With a Unique Voice, Witty Memoir Conveys the Spirit of an Era

BAD BLOOD

A Memoir

By Lorna Sage

William Morrow

288 pages, $24.95

An influential literary critic, professor at the University of East Anglia and biographer of novelist Angela Carter, Lorna Sage had an active career cut short by an untimely demise. The 57-year-old Sage died of emphysema and related infections in January 2001. But she did live long enough to complete the book that won her the 2000 Whitbread Biography Award: “Bad Blood,” a scintillating memoir of three generations.

Few otherwise lamentable situations are richer in comic potential than a truly rotten marriage--to outsiders, anyway, if not to the participants.

The first section of the book stars Sage’s maternal grandparents, an Anglican vicar and his wife, who had ceased talking to each other before their granddaughter was born. So fierce had been their fights that their daughter (Lorna’s mother) lost her front teeth trying to break up one of their battles, while the vicar bore a scar left by his wife and her trusty carving knife.

Born during World War II, little Lorna started life in an odd household. Her father was away fighting the war, her shy, hard-working mother was kept busy around the house, while her grandmother withdrew to her room in a permanent fit of pique, refusing to do housework, socialize with parishioners or perform any of the functions usually associated with the role of a vicar’s wife. She hated her husband, her marriage and the tiny rural village where he’d been sent to serve as vicar: “She’d shake a trembling fist at the people going past the vicarage to church each Sunday, although they probably couldn’t see her from behind the bars and dirty glass.” Lorna became her grandfather’s shadow, following him around the house, church and village, especially the pubs where he pursued one of his favorite occupations: drinking.

Relegated by his superiors to a poor, remote, backward country parish in northern Wales, this highly literate, histrionic man had a flair for dramatic pulpit oratory, a passion for amateur theatricals and a history of womanizing. He seemed to extract a bitter, ironic pleasure from his own misery. His wife referred to him as “The Old Devil,” but to little Lorna, he was something else entirely. “Back then,” she recalls, “I thought that was what a vicar was: someone bony and eloquent and smelly (tobacco, candle grease, sour claret), who talked into space. His disappointments were just part of the act for me, along with his dog-collar and cassock. I was like a baby goose imprinted by the first mother-figure it sees--he was my black marker.”

Sage’s accounts of her later discovery of her grandfather’s diaries--and of her grandmother’s success in blackmailing him--make for truly enthralling, downright hilarious reading. Equally brilliant is her acidulous portrait of her grandmother, “soft and slightly powdery to the touch, as though she’d been dusted all over with icing sugar like a sponge cake ... she insisted that she couldn’t chew or digest gristly, fibrous meals with meat and vegetables, but must live on thin bread and butter with the crusts cut off....”

If her grandparents’ marriage might have furnished the material for a Strindberg play, Sage’s parents could have posed for a poster of marital harmony. Moving out of the chaotic vicarage into sparkling new public housing after the war, they strove to embody the postwar ideal of the happy, functional, nuclear family: her father, the responsible family man and up-and-coming entrepreneur; her mother, the loyal, loving wife.

Young Lorna’s take on her parents’ “normalcy” was wryly subversive: “For a husband and wife to get on together, gang up with each other, seemed strange and unfair.” The adolescent Lorna must have been a difficult customer: obstinate, self-willed, hard to reach. (She claims that for years she was actually unable to tell time.) As befits a future literary critic, she had an insatiable appetite for all kinds of books. Afflicted with insomnia, she would stay up all night reading and much preferred imaginary worlds to the one in which she lived. At the same time, she was entranced with the emerging teenage pop culture, desperately seeking Elvis-like traits in the boys she met. Her first romance, so to speak, is quite an unusual one that might well be used to make a case for mandatory sex education courses.

Written with shrewd insight and enormous verve, Sage’s evocative, enthralling, often hilarious, memoir accomplishes the two goals of its particular genre, summoning up the general spirit of a time and place while conveying a keen sense of individual uniqueness.