1920s

Vera by Elizabeth von Arnim

StuckinaBook All , , , 9 Comments

Vera

For years I’d heard three things about Vera (1921) – that it was Elizabeth von Arnim’s darkest novel, that it was autobiographical, and that it was possibly the inspiration for Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. For some reason that made me think that it might be a bit of an outlier in von Arnim’s output – but Vera is very clearly from the same pen of Father, The Caravaners and many of von Arnim’s other novels that feature a terrible man to a greater or lesser extent.

As it opens, Lucy is mourning her father. Or, rather, she is feeling numb in the first shock of his death – it has only been three hours. She cannot quite believe that it has happened, or imagine a world without him. Lucy has cared for him for years – not just this final illness, but a lifetime of delicacy. ‘She had had no thought since she grew up for anybody but her father. There was no room for any other thought, so completely did he fill her heart.’ We never truly get to know her father objectively – only through the deeply affectionate memories of his devoted daughter. And she is barely grown up herself, just a few years into adulthood.

It is in the midst of this grief that she meets Everard Wemyss. He, too, is in mourning – officially, at least. His wife has recently fallen to her death from their home, The Willows – and she, like du Maurier’s Rebecca, gives her name to the title. She has only been dead a fortnight.

Lucy sees someone who can be a companion in grief. Perhaps they can support each other as they face life without somebody they held so dear? But it quickly becomes clear that Everard has something else in mind. He has fallen for naïve, gentle Lucy and is determined to make her his wife. Lucy receives a charm offensive – he is lovable, loving, entirely confident that it is not too soon after Vera’s death – quashing her doubts on the subject. Von Arnim is very clever in the way she presents Everard. We get enough hints of his character to see that Lucy should probably run a thousand miles away – but also enough of his ability to charm that we can understand how Lucy, rocked by her loss, assents to his proposal of marriage.

It irked him that their engagement — Lucy demurred at first to the word engagement, but Wemyss, holding her tight in his arms, said he would very much like to know, then, by what word she would describe her position at that moment – it irked him that it had to be a secret. He wanted instantly to shout out to the whole world his glory and his pride. But this under the tragic circumstances of their mourning was even to Wemyss clearly impossible. Generally he brushed aside the word impossible if it tried to come between him and the smallest of his wishes, but that inquest was still too vividly in his mind, and the faces of his so-called friends. What the faces of his so-called friends would look like if he, before Vera had been dead a fortnight, should approach them with the news of his engagement even Wemyss, a person not greatly imaginative, could picture.

Everard gets his way – we are learning that he will always get his way – and they are not only engaged but married at incredible haste. This does take most of the first half of the novel, but it covers a very short time – and as soon as the marriage is complete, the veil starts to be lifted from Lucy’s eyes. Here they are, on honeymoon:

Marriage, Lucy found, was different from what she had supposed; Everard was different; everything was different. For one thing she was always sleepy. For another she was never alone. She hadn’t realised how completely she would never be alone, or, if alone, not sure for one minute to the other of going on being alone. Always in her life there had been intervals during which she recuperated in solitude from any strain; now there were none. Always there had been places she could go to and rest in quietly, safe from interruption; now there were none. 

Everard thinks only of his own happiness, and at the moment his happiness revolves around being with his lovely young wife. We don’t see much behind the bedroom door, as it were – being 1921, this is unlikely to be a big topic – but he monopolises her throughout every waking hour. Perhaps this is something that honeymooning couples would usually be very pleased about. But Lucy has previously seen Everard in courtship mode, and that was forceful but charming. Married Everard is forceful without the charm.

Von Arnim is very good at infantilising her ogres. From what I’d heard about Vera, I’d imagined that the husband would be brutal, perhaps violent. But he is like many of her terrible man: monstrously selfish. So many of her male figures are like toddlers, but toddlers with the power to live out their self-centredness, sulkiness, demand for attention. Everard is particularly childlike in his determination that his birthday be a hallowed day. He cannot believe that anybody would cross him or refuse him anything on his birthday, even if some of the ‘refused’ things are things he hasn’t mentioned.

