1910s

Free Air by Sinclair Lewis

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When we look for what we’re about to read next, there are probably a few things going on in our minds. I try not to plan too far ahead, because I find that putting books on an immediate to-read list rather kills my excitement – I love leaving the decision to the spur of the moment, to what appeals most to grab. And the other day I really wanted something mid-century American. I think it came after reading May Sinclair’s journals and wanting to recapture something of that, but in a more urban setting. I turned to Sinclair Lewis.

Now, first of all I took Babbitt off the shelf. I read a few paragraphs and… didn’t feel inspired. It wasn’t quite the tone I was after. The font was too small (for such things do matter, sometimes). I decided to take down the only other Sinclair Lewis book I own – 1919’s Free Air. Not mid-century, unless the definition is stretched very loosely, but perhaps it would suit a mood.

And, reader, it certainly did.

Free Air is a road trip novel, I suppose, from the early days of such things existing. Claire Boltwood is an upper-class young woman who decides to motor from New York to Seattle, accompanied by her father. Even today that would be quite the undertaking, but in the late 1910s with a car that struggled to get up hills and routinely broke down, it was an astonishing adventure. Not far into the journey she encounters Milt Daggett – a mechanic who owns a garage, and who saves the day in the first of her many roadside calamities. Smitten, he decides to follow her across the country – accompanied not by a father, but by a cat called Vere de Vere.

Early on in the trip, Claire realises that he is following them – and politely but firmly suggests that they can have no further acquaintance. He accepts, but continues to follow with an eye on her safety. There are definitely some dynamics that are a bit problematic in Free Air – his kind determination could certainly be read as stalking – but there are other elements of the novel that prevent it feeling uncomfortable. One is that Claire is far wealthier and more socially confident than Milt. The other is that she certainly isn’t a damsel in distress. While she does often need the help of a mechanic or a second pair of hands to get out of a danger, you also feel that she can handle herself well and isn’t easily deterred. (Her father, on the other hand, is a rather passive, useless man. As such, he is perhaps the character I felt the greatest affinity with.)

The plot of Free Air could easily be a romantic adventure novel. Essentially, it is a road trip constantly interrupted by mishaps – from mechanical issues to death threats. What stops it being like a dimestore thriller are two things – one is the interesting and engaging characters, and the other is the writing. As I understand it, Free Air isn’t quite like Lewis’s better known books – but there is still an elegant, beautiful turn of phrase even to such adventurey topics as driving speed:

If Milt had been driving at the rate at which he usually made his skipjack career over the roads about Schoenstrom, he would by now have been through Dakota, into Montana. But he was deliberately holding down the speed. When he had been tempted by a smooth stretch to go too breathlessly, he halted, teased Vere de Vere, climbed out and, sitting on a hilltop, his hands about his knees, drenched his soul with the vision of amber distances.

‘Drench his soul with the vision of amber distances’ is just the right side of overwritten, in my mind – the sweet spot where it is just beautiful. And the book is somehow filled with writing in that tone, while still feeling pacey. It has all the good bits of an adventure novel with none of the things that would put me off them. And it’s funny! Here’s a bit I enjoyed, just as relatable today as it was more than a century ago:

So for two hours Claire and her father experienced that most distressing of motor experiences – waiting, while the afternoon that would have been so good for driving went by them. Every fifteen minutes they came in from sitting on a dry-goods box in front of the garage, and never did the repair appear to be any farther along. The boy seemed to be giving all his time to getting the wrong wrench, and scolding the older man for having hidden the right one.

I don’t know anything about cars today, but the world of 1919 cars was a total eye-opener. It does mean that some sentences don’t make much sense to me – ‘So the cylinders filled with surplus oil, the spark-plugs were fouled, and the engine had the power of a sewing-machine’ – but I enjoyed being thrown into this world. And grateful to drive in an era of mobile phones, where assistance is more or less locatable.

So, what stops this generous, good-hearted young man and impetuous, good-humoured young woman from instantly setting off on a new life together? One word: class. While class is the bedrock of the British novel of more or less any era, it is perhaps less at the forefront of American literature. Wealth is often a theme, of course, but I’ve seen less about class – and how people from different spheres of life could be considered incompatible, even if they were to enter the same financial bracket.

