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Published to instant acclaim in 1981, it was nominated for the Booker Prize but lost to Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. Her most popular work, Songs of the Glens of Antrim (1901), a collection of slightly fey dialect poems, was much praised by the poet laureate, John Masefield, and set to music by the Irish composers Charles Villiers Stanford and Hamilton Harty. In it she thanked me for publishing Good Behaviour, with the most emphatic declaration of how much it had meant to her – how it had given her a new life.
A narrator in denial; a style purged of description; a plot never spelled out; a love that dares not speak its name. All my life so far I have done everything for the best reasons and the most unselfish motives,” says Aroon soon after. She spends her days immersed in gardening and art, occasionally painting Aroon’s attractive younger brother Hubert.Keane’s novel deliberately blurs the distinction between the child averting her eyes over a misunderstanding, and the adults’ habit of drawing a dignified veil over transgression. Grania, the silly 18-year-old protagonist in Two Days in Aragon (1941), lacks imagination for a future in which her lover will abandon her. She quickly eats the short breads and cake slices before her father's pampering cook cum nurse Rose can come back in time (I bet he fucked her a time or two). The novel is both funny and terrifying precisely because of the suspicion that Aroon knows exactly what is going on and that the only way to survive is to behave as though she doesn’t.
But crumbling codes of conduct cannot hope to save the members of the St Charles family from their own unruly and inadmissible desires. She rented out her house to English friends fleeing socialism; for a time she took a wing of the Keane cousins’ mansion at Cappoquin House, until there was a falling out over money; when she had a windfall from her play Treasure Hunt (1949), she bought a bungalow by the sea, renovated and extended it. Molly’s happy marriage in 1939 to the much younger Robert (“Bobbie”) Keane saved her from the former fate but not the latter. It was fortunate at this juncture that it came to the attention of the legendary editor Diana Athill, who became its fierce champion.Anyone who has endured the feeling that they don’t fit in, the realisation that the behaviour and motivations of others are not always kind, will identify with Aroon. Sometimes the spotlight falls on the abject residues that good behaviour would prefer discreetly to ignore: diarrhoea, for example, and vomit (several times, including its lingering taste and smell).
She had tried one publisher after another – publishers with deeper pockets than Deutsch – and could interest no one in this novel she so loved. She wrote until 1946 when her husband died, and didn’t start again until 1981 when this novel was published and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Hers is an invention of innocence – a perpetual humming at life’s grim party – because knowledge and experience don’t get you anywhere. But they are on the way to Shannon Airport, where they will collect a young American visitor with whom Jane is destined to fall in love. She was an editor for the publisher Andre Deutsch, and she was responsible for approving that the publishing house accept and publish the book…this is at the end of a review of the book written by Athill: “Not long before she died in 1996, when guiding a pen over paper had become difficult, she wrote me a little goodbye letter.
The rest of the book beings us back to Aroons’ birth and then moves forward to when she is in her 30s. Readers of Clair Wills’s essay about Molly Keane and Good Behaviour may be surprised to hear that this extraordinary novel almost didn’t get published ( LRB, 18 March). In the only explicit reference to sex in the novel, Mrs Brock lashes out with a shaky version of the truth. In case we miss the analogy, he even brokers sex on one occasion by offering a thoroughbred horse to the twins.
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