Sunday book pick: ‘Great Granny Webster’ is a handbook on how to remember someone who refuses to die

“I suddenly saw Great Granny Webster as awesome. She had outlived so many. She had managed to be both the start of a line and the end of a line. In my family she seemed to be Alpha and Omega.”

Caroline Blackwood’s 1977 novel, Great Granny Webster, shortlisted for the same year’s Man Booker Prize, was famously denied the winner status by the jury chair, poet and novelist Philip Larkin, for being an “autobiography and not fiction”. He so strongly held his opinion that he threatened to jump out the window should the rest of the jury disregard him.

Whatever the reason for Larkin’s caprice, the Man Booker Prize-losing Great Granny Webster is as fascinating as its author herself.

Born into fabulous wealth, Blackwood was the eldest of her four siblings and belonged to the British aristocracy. She had an unhappy childhood and after being presented as a debutante in London high society, would go on to have three high-profile marriages with painter Lucian Freud, composer Israel Citkowitz, and finally, poet Robert Lowell, much to her family’s disapproval. Much of her fiction reckoned with her aristocratic status and the “gothic excesses of material” as noted by writer Honor Moore, who introduces the NYRB Classics edition of the book.

An oppressive closeness

The novel is divided into four parts – each a vignette and recollection of the formidable Great Granny Webster. The unnamed narrator first meets Great Granny Webster when she’s 14. Prescribed sea air for recuperation, she spends two months in the grand old lady’s company in the seaside town of Hove, England. Unlike the gay Brighton, Hove is reserved for the genteel class and is much quieter than its twin seaside town. Older than time itself, the narrator finds herself transported to the austere war years when everything had to be rationed. Great Granny Webster is miserly with provisions, preferring plain margarine to butter and a drop of saccharine to sugar. Her wealth has not been depleted despite the war, and yet, she sees frugality as virtue. A Scottish aristocrat by birth, she disdains England, yet it is her “passion” for pointless suffering that holds her back despite having no real ties to the land.

In this section, an adolescent’s observant eye recounts the oppressive closeness of Great Granny Webster’s life. Every furnishing is in a shade of black, the windows are never opened, and the old woman sits with her spine straight against a tall, hardback chair. The old woman obstinately keeps away from her young great-granddaughter while the child, begins to hate her instead of merely being afraid of her.

The reader too comes to loath Great Granny Webster, such is the extent of her unfeeling and stoicism. It is hard to crack what is beneath her hard shell – and the text too, in no way, offers any explanation as to why she is the way she is. Like solid boulders that just are, impenetrable and ageless, so is Great Granny Webster.

Aunt Lavinia – the deceased sister of the narrator’s father – arrives in the second section. She’s been married three times, and has hordes of lovers who enter and exit her life in a seemingly uniform design. Aunt Lavinia impresses upon her niece that she’s taken care of by these men, who feel responsible for her extravagant lifestyle. The perception of her glamorous lifestyle is shattered when she’s discovered in the tub after an attempt to suicide. Put away at a psychiatric hospital, Aunt Lavinia endures sexual abuse there. In her conversations with the narrator, Aunt Lavinia derides Great Granny Webster so much that the narrator is surprised to feel a pang of pity for the absent matriarch. But even in her excesses, Aunt Lavinia is cut off from the outside world, suffering from a delicate mental state – not very different from her grandmother whom she hates.

An outsider’s view

Great Granny Webster’s third recollection is of Thomas Redcliffe, a friend of the narrator’s father and a biographer by profession. The narrator approaches him to know more about her own father and his apparent affection for Great Granny Webster. Thomas remembers his visits to Dunmartin Hall, a derelict mansion inhabited by Great Granny Webster’s daughter and her aristocratic but poverty-struck husband. Never having received any love from Great Granny Webster, her daughter exhibits rapid mental detirioration when she moves into Dunmartin Hall after marriage. Through varying stages of insanity, her daughter comes to believe she belongs to the fairy folk and resolutely rejects her children, thinking of them changelings left behind by evil witches. The insanity and instability makes Dunmartin Hall unfit for a happy childhood and Thomas believed that his friend, who was killed in Burma in the war, preferred his Great Granny Webster’s company – she had no surprises in store.

The final section, set 15 years after the narrator’s visit, relates the immediate events following Great Granny Webster’s death. Survived by her ancient maid Richards and her daughter (now permanently committed to a mental hospital), the old woman’s tyrannical control is felt from the afterworld as Richards frantically arranges a funeral as per her mistress’ liking. The narrator, who at this point, has determinedly moved on from solving the mysteries surrounding Great Granny Webster, ends up as the chief – and only – mourner at the funeral.

Great Granny Webster who presides over a severely emotionally distressed family, either by choice or chance, sets off an avalanche of death and destruction by withholding affection. Through vignettes and faded memory, the narrator tries to piece together Great Granny Webster, who even after surviving two world wars, is unproductively occupied with conserving the old order. Her wealth and status, which is still of incredible value, are in danger of becoming relics of colonial brutality. Blackwood’s employment of tropes from Gothic, Victorian, and post-war literature in her condensed little novel works wonderfully – it is the only way to tell the story of someone as ancient as Great Granny Webster, who has floated through the ages like a timeless spirit.

What is remarkable in Blackwood’s prose is its emotional fluidity – with every new narrative, the reader rethinks their feelings about Great Granny Webster, at once fearing, hating, pitying, until finally, understanding her.

Great Granny Webster, Caroline Blackwood, NYRB Classics.