Will I hate him when I see him with nice people? Can I introduce him to the Gilsons? Oh, I was mad; so wrought up by that idiotic chase with Dlorus, and sure I was a romantic heroine and – And I’m simply an indecisive girl in a realistic muddle!

So Claire thinks to herself in the latter section of Free Air, where they have reached their destination and have to decide whether they should be friends – or more, or less. And it’s not just one-sided. Milt is equally unsure that he can reach up to her echelon of society, though determined to try. This section of the novel is more grounded, and I found the discussions of class and compatibility really good – we have grown to love both characters by then, and I felt very invested in their decision in a way that I didn’t when they were first introduced.

It is odd to have such a realistic conundrum in a novel which is suffused with unreality, but Free Air is continually a novel where expectations of genre are challenged and discarded. I really enjoyed and appreciated it, and shall return to Babbitt with more eager enthusiasm at a future date.

A Bachelor’s Comedy by J.E. Buckrose

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After I enjoyed J.E. Buckrose’s novel The Privet Hedge, my friends Kirsty and Paul bought me a few other of her novels. She’s one of those writers who could so easily be a Persephone or a Virago, but has yet to be rediscovered. I’m hoping to keep reading and find one that could be good enough for the British Library Women Writers series – or, rather, which fits all the criteria. Because I think A Bachelor’s Comedy (1912) is really good, but the protagonist is a man so it doesn’t fit the Women Writers series.

Here’s how it opens…

This was no comedy to those most concerned, of course, for comedy is like happiness – directly a person knows he is in it, he is out of it. Tragedy, on the other hand, can only touch those who do not take themselves seriously enough.

No man, however, could take himself more seriously than did the Reverend Andrew Deane as he travelled down alone in a third-class railway carriage to his new living of Gaythorpe-on-the-Marsh.

You might need to dispense with some of the stereotypes that come into your mind straight away. Reverend Andrew is not some white-haired, kindly old man – he is fresh from theological training, in his 20s, and quite unsure how to take up his position leading a rural parish. At the same time, he has a certain bullishness. He doesn’t want to show weakness to this new flock, and is keen to get their respect as soon as possible. No more being called ‘Andy’ by people who can’t see him as a proper, responsible grown up.

One of the first things he wants to do is fire the gardener, on the advice of the churchwarden who gives him a lift from the railway station.

“Those Petches are none of ’em models. They don’t seem to know when they’re speaking the truth and when they aren’t. And young Sam drinks a bit too. No, I can’t really advise you to keep him on.”

“I shall certainly not do so after what you tell me,” said the new Vicar, sitting very erect. “I have the strongest feelings about the households of the clergy – they should be above reproach.”

Of course, these fine resolves don’t hold up when Reverend Andrew is faced with the Petches themselves. Sam Petch is one of my favourite characters in the novel. The churchwarden’s assessment is accurate, and Petch doesn’t think twice about lying if it will get him out of trouble – is that alcohol on his breath, or is it that his coat has been cleaned with spirits? – but is affable and generous in his turn. He is prepared to respect and help Reverend Andrew where he can, and his deceit and laziness don’t seem to factor into his own interpretation of the equation. Reverend Andrew tries to get Sam Petch to give up alcohol by making a pact to give up his favourite thing in return – butter. This has the effect of spreading rumours around the village that the new vicar is eccentric… and Sam doesn’t really think beer counts as alcohol, so doesn’t have much effect on the gardener.

Reverend Andrew often finds that his ideals aren’t born out by the real life of a parish priest. There are some funny moments – such as his bidding for an ornately ugly sideboard that his housekeeper has to sell, intending to give it as a present. It won’t fit in her new, smaller home, so he reluctantly ends up having to have it in ‘safe keeping’ for her. Buckrose is very good at finding the genuine emotion of silly moments like this. In a Wodehouse novel, it would be a sprightly knockabout moment. In A Bachelor’s Comedy, it is certainly amusing, but we also feel the pathos of the situation – and the awkward frustration that a good deed has not gone quite to plan.

