Dinah Brooke, the Brilliant Forgotten Novelist Who Gave it All Up to Live in an Ashram
As her superb book—inspired by a cricketer who murdered his parents — is reissued, Brooke talks about her extraordinary life
By Claire Allfree
Originally published in The Telegraph
In 1975, Dinah Brooke walked out of her Gloucester Crescent flat with her two young children, travelled to the airport, and got on a plane to India. There, in Pune, she devoted herself to the Indian philosopher Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, also known as “Osho”, and the practice of Divine Meditation. She soon sent the children back to their father, from whom she’d already separated, but remained there herself, in an ashram, for six years.
When she returned to Britain in 1981, Osho having moved on to America, she was unrepentant about what she’d done. She still is. “I heard the call of the master,” Brooke, now 88, tells me. “Osho spoke to me like no one else had done before. A parent has a responsibility to their own life. Anyway, I have a good relationship with [the children] now.”
Brooke has lived a startling life. She took herself to France aged 16 to learn Greek, hung out with the counterculture in 1960s Greenwich Village in New York, and in the early 1970s briefly established a commune in Camden Town, north London. Before she went to India, she wrote four astonishing novels, completing them at her kitchen table, children at her feet, a bottle of Teacher’s whisky by her side.
One of them, Lord Jim at Home, a ferocious comedy of middle-class dysfunction, was published to controversy in 1973. It was inspired by the case of Miles Giffard, a young cricketer executed in 1952 for murdering his parents. Rich in grotesquerie, including several comically repulsive sex scenes, it has the unhinged realism of a fairground mirror. “A monstrous parody of the way nice well-brought-up people think and behave,” claimed the Times Literary Supplement. But The Sunday Telegraph called it “evocative and excellently terse”, and praised Brooke’s “cold and beady eye”. The novel is being reissued by Daunt Books today.
At home in north London, Brooke is giddy with girlish excitement that, after 50 years of literary obscurity, she’s back in print. She had never, she says, intended Lord Jim to be shocking. “I was just fascinated by the upbringing of murderers,” she tells me. “Miles Giffard’s nanny would lock him for hours at a time in the cupboard. His father had insisted he went to Rugby, but it was clear he wasn’t cut out for it. He was apparently a completely cut-off child – he didn’t connect properly with people.” She remembers meeting similarly emotionally stunted men at Oxford University, where she studied English Literature in the late 1950s. “There’s something about the English, particularly the upper classes, that produces this horribly painful way to live.”
Dinah Brooke pictured next to her mother's, Christina Brooke's, paintings. Photo by: Rii Schroer
Brooke spent a lot of her childhood escaping her own pain. Her father was a steelmaker; her mother, a gifted painter, had tuberculosis, and spent years in and out of sanatoriums. During the Second World War, her father became an RAF instructor, and the family moved from airstrip to airstrip, staying in “awful little boarding houses”. Her parents split up after the war, and Brooke, who remained with her mother, ended up at Cheltenham Ladies’ College where, she says with contempt, she was taught “how to talk about politics at dinner”. She remembers, in the main, feeling horribly lonely. She barely saw her father, who became an alcoholic, for the next 20 years.
In 1954, she escaped “dreary England” to spend a year in France, working as an au pair on the Left Bank, studying Classics and dreaming (in vain) of meeting Cocteau. On her return, she got into Oxford, and then spent a couple of years working in film. She moved to Greenwich Village, living above The Five Spot Café where Charlie Parker would play; she hung out with artists and writers and, by her own admission, took a lot of drugs, including one memorable acid-trip in a field. By this point, she was in a relationship with the American actor Frank Dux, but she also had a pivotal affair with the writer Terry Southern, who in 1964 helped her publish her first story, The Letter, a coolly ironic portrait of unrequited obsession, in The New Yorker.
Cricketer and murderer Miles Giffard, whose story inspired Brooke. Photo by: Murderpedia
Brooke was forced to return home in 1966 to look after her father, who’d just been released from “a lunatic asylum”. She and Dux, by now married parents of twins, moved to a flat in Gloucester Crescent (in Primrose Hill), at the time the centre of the London literary demi-monde: Jonathan Miller and Alan Bennett were neighbours, and every morning Brooke would pass Margaret Fairchild, “the lady in the van”. In the succeeding years, she fell in with the feminist movement, separated from Dux and set up the commune – “but we weren’t very good at sharing the cooking, so it didn’t really work”.
Prompted by a bout of intense therapy, she also began to write in earnest. But, she says, “I never talked about the wounds of my childhood during my therapy sessions. Instead, it all came out in the writing.” Much of this pushed against convention. Her first novel, Love Life of a Cheltenham Lady (1971), was semi-autobiographical.
“My agent said to me he’d never seen anyone write about sex like that.” Her third, The Miserable Child and Her Father in the Desert (1974), was about her father. Her fourth and final, Games of Love and War (1976), was a hallucinatory work full of a daughter’s queasy longings for her father; she wanted to call it The Woman Who Almost Succeeded in Killing Herself. “But no one would publish it under that title.”
Author Dinah Brooke Credit: Rii Schroer
Lord Jim at Home, however, her second, is her magnum opus. In a new introduction, the American novelist Ottessa Moshfegh – herself no stranger to the transgressive and dark – writes admiringly of Brooke’s “surreal” and “dangerous” writing, and describes the curiously transfiguring effect of Brooke’s writing: “I grew new nerves, as if [the novel] had altered my anatomy and sense of time.”
It’s a sentiment echoed by Lucy Scholes, senior editor at McNally Editions (and frequent Telegraph contributor). Scholes was the one who “rediscovered” Brooke two years ago, after coming across a furiously candid essay the novelist had written about her father in a 1983 Virago collection, Fathers: Reflections by Daughters. “I had a very visceral reaction to it,” Scholes says. “So I tracked down second-hand copies of her novels.” (Having acquired the world rights from Brooke for McNally, she sold them on, in the UK, to Daunt.)
Brooke says she never had any sense of the literary culture around her. “I would have loved to have been best friends with authors, but I didn’t have anything in common with anyone. I was always aware of not having ‘a background’. I never fitted in.”
And after she joined the Indian ashram, she never wrote fiction again. “My life there replaced in me the need to write.” She once told Osho that he had stolen her creativity. “His response was to hit me, really hard. The effect was to release my attachment to writing. This is what an Enlightenment Master is for.” I tell her that, to me, the story sounds tragic. “Not to me. To me it felt wonderful.”
On her return to England, Brooke trained as a colourpuncture therapist, and to this day continues to work on independent film projects. She shows the spark and energy of someone half her age. She has no regrets – except one: “I do wish my novels had been a bit more successful.” I tell her that Lord Jim is a masterpiece, and that there is still every chance of that.