Customer Reviews

In My Father's House: Elegy for an Obsessive Love

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Miranda Seymour is the author of a number of highly regarded biographies (Henry James, Mary Shelley) - in this book she turns her attention to the story of her family with a focus on her Father. Her Father's object of affection, is not Seymour (his daughter) but "Thrumpton Hall" - a beautiful country house in Nottinghamshire.

Her Father George Seymour was left in the care of his Aunt at Thrumpton Hall at a very young age - being described by his Mother as being "unfit and weakly" to make the trip to La Paz with the other family members. George Seymour grew up in solitude or in the hands of nanny's - over time, the child fell in love (compulsively) with Thrumpton Hall.

He was not the sportsman's type and acted as a much older member of aristocracy - which made him the subject of ridicule of school mates. Later, as many of his classmates and friends were enlisted in the draft and went off to war, George Seymour, after several attempts to attend boot camp, was dismissed for a condition called "effort syndrome" - the drill sergeant not being impressed with his physique, his attitude and his aversion to team sports - - George was sent home. Despite this profile, once George was locked in on a mission, he was unstoppable - he was charming, relentless, controlling, determined and not easily put off. He eventually was successful in acquiring his love (Thrumpton Hall) but learned that this came at quite a cost.

"My father had hoped for so much from the House. It was his Camelot, his grail, his lost land redeemed, from which all good would flow. But the House couldn't give more than it was. It couldn't confer friendship or success. This was a source of bewilderment, sadness and disappointment...The House was the grail that my Father pursued throughout his life. It came as a shock (to him) that it was an empty cup."

Much of the later part of the story speaks to Miranda Seymour's "pain of being displaced" by her Father with the House, younger boys, his other addictions at the time. P. 238: "I'm clearer on the fact that it was, once more, the pain of displacement that troubled me most. Being ousted, reduced to a lesser place in my father's affections than his friend: this was what hurt, like a bad headache, all the time."

My assessment of the book:

* Hang in there.
The story starts to cook after 100 pages or so. I'm not a avid history reader or fan of British aristocracy (and the related quirkiness) and found the first one hundred pages or so that lay the foundation for her Father's childhood, teen and adult years to be thick, dense and somewhat of a grind. Yet , the story catches hold once Seymour moves in and squarely focuses on her Father's, Mother's and family's life.

* The book is exceptionally well researched but fully engaging.
I was awestruck by how Miranda Seymour is able to pull the history and facts together in a compelling storyline. The book is a mere 270 pages - it can be read in 1 or 2 sittings - yet you have learned so much about the family and the players and the story is so engaging you will feel that you've lived in the household. Amazing effort.

* Seymour has put forth a deeply introspective and moving work with piercing insights into the life of her Father, Mother and herself.
How she's managed to do so (with her research, letters, conversations, etc) and connect the dots is simply a marvel.

* I'm me because of my parents.
Yes, if you believe that many of our adult problems stem from our relationships with our Fathers and Mothers - and the incessant yearning for their love, this is substantive supporting case. Page 186: "The technique by which this in many ways unremarkable man kept two strong-willed women under his control was simple and invisible; he made us feel worthless. Without value, you have no power. No physical force was employed, no threat, except of his displeasure."

* "Mom knows all."
Seymour interjects the opinions of her 80-year Mother - which adds considerable balance, color and nuance to the story. She makes you feel as if you are sitting around the table with Mother and Daughter and they're telling you the family history.

*The book is beautifully written and engaging - pulling you along as you turn the pages. I highly recommend it.

Page 3: "We buried his ashes privately, in the garden of the House to which he gave his heart. The wording on the tablet that marked the spot was borrowed from Christopher Wren's epitaph. Si monumentum requirus, circumspice The pride of it, loosely translated here felt right: If you wish to know me, look around you. Here I am."

I couldn't put this book down - although not the best writing ever, the structure that combines a linear life story with present day discussions between mother and daughter is an interesting device that works well here.

I bought the book based on the NY Times review (in fact, one of the other reviews here reads a lot like that review), expecting insights into life in an English country house in the last century, focused around one person specifically. It starts that way, but by about halfway through, it's much more about George Seymour than his house or even his relationship to his house (in the latter part of his life, the house apparently lessens in importance to him). By the end, I realized it's actually a book about Miranda Seymour, the author, and her as yet unresolved relationship with her father. A few days after finishing the book, I've decided that the book is in fact entirely about Miranda Seymour, and her as yet unresolved issues with herself.