At the auction, Reverend Andrew was almost outbid for the sideboard by a young woman – who later turns out to be a local called Miss Elizabeth Atterton. It is instantly obvious that they will fall in love… and, of course, the course of true love never did run smooth. Not least because everyone expects her to marry another man in the village, including the man himself.

As I wrote in my thoughts about The Privet Hedge, I think Buckrose is more enjoyable and interesting when she is talking about village life and all its myriad relationships than when she is writing about romance. But it’s also true that I tend to find romantic storylines a bit tedious in general. I certainly enjoyed Reverend Andrew’s enamoration with Elizabeth to be more engaging than the love affair in The Privet Hedge, but I still think it was less engaging than all the rest of the book. (Though, at the same time, I was cheering them on as the novel drew to a close.)

What I’m trying to say is – Buckrose is fresh and witty when she writes about shirking workers, gossipy neighbours who flit comfortably between friend and nemesis, chaotic village events, and all the other things that make up the eternal patchwork of village life. She is perfectly capable when writing about romantic love, but less original and less vibrant. Though it is a nice change for a vicar to be a feasible romantic hero in a novel – and, indeed, unusual for a vicar to be a hero at all, and one who doesn’t fall into any stereotypes. Some of the sweetest moments were when he thought back across the centuries to a previous incumbent, also a bachelor, and considered him a brother.

Overall, this is a real delight of the sort of well-written, amusing domestic novel that is often being rediscovered. Maybe J.E. Buckrose will be the next rediscovery, and I’m glad to have more of her books on my shelves to try.

Uneasy Money by P.G. Wodehouse

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There are some authors I think of as ‘break glass in case of emergency’ authors. And I didn’t have a particular emergency the other day, only nothing I was picking up felt right. I had a few books on the go, but wasn’t in the mood for any of them. So… I went to my Wodehouse shelves.

As he was so prolific, and copies of his books abound cheaply, I have an awful lot of unread Wodehouse books. I picked Uneasy Money (1917) off the shelves more or less at random – and had a lovely time. I could write down almost any sentence from a Wodehouse novel as an example of his mastery of language – this is from the second page, as our hero Lord Dawlish is approached by someone asking for money.

For some minutes he had been eyeing his lordship appraisingly from the edge of the kerb, and now, secure in the fact that there seemed to be no policeman in the immediate vicinity, he anchored himself in front of him and observed that he had a wife and four children at home, all starving.

Lord Dawlish ‘has always looked on himself as rather a chump – well-meaning, perhaps, but an awful ass’, and he is accurate in that. Of course he is; he is a Wodehouse hero and they’re almost all like that. Being well-meaning, he gives the man some money – but appearances are deceptive. He might be a Lord, but he doesn’t have much money. He earns an income as a secretary at a club, though this is really pity money, and otherwise is stony broke. Much to the chagrin of Claire, his fiancée, who refuses to marry him unless he gets a better income.

It’s always relatively clear in a Wodehouse novel which characters are to be cheered on and which to be disliked, and Claire is in the latter camp. She is fixated on money, rigidly unkind to our Lord Dawlish, and we never for a moment dream that they will end up together. Though they do end up both heading off to America, unbeknownst to each other. Lord Dawlish is informed that anybody can make millions in the Land of the Free, while Claire goes to visit a friend (and also with her eyes set on a rich middle-aged bachelor whom she knows is travelling by boat at the same time).

All is set up for a fun plot – which gets all the more fun when Lord Dawlish learns he has inherited a million dollars from an old man whom he once helped with his golf swing. He is chuffed – but also horrified that thus is disinherited the old man’s nephew and (more to the point) niece. He somewhat disregards the nephew, but writes to the niece (Elizabeth) to offer her half the money. She, however, refuses. And Lord Dawlish makes it his mission to find Elizabeth and persuade her to take the money – albeit, for reason, under an alias.

The plot is as brilliantly worked and completely unlikely as any Wodehouse novel, and the characters come alive with his trademark vivacity and vim. I loved the whole lot of them, even the ones we weren’t meant to like. But the star of the show is, of course, Wodehouse’s writing. His mix of exaggeration and understatement is always brilliant; his pithy descriptions of people (‘his appearance was that of a bewildered drainpipe’) are always a delight.

