Laski, Audrey Louise 1931-2003

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LASKI, Audrey Louise 1931-2003

PERSONAL:

Born March 12, 1931, in London, England; died of lung cancer January 18, 2003; married John Gaster Laski (a mathematician and teacher). Education: King's College, London, M.A.; Newnham College, Cambridge, M.Litt.

CAREER:

Author and educator. Sheffield High School for Girls, assistant teacher, 1959-61; Carlyle School, Chelsea, England, head of English department, 1961-64; Peckham School, deputy head; Central School of Speech and Drama, lecturer in literature.

WRITINGS:

Venus in Transit, McGraw-Hill (New York, NY), 1964. A Very Kind Undertaking, Heinemann (London, England), 1965.

Seven Other Years, Heinemann (London, England), 1967.

The Keeper, W. W. Norton (New York, NY), 1968. The Dominant Fifth, W. W. Norton (New York, NY), 1969.

Night Music, Hutchinson (London, England), 1974.

Contributor of articles and reviews to periodicals, including Guardian, Times Educational Supplement, Teacher, and Book Trusted, and to the Continuum Encyclopedia of British Literature, 2003.

SIDELIGHTS:

Author Audrey Louise Laski was a much-admired English educator and novelist whose work reflected the culture of the 1950s and 1960s. She was also an expert on, and advocate for, quality literature for children.

Laski most often wrote about cultural and class differences. This theme is reflected in both her first novel, Venus in Transit, and her second, A Very Kind Undertaking, in which an upper-class couple mentors a young, working-class woman who wishes to be a hairdresser. In Seven Other Years, a Hungarian refugee struggles with responses to him from others in the Cambridge University community.

The Keeper is the story of Colin Gregory, an Englishman who takes control of a religious group by defeating in combat their Keeper—the leader who had ruled them with fanaticism and repression. These people are the descendants of a band of seventeenth-century Puritans who were shipwrecked on the coast of Wales and who lived through the centuries unchanged by passing time. A Choice reviewer noted that when Colin, a twentieth-century liberal, attempts to replace their old values with his own, he discovers that "he can offer them little more than the clichés of a now bankrupt liberalism based on his belief in cultural pluralism."

Laski's final two novels are her most-praised. In The Dominant Fifth when Stewart Gillis, the viola player in the Burney Quartet, is stricken with leukemia, he chooses his successor. Stewart and the other members are all Jewish, although only one observes, and the introduction of the Gentile Roger Dudley into the musical group causes the other three members to reflect on their lives and friendships. Laski also explored how Stewart's impending death affects his own family.

"Rarely has there been such a perceptive description of a contemporary Jewish dilemma, or of the way the tightness of old closed societies can be reenacted in the togetherness of an apparently free and open circle," according to a Times Literary Supplement reviewer. David Williams noted in Punch that Laski wrote of the approach of Stewart's death and the tensions created with Roger's arrival "with great intelligence and sympathy." A Kirkus Reviews contributor felt that Laski handled the difficult moments "with a shrewd sensitivity which never forfeits sympathy for all concerned."

Laski's final novel, Night Music, features protagonist Ivor Hillman, first violin with a well-known string quartet and a self-described "closet queen" who lives with his domineering mother. In a moment of conciliation, Ivor, who loves his mother but finds himself unable to free himself from her, asks her to accompany him on a trip through Europe. They set out, along with her companion, in his Lancia, with Ivor promising his mother that they will not travel through Germany, with its reminders of the persecution and execution of the Jewish people.

Ivor does find it necessary to cross the country, however, and their vehicle breaks down in Munich. Ivor enjoys meals that include pork and sees the sights, and Mrs. Hillman is surprised to also find the stop pleasant. But with this unsettling discovery, she decides not to continue the trip and returns home by train and boat, leaving Ivor on his own. After a time, the middle-aged man picks up a sullen, freakish American hippie, who convinces him to "turn on" with LSD.

Tony Henderson wrote in Books & Bookmen that "the result is the simultaneous release of all his suppressed guilts and fears through a three-dimensional nightmare of blood and torture, depicted in horrific and relentless close-up—a phantasmagoria of horror and filth like one of Bosch's visions of Hell." As Ivor hallucinates, he perceives himself to be an Aztec priest sacrificing victims and also burning heretics during the Inquisition. He also finds himself in the skin of Herod, as he orders the killings of baby boys.

He finally comes down from his high and returns home, but some of his visions remain with him. Worse, he is so distraught by his experience and disgusted with himself that he is unable to play his instrument.

Henderson questioned whether Laski uses the hippie and LSD incident to condemn the alternative world and the use of drugs, or if "some kind of Dionysiac redemption through the experience of horror and pain is being held up as a path of salvation." New Statesmen's Peter Straub commented that Night Music is a novel he would like to show "as an example of what a superbly accomplished and sensitive writer can do with the traditional matter of fiction."

Although Laski had never smoked, she died of lung cancer at the age of seventy-one. She bequeathed her body to medical science and her corneas to a recipient to be selected. London Guardian contributor Valerie Grosvenor Myer wrote that "she made telling use of interior monologue and apt literary allusion. In literature as in life, she carried her learning lightly.… She was loved by her friends for her warmth, her clever but never pretentious or unkind conversation, her sense of humor, and the interest she took in life and people."