The Grain of Storm Jameson's Talent

It is said that you should write about what you know and that may be true if that’s all you know. For others writing about what they don’t know or what is outside their normal affiliations and interests can liberate their imaginative depths. Storm Jameson is freed from the constraints of her personal experience by moving to terra incognita. Company Parade mirrors her personal life and is marred by reticence, hesitation, and ellipses. It was supposed to be the first in a roman fleuve series and she wrote two more before giving up as it ‘went against the grain of my talent’. I hit the pause button on that novel but three others; Last Score, In the Second Year and Cloudless May were engrossing. None of those books have parallels in her own life and thus allow scope for imaginative penetration. There are those sudden shifts in awareness by which we become aware of her genius at work. I hold to the ancient idea that one has a genius and not that one is a genius. The first of the novels mentioned has a diplomat that adds to his mastery of rhetoric a branch accepted by Aristotle, torture. The second is the internal struggles of a English fascist family who are leaders of a successful coup. The third is a complex and quite long for her, story of various personages in a town on the Loire during May and June 1940. She published it in 1943 and Francophile though Jameson was it is clear that a massive dose of political cascara would be needed if ever Doctor Epuration made a country call. Which he did.

Cloudless May is over 500 pages long so evidently Jameson didn’t have the time to make it shorter. Leaving nothing out generates a nervous fervour. There is truth in the scenes that might be left out and this welds it all together. Things are after all going out of control and the hope that if the Nazis are long enough in France and eat enough black pate they may yet be humanised is a bleak irony. I will write more on this neglected classic.