Jacqueline Wheldon - Writer

Writer

Wheldon had begun to contribute articles on television to such journals as Truth and Context, but she had already begun to think about and make notes on a novel that, following the birth of two further children, was to grow by 1964 to well over 400,000 words. Eventually reduced to a mere 220,000 Mrs Bratbe’s August Picnic was published in 1965. It earned plaudits from, among others, Richard Church in Country Life ("the most astonishing first novel I have ever read") and Anthony Burgess in The Listener, who called Mrs Bratbe “as outrageous a prodigy as we have had this side of the war”. Mrs Bratbe’s August Picnic is a retelling of the Oedipus story, with the sexes reversed. Alexandra, daughter of the outrageous media magnate Hytha O. Bratbe, is brought up in France, falls in love (unknowingly) with her father, causes the death of her monstrous mother and blinds herself in remorse. The writing was considered (in the TLS) to owe much to the "shadow" of Iris Murdoch and the "ghosts" of Aldous Huxley and Virginia Woolf. Wheldon in fact looked more to the ‘great tradition’ for her masters and in particular to Henry James and D. H. Lawrence.

Before Mrs Bratbe’s August Picnic had been published Wheldon was at work on a new novel, Daughters of the Flood. It was never published. A conservative estimate of two million words made it quite unpublishable as a single work (for comparison: Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu – a work Wheldon revered - is around a million words). Wheldon would never consent to the piecemeal publication that her publishers urged on her, and eventually, as she wrote to Dan Jacobson, the book “shattered” in her hands.

Set nominally in London and Korea in the years of the Korean War, it is, it has been said, "about everything", though to Norman Podhoretz she said it was "about running". Wheldon (and her mother) had both been much better than average sprinters in their youths. The remark was unhelpful to Podhoretz but her son Wynn has interpreted it as meaning simply "about living to your very utmost limit". Wheldon ceased writing the book on the death of her mother in 1980, and never went back to it. She wrote that she was never more alive than when she was writing.

Wheldon suffered all her life from partial deafness (she was completely deaf in one ear and half deaf in the other, the result of a botched middle-ear operation in her youth). This made her unhappy in large groups as she could not hear or share in conversation. She also suffered from what is now called bi-polar disorder and was then called manic depression.