And they go back to The Willows. Lucy doesn’t want to live there. If she has to live there, she doesn’t want Vera’s old sitting room. If she has to have Vera’s old sitting room, she wants it redecorated. None of these things happen. Everard dismisses all her concerns and anxieties. He twists them to be antagonistic to him. Her wishes and feelings clearly mean nothing to him – and von Arnim is brilliant (as ever) at the man who sounds logical even while he is being appalling. Like Father in Father, Otto in The Caravaners, Jocelyn in Introduction to Sally and probably others I’ve forgotten, Everard manipulates what other people say – retaining his cold sense of being hard done by, pouncing on any weakness so that he can seem calmly affronted. He does it with Lucy; he does it with the servants (who have long learned to put up with it, because he is in London most of the week); he does it with Lucy’s aunt Miss Entwhistle who is clear-eyed about what a disastrous marriage this is.

Oh, Everard is brilliantly infuriating to read! And Lucy has gone into the lion’s den without any defences. She is intimidated by the lingering presence of Vera in her possessions and her portrait – but the reader quickly realises that Vera is a fellow-victim of this monster. It’s an interesting choice for von Arnim to make Vera the title. I’m not quite sure she earns it. The reader feels sympathy for Vera from the outset, so despite Lucy’s fear around her, she doesn’t have the sort of narrative presence or power that du Maurier’s Rebecca does. If she did steal that idea, she does it better.

I was surprised by what a short time period it covers, particularly the time at The Willows – which is only a week, most of which Everard isn’t there. We only see Everard and Lucy at home together for a couple of days, which means von Arnim has to escalate the horror of marriage to him quite quickly. His brattiness, his selfishness, his cruelty – he locks Lucy out in the rain for petty reasons, then gets angry with her for being wet. I think it is meant to be all the more horrifying as a snapshot of what Lucy will have to endure for much longer, but I do wonder if it is sped up a little too much. This sort of horror might have worked even better as a gradual dawning.

But this is a quibble for a very good book. If someone came to this after only having read the charm of The Enchanted April, it must feel like a huge gearshift. But if you’ve read more widely in von Arnim’s oeuvre, this is very much in her wheelhouse. It’s bleak, though with trademark ironically funny moments and the amusingly detached narrator. Above all, it’s a brilliant character study.

To Let by John Galsworthy #ABookADayInMay No.22

StuckinaBook All , , 21 Comments

Super quick post tonight, because it’s late. In fact, let’s do it in bullet points.

  • I read To Let by John Galsworthy, originally published in 1921
  • (In fact, I listened to the audiobook – which was good, though it kept repeating lines of dialogue that I assume were meant to be edited out)
  • It’s the third of the Forsyte Saga
  • The first was published in 1906, but then Galsworthy went on a bit of a role – with one in 1920 and another in 1921
  • I read the first one a few years ago, for Tea or Books?, and then the middle one towards the end of last year
  • To Let really relies on you remembering what happened in book 1 – the doomed, cruel marriage of Irene and Soames
  • To Let is chiefly concerned with the next generation – particularly the love that blooms between Irene’s son and Soames’s daughter from their subsequent marriages
  • (But these two – Fleur and Jon – don’t know the other exists. They don’t even know that their parents used to be married.)
  • Fleur has a much more eligible, but profoundly dull, suitor
  • It’s a classic Romeo and Juliet sort of pairing, but if Romeo and Juliet don’t know why they aren’t a perfect match in the eyes of their families
  • Galsworthy is just very good, isn’t he? There’s a reason he was such a staple in the Edwardian era
  • It became fashionable to despise him in the mid-century, particularly if you were someone like George Orwell (who described bad books as ‘Galsworthy-and-water’)
  • But he really gets families, regrets, secrets, sacrifice, stubborness
  • He even makes reading about young, selfish people falling love bearable, and that’s impressive in my eyes
  • To Let has such a brilliant final line – you *almost* feel sorry for a character you’ve spent three books loathing
  • I am amazed that the three books of the first trilogy of the Forsyte Saga are so distinct, and each cover a distinct and intense theme, and yet work together masterfully as a series. Bravo, John.
  • Will I ever read the (gulp) six books in the Forsyte Chronicles? Does anyone? Perhaps in the next six decades.

