NLR14507

review
Neil Belton
A Country House Childhood
Ronald Fraser is England’s outstanding oral historian. In the 1960s he

pioneered the sensitive recording of the texture of working peoples’
experience of labour, first in the pages of this journal and later in two
Penguin books, Work and Work II. His concern with lived experience
in history found ambitious expression in three books on Spain: In Hiding
(1972), an account of the twilight life of a Republican mayor concealed
from Franco’s police for thirty years; Pueblo: A Mountain Village on the
Costa del Sol (1973), a broadening of his canvas to include the collective
life of an entire village in the post-war period and finally the magnificent
Blood of Spain (1979), nothing less than an oral history of the Spanish
Civil War. That book was not only a great literary document, integrat-
ing the testimonies of hundreds of participants within a masterly
narrative of the war, but also a major contribution to the historiography
of modern Spain. It recast our understanding of the civil war while
transforming the genre of historical writing.
Fraser’s new book, In Search of a Past1, also challenges conventional

categories: an elegant and experimental work suspended astride auto-
biography, history and fiction. It is the narrative of a psychoanalysis of
a writer who wants to write the history of his own childhood. To do
so, he uses the techniques of oral history to reconstruct his past and
that of his parents. Two normally discrepant forms of remembering,
therefore, structure and energize the text. The book is divided into
three sections that move along a chain of pronouns that form chapter
headings and denote alienated relationships of various kinds (‘We’,
‘They’, ‘You’), to the finally reconstituted ‘I’ who has—at least
provisionally—come to terms with the past.
The circumstances of that past are unusual, or unusually frankly

acknowledged for a Marxist traitor to his class: the inter-war world of
rural, or rather ‘county’ Berkshire, of the monotonously sporty hunting
rich. The writer’s first session with his analyst sparks a determination to
rework and order a series of taped interviews with the family’s servants
made ten years before. In this long section the present subject of the
1
Verso, £3.95.
125
narrative addresses the fragmented object-self of the past as a separate
person: ‘through them, I recall you thinking, you might at last find a
way forward’. There are interviews with the nanny who brought him
up, with the gardner, the groom and the housemaids. An extraordinary
network of personal lives begins to emerge, dotted by the tiny struggles
of the oppressed with each other, resonating in a wider political history:
there is a familiar, tense combination of resentment and nostalgic
deference towards the prewar past in many of the servants’ reminis-
cences. The detail of the work they had to do, most of it drudgery,
comes through without bitterness but with full consciousness of
oppression. They couldn’t speak unless they were spoken to; were
banished from the front of the house, like incidental landscape figures,
when friends came to call; like the groom, were sent off to the war after
seven years’ service without a sentimental word or a valedictory fiver.
Rarely has the human cost of the English bourgeoisie’s dream of
country life been so carefully registered and dissected. That the mother
was American and the father Scottish probably gave an extra edge of
insensitivity to their behaviour. The divisions and contradictions among
the servants are fascinating: for the nanny (a German to whom England
was a weird place of horses, sport and Gracie Fields) the writer’s father
treated the servants as human beings, while for the gardener (who had
to put leather shoes on the donkey before he mowed the grass) he
treated people like pigs.
A double relationship of class difference and personal identification is

established: finding ‘yourself’ in the discourse of ‘their’ class oppression.
Although he is in a sense searching for his own identity in the identity
denied to them, what they are recalling is a hidden history that lends
reality to the blanks of his early childhood. Through these non-familial
witnesses (defined by a specifically class relationship) he can begin to
restore the phantasized damage done to the love objects of his past (a
specifically psychic relationship, figured in the text in broadly Kleinian
terms): a kind of personal history from below.
In strictly psychological terms the relationships are even more complex.

His relationship with his parents is marked by coldness, distance and
separation, physical as well as psychic. Both the psychoanalysis and the
history allow him to progress beyond a vision of the mother as split
between indifference on the one hand and magical love, permitting
anything to happen, on the other. Before the war, she represents an
unreachable realm of freedom. Then she recalls him from some unnamed
and grim public school. In the context of rapidly transformed social
relations that alter his relationship with the ‘village’—untouchable
before—he lives in an idyllic union with the mother until displaced by
the airman she leaves his father for. Coming to terms with this
phantasized ideal mother also involves repairing the guilt he feels
towards the father, stiff, conventional, all tenderness socialized out of
him by the rituals of army and hunt. The psychoanalytic exchange is
intercut by memories of another dialogue with a senile old man being
driven toward a nursing home, which gradually reveals itself as the
prelude to the father’s death: a sadness with an oedipal anger burned
into it.
126
If the parental relation is the primary one it is paralleled by and
contrasted with his identification with the servants. The split ego of the
child is jarred into a quadrifocal pattern of allegiance: the gardener Bert
and the nanny at times take on the role of ‘good’ mother and father.
The tension of this family romance carved out of class differences is one
of the most intriguing ironies of the book.
As might be expected from the author of Blood of Spain, the oral history
is brilliantly done, integrating the normally absent subjectivity of the
questioner with great delicacy. The dialogue of the reconstructed
psychoanalysis is handled in a way that allows the language of explicit
interpretation (depressive position, projection and so on) to emerge as
a necessary part of the reconstruction of the fragmented psyche, and
also to engage in a submerged debate with the rival claims of materialist
history. At one point the analyst objects to Fraser’s obsession with
‘someone else’s testimony’, declaring that ‘what happened is less
important than what is felt to have happened’. Later he can accept, still
without believing that there are complementary theories to his own,
that the writer wants to become the ‘historian of his own past’ in the
book that is an issue during the analysis.
In Search of a Past interweaves different modes of narrative, setting

