Storm Jameson's fine audiobook tells the story of two men, their
beginnings, ambitions, wives, failures, successes. Gregory Mott is seen
at first solely through the eyes of other people: the old man who taught
him when he was a child; his aristocratic wife; his oldest friend,
Lambert Corry; and Harriet Ellis, at one time his mistress and still his
close friend. He is a religious man, a writer whose Anglican beliefs
have had considerable influence. For the past ten years he has been a
successful Director of the Rutley Institute of Arts. What man could be
happier or more secure? But suppose such a man makes an error, social or
moral--and makes the further blunder of denying it? During a journey
abroad this happens. Afterwards, in London, truth eats its way into his
life through the defences of fear, vanity, self-deception, egoism.
Friends, and his religious assurance itself, fail him, and step by step
he is driven to look at himself in the clearest bearable light. The
other man, Lambert Corry, makes no errors. And, though at one moment he
runs some risk of recognising himself, his prudence and agility save him
from this danger. Apart from the journey through France and the scene in
a pilgrimage village in Switzerland, the action takes place in London,
much of it in Mott's house on the north side of Hyde Park. The view from
this house, seen at different times of day or night, at different
seasons, forms the background for a novel which is both a social comedy
and the account of one man's unwilling discovery of himself.
Storm Jameson (1891- 1986) born to a North Yorkshire family of
shipbuilders. Jameson's fiery mother, who bore three girls, encouraged
Storm (christened Margaret Storm) to pursue an academic education. After
being taught privately and at Scarborough municipal school she won one
of three county scholarships which enabled her to read English
Literature at Leeds University. She then went on to complete an MA in
European Drama at King's College London.
During her career Jameson wrote 45 novels, in addition to numerous
pamphlets, essays, and reviews, in an effort to make money. Her personal
life suffered, and her first marriage to schoolmaster Charles Douglas
Clarke was an unhappy one. After they divorced, in 1925, Jameson went on
to marry Guy Chapman, a fellow author, and remained with him despite her
apparent rejection of normal domestic life.
Storm Jameson was always politically active, helping to publish a
Marxist journal in the British section of the International Union of
Revolutionary Writers in 1934 and attending anti-fascist rallies.