Reviews here and elsewhere have portrayed George Seymour as the villain, an unsympathetic character and a deplorable man. But by the author's own testament, short of a few odd episodes such as the one revolving around wigs, her father tried hard to create a close-knit family and a happy childhood for his two kids - exactly what he did not have growing up, and which in part led to his obsession with the only tangible constant in his life, Thrumpton Hall.

I'm left with questions about the father's relationship with his own father (who barely plays in the story, and even his "beloved" mother eventually dies without fanfare), and in turn his son (a conscious choice by the author in respect of her brother). The father's older siblings are also barely mentioned; and after going to the trouble of printing a full family tree at the start of the book, very few of those relationships are explored. One does get the idea that George Seymour felt lonely and isolated - it's a key theme of the book - but at the same time, his passion for correspondence, social visits and parties is well documented, in stark contrast. Thus, I remain curious about this man's relationships beyond his daughter and wife (the latter being rather distorted through the eyes of the former).

On this point, on a personal level, this is perhaps the most important lesson - that our tendency to become angry with loved ones over their relationships with other people is often misplaced.

In the end, if it's supposed to be a book about Thrumpton Hall, then 2 stars, because I want to know much more. If it's supposed to be about George Seymour, then 4 stars, because I feel I now know him, even if left with several perplexing questions.

If it's about Miranda Seymour, then 5 stars, because I think I know her quite well now - to the point that I've had enough and don't want to know any more at all. But since I think the author set out to tell a different story, I'll put it back down to 3 stars.

This true family story of an English manor house and the spell it weaved on the author's father. George Seymour was not a nice man, husband or father -- abandoned as an child, he fell in love with the house where he was raised and dedicated his life toward it. The author tells an entertaining story of her father's eccentricity but can't conceal the the fact that he was not very likable. The author is likable and tells her tale in crisp and clear prose.

"Thrumpton Hall" is a delightful memoir by author Miranda Seymour. It is a strange but fascinating real story of the romance of George Seymour, the author's father, first with Thrumpton Hall, a grand manor house in which he grew up in Nottinghamshire, England, and, later in life, his second romance with a leather-clad motor cycle rider, a young man named Robbie.

Even though George FitzRoy Seymour was a descendant of the Marquess of Hertford and related to the 10th Duke of Grafton, he had no title; but he craved for one. It is said that if one is poor and strange he is considered a lunatic or mad man, but if one is rich and strange he is considered most assuredly an eccentric. So, George Seymour was considered an eccentric man.

When George's father was posted to La Paz as a diplomat, George was sent to Thrumpton Hall and put in the care of his aunt, his mother's sister, Lady Byron. He was only two years old. Thrumpton Hall belonged to his aunt and uncle, Lord Byron, a descendant of the famous poet. Lord and Lady Byron, who were childless, gave George his own quarters in the manor house, in the attic.

People with extraordinary and strange names such as ShotBolt the butler, who was his best friend, and Percy Crush the footman, who shined his shoes, and Sarah Death the house maid who tended to his needs, create an indelible impression as if you were reading a Gothic novel, and not a memoir that it is.

His uncle gave him life tenancy at Thrumpton Hall, but when his uncle died, the tax bill was so huge that George bought the manor on borrowed money. George married Rosemary Scott-Ellis, a daughter of the 8th Baron Howard de Walden, not for his love for Rosemary, but for his love of her inheritance. Unluckily for him, she never inherited anything, much less a fortune.

In middle age, not finding the happiness he sought from the manor, George, dejected, tried to find solace in the company of young men, and became a biker. Be bought a motorcycle and, dressed in leather pants and jackets, began riding around the countryside, first with Nick, a local shopkeeper's son, and after Nick married a woman and broke George's heart, with Robbie, who became George's second greatest love in life, after Thrumpton Hall, of course.

