Rosamond Lehmann: The Weather in the Streets

One of my favourite things about reading books from eras past is those rare flashes of insight that remind me that I’m really no different from people who’ve gone before. ‘Stop thinking you’re so sophisticated,’ the best writers say, ‘Stop thinking that you invented sex, irony, hair removal [or whatever it might be]: you’re much more similar to these folk than you can even begin to imagine.’

That doesn’t happen in Rosamond Lehmann‘s The Weather in the Streets. There is not one single, isolated insight. Instead, the whole book is soaked in universal female experience; so much so that you forget you’re reading and feel rather as though you have been granted privileged access to the interior monologue of the woman sitting across from you on the bus as she thinks through the things that happened to her last year.

Told from the perspective of Olivia, an early thirty-something who has separated from her husband and rents a room in a wealthy single friend’s London pad, this 1936 classic unfolds the germination, blossoming and consequences of her affair with a married childhood friend. It charts her progress from emotionally fettered, overgrown adolescent to seasoned woman, throwing up startling glimpses of the mental cages that the people around her live in along the way.

Lehmann is a fearless writer. Not only does she lay bare the terrors and neuroses that riddle us all and wade freely in the waters of the forbidden — homosexuality, drug use and back-street abortions being just a few of the topics she takes on — she also takes the rules of writing and snaps them in two.

Her promiscuous use of both the first and third person voice would make a creative writing tutor weep. Indeed, it would make nonsense of most writer’s work, but Lehmann’s style is so distinctive, and her touch so deft, that it merely serves to heighten our sense of being in Olivia’s world by showing us the ambivalent way she sees herself — sometimes ‘me’, sometimes ‘she’. At its most magnificent, Lehmann’s writing has the fluidity of an impressionist painting, yet with all the details picked out in astonishing clarity.

She’s really funny, too. Best of all are the flashes of steel that puncture the pomposity and smugness of minor characters. A case in point is Olivia’s private response to a prudish acquaintance’s plans to embroider a set of eight chair covers for her dining room chairs.

‘I think it will be gay’  she said meekly, holding up the square with her dear little old-fashioned head on one side.

Nothing you did or conceived of could ever be gay; and do your children know yet they hate you?

That’s not to say the book’s perfect. The wrapping up, involving a host of secondary Bohemian friends who engineer a possible next step for Olivia, feels thin after the heady emotion of the preceding chapters. Although it does contain some nice touches and wicked vignettes — the scene where the drunk Adrian tries to chat up the beautiful teenage boy who features as the back end of the bull in the amateur play is great.

Taken as a whole, though, this book is extremely impressive, elegant, engaging and a lot of fun. Much like the lady who recommended it (thanks Jo).

Picture by jaybergesen.