SOURCE: Hamilton, Ian. “Bohemian Rhapsodist.” Guardian (10 July 1999): 6.

[In the following essay, Hamilton traces Mackay's life and literary development.]

Shena Mackay has never been one for trendy self-promotion. Like Lyris, the neglected painter in her most recent novel, The Artist's Widow, Mackay would—on balance—rather be overlooked than vulgarly exposed. “A publicist's nightmare” is how her own publicists have now and then described her, and Mackay takes a certain pride in their exasperation.

Even today, with 10 highly-praised books in print (two, The Artist's Widow, and Dunedin, are out in Vintage paperback this month), and with a paean from Julie Burchill to amplify her blurbs (Burchill recently called her “the best writer in the world today”), Mackay cannot quite bring herself to bustle on the circuits.

As she told me recently: “I do think the whole climate for writers these days is so vulgar. It's all so money-led. I hate going into book shops and seeing, you know, the Top Ten Bestsellers, a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. I just find the whole thing so vulgar: the books pages, and the way writers are portrayed—snippets in diaries about so-and-so's advance. It all just creates a climate of anxiety for the majority of writers and gets them into the feeling that it's all a competition”.

A publicist's nightmare, to be sure, and yet Mackay, when she first started out, seemed quite the opposite. When I first heard of her, in the early 60s, she was being touted as the youngest and prettiest girl-novelist in town. She was featured in style sections of the tabloids, along with figures like Marianne Faithful, and seemed to be heading for a starring role in the about-to-happen youthquake. She had written her first novel when she was 16, we were told, and by 20 had clocked up quite a few foam-flecked reviews: “Macabre, zany, scoffingly droll, sadly beautiful, wildly funny, glitteringly stylish—and quite brilliant … She stands on her own—an original and a very hot property”. And that was just the Daily Mail.

As for the prettiness—this too was the stuff of dazed hyperbole. A poet friend of mine, who can't be named, remembers meeting Mackay at a mid-60s literary festival: “A vision of blonde, schoolgirl loveliness”, he says, “but sexy and flirtatious too. You should have seen those corduroyed belletrists swoon whenever she timidly sashayed into the hotel bar. They all wanted to, well, protect her, advise her, and so on—and in spite of the deadpan wit with which she kept them all at bay, she did somehow seem to need protecting. Let's just say that she was the kind of novelist who didn't really need to write another novel.”

Mackay did write other novels, though, and in many of them the lustful male is skewered with brutal finesse. Her early novels in particular are full of bristly predators, and we are spared none of the repulsive details: the starings and the gropings, the bad breath, the drunken bullshit, the love-talk that turns nasty when our heroine sees through it, and so on.

I asked Mackay the other day if she had ever invented an admirable male character. The question seemed to take her by surprise, and in the end she came up with Stanley in A Bowl of Cherries: a wan and ineffectual bedsit loser. “And what's so terrific about Stanley?” “Well, he's nice to children”, she replied.

Shena Mackay (nee Mackey) was born in Edinburgh in 1944, on D-Day. Her father was in the army; her mother was training to be a teacher. They had met as students at St Andrews University. He was the son of a headmaster; she the daughter of a Presbyterian minister, and according to Mackay the marriage was a “genuine love-match”. After the war, the family moved to England, at first to Hampstead (where, for a time, they lived next door to the Saatchis; little Charles, says Mackay, would now and then come crawling through their hedge) and later, via various London locations, to the village of Shoreham in Kent.

Benjamin Mackey, Shena's father, had problems “settling down” after the war, not least because he seems to have been the victim of a somewhat volatile Scottish temper. He took a succession of short-term jobs, ranging from coal-miner to ship's purser. There were frequent parental absences: not all of these unwelcome to Shena and her two sisters. Nor, maybe, to their mother.

Mrs Mackey was steadfast, intrepid and self-sacrificing. During the family's eight years in Shoreham, the years of Shena's growing up, it was the mother who kept everything together. Although of an arty disposition, counting as friends many poets and painters of the day, she was also a rigorously conscientious coper. According to Valerie Foster, a childhood friend, the Mackey girls were always “stylishly turned out”, although the family was invariably short of cash.

Certainly it was from her mother that Mackay picked up several habits and interests that would stay with her later on: her vegetarianism, her interest in modern painting, her passion for wild flowers. “My mother made us learn the names of all the flowers in Kent”, she says, and there is no book of hers, I think, that does not contain at least one flourish of botanical expertise. Mackay's mother also encouraged her to read. “Shena was always, always reading”, says her sister Frances, and Foster remembers her friend poring over Sherlock Holmes and Billy Bunter.

Mackay herself recalls her mother scolding her, along the lines of “A big girl of eight and you haven't read Crime and Punishment!” But the scolding is remembered with intense affection: “I adored my mother”, Mackay says today, “I got all sorts of values from her. She was a trouper, if you like, and lots of fun. But she had very high standards. We were brought up with quite liberal values but with a Presbyterian moral codes as well”.