Mystery at Geneva by Rose Macaulay #ABookADayInMay No.5

StuckinaBook All , , 12 Comments

Today’s book is a curio by a relatively well-known writer. Lots of us love Rose Macaulay’s novels, whether that be her famous Towers of Trebizond or the delightfully funny, wry books she wrote in the 1920s – Crewe Train, Dangerous Ages, Keeping Up Appearances, Potterism and so forth. Not so much talked about is Mystery at Geneva (1922)

It starts with an author note that we certainly shouldn’t take at all seriously:

Note: As I have observed among readers and critics, a tendency to discern satire when none is intended, I should like to say that this book is simply a straightforward mystery story, devoid of irony, moral or meaning. It has for its setting an imaginary session of the League of Nations’ Assembly, but it is in no sense a study of, still less a skit on actual conditions at Geneva of which indeed I know little. The only connection I have ever had with the League being membership of its Union.

Let’s be clear – this is not at all true. Macaulay is at her most satirical in this novel – a satire of detective novels, to an extent, but particularly a satire of the League of Nations. The hero is Henry Beechtree, a journalist for The British Bolshevist – and he has been sent to Geneva to cover a meeting of the League (which, at the time Macaulay’s novel was published, was still very much in its infancy.)

Along the way, Macaulay has a great time poking fun at newspaper men and the rivalries between them, as well as the mutual hysteria of journalists who cling to the far-left or far-right of the political spectrum. Macaulay is always wonderful when she is at her driest, and if the characters are very exaggerated then that doesn’t stop the prose being very funny.

Similarly broadly drawn are the delegates from different nations. Macaulay mostly manages to avoid anything that would feel uncomfortably racist today – the divisions are drawn chiefly along political lines (Irish Republicans vs Loyalists, for instance) and the good-humoured rivalry of adjoining European countries.

All is going more or less dully, and Henry is sending back sarcastic reports to the Bolshevist, when the mystery kicks in. The President of the assembly goes missing.

And then, over the next few days, more and more of the delegates disappear. We often see their final moments before disappearance – coaxed away by appealing to their particular weakness, whether that be wanting to help the poor, or getting involved in a political discussion, or finding a rare copy of their own book for sale. Rumours start to circulate that the whole thing is being done to undermine the League itself.

For what would be the use of getting rid of one man only, however prominent? The Assembly, after the first shock, would proceed with its doings. But what if man after man were to disappear? What if the whole fabric of Assembly Council and Committees should be disintegrated, till no one could have thoughts for anything but the mysterious disappearances and how to solve the riddle, and how, still more, to preserve each one himself from a like fate? Could any work be continued in such circumstances, in such an atmosphere? No. The Assembly would become merely a collection of bewildered and nervous individuals turning themselves into amateur detectives and, incidentally, the laughing-stock of the world. 

It should be noted that nobody is trying very hard to preserve themselves, as they do continually wander off into places where they are likely to be abducted. And there are so many characters, many of whom disappear before we know very much about them, that it is certainly more comic than tragic when they vanish.

Henry muses about the motives and perpetrators, but there isn’t really a sense that the reader is being given clues to disentangle. There is a solution, but ultimately it doesn’t really matter. This is first and foremost a satire on political and national grounds. The teasing of detective fiction is less successful because detective fiction was routinely so outlandish in the period that it’s almost impossible to satirise the lengths to which a plot can go. Of course, with most of the satire resting at a point in time in 1922, it is hardly a novel for all the ages. Some elements are recognisable, but others feel very much of a moment.

Something that does feel quite perennial is Macaulay’s (/Henry’s) comment on the way that magazines and newspapers write about women. It’s a theme she returns to often in her fiction and non-fiction, often in near-identical phrasing – but I love it every time, particularly the frustration that seethes beneath the surface humour:

All sorts of articles and letters appear in the papers about women. Profound questions are raised concerning them. Should they smoke? Should they work? Vote? Take Orders? Marry? Exist? Are not their skirts too short, or their sleeves? Have they a sense of humour, of honour, of direction? Are spinsters superfluous? But how seldom similar inquiries are propounded about men. How few persons discuss superfluous bachelors, or whether the male arm or leg is an immodest sight, or whether men should vote. For men are not news.

Mystery at Geneva is an odd, slightly silly and ultimately rather enjoyable book. I should think it would entertain anybody with an interest in 20th-century political history, particularly the way the League of Nations was considered by the everyman/woman. It’s not up there with Macaulay’s most accomplished and satisfying novels, but it does feel intended to be a jeu d’esprit rather than a substantial work. On its own terms, it’s a lot of fun.

