16 - A Certain Detachment?

Summary

[Y]esterday reached a new low, when I had to cancel going out in the evening as Mama declared, hysterically, that it was ‘inconvenient’: she hadn't finished her Mozart piece for The Sunday Times.

Brigid Brophy, the person I knew as ‘Mama’, was a figure of some prominence in the middle portion of the twentieth century. And yet she remains, broadly speaking, obscure. After my mother's death in 1995, my father, Michael Levey, would on occasion lament the lack of renewed interest in Brigid's novels. Now in my daughterly turn, although I am not in the literary sphere, I note that Brophy has eluded the type of revival enjoyed by some of her contemporaries. This, the first volume to focus solely on her, therefore forms a most welcome marker. Tribute is due the small bunch of acolytes who have sought by their sterling proselytising to rectify Brophy-blindness. And while I hope exploration of Brophy's reputational neglect does not develop into a branch of study in its own right, I am glad that the causes of her exclusion, thus far, from the strong beam of the spotlight of retrospection have also been examined.

A multitude of factors may militate against Brophy: antipathy towards intelligent, strong-minded women might be still be potent; certainly, sophistication is viewed with suspicion. It's true that her oeuvre is of a formidable scope. And there is the sheer laziness factor: Brophy is not an easy read, nor can she be safely be summed up in a pithy phrase – she demands more concentration than that. In a culture so fixated on artists who ended their lives by suicide, I have wondered whether that last chunk of Brigid Brophy's life, the twelve or so sequestered years when she was crippled by multiple sclerosis, when she faded from view, has skewed later perceptions of her adversely. I don't really discern it, nor can I imagine why it should be the case. But I note that, whether people have been delicate or dilatory, they have not asked me about my mother's last years. I aim to offer here a snapshot of that period about which outsiders know so little.