Mrs Mackey made sure that her daughters attended the village church and that they went to Sunday school. Mackay sang in the church choir, and although Foster recalls a few moments of Sunday irreverence, Mackay always remembered the words of all the hymns, and has worked quite a few of them into her books.

These childhood years left a deep imprint, to be sure, and Foster remembers them as an “enchanted” time. Mackay, she recalls, was always the mischievous tomboy, forever embarking on escapades and getting into scrapes. “She was always more daring than I was. She liked danger and even then she had a macabre sense of humour.” At Tonbridge Grammar School, the two girls were co-conspirators—mocking the teachers, playing truant and so on—but Mackay (brilliant at English, bad at maths) always came out top of the detentions league. And she had begun writing poems and short stories: dark, horrid stuff, apparently, with lots of gratuitously sudden deaths (which also feature fairly often in her adult work). Even in these early, schoolgirl years, Valerie Foster was in no doubt that her naughty little friend would one day be “a very well-known writer”.

Mackay's Shoreham childhood features repeatedly in her grown-up writings and is still looked back on with a sense of loss. In some ways, all of her novels and short stories, whatever their actual settings, can seem like attempts to reclaim the sharply circumscribed intensities of village life. She is celebrated now as “the tenth muse of suburbia”, “the supreme lyricist of daily grot”, but her beady-eyed dissections of the London suburb always seem guided by what one might call a villager's sensibility.

She is always on the lookout for oddballs and eccentrics, for tiny gaffes and small-scale self-delusions, and even when she is at her most caustically satirical there is usually an elegiac undertone. She has a wonderfully good ear for bus-stop dialogue (“for reasons best known to themselves”; “it's the children I feel sorry for”) and she always wants to know what's going on behind the counter at the corner shop.

Unglamorous community endeavours—flower shows, amateur dramatics, church socials, and the like—always bring out the mordant best in her writing. She has on the whole been happier with close-ups than long-shots. At the same time, the village schoolgirl was, from early on, enticed by the idea of the metropolis. She had observed her mother's arty visitors and friends—the poet W S Graham and the painter Glyn Collins seem to have been regulars—and she nurtured adolescent fantasies of the artistic London life.

In 1960, she edged a step closer to metropolitan Bohemia. Her parents moved to Blackheath in south east London, and the children were switched from Tonbridge Grammar to Kidbrooke comprehensive, which Mackay hated from the start.

Kidbrooke does seem to have transformed her from a mischievous rural tomboy into a trainee urban-disaffiliate. She began to put on beatnik airs, failed most of her O levels, listened to Radio Luxemburg and got herself an art-student boyfriend, with whom she enjoyed exciting weekend trysts in Soho. On schooldays, she and a friend would sometimes bunk off to the big city, encountering predators everywhere.

By this stage, she was reading Catcher in the Rye and On the Road, classic truant texts, and there were few pop songs that she hadn't learned by heart. Mackay spent one restless year at Kidbrooke before announcing, at 16, that she wanted to leave school. She won a £25 prize in a Daily Mirror poetry competition—“Windscattered little bones of birds / Lie on this fallow field”—and began to see herself as thoroughly committed to the writing life.

She applied for jobs in London and eventually landed a quite good one which, as things transpired, would change her life. “Girl Wanted for Antiques Shop. Easy Hours. Good Wages.” The antique shop was in London's Chancery Lane and it was one of a pair owned by the parents of the art critic David Sylvester. One of the two shops sold antiques (jewellery, porcelain, etc) and the other specialised in silver. Mackay's job was in the silver shop, which was managed by the soon-to-be famous playwright Frank Marcus (his hit play, The Killing of Sister George, is not at all, says Mackay, based on her).

Marcus, now dead, was married to the Sylvesters' daughter, Jackie. In no time at all, it appears, Mackay had the Sylvester household at her feet. Marcus helped her to get moving as a writer, by introducing her to publishers and agents, and David Sylvester began to escort her to art galleries and Soho drinking clubs. Mackay became a Colony Room regular (even the notoriously misanthropic Muriel, the Colony's grande dame, seem to have quite liked her), and with a shuddering heart found herself getting introduced to legendary art-world figures like Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach and Francis Bacon: “Francis could be vicious but he never was to me”.

And nor was anybody else, so it would seem. Before long there was scarcely a big-name painter in England with whom Mackay was not on friendly terms: “David took me to galleries, openings, parties, painters' houses and studios and introduced me to the greatest British and American artists of the day, and to the Australians Sidney Nolan and Brett Whiteley. We visited Henry Moore at Much Hadham and had tea and whisky in bone china cups with David Hockney in Powis Square. I had the great privilege of meeting Giacometti not long before he died. He was gracious and kind, his noble lined face weary beneath his grizzled hair.”

