distraction,” but he had forgotten that the phrase was not his but Saul Bellow’s.
There’s also a question of courtesy. The 2006 Booker Prize was won by Kiran Desai, the Indian novelist. St. Aubyn was, effectively, the runner-up: I was told that “Mother’s Milk” lost, four votes to one, when the judges met just before the ceremonial dinner. Most novelists, drafting a Booker satire a few years later, would not have included, as St. Aubyn does, an Indian woman whose book of old recipes gets onto a literary prize’s shortlist by mistake. One can detect in this a hint of his father’s contempt for bourgeois niceties.
The year that he lost the Booker, St. Aubyn sold Le Plan to a “very nice and massively rich” French family that reminded him of characters in the Babar books. His mother had died, after a series of strokes, the previous year, between the delivery and the publication of a novel that described her physical and cognitive decline. She had no more money. St. Aubyn had by then given himself a few years to experience Le Plan through the eyes of his son. For Lucian, “it wasn’t filled with these dark and complex meanings,” he said. “He just thought it was completely fabulous, as indeed it was. You know, there were cherry trees and apricot trees with ladders leaning against them—you could climb up and have an apricot. And frogs, and a series of ponds, and goldfish, and water lilies: this little fiefdom, this hamlet, which took quite a long time for a small boy to walk around.”
Alan Hollinghurst had visited Le Plan several times in previous years, and had written parts of “The Line of Beauty” there. Just before the property changed hands, he came to stay with St. Aubyn, and they went from building to building, deciding what should be added to a bonfire that burned for three weeks. As St. Aubyn recalled, “I’d be saying, ‘Oh my God, I remember getting this suit!’ There would be, of course, a story attached to everything. And I’d look at Alan, who’d say”—firm, low voice—“ ‘Burn it.’ ” After a while, St. Aubyn skipped the anecdotes; Hollinghurst continued to say, “Burn it.”
St. Aubyn moved back to London. He was living alone, in a house much smaller than the one he’d sold a few years earlier. “My study here is basically a big cupboard,” he said. “It isn’t quite the same as sitting under the plane trees.” But there was a compensation: readers had finally caught up with St. Aubyn’s project, and, as if settling an old debt, “Mother’s Milk” became a best-seller in Britain. In America, St. Aubyn switched publishers, from Open City to Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
The novel that St. Aubyn then began, “At Last,” registers his sense of accomplishment. Mourners gather for the funeral of Eleanor Melrose, whose American family is modelled closely on Lorna St. Aubyn’s family. Someone says, “What is it now? Six generations with every single descendant, not just the eldest son, essentially idle.” As Patrick also observes, the enormous wealth of Eleanor’s family was never turned into political power or cultural monuments. Similarly, one can Google one’s way across Lorna St. Aubyn’s family tree and find little evidence of activity beyond astrology, horse-carriage driving, and an upmarket nail salon on West Broadway. If St. Aubyn’s achievement is literary and psychiatric, it’s also sociological: he got something done. In his living room, he described boyhood visits to see his grandfather, an alcoholic wreck, in the Jardins du Casino, in Monaco. “He’d be sitting in these beautiful suits which were only marred by the fact that he’d pissed himself,” St. Aubyn said.
It took St. Aubyn five years to finish “At Last.” In the novel, Patrick is separated from his wife, Mary, and their two children, and is living in a small apartment in London. It is a tightly structured story that wraps flashbacks inside flashbacks and gives secondary characters new autonomy—a right to exist beyond the protagonist’s peace of mind. Even Patrick seems ready to glimpse the humanity of fools. He reflects on a recent stay in rehab, and on the horror of his parents’ marriage; he recalls his mother’s account of his conception—in rape—and his new sense of how “she craved the extreme violence of David’s presence” and “threw her son into the bargain.” Near the end of the novel, at the party following his mother’s funeral, Mary asks him if he’d like to eat supper with her and the children, and he declines. He flirts with a waitress with a long neck, and, at the start of the final chapter, he returns alone to his apartment, with her number in his pocket.
In 2009, in his closet-sized Notting Hill study, St. Aubyn had written his way to his present self—in its fundamentals, if not its details. The Melrose story had caught up with its author, who had no plan for an ending, and no archive of experience from which to draw. St. Aubyn was presented with the strange and extravagantly Romantic experience of deciding Patrick’s fate and discovering his own, at the same time.
“The revelation was in the process of writing,” he told me. “The liberation came from the revelation, which came from the writing. It was happening in real time.”
Finishing a five-book series, St. Aubyn wanted equally to avoid an anticlimax and a miracle. As he wrote, he began to allow Patrick, sitting alone, to consider how the death of both parents could create a truce with his inheritance, if not quite the “acceptance, acceptance, acceptance” of Lorna St. Aubyn’s ritual. When one of Eleanor’s New Age friends calls Patrick, he shows her an unprecedented civility. Afterward, he opens himself up “to the feeling of utter helplessness and incoherence that he supposed he had spent his life trying to avoid,” and finds that he is not dismembered by it. He thinks his way to a state that St. Aubyn has called “unconsoled”: not consoled, but not inconsolable. Patrick phones Mary about supper.
One could say: a sorrowful egomaniac deigns to eat with his children. Or one could say, as St. Aubyn put it, that the books trace Patrick Melrose’s attempt to emerge “with dignity from an impossible assault on dignity.” Certainly, it was a happier ending than St. Aubyn was expecting. “There were tears streaming down my cheeks,” he said. “It was amazing to me.”
Written words are fixed, he said; a state of mind is not. But, for St. Aubyn, the conclusion has not come to feel false or wishful. It was, for him, “the deepest moment of authenticity so far, which I can very easily betray by becoming distracted, by becoming caught up in some game.” He continued, “But I know it’s there, and, at my best, that’s where I would be.” ♦
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