As I’ve often said, and others have too, if Wodehouse had written a handful of novels, they’d all be classics we learn by heart. Because he was so prolific, and so consistently good, there aren’t many that are individually well-known. He is a victim of his own brilliance. But Uneasy Money is certainly up there with his most enjoyable of the 20 or so I’ve read, and now I’m going to have to work hard not to just chain-read Wodehouse for months…

William – an Englishman by Cicely Hamilton (Novella a Day in May #2)

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William - an Englishman – Persephone Books

William – an Englishman (1919) by Cicely Hamilton isn’t really a novella, coming in at 226 pages, but I needed to reread it for Tea or Books? so I thought a Bank Holiday Monday was a great opportunity to read something a bit longer. Never too early to break the rules!

I can’t remember when I originally read this book, but not that much of it had stayed in my mind – except some searing scenes. And this is a decidedly searing book. It was the first novel published by Persephone Books, and it certainly dispels from the off the idea that they only publish cosy books. It’s hard to imagine anything less cosy – William – an Englishman is almost a work of horror at times.

It is titled after William but it is also about his wife, with the rather absurd name Griselda. As the novel opens, they have not met – but both have been swept up in the contemporary tide of socialism and suffragism. It is 1913 at this point, I think, and both movements are in full sway. William and Griselda are not paddling in the shallow waters of these movements either. They have dedicated their whole lives, their whole beings, to the cause.

From that day forwards he devoted himself to what he termed public life – a ferment of protestation and grievance; sometimes genuine, sometimes manufactured or, at least, artificially heightened. He was an extremist, passionately well-intentioned and with all the extremist’s contempt for those who balance, see difficulties and strive to give the other side its due.

Hamilton writes quite satirically about them. She doesn’t doubt their convictions, nor does she particularly undermine the causes for which they fight – she just portrays their extremism in the light of an authorial voice for whom calmness is the hallmark of good sense. The reader feels safe. There is a definite safety in seeing such passion from a distance, where we can turn it around in our mind, chuckling at its excesses.

But Hamilton has lured us into a false sense of security. The novel is about to become much less safe.

William and Griselda get married and set off to spend their honeymoon in Belgium, at the holiday home of a friend. They are three weeks into their time there, away from newspapers and letters and any contact with the outside world, when they spot some soldiers on the horizon. With their pacifist stances, they just mock the men out ‘playing at murder’. They do not realise that, since they last heard the news, a war has been declared – and Belgium has been invaded by German soldiers.

From here, William – an Englishman becomes much darker – even brutal. It is fast-paced, as the couple find themselves caught up with swift intensity in a situation they couldn’t have imagined. Hamilton switches tone expertly, and we can no longer smile at the naivety of this young pair. None of it feels melodramatic or gratuitous, simply because the horrors they are suddenly exposed to are horrors that genuinely happened to enormous numbers of people.

Later in the novel, I found the intensity flagged a little, and Hamilton loses a bit of her subtlety for a period – but the ending recaptures the pathos of the early novel. It’s extraordinary that this novel is more than a century old – it still feels fresh and vital, and one can’t help thinking about other invasions and violence happening in the world today.

Rachel and I will soon be recording an episode of Tea or Books? comparing this with a novel about a couple at the beginning of World War Two – Olivia Manning’s The Great Fortune. Look out for that!

Heritage by Vita Sackville-West – #NovNov Day 12

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I think Vita Sackville-West is a really underrated writer – because she is still chiefly remembered for her connection with Virginia Woolf. No, she isn’t in Woolf’s league as a writer – who is? – but she is very good indeed. Except, erm, in her first novel, Heritage (1919). This is my first real disappointment of Novellas in November.