All this was a far cry from Blackheath, where her parents' marriage had gone into terminal decline. Worse still, Mackay's mother had become seriously ill, with rheumatoid arthritis. With both parents out of action, so to speak, the anxious Mackay (who might otherwise have been pressed to sign up at some university or college) was free to immerse herself in the Marcus/Sylvester world of publishers and painters. She took a flat-share in Earls Court and for a period drank deeply at the well of urban dereliction.

In Earls Court in the early 1960s she has said low life ran parallel to, and sometimes encroached on, backpackers' paradise; corruption coexisted with the conventions. And this, for Mackay was the perfect mix: Bohemia meets Presbyteria. Her Earls Court experience coincided with the publication of her first work of fiction—two novellas, published in one volume by Andre Deutsch in 1964—and she soon had enough money (just about) to enable her to give up her full-time job at the antique shop.

Music Upstairs (1965) her second book, was a witty and candidly bisexual romp around the sleaze-spots of Earls Court, and Old Crow, two years later, was a murky and staccato rendering of rustic angst: surreal lyricism combined with a high body-count is how she now describes. it. In these early books Mackay's gift for the killing simile and the surprising, spot-on image was splendidly in evidence. The plotting was half-hearted and oblique and some of the characters were caricatures, but line by line the writing had a studied and altogether individual brilliance.

Quite clearly, hers was an authentic talent. At the age of 22, she was a presence to be reckoned with. “People often remark,” she says “that it must have been exciting to be published so young, and it was, but it was also terrifying. I was both blase and shy, and I was entering an entirely new world, with holes in my shoes, and, as often as not, a dog in tow.”

In the early 1960s she recalls, all books by young persons were treated in the papers as dispatches from frontline Swinging London. She was regularly interrogated on matters youthful by magazines and TV shows. Her opinion, she says was sought on everything from the Beatles to reasons why a pretty girl should waste her time on writing novels. And she was certainly not getting rich. In spite of a small subsidy from Andre Deutsch, she still had to look for part time jobs: “I was a model for classes taught by gruff, white-bearded Chelsea artists, and a shop assistant for a morning at Chic of Hampstead—I fled at lunchtime because I could not fold cashmere sweaters—and I worked at a greetings card warehouse where we had the perfect line-up for a sitcom along the lines of Are You Being Served?”

In 1964, Mackay got married, to a boyfriend she had left behind in Blackheath. Robin Brown was an engineering student and not in the least literary, indeed, those kind of people, made him nervous. “But I married him for love, and we had many happy times together.”

Three daughters followed, and one further novel, The Advent Calendar, published in 1971. Then came what critics have described as Mackay's doldrum years, from 1971 until 1983, the year of her next publication. Doldrum they may have been for admirers of her work, but for the author herself these were the years of young motherhood and marriage, and pretty busy years at that. “Maybe I was exhausted,” she suggests, “I didn't have much time. I was running a big house. My mother was unwell. We took in lodgers. And there were three children to bring up.”

As a mother, Mackay is extolled by her friends as wonderfully conscientious. “She always made sure they had their name tags sewed on,” was just one of many accolades. In 1972 she and Robin moved the family from East Finchley to Brockham, a village in Surrey where Mackay perhaps hoped to give her daughters a taste of her own enchanted childhood, and thence to Reigate, scene of several of her subsequent suburban tales.

During the 1970s, though, her marriage began to falter. David Sylvester had reappeared (indeed, he is the father of her youngest daughter, Cecily Brown, now a highly thought of artist who recently sold a painting to the Tate Gallery). Why didn't she go off with Sylvester? “When it came to the point neither of us could do it. I couldn't do it to my children and he couldn't do it to his. We would probably have driven each other mad very quickly.”

During the so-called “doldrum years” Mackay continued writing—several of her most incisive and merciless short stories belong to this period—but found it hard to get to grips with anything large-scale. One novel, The Firefly Motel, was completed, then abandoned, although some of it was salvaged for A Bowl of Cherries, her next full length work, which was submitted to Jonathan Cape, with whom she had a contract.

Cape turned it down. Approaching her forties, Mackay found herself without a publisher, a dispiriting situation, considering her early triumphs, and all the more galling, maybe, because with this new book she had made a conscious effort to move beyond the disjointed lyricism of her first three novels. She wanted, she says, more narrative straightforwardness, more explanation.

It was around this time that she met Brigid Brophy, then a highly prominent figure on the literary scene. Over the ensuing years, Brophy would become one of Mackay's closest friends. In 1982, her help was crucial. She read A Bowl of Cherries in manuscript, liked it a lot (she had already admiringly reviewed some of Mackay's early work) and passed it on to Iris Murdoch who in turn recommended it to a small publisher, the Harvester Press.

