Kathleen Sully was 58 when Horizontal Image was published. Liddy Creemer, her protagonist, is perhaps ten years younger. Her husband Tim is a good man: faithful, a good provider. Her daughter Olive is married to the also faithful Jeff. Together, they are visiting the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey when Liddy looks into a mirror set horizontal to the ground and sees “a visage of eighty years old.” It shocks her so much she reels, thinking, “My life has gone: I’m old — nearly dead.”
I’m not sure the phrase “mid-life crisis” was being used in 1968, but I’m pretty confident it wasn’t being applied to women. Reading Horizontal Image, I was often struck by how Kathleen Sully’s perspectives on the situation of women was far ahead of its time. Here, for example, is a short discussion between Liddy and her daughter:
“It’s my opinion that a woman can’t be a good mother and a career girl at the same time.”
“That’s right, Olive: you are beginning to see the problem. Husbands ought to share in the beginning and –”
“If any father ever took his responsibilities seriously, it’s Tim. He still does.”
“He takes the pleasure of his children — I’m talking about dirty diapers, feeding, cooking, cleaning, nursing and minding in those first years. A father should share the work and so allow the mother to continue to earn so that she may always be independent financially. And so that she can enjoy the children, too.”
“He takes the pleasure of his children” — that’s a fine (meaning, well-put) distinction. As a stereotypical housewife of her time, Liddy recognizes the steep economic uphill climb she faces if she wants to be independent: no skills worthy of easy employment; housekeeping and cooking skills sufficient to please a husband but not to work in either capacity professionally; no access to money without her husband’s permission. When she does decide to leave home and trying living on her own, Liddy has no other option but to pawn her jewelry, none of which is of any great worth.
Once on her own, when Liddy decides to explore the possibility of relationships with men other than Tim, she soon realizes that they all come with drawbacks of some type. One seeks sex but really wants a housekeeper; another is a fine companion in the day but an utter loss at night. Considering that Horizontal Image hinges on a woman’s negative self-image, it’s men who are seen in the worst light. Sully often offers up corrective asides to set the reader straight: John Downe was boyish in the manner meant when grown men are called boyish. Real boys are not at all like boyish men: they tend to be mischievous with a cruel streak, their energy is directed nowhere or anywhere, their innocence is a surface quality masking a furtive probing towards adult feelings.”
Liddy ends up in Sicily, where she manages to scrape out a way of surviving, but not before putting out a call for cash to avoid being put out on the street. She sends it in parallel to the three men — including her husband Tim — she thinks may still be prepared to help. The response is surprising and leads to a hectic and comic ending. But the reality of being female in a world run by men is never far, as an encounter on the steps of a Sicilian church reminds her:
She sat there, grey and old, dressed in dusty black — black cotton dress, black shoes and stockings, black shawl — all as old as herself and as worn. Her grey hair was drawn harshly back from her wrinkled brow and her nobbled, veined hands hung loosely over her skinny knees.
Liddy had been preparing to enter the church. The woman’s eyes caught hers and held them: not so much because they begged but by the surprise, amazement and envy in them. Liddy wore a simple pale cream dress, sleeveless, with a cream cardigan slung loosely over her shoulders.
The woman summed it all up in one simple gesture: with her left hand she indicated her own wretched attire — her own self — then moved the hand towards Liddy’s immaculate outfit and well-fed person. They looked into each other’s eyes — Liddy’s cool English ones and her near-black anguished ones. They were sisters: it was neither fair nor equal.
Horizontal Image is no Golden Notebook, but it certainly is proof that feminism was, by the late 1960s, penetrating deeply into the sensibility of English women — including that of a 58 year-old housewife and mother of three well into her second decade as a novelist.