Restrained memoir tells of father's reign
'As a child, I used to pray, deep into my pillow, that my father would die." Such a sentiment is not commonly found in life-with-father memoirs, but Miranda Seymour's Thrumpton Hall - which last month won Britain's PEN/Ackerley Prize for autobiography - is a most uncommon memoir. At a time of autobiographical glut, that alone would make it noteworthy, but there's a lot besides that to recommend it.
A Memoir of Life
in My Father's House
By Miranda Seymour
Harper. 270 pp. $24.95
Reviewed by Frank Wilson
'As a child, I used to pray, deep into my pillow, that my father would die."
Such a sentiment is not commonly found in life-with-father memoirs, but Miranda Seymour's
Thrumpton Hall
- which last month won Britain's PEN/Ackerley Prize for autobiography - is a most uncommon memoir. At a time of autobiographical glut, that alone would make it noteworthy, but there's a lot besides that to recommend it.
Economy, for one. Seymour, best known for her biographies - most notably
The Bugatti Queen
, about record-breaking race-car driver Hellé Nice - tells only so much and no more. We learn little about her, and even less about her younger brother. Her mother, who is still alive and had reservations about her daughter's writing this book, comes across in the conversations with her that Seymour records as the single most attractive personality in it:
It's taken all of the ten years since my father's death for my mother to blossom back to the brightness as she emerges from the emotional bolthole in which she buried herself in order to survive. I used to hope only that her death should be merciful, quick as a blink or a dropped stitch. Now, I can't imagine life without her. I want her never to die.
That notwithstanding, it is George FitzRoy Seymour who dominates the book - just as, in life, he dominated everyone around him.
Seymour père was born in 1923, the youngest of three children. Not long afterward, his diplomat father was assigned to La Paz, Bolivia. Little George was thought a delicate child, so his parents decided to leave him in the care of his mother's sister, newly married to a clergyman who had just inherited Thrumpton Hall, "constructed from rosy bricks . . . crowned with curved stone gables," and set "among the meadows flanking the River Trent, in the middle of England, a hundred miles to the north of London."
Thrumpton started out as "a modest Nottinghamshire manor house built in the time of Shakespeare," but had been enlarged twice. In the 17th century, "a large carved staircase and a grand reception room" were added. "In the 1820s, the House gained a courtyard, a library and a lake."
A "chilly, carpetless room at the top of the House" may not seem the ideal place for a 2-year-old, but, attended by servants with such Dickensian names as Mr. Crush, Miss Death, and Mr. Shotbolt, young George thrived and came to love Thrumpton. "I want to live at Thrumpton and care for the village," he confided to his diary when he was all of 11.
Given that he had no hereditary claim to the place, this was unlikely. But he managed eventually to gain a life tenancy of the property and then borrowed 50,000 pounds to buy it. George Seymour had a way of getting what he wanted, and of tyrannizing all:
The technique by which this in many ways unremarkable man kept two strong-willed women under his control was simple and invisible: he made us feel worthless. Without value, you have no power. No physical force was employed, no threat, except of his displeasure.
He was also given to emotional blackmail, evident in Seymour's account of when she lost respect for him:
The incident was sparked by some private grief of his in which I, a little girl with fine, mouse-brown hair held back by an 'Alice' band, had no share; my memory is only of the shocking spectacle of a grown man crying. He wanted, he said, to kill himself; all reason for wishing to live had gone. Sitting beside him, I looked sideways at his bent head and the tears falling on to his knees. Sobs blocked my throat when he told me that we would all be happy when he was dead.
Unfortunately for George Seymour, his very love of Thrumpton, "his longing for it always to be perfect, always at its best," proved in the end to have "created instead a sense of tormented strain. It was as if the House had become the mirror to his own unquiet spirit."
His final years became a ghastly combination of pathos and farce. He developed - somewhat like Mr. Toad with his motorcars - a passion for motorcycles, began donning sunglasses and leather suits, and courted the friendship of much younger men.
I know what you're thinking. I thought the same, and it is probably true. But the point is that - that's not the point. This memoir ends with a twist that, were this a novel, the writer might well have rejected for its asking a little too much in the way of suspended disbelief.
"The child is father of the man," Wordsworth declared. In George FitzRoy Seymour's case, the child may be said to have preempted the man, who remained spoiled and demanding, ravenous for attention, and absolutely set on having all things his own way. The problem is, his way led nowhere.