Written in prose so grand and lyrical, and the story so captivating, that reading "Thrumpton Hall" was a great delight. Miranda Seymour's prose - the Queen's English, that precious thing one rarely finds in modern literature, was music to my ears: "His address provides the clue to George FitzRoy Seymour's most substantial achievement. Deposited with its childless owners as a baby, he fell in love with the House that always seemed to be his natural home. His vocation was announced in one of the first roundhanded essays he wrote as a schoolboy. When he grew up, he wrote, he wished to become the squ'arson of Thrumpton Hall, combining the role of landowner and parson as his uncle, Lord Byron, the poet's descendant, had done before him. He would look after the tenants. He would be kind to his servants, especially when they grew old. He would cherish and protect the home he loved."

Read this witty, charming, sad and humorous book for the sheer joy it gives.

In 1944, twenty-one year old George FitzRoy Seymour ecstatically bought the house of his dreams Thrumpton Hall in Nottinghamshire, England; the home his Foreign Service parents abandoned him in with relatives when he was two. To make the purchase he marries wealthy Rosemary Scott-Ellis. However, the estate and the manor house instead of his wife became his significant other as everything he did from that pivotal point was to keep his house in perfect order. He expected his children to be as perfect as the house and ripped author Miranda Seymour for being a fat teen. He also did not hide his sexual preference for young males.

This is a fascinating memoir that is made even stronger by the author being the daughter of the subject and her key disclaimer that she does not know all the skeletons. George is an intriguing individual who knew the intricate history of his house especially as the first minor to reside there in over three centuries. His childhood abandonment impacts his adulthood at a time in which the aristocracy is in rapid decline following WWII. He obsesses over owning and maintaining THRUMPTON HALL. Readers will appreciate renowned biographer Miranda Seymour's look at growing up with a father who cherished his house as his significant other and loved the edifice seemingly more than he did his family.

Harriet Klausner

I don't usually add reviews to Amazon, but after reading that one person found this book "sophomoric," I had to respond. I don't know which book entitled, "Thrumpton Hall" that particular reviewer is referring to, but it can't be this one.

Ms. Seymour's memoir of her family's stately house is a wonderful story, and she gives it great life. If you like Evelyn Waugh or Nancy Mitford, this book will please you enormously. Books that receive raves on the front page of the Ny Times book review often end up disappointing. This one lives up to the hype.

As someone who still argues occasionally with his own parents (they've both been dead for years), I can well understand Miranda Seymour's need to vent. She does a very good job of it. And she keeps her mum, still alive, on the sidelines as a one-person Greek chorus who doubles as a sparring partner. Whether you like or sympathize with Seymour or find her annoying by the end of "Thrumpton Hall" is irrelevant. Whether or not you feel sorry for her sad, creepy father or find him merely ridiculous is irrelevant as well. You have been taken on a beautifully written tour of a time and place redolent of the 19th Century that still existed in the middle of the 20th. Stay with it. It starts out well and gets better as it goes along. Highly recommended, especially to anyone whose family life wasn't just perfect.

Well, this is a dark memoir indeed. What is abundantly clear from the get-go, stated quite plainly by the author, is that she hated her father George. What is less apparent is why. She paints a picture of a less-than-manly man, who didn't carry the war credentials that were the coin of his era. She depicts him as someone without an aristocratic title, who fancied himself a snob. A sociable man with almost no friends. A family man who ruled his roost a little too tightly. An emotional man given to bouts of maudlin self-pity. Yet as I read the book, I kept thinking, "But he tried, he tried."

George Seymour does not emerge from these pages as a likeable person, but neither does his daughter. Her basic premise is that he fell in love with Thrumpton Hall, the run-down estate of his aunt and uncle, where he lived as a small child--and then spent the rest of his life loving it better than anything or anyone else, particularly after he came into possession of it and made it his own. But even then the manor disappoints. It does not attract to George the status and friendships and admiration that he is hoping for, and a hydraulic plant is built right next door, a looming figure on the landscape. Its need for upkeep taxes his resources. Reaching middle age, his depression brings him to a point of crisis; what is he to do? His iconoclastic answer is to give himself over to fast motorcycles and presumably gay relationships (Miranda hedges on this last point). He enjoys a good two years of buddydom with Nick until he marries, and then another fourteen years with Robbie until he blows his brains out. Along the way, Thrumpton itself is burgled and stripped of some of its treasures and its trusty watchdog drugged and stabbed and then left to die in a terrible way. So George came by his depression honestly. Miranda will tell you that her father died of pancreatic cancer, but personally I think he died of a broken heart. She wrote, "We sat in silence at meals where my father, pushing his plate away, leaned forward, rocking his head in his hands, attempting to shield from sight the tears that never stopped falling . . . `I wish I could overcome this misery,' he wrote to me, but it held him as if in a vice."