Here are some thoughts in bullet points…

  • The novella is about Ruth Pennistan, a characterful farmer’s daughter who is torn between a conventional husband option and a wild Heathcliff-type. And a third character, who narrates – sort of. More on that in a mo.
  • It is very, very of it’s time. The sort of bucolic novel where rural folk are all tempestuous or stupid, and say things like this: ”I sometimes feel I can’t escape Rawdon,” she cried out. ”He’s always been there since I can remember, I think he always will be there. There’s something between us; it may be fancy; but there’s something between us.”
  • It’s a layered narrative – the actual narrator is relating something an acquaintance, Malory, told him once in Italy – so we get all the dialogue given at one remove. I really dislike the device which assumes someone has memorised days and days of conversation, and relays it, and the rest of the narrative, in an enormous monologue.
  • The middle section IS the narrator visiting the farm himself – that felt much more immediate, and did work better for me…
  • …but the third section is a letter, written by Malory, and we’re back to the weird distancing effect.
  • All the emotion is heightened and a bit silly – I wonder if Sackville-West had been on a diet of D.H. Lawrence, without his lyricism – or Mary Webb, without her dialect.
  • (The best thing Heritage has in its favour is that there isn’t any dialect.)

I should say, plenty of reviews online disagree with me and think this is a fine novel. I think she hadn’t found her voice as a writer at all yet, and this is a derivative and emotionally alienating novella that shows little of the promise of the brilliant novelist Sackville-West would become. Well, she got it out of her system, and only three years later she would publish the extraordinary novella The Heir. My advice: skip over Heritage and seek out her best work.

Sally on the Rocks by Winifred Boggs

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I bought a couple of books by Winifred Boggs, as she sounded like the sort of author I’d like, from the scant information I could find online – and the gamble has paid off. Sally on the Rocks, from 1915, is a really wonderful book with a heroine I won’t forget in a hurry.

Winifred Boggs starts us with the sort of village community that has been the basis for many of the great works of literature. Little Crampton is an insular world, assured of its own superiority, and not necessarily very welcoming to outsiders. But how few outsiders would be interested in it, because any village would be equally convinced that it is the first and best village in its region. Little Crampton is ruled over by Miss Maggie Hopkins – an unofficial position, but her gossiping, her rigid adherence to morality when it can shame others, and her determination to root out the truth in any situation mean that she is feared and also a vital source of information.

As the novel opens, she writes to Sally, hinting that the curate, Mr Bingley, is looking for a wife. ”He’s so safe, and of course there’s the house and ‘perks’, as well as the fifteen hundred,” she writes, none too subtly. It is enough to bring Sally back to the village where she grew up, adopted by the vicar Mr Lovelady, who is still in residence but hears little from his ward. She is in France, wary of the probable coming invasion – for the war is underway – and she has is licking the wounds of an unsuccessful love affair. She comes back to Little Crampton.

As she says, ”You’re not out for romance at thirty-one; it’s a business.” She is truly fond of Mr Lovelady, but she does not want to end up dependent on him – rather, she sets her cap at Mr Bingley and is willing to do whatever it takes to become his wife. All is fair in love and war, perhaps – but there is neither love nor war here. It is a woman who has been broken by the world seeking to play the world’s rules against themselves. She is like a much more likeable Becky Sharp. She doesn’t seek power or position – just stability.

Sally on the Rocks is wonderfully feminist at many junctures. I shan’t spoil all the plot, but Sally’s lover from France comes back. When Sally is asked, by her ex-inamorato, if she can forgive him, she replies:

”There is no question of that, only you are a little illogical, aren’t you? You are to be permitted to forget, but never I. Yet you have paid no price. Your wife forgave you and married you just the same, as women, wise or foolish, do the whole world over. You look at the matter one way and I the other – the man’s and the woman’s way. You ran no real risk of losing your wife by confessing. I lose everything in this world; some think everything in the next. No, such things are not on the same footing, after all.”

Most wonderful is Boggs’ take on a love triangle. Mrs Dalton, a widow with a young daughter, is also keen to persuade Mr Bingley to marry her. We have seen, hundreds of times, the two women pitted against each other for the ‘prize’ of the man. Here, the women candidly agree that Mr Bingley is a repellent prospect but the financially savvy one, acknowledge that they will both fight hard to win his hand, but that they will play fair. There is a sense of comrades-in-arms between them that I haven’t seen in a novel before.