different causalities to work against each other. The deliberately multiple
focus questions the self-present adequacy of both materialist and
psychosexual forms of determination. Class and existential alienation,
the duality of mother and nanny and the cultural dynamics of the
parental split are all actualized, and are inseperable. But although the
figure of the ‘I’ is not fixed and has in this sense no simple hierarchical
causation, it is not a Lacanian subject rollercoasting along the symbolic
order—the mother’s body may be part of the unattainable ‘real’, but the
meanings it generates are constrained, grounded and determinate in the
context of the work as a whole. It is rather difficult to argue, attractive
though it might seem at first sight, that the book is a classically
modernist autobiography: decentred, riven by multiple voices, polyva-
lent. The anxious stress of the text, enacted in the interviews with the
servants, is on the operative weight of historical structures of class.
Creative exploration of the intense space between the political filiation
implied here, and the personal trauma of embodying it, has produced a
work that challenges the fashionable conventions of post-structuralism
and of the older drama of the Bildungsroman—refusing, in particular, the
latter’s classic resolution of the tension betwen ‘autodetermination’ and
‘socialization’2. There is never a moment at which the young Fraser is
pictured as alone; never full of the bumptious anxieties of precocity, like
Sartre’s image of himself in Les Mots.
An equally interesting undercurrent in the text is its subversion of a
prevalent literary-political form of identification with conservative
constructions of the past: rural, big-house nostalgia, where either
youthful fulfillment or romantic disillusion create a lost eden. The fall
from grace becomes the most significant movement of all, displacing
2
See Franco Moretti, Bildungsroman, Milan 1985 for a comprehensive and brilliant account of the
‘novel of development’ in European culture.
127
the personal onto the historical and history into myth. The characterist-
ically melancholic versions of this form, from Brideshead Revisited to
Woodbrook have their counterpart in the mass cultural exploitation of
tragic historicism. Fraser admittedly owns to ‘a deep yearning for what
might have been’ in the ideal summertime of the war, before the twin
certainties of maternal bounty and patriotic classlessness disintegrated.
But the real work of the text is of realistic reparation: making good
broken internal objects in order to totalize the past while recognizing
that they can never be restored. It’s the richness of the resistance to this
process that gives the book its strength.
The book also activates a second kind of integration of the past. If the
first is reparation—the adult recognition of separateness and loss—the
other is recuperation, a ‘fantastic’ over-completion of the lost object
that probably must accompany any attempt to externalize it. The
calmness, the near-formalism of the encounters between Fraser and his
analyst P. must be related to this pre-oedipal completeness of the
recovered past symbolized by the mother. Purists would say that
Fraser’s is not a proper analysis: we are spared the furies of transference
and the full unravelling of his relations with his father. The implication
that the achievement of the text indicates a hereafter, a cure, redirects
our attention to the phantasies that knotted the character into what it
was, but also embodies a distinct form of nostalgia, a recuperative
‘acting-out’. This integrative ego of the finished narrative moves in
parallel, but in a different temporal space, to the reparative process. The
power of re-enactment here is that it gestures, in its transparently
illusory closure, towards a dialogue between forms of intersubjectivity:
neither the banal triumphalism of the successful transference nor the
trim ironies of the inter-class encounter.
In Search of a Past is a new departure in the form of personal writing on

the left. Its confessional element can be traced to the openness about
personal vulnerability made possible by the resurgence of feminist
autobiography; its formal structure owes much to the nouveau roman and
its integration of popular experience would be unthinkable without the
new sophistication of oral history. The personal here occupies the
political, but this is not the recessional of defeat and neo-liberalism. The
rival claims of self and history are held in careful tension. As a social
document of the miseries of a ruling-class upbringing, from which few
of its children are likely to be liberated in the very near future, the book
has few rivals; as autobiography it allows us to speculate about how
subjects are produced. In either case it is a pleasure to read, clearly
written and beautifully constructed.
128

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review

A Country House Childhood

Ronald Fraser is England’s outstanding oral historian. In the 1960s he

Fraser’s new book, In Search of a Past1, also challenges conventional

The circumstances of that past are unusual, or unusually frankly

A double relationship of class difference and personal identification is

In strictly psychological terms the relationships are even more complex.

In Search of a Past interweaves different modes of narrative, setting

In Search of a Past is a new departure in the form of personal writing on

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