The writing in this memoir is superb, witty and evocative and compelling. But the author's craft can not disguise the fact that her writing is perhaps best understood as an exercise in self-therapy, a book meant to exorcise the demons of a woman who felt unloved by her father her entire life. One enlightening feature of Thrumpton Hall is the ongoing dialogue between Miranda and her mother as the book is being written. As she paints one negative scene after another, mom (the other eye witness to the events described), keeps reminding her, "It just wasn't that bad. Why do you have to write like that?" The answer simply must be that the author wants to validate her own dour view of things. Read it for the writing, not for the unhappy story . . .

I really enjoyed this book and would have kept reading if it was twice as long. Just a great portrait of one of the last of a vanishing breed of great country home owners in England. Seymour's writing is crisp and clear, as she skillfully interweaves past to present.

My only comment would be that I never fully understood why the author hated her father. He evidently could be a little difficult - not exactly unusual - but he was hardly a monster. To me, he seems to have made the best out of being a man who no longer fit his times. Regardless, a book well worth reading.

Great horror fiction is full of them: enormous, ancient, drafty houses filled with formidable ancestral portraits and violent memories. But Miranda Seymour, perhaps inadvertently, uncovers a new secret passageway in the age old genre so perfected by authors as divergent as Edgar Allan Poe and Shirley Jackson. In "Thrumpton Hall: A Memoir of Life in My Father's House", she brings the reader, sometimes squirming and often unnerved, to a place that is real, where houses do pulsate with sinister life, and ghosts linger with malicious intent.

From the outset the book's main character is Thrumpton Hall itself, sullen, elegant, filled with the pride of former glories and disdainful of modern life. The house is the seat of the Byron family, descended from the great poet himself, and imbued with much of his tormented, brilliant poetic soul. Family members, eccentric bit players in moldy British aristocratic circles, moved through the manse's halls through the decades of three centuries, absorbing its suffocating, engrossing demands, until the twentieth century dawned, and with it the ruthless attack of a changing economy and shifting social mores.

It's then that the the modern story is joined, and the house launches its all out battle for survival through the soul of George Seymour, a minor leaf on the family tree who finds himself absorbed by Thrumpton Hall when he's effectively abandoned there by his parents as a five year old in the 1930s, to be cared for by a childless uncle and aunt. George moves through his childhood isolated and removed from all reality, attaching himself to the house as other children might to an affectionate nanny, nurturing a devotion to it which over the years becomes consuming, and then obsessive.

Neither the house nor its servant are likeable; both are fussy, selfish and mercurial, insistent that their immediate needs take precedence over those of others. George Seymour's solipsistic indifference to the outside world he disdains colors his whole young life, from his avoidance of military duty in World War II to his cynical choice of a bride whose dowry enables him to keep Thrumpton Hall from outside predators. But it's when his children enter the scene, and the author relates her first hand experiences with him, that the true destructive, compulsive force of the manor comes to life.

In the first part of the book Miranda Seymour's prose, though always elegant, assumes a documentarian tone that would interest a pure genealogical historian more than a reader of memoir. But once her own memories comes alive, her writing opens up like a beautiful Venus fly trap and lures the reader in on a much more visceral level. She relates her removal to a far wing of the house as a young girl in the fifties: "three terrors ruled life on the top floor: ghosts, fire and flood".

Embedded in these fears were the more prosaic ones of abandonment and neglect, and a subsequent life of yearning for the warmth and reassurance of a father's love. Seymour's book is an exploration, a lament, an indictment, and a horror story all woven into one. As George Seymour moves toward senescence and open love affairs with young boys, his daughter reveals her sense of inadequacy and irrelevance in his life, and by extension that of the house itself, with heartbreaking poignancy.

The book will haunt you, rest assured. One can only hope that by writing it Miranda Seymour has brought herself some release. But ghosts, of course, never die.