I should say, Sally on the Rocks is very funny, as well as having a lot to say about the status of women at the time. Sometimes simultaneously. My favourite, extended scene was when Sally takes Mr Bingley off on a walk in the woods, deliberately letting them get lost – her plan being that, lost alone with her in the woods, under a full moon, he will feel duty-bound AND romantically inclined to propose.

But much of the humour, as well as the enjoyment in the book, comes from Sally. She is determined, witty, bloody but unbowed. She is even rather ruthless, but there is plenty of humanity in her too – and, of course, there is another man who catches her eye. He is not at all the savvy choice. I shall leave it to your imagination to decide which path she ultimately takes…

It’s a joy to find a book so utterly forgotten and to love it. Or perhaps I am wrong, and there are many latent Boggs fans? I’ve now read another, with a better title and worse content, which was silly fun. And Sally on the Rocks is sold as being By the author of The Sale of Lady Daventry, which is an intriguing title. I couldn’t find cheap copies of many of her books, but I do have another on the way – I’m hoping to discover more and more joy from the unfortunately-named Winifred Boggs.

Regiment of Women by Clemence Dane

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Clemence Dane 01.jpgIn 2011, I bought an enormous book called Recapture by Clemence Dane – largely because her name was familiar to me from my research into the Book Society of the 1930s – a book of the month club of which she was a panel member. I might have opened it then, but it basically went on the shelf and I’d forgotten what was in it. I thought maybe it was a trilogy anthology.

Well, turns out it has eleven works in it – mostly plays, and two novels. One of those is Regiment of Women (1917), which is Dane’s first novel and probably her most famous work after Broome Stages. It’s set in a girls’ boarding school, and is largely about the relationships and power dynamics that happen within it. It’s also a really impressive portrait of an almost Machiavellian creature: Clare. As a world, the boarding school is almost hermetically sealed from the outside, and this exaggerates all emotions and relationships within it.

The present boarding-school system of education ousts the mother from that, her natural position; renders her, to the daughter steeped in an alien atmosphere, an outsider, lacking all understanding. Invaluable years pass before the artificial gulf that boarding-school creates between them, is spanned.

Clare is obsessed with power, and is blessed with a personality that bewitches many – though there are also those who see right through her. She is one of the teachers who has been there a while, officially below the headmistress in the hierarchy, but managing to bend the will of the school to her own. And she does it by charming people – by making them care deeply what she thinks of them. Her main targets are Alwynne, a 19-year-old who is a new teacher at the school, and Louise – a young girl who has been put up a couple of classes because she is so intelligent.

Alwynne and Louise are besotted with Clare. Louise believes herself in love with Clare, and I have seen this described as a lesbian novel – well, it’s quite possible that Louise is experiencing her first lesbian attraction, but it certainly isn’t a two-way street. Clare intends to captivate her and make her servile – while also seeing extraordinary promise in her unusual skills in English and Drama classes.

Meanwhile, she is also determined to rule Alwynne – a kind, nervous, animated young teacher, not yet sure how to make the leap from pupil to authority figure. She lives with an aunt, a good woman who had taught Clare and sees through her. A power battle begins that Alwynne is not conscious of, and her aunt is barely fighting. Clare puts all her energy into it.

She intended to master Alwynne, but she realised that it would be a question of time, that she would give her more trouble than the children to whom she was accustomed. Alwynne’s utter unrealisation of the fact that a trial of strength was in progress was disconcerting: yet Clare, jaded and super-subtle, found her innocence endearing.

So, at the heart of Regiment of Women is an extraordinary and sustained portrait of somebody selfish, cruel, and charming. It is brilliantly done, in terms of character creation, even if it makes for nasty reading at times – and the book certainly gets quite dark.

Sadly, the heart of the book is surrounded by an awful lot of padding. There is a brilliant 20-page novel in this 345-page novel. But it takes so long to get going, with overly elaborate detail about the school – and every scene is bogged down with the same emotion or thought being played with in three different ways before we’re allowed to move on. It’s often frustratingly slow – and, indeed, is a product of the sort of baggy writing that characterises a lot of 1910s literature. The second half of the novel moves faster than the first, but there were many times in that first half where I almost gave up.

