Most memoirs are not really very memorable – like most lives. We live, we do what little we must do, and then we die and are soon forgotten. Even if we achieve great things, or think great thoughts, or are somehow great people, there is no guarantee that our accounting of our great deeds and thoughts will in any way be remarkable. There are of course memoirs that do astonish and exceed our expectations of mere self-accounting: in recent years, Helen Macdonald’s H Is for Hawk; Patti Smith’s various autobiographical writings; Lorna Sage’s Bad Blood; and Gillian Rose’s Love’s Work. Alison Light’s A Radical Romance now joins this select bunch of books about the self that are not simply self-regarding but truly self-exploratory.
A Radical Romance is first and foremost a book about Light’s married life with the great Marxist historian Raphael Samuel, who founded the History Workshop movement and died of cancer in 1996. Light describes the book as, in part, “a homage, a tribute to a man whom I knew to be a good and rare human being; in part a love story and a death story, and a story about a marriage and its vicissitudes”. But it is much more than even this broad summary suggests: it is also a history of a place, or a series of places, a history of a house, a history of a period, and indeed of a way of thinking. It’s an investigation of the relationship between classes, and religions, and the public and private: it is nothing less than a grand projet, written in the form of a grief work.
Light is a historian and literary critic who writes for a general audience in a refreshingly non-academic style and tone, without ever pandering or talking down. She is perhaps best known for her books about “common people”, including an investigation of her own family history with that title, and Mrs Woolf and the Servants, about the people who worked for Virginia Woolf and the rest of the Bloomsbury circle. This new book, however, is about uncommon people.
Samuel grew up a part of a brilliant Jewish family, totally committed to a life of study. Light, 20 years younger, born into a working-class family in Portsmouth, worked her way into university and through the BBC, into journalism and academia. She was drawn into Samuel’s world of endless intellectual activity, introducing him in turn to the simple pleasures of TV and package holidays. Her memories of their romance and marriage are pieced together with all the care of an insider and the sly wit of an incomer into another world. “Had I ever perhaps been to the home-improvement mega-stores like B&Q or MFI? (I had.) Did they sell plastic cornices and ceiling roses, dado rails or maybe fake wrought iron? (They did.) Could we meet to talk about it? (We could.)”
Light has already done a lot of what she calls “widowing about” – editing volumes of Samuel’s essays, establishing an archive – but in this book she’s clearly doing something else. She certainly shares the anguish of her loss and mourning, but she also uses her account of her complex relationship with Samuel as a kind of lens through which to view their personal histories and their wider family lives. It offers an insight into radical London and Brighton in the 1980s and 90s, and the gentrification of Spitalfields, where she and Samuel lived. We also learn about the history of East End Jewry and what it might mean to live one’s personal life in the public sphere, as part of a radical project and enterprise.
Throughout, she is modest without being solicitous, and wise without offering easy nostrums. She takes nothing at face value, including her own ideas and memories, and proceeds via a combination of fond recall, robust querying, anecdote and aperçus. She is merciless without being cruel. “I experienced something of what the daughter or son of a famous man might feel – being at once a protege and a shadow. I felt, as never before, incompetent”; “The Jewishness I fell in love with was in part a fabrication, though one that Raphael was happy to embroider with me.”
Books, of course, amount to more than quotes, but almost every page here has something quotable. “Having any kind of new thought is much harder than one thinks. It may be that we only get to know our old thoughts better, whether we accept or reject them.”
The greatest memoirs give us something more than scenes from a life – they offer all the complex shades and colours that we expect in fiction. A Radical Romance is more than just some summing-up: it is a work of art.
• A Radical Romance by Alison Light is published by Penguin (£20). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p on all online orders over £15.
