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 Melvyn Bragg’s new book presents a fictional account of his ex-wife’s suicide |
Camden books | Remember Me by Melvyn Bragg| review | TV and radio broadcaster
Melvyn Bragg’s latest book sees the TV and radio broadcaster fictionally
revisiting the darkest period of his life, writes Gerald Isaaman
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HE’S a great talker.
On radio you hear his persistent questions and curiosity coming across on a variety of fascinating programmes. On television he displays his empathy for the demons that have disgraced other lives and tempts the victims to reveal themselves in the South Bank Show.
And in the House of Lords he brilliantly pleads the case for the arts, as a fervent Labour peer who has himself risen from a poor publican’s son in Cumbria to become an Oxford graduate, BBC trainee and now, at 68, is acknowledged – and rewarded – as a distinguished broadcaster, film-maker and award-winning author.
How do you toss all that aside when you want to criticise his latest poignant novel, born out of the hurt and anguish of his first wife’s suicide? How do you say: you should have kept your torment and guilt secret and not paraded it on the public stage?
How do you convince yourself after reading all 47 chapters that this bravura attempt of turning truth into fiction is not only misguided but that it fails in the very agony of remorse it attempts to evoke?
Yet Melvyn Bragg has worked on drafts of his personal saga of the calamity of his marriage to, and separation from, Lisa Roche, an artistically talented aristocratic French girl, for decades because it is in many ways his true Hampstead novel.
The dust jacket shows the sun setting over London, from the seat on Parliament Hill they shared, Hampstead being the place where he lived then – and still does – after Lisa went off to kill herself in Kew leaving their daughter, Maria-Elsa, then aged six, in the house, while he made love to the woman who was to become his second wife.
He says now that his reason for stripping his emotions bare is because he wants his daughter, ordained last year as an Anglican priest, to know the truth (in fiction?) and would not have published Remember Me… without her consent.
And he insists that the event, told as the story of Natasha and Joe by way of explanations of every detail to his beloved daughter, is not, repeat not, some cathartic exercise to replace the stresses of the analyst’s couch he suffered to try to save Lisa’s life.
“The idea of something like this being therapy is absolute rubbish,” he declares. “It just makes things worse. It’s stirred up stuff, so that I’ve thought again and again, ‘Why didn’t you just leave it alone?’”
It’s a valid question, the more so when his statement is made in a single newspaper interview – all other requests rejected – exposing the suicide sickness that has haunted him since his wife’s death in a barricaded bedroom in 1961.
Why do that when the book itself makes no connection between the sorrowful story it tells and Bragg himself, the only reference being its dedication “In Memoriam L.R”? The tragic link is left, sadly, to be exposed in newspaper headlines he has feared for years would reveal so graphically his living misery and grief, which he now offers up for free in promotional confession.
“It was a rupture because one’s whole life spiralled out of control,” he says of the suicide. “And there was such pain. And the death of Lisa just never stops.”
Yet Lisa had a history of depression and suicidal tendencies. So why does he present himself now, almost 40 years later, as a tortured, vulnerable man overflowing with insecurity, whose panic attacks include being sucked over the edge of a Tube platform on to the track, a man who hides behind the mask of questioning others about their darkest thoughts?
It surely can’t be simply to sell the book, itself a strange, sometimes dream-like account that lacks momentum as it pours out its ponderous purpose with poor editing and, at times, poor writing. And amid the shame he claims has poisoned his life, he dares to suggest Lisa’s suicide was a last desperate gift from her to free the man she loved, to marry another.
Taking sentences out of context may be unfair, but have you ever heard conversation where someone says: “The eroticism of pre-puberty is understandably under-researched”? Or statements such as: “Yet he came to think he had exaggerated the gift of sex. The truth was that he loved her in ways he did not know then nor would he ever fully know what this ‘love’ was”?
Much of Bragg’s writing – he is, after all, a history graduate – is sensitively autobiographical, as with other novelists, but it is only the great ones who have been able to transform their experience into something beyond the clouds of confession into works of memorable art that touch us all.
In this case it would have been logical and coherent to write his memoirs rather than romance a life dazed by his own dilemmas through fiction, which the majority of readers are totally unaware are the sad facts of Bragg’s apparently own joyless, tormented life.
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