If you have more tolerance for that sort of bagginess, then I think you’ll be rewarded by the power of what is written inside it. But I would sympathise if you got to the end of the first chapter and thought it might not be worth the energy.

The Green Overcoat by Hilaire Belloc

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Like many of us, I suspect, the name ‘Hilaire Belloc’ was always associated in my head with characters like Matilda, who lied and burned to death, and Jim, who ran away from his nurse and got eaten by a lion. These spoofs of moralistic stories for children have outlasted the things they were spoofing, and I remember enjoying a cartoon of it as a child. It’s also where most people hear about Arthur Wing Pinero and his very-interesting-play nowadays.

Incidentally, in one group of friends we use ‘belloc’ as shorthand for ‘hilarious’.

Well, nine years ago I bought The Green Overcoat (1912), to find out a bit more about Belloc’s other writing, and now I’ve finally read it. The main character is Professor Higginson, a psychologist described thus:

He was a tall, thin man, exceedingly shy and nervous, with weary, print-worn eyes, which nearly always looked a little pained, and were generally turned uneasily towards the ground. He did not dress carefully. He was not young. He had a trick of keeping both hands in his trouser pockets. He stopped somewhat at the shoulders, and wore a long, grey beard. He was a bachelor, naturally affectionate by disposition, but capable of savagery when provoked by terror. His feet were exceedingly large, and his mind nearly always occupied by the subject which he professed.

He is leaving an event when he discovers it is pouring with rain and he hasn’t brought a coat. He decides to borrow another coat on the rack, intending to return it the next day – it is a very distinctive green overcoat, and he doesn’t know its owner. What’s the worst that can happen?

Well, as it turns out, he gets kidnapped! The overcoat had misidentified him.

This is only the beginning of the bizarre chain of events that happen because Professor Higginson borrowed the coat. All of them follow relatively convincingly after the first, only slightly heightening probability. Truth be told, I expected them to be a little more surreal than they are, and there are periods of the novel where Belloc seems almost deliberately to be avoiding the more extreme things that could have happened.

In terms of tone, it’s a comic novel but with a much lighter touch than I’d expected. That is, Higginson’s distress at being kidnapped is real rather than written for laughs – the humour comes from the absurdity of the situation. And Professor Higginson is a likeable main character, having the right mix of nervousness and ultimate determination to make him empathetic. These sorts of things rely on the reader thinking they might have made the same choices, and there is no cruelty at his expense from the novelist, in the way that Waugh does when his affable characters experience misfortune.

Ultimately, I think I’d have liked the novel more if it had been a bit more heightened – closer to Saki, perhaps. As it is, it’s a fun read that doesn’t quite live up to its potential, but good to know more about Belloc than I did before.

British Library Women Writers #1: The Tree of Heaven by May Sinclair

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The first lot of British Library Women Writers reprints are out! And in this uncertain and scary world, I think this series is more vital than ever, in these difficult times – bookshops are probably closed now, but the British Library are still delivering from their shop and lots of local indies are still doing postal delivery.

If you missed my announcement a while ago – this Women Writers series is reprinting novels by and about women from the first half of the 20th century, and I’m lucky enough to be series consultant! I’m also writing the afterword for each one, picking out a particular contemporary issue in the novel. For The Tree of Heaven, I wrote about suffragettes. I’m a bit nervous about my afterwords being out in the world, and hoping that people enjoy them – though of course the main thing is the novel itself.

I didn’t choose these first couple of novels, The Tree of Heaven and My Husband Simon – though they’re great – but I did choose the next batch. More on those soon! As they become available, I’m going to be putting up reviews.

The Tree of Heaven was published in 1917, and it’s always interesting to read a novel published during a World War, because obviously the author doesn’t know how or when it will end. It certainly has an effect on all the members of the family at the centre of the novel: there are four Harrison children, Dorothea/Dorothy, Michael, Nicholas/Nicky, and John. Sinclair is clever in the way that uses each of them to embody something major going on at the time, without making them seem too much like stock characters or simply there to represent a theme. Michael, for instance, is in the aesthetic set – all poetry magazines and being anti-patriotism – while Dorothea gets swept up in the suffrage movement.

