Writing Home

Polly Devlin

Pimpernel Press, £10.99

IN Writing Home, a collection of her essays, Polly Devlin flaunts her famous friends as if they were Tiffany diamonds. A long-time chronicler of the Beautiful People in the great cities of the world, she spent the 1960s hanging out with, among others, Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Mick Jagger, Andy Warhol and Jean Shrimpton.

Drawn to opulence and glamour, she worked for Diana Vreeland at American Vogue, wandered the alleyways of Venice with Peggy Guggenheim and once had Princess Margaret round for dinner (they didn't hit it off, but HRH got stuck into the washing up).

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Yet only sporadically does her writing on these glitzy A-listers yield any profound insights. She doesn't tell us anything about Dylan (the interview she wrote was never used) and many others serve chiefly as trophies of her rise from the backwaters of Northern Ireland to the heart of the Youthquake.

One of seven children born into a Catholic family in Ardboe, County Tyrone, Devlin won a writing competition at the age of 20 for which the prize was a job at Vogue in London. An interview with the playwright John Osborne caught the attention of Vreeland, who brought her to New York. Later, she married old Etonian Andy Garnett, and went on to write for the Times and The Observer.

Devlin's flair for capturing people's physical idiosyncrasies is ostentatious. Shrimpton "looks as though she sleeps in cathedral pews and sucks artichoke hearts for sustenance"; Guggenheim walks "like a dancer, toes turned out, elegant, careless, in vividly-coloured mules".

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In the book's two stand-out essays – one on author Jean Rhys and one on Vreeland – she paints nuanced portraits of difficult women. She says Rhys "recoiled from the devotion of her fans and set about finding out what happened when easy sympathy was punched in the guts by her sharp little fists" and concludes "[Rhys] had the most fluid of personalities; she trickled it away when you tried to grasp it, like scooping moonlight off water."

Vreeland she portrays as a captivating but amoral monster. Her description of her eyes twinkling "like tiny light bulbs flashing, taking an infinite series of shots, and editing down into what she wanted to see" is one of many razor-sharp observations

And yet, beyond these essays, Writing Home frustrates. There is a superficiality; a failure, by Devlin, to challenge her own beliefs, and a lack of curiosity about the world beyond her own.

Some of the flaws she identifies in Rhys and Vreeland, could be applied to herself. She recognises that, for Vreeland, who revered Coco Chanel, despite her anti-Semitism, "virtue was not necessarily something to be admired, and style was,” but Devlin too can seem dazzled by wealth and status.

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She quotes Rhys as saying she was "too lazy for [writing]", yet confesses to having hated every minute of being an interviewer. In a recent interview with the Irish Independent, she goes on: "You have to prod me with a cattle prod to make me write. I've never written without being asked. And prodded. I find writing very easy. I just hate it."

Unfortunately, this reluctance is apparent in her work, which is too often evasive. This never truer than when she is writing about herself. Though she alludes to personal pain, she shies away from exploring it.

The defining event of her life, she has said, was the sexual abuse she suffered as a child. Too young to remember it, she didn't find out until she was diagnosed with an STD she could only have contracted through penetration. She does say that she has never come to terms with it; that all her life she has been restless. But – as is her wont when the going gets tough – she quickly turns to other voices, in this case WH Auden and Seamus Heaney, leaving the hard labour to them.

In What Makes A Marriage Last? she hints at having fallen in love with someone else, but all she is willing to say about the repercussions is that her husband "stood fast". A writer should not, of course, be forced to offer up their soul; but if you choose to reflect on the institution of marriage, while featuring your own, it seems strange not to interrogate how you survived its biggest crisis.

It is not, then, that Writing Home is uninteresting or that Devlin's writing lacks panache. Rather, the frustration lies in the fact that the author reveals just enough of herself to suggest there is much more we will never know.