Three more #1929Club books

StuckinaBook All , , , , , 11 Comments

It’s the final day of the 1929 Club and I have three books I haven’t reviewed – I really went to town on 1929 titles! Indeed, one of them I only started yesterday. Here are some quick thoughts about the three final books I read…

I Thought of Daisy by Edmund Wilson

I Thought of Daisy by Edmund Wilson

Edmund Wilson is one of those names that I’ve heard a lot – one of the literary hangers-on who is better known for his criticism than his own fiction. Or perhaps better known in America than in the UK. Apparently he helped the public get to know and appreciate a range of writers, from F. Scott Fitzgerald to William Faulkner to Ernest Hemingway. It wasn’t until I looked at his Wikipedia page just now that I realised that I Thought of Daisy was his only novel. (Having said that, other reviews say he wrote three, so who knows.)

One of the things that makes us know that we are in 1929 America is that Prohibition is front and centre – and one of the things that makes us know we are in a certain echelon of society is that everyone seems to known ways to evade it. The narrator is at one such party, flowing with booze despite the rules, when he meets two women. Rita and Daisy. Rita is a poet; Daisy is a chorus girl. The novel is occupied with seeing which of the women he will choose (with something of an assumption that either of them would be delighted to be chosen).

Reading I Thought of Daisy was an interesting experience. Wilson doesn’t write in a High Modernist style – that is to say, he always uses full sentences, and the prose is quite traditional. But he has the Modernist technique of considering every small detail of essentially equal worth. Everything he notices and thinks is documented. Characters are given long, anecdote-driven backstories that could last ten pages, and then they’re never seen before.

What I found, in Wilson’s hand at least, was that this approach made each sentence, paragraph, page interesting to read, and his writing is very pleasing – but that the whole was less than the sum of its parts. I found that, by documenting everything, he left us with nothing. I read acres of details, but never felt that I knew or cared about anyone. Though I could also see that, to another reader, it might be mesmerising.

Mr Mulliner Speaking

Mr Mulliner Speaking by P.G. Wodehouse

Well, you can’t go wrong with a Wodehouse, can you? Mr Mulliner Speaking is a collection of short stories, and Mr Mulliner is the least significant character in them. He is merely a man in a pub who has lots of stories to tell, and tells them insistently – so there is always something in the first paragraph that reminds him of a nephew, cousin, or friend. From then, he tells the story about them, and fades into the background.

It’s all delightfully Wodehouse. In perhaps my favourite story, a gentleman goes to extreme lengths to avoid being seen in public with yellow shoes. But most of the plots are about engagements – either ones that people want to get into, or get out of. His characters stumble in and out of proposals at the drop of a hat, and it’s such fun. In one story, the winner of a golf match must propose to a woman they both loathe; in another, a man will be horse-whipped on the steps of his club by one man if he doesn’t propose and trampled with spiked boots by another if he does.  Here’s Archibald, masquerading as a teetotaller who believes Francis Bacon wrote the works of Shakespeare to impress his chosen woman’s aunt:

Life, said Archibald, toying with his teacup, was surely given to us for some better purpose than the destruction of our brains and digestions with alcohol. Bacon, for instance, never took a cocktail in his life, and look at him.

At this, the aunt, who up till now had plainly been regarding him as just another of those unfortunate incidents, sprang to life.

It’s bits like ‘regarding him as just another of those unfortunate incidents’ that make me love Wodehouse so much. His turn of phrase is unparalleled, isn’t it? A delight to read a book I’ve had since 2006, thanks to the 1929 Club.

Hill (New York Review Books Classics): Amazon.co.uk: Giono, Jean, Abram, David, Eprile, Paul: 9781590179185: Books

Hill by Jean Giono

I’ve managed to get one book in translation into the 1929 Club – Hill by Jean Giono, translated from French by Paul Eprile. This was his debut novella and tells of a small community who live in an isolated community. There are twelve people living in four houses – each household holding some slightly fractured version of a family. In one, the wife has died, found hanging a few years ago. In another, the patriarch (Janet) is in the final throes of illness. It is a self-sufficient community, but very discontented.

In the space of about 120 pages, Giono shows us the slightly grotesque world here. He described it as the first of his ‘Pan’ books, and nature is certainly front and centre in the book, but so too is the ugliness of human nature that lies just below the surface. The people here care only for themselves, deep down – but do so in a casual way. There is little malevolence here, just an absence of kindness.