They grow realistically from children to adults over the course of the novel, and there is a middle section called ‘the vortex’ where each of them finds that their particular interest or allegiance might lead them into a ‘vortex’ that removes their individuality:

For Dorothy was afraid of the Feminist Vortex […] She was afraid of the herded women. She disliked the excited faces, and the high voices skirling their battle-cries, and the silly business of committees, and the platform slang. She was sick and shy before the tremor and the surge of collective feeling; she loathed the gestures and the movements of the collective soul, the swaying and heaving and rushing forward of the many as one. She would not be carried away by it; she would keep the clearness and hardness of her soul.

There’s a lot going on with signing up – or not signing up – to fight, and there’s a subplot about the disputed parentage of another character. There’s a lot going on and, being the 1910s, there is a slightly heightened emotionality to everything – but Sinclair weaves all the strands together really well. I think she’s better at women than men, or at least I found more to engage me in Dorothea’s uncertainty about whether the means justifies the ends in militant suffragism than I did in the different boys’ decisions about whether or not to fight. Not that that isn’t an important discussion, but it felt like Sinclair was a little less invested in it herself, and it’s high and low points lean a little closer to emotional cliche.

But it’s a really engaging, enjoyable, and moving novel. If you’ve only read Life and Death of Harriett Frean then there is a great deal more to love about Sinclair – and this one isn’t as melancholy, though it certainly isn’t a chuckle-fest!

I promise my afterword was more thoroughly researched and diligently edited than this outpouring of thoughts late on a Sunday night ;) – something to compare and contrast if you do get a copy! I’ll be back with more on the other books in the series soon – and revealing which books will be published in the series in the autumn [though if you’re impatient, they’re all in the British Library catalogue and listed on Amazon already].

Alexander’s Bridge by Willa Cather

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Willa Cather has definitely been on my list of authors I’m stockpiling rather than reading – so I decided to rectify that a little. I picked up one with a name in it, mais naturallement, but it also turned out to be her first novel – Alexander’s Bridge from 1912. She apparently disowned it later in life, but I thought it was rather good.

The Alexander of the title is Bartley Alexander, an engineer who has specialised in bridges and secured a great deal of money and renown with his ambitious designs. We first see him through the eyes of a man who has known him since he was a boy, Professor Wilson, and is now visiting Alexander and his wife in their Boston home. Mrs Alexander is intelligent, warm and conscious of having made the choice to live in her husband’s shadow. I found Mrs Alexander the most intriguing character in the novel, and would have loved to spend more time with her. Cather is so good at memory and a feeling that is not quite regret, but wondering how life could have been different. But with a romanticism that has not been dimmed by this:

“The bridges into the future—I often say that to myself. Bartley’s bridges always seem to me like that. Have you ever seen his first suspension bridge in Canada, the one he was doing when I first knew him? I hope you will see it sometime. We were married as soon as it was finished, and you will laugh when I tell you that it always has a rather bridal look to me. It is over the wildest river, with mists and clouds always battling about it, and it is as delicate as a cobweb hanging in the sky. It really was a bridge into the future. You have only to look at it to feel that it meant the beginning of a great career. But I have a photograph of it here.” She drew a portfolio from behind a bookcase. “And there, you see, on the hill, is my aunt’s house.”

But Alexander isn’t just hanging around in Boston. He works in London regularly, and there he meets again a woman he used to romance… and picks up where he left off.

I found Cather rather less convincing in this part of the novella, and it doesn’t help that I find tales of adultery rather dull on the whole. She is still an excellent writer, but there felt like there was less truth and sincerity in these sections. Maybe that was why she wanted to disown it later. They’re not terrible pages, but they contrast poorly with how good she is elsewhere.

The novella ends with a very effective climax, beautifully described – and based on a real event from the news, though I don’t think Cather drew the characters from life outside this moment. I really enjoyed reading it and it’s given me a keenness to return to Cather’s portraits of small-town American life again before too long. A Lost Lady is better, but there is enough here for me to relish.