The adventure of a lifetime

Novelists reshape events, biographers perform selective autopsies. The great quality of Anne Chisholm's biography of fiction writer Rumer Godden is that she knows how to make surgery read like a lifetime's adventure. Godden, who has herself published two volumes of memoirs, is worthy of such attention.

She is the author of 70 titles. Several of her novels have been successfully adapted to film: Black Narcissus, A Fugue in Time (as Enchantment, 1948), The Greengage Summer. Her children's novel, The Diddakoi, won the 1972 Whitbread Award. She has written at least four books of lasting merit. She inspired Jean Renoir to make a masterpiece of film-adaptation with her 1946 novella, The River (1952). Chisholm's account of the on-set collaboration between the staid Englishwoman and the exuberant Frenchman is a luminous delight.

Margaret Rumer Godden was born on December 10th, 1907, in Eastbourne. She is now 91 and lives in a rambling house in Dumfriesshire, in the west of Scotland. A garden room links her home to that of her daughter Jane and her family. The real owners of both dwellings are hordes of houseproud Pekingese. She is formidable to meet, genial over a gin, marvellous company when relaxed.

In 1934 she married the charming but weak Laurence Foster. For a short time she became Peggy Foster. They had two daughters. Chisholm, unlike her subject, refuses to be judgmental. "Nothing is harder to recapture than the good parts of a failed marriage," is her only comment on the following two decades.

These were eventful years on both personal and literary levels for Godden. As Peggy evaporates, Rumer advances. A significant incident occurs in a remote cottage in Kashmir in 1944. India had entered the war. Did a disgruntled servant, Indian nationalist, attempt to drug her children and then kill all three of them by putting ground glass in their food? Godden believes so. She, children and the family of Pekingese fled towards England. Summonses were issued for her. No one was charged in India.

In 1994 Chisholm and a BBC documentary crew visited the area. They met either denial or silence. The "difficult" daughter Paula has refused to be interviewed or comment. The event becomes a fiction related with rare passion in the novel, Kingfishers Catch Fire (1953).

Godden's first novel, Chinese Puzzle, was published in 1935. Taking its title from an Indian perfume, Black Narcissus (1939) was her first international bestseller. Her most remarkable early novel is A Fugue in Time (1945), set in a wartime England she could not have known. It was retitled Take Three Tenses in the US.

Her conversion to Catholicism in 1957 led to a friendship with the enclosed Benedictine nuns of Stanbrook Abbey. This in turn informed her finest later novel, In This House of Brede (1969). Angus Wilson, Booker chairman in 1969, felt it should have been a "certain winner". Godden has over the years served on the Arts Council and Book Society. In 1959 she recommended Muriel Spark's Memento Mori as Book of the Year. In 1993 Godden was given an OBE. In the same year's Honours List Spark became a Dame.

Coinciding with this biography is the paperback edition of Godden's most recent novel, Cromartie v The God Shiva (1997). It is an ideal introduction to this writer. Set in contemporary India, it unravels at a slow, sultry pace into a picaresque thriller. In setting and tone it complements Godden's most recent bestseller, Coromandel Sea Change (1991). Chisholm's book is subtitled "A Storyteller's Life". The tale is not quite finished yet; the words "to be continued" loom large.

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