Harvester published the book in 1984, to excellent reviews. Shena Mackay's barren years—“barren, indeed” she says—were over. In 1984, she turned 40, her children were getting ready to leave home, she was finally divorced (in 1982), and she was enjoying a second wave of recognition. Her life had become simpler in some ways but, as she points out, it was not quite a bowl of cherries. She had to support herself with part-time work at Reigate Library, her mother was still seriously ill and needed much attention (she would die in 1993) and Brigid Brophy was also in poor health (she died in 1995), and there were other turbulences too, some of them to do with drink.

On this topic, Mackay is undeniably reluctant to hold forth, but she does admit to having suffered from a “genetic predisposition to use drink as an anaesthetic against anxiety and depression. To deny it would be to deny the wonderful people who have helped me … I wouldn't be the artist I am if I didn't know about the dark side of life and the dark night of the soul.”

Nowadays, Mackay doesn't touch a drop, but it has not been easy. It obviously pains Shena Mackay to talk about such matters, just as it pains her to be quizzed about her sometimes close relationships with other women. She loathes the word “bisexual” and visibly winces when the subject is touched on. “If you love someone”, she says, “it doesn't matter what sex they are. I go along with Keats in being certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart's affections and the truth of the imagination.” And it would be a vulgar inquisitor, indeed, who could insist on pressing for more details.

For a shy person, Diet Coke is not a great loosener of tongues. For her, though, the correct place for eloquence is on the page, and over the last decade she has been eloquent indeed. Since 1984, there have been four novels and three volumes of short stories. There has also been some progress in the marketplace, her 1996 novel: The Orchard on Fire, was short-listed for the Booker Prize and paperback sales are heading for six figures.

Mackay despises book-hype but on the other hand she has no wish to be marked down as merely “quirky” or “stylishly off-beat”. Her mother used to warn her, in jest: “Please don't end up like Jean Rhys”—by which she meant “neglected and admired”. Perhaps Mackay's fictions are still more likely to be valued for their brilliant detail than for their narrative excitements. When I asked a few of her admirers to nominate the features of her writing that they most admired, nearly all of them remembered similes, plane trees in the sunshine looking like giraffes, the flames of a gas fire like lupins, a collapsed umbrella like an injured fruitbat, and so on. Or they mentioned her sly, semi-private jokes.

For myself, I always chuckle when I recall one of her characters attempting to quote Yeats: “The falcon cannot bear the falconer”, he says. “That's not a misprint, is it?” I once asked her: “What do you think?” she replied. (The “bear” in case you don't know, should be “hear”).

It is not common for compulsively “visual” writers to be good at telling stories; they are always dawdling so that they can take a closer look. But with recent novels like Dunedin and The Orchard on Fire, Mackay does seem to have been trying for a new structural surefootedness. And she is nicer to her characters these days, although, it must be said, she's still not very nice to them. As one of her admirers pointed out to me the other day: “Mackay simply does not know that she is being cruel to people in her books. She says that she means them to be sympathetic”. And this does seem to be the case. When I put it to Mackay that the pervert Greenidge in The Orchard on Fire is a triumph in sheer loathsomeness, she looked seriously troubled. Apparently we are meant to feel sorry for this child-seducing wretch.

But then feeling sorry for people—and feeling sorry for flowers, animals, insects and sometimes the whole planet—seems to be ingrained in Mackay's nature. “I can't see a distressed pigeon in the street without wanting to look after it”, she says. “And if I come across a snail on a pavement, I have to move it to a safer place, where it won't be trodden on.” Does all this make her better than the rest of us? “Oh no, not at all. I wish I didn't feel like this. It's sometimes a real nuisance, an affliction.”

A new Mackay novel will be finished by the end of the year, she tells me, but that's all she wants to tell. Her life now is industrious and calm. She has a circle of devoted and protective friends, not all of them literary, and she has what she calls “a huge extended family”, including two grandchildren, on whom she evidently dotes. She sits on committees (she is a Booker Prize judge this year), supports environmental causes, is indignant about Nato and her favourite politician is Tony Benn.

“You can say that I live quietly in south London with my cats,” she says. But what about the old days? Has the Bohemian been altogether vanquished by the Presbyterian? She smiles what I take to be an enigmatic smile. “There's a wonderful play by Rodney Ackland”, she says. “It's called The Pink Room [later renamed Absolute Hell] and it's set in a club rather like the old Colony Room. The production I saw a few years ago ended with Judi Dench, who played the club owner, alone on the stage. The club is closing down. It has to, for some reason. And Judi Dench's last despairing cry is: ‘Where are the pink lights? For God's sake let's have the pink lights on!’ There's still part of me that wants the pink lights, the vie en rose, the artifice, the tawdry glamour. Outside is the cruel daylight and all that. But most of me doesn't want that. Most of me wants to live in the country, really.”