Someone on Twitter, with whom I was discussing 1929 books that had been translated into English, seemed quite cross that Jean Giono had been translated at all. She called him a bystander, a regional writer, who wrote about things that weren’t significant in 1929. And I disagreed – while the everyday lives of a community relying on the land will not be in history books, survival is always the most significant thing in any country, at any time. And farming will always be central to that. Rural life is often dismissed as less important than cities and politicians and wars, but without the production of crops, civilisation ends.

Giono knew that. And he knew how to write piercingly about nature – knowing its dangerous beauty.

Until now Gondran used to study the clouds for the threat of storms, for the white light that warns of leaden hail. Hail is no longer on his mind.

Hail means flattened wheat, hacked-up fruit, ruined hay, and so forth . . . but what he’s on the lookout for now, it’s something that threatens him head-on, and not just the grass. Grass, wheat, fruits—too bad for them. His own hide comes first.

He can still hear Janet saying: “So you think you know, do you, you sly devil, what’s on the other side of the air?”

And so, Gondran stays absorbed, right until the moment they call out to him from the Bastides.

And it is the elements that threaten them – starting with their water supply, which dries up overnight. Before this, they have seen a black cat walking through their community. They knew this cat to be the portent of something evil. Not evil in itself, but a warning. They have to work out where the evil within the four houses – who might have cursed the water, and how they can prevent it. The plot gets going at this point, as the superstitious and the intensely practical interweave, as they try both paths to solve this crisis.

Throughout, Giono (and Eprile’s translation) had lines that showed great perception, written in eerily lovely prose. I noted down this, of a girl suffering a terrible illness – ‘Through her skin you can the fire that’s consuming her, licking at her bones.’

The only reason I didn’t love Hill as much as this review might be suggesting is that I found it a little confusing. There are a lot of characters for such a slim novella, and beauty is sometimes prioritised above clarity in the writing. It wasn’t the easiest book to sit down and spend time with, though rewarding when I did. I’ve read three books by Giono now – this, Melville and The Man Who Planted Trees – and they’re all so different. But I’m glad to have experienced something so powerfully elemental – and, even though Giono was writing about some unspecified time in the past, the passions and needs of communities like the one in Hill existed in 1929, and still exist.

The Iron Man and the Tin Woman by Stephen Leacock – #1929Club

StuckinaBook All , , , 5 Comments

Stephen Leacock is one of the authors I first got really into, and I’ve put together quite a collection. Like a lot of the authors I loved around 2002-2005, I binge-read a lot at the time and now only read one every few years. When I spotted that The Iron Man and the Tin Woman was a 1929 title, it was a great opportunity to make this one my next Leacock.

It’s not one of his best known or easiest to find, in this country at least, and I think it’s a really interesting addition to the 1929 Club because it’s about the future. While in Leacock’s characteristic style of humour – dry exaggeration – it shows what was considered to be the frontiers of modernity in 1929. Some of the sections are what might happen in a couple of decades’ time, while other sections highlight things that seem alarmingly modern in everyday life. For example, there is the idea that life is far more regulated by rules and bureaucracy:

“Dear me!” sighed Angelina, “I suppose it’s wicked to say it, but sometimes it seems terrible to live in this age when everything is so regulated. Did you read that awfully clever novel that came out last week called ‘Wicked Days’ that told all about our great-grandfathers’ time when people used to just do almost as they liked?”

“No, the book was suppressed, you know, immediately. But I heard something of it.”

“It must have been awfully queer. Anybody could go round anywhere and visit any house they liked and actually, just think of it!—go and eat meals in other people’s houses and even in public restaurants without a Sanitary Inspector’s Certificate or anything!”

Edward shook his head. “Sounds a bit dangerous,” he said. “I’m not sure that I’d like it. Suppose, for instance, that somebody had a cold in the head, you might catch it. Or suppose you found yourself eating in a restaurant perhaps only six feet away from a person infected with an inferiority complex, it might get communicated to you.” He shivered.

“Let’s sit down,” said Angelina suddenly. “I want to go on talking, but I don’t feel like walking up and down all the time. Here’s a bench. I wonder if we are allowed to sit on it.”

“I’ve got a Sitting License for two in my pocket,” said Edward, “but I’m hanged if I know whether it’s been stamped.”

I also love any time when Leacock apes popular styles of writing, and applies them to mundanities to highlight their absurdities. It’s something he often returns to and I can’t quite describe what he’s doing and why I enjoy it so much. Anyway, here’s an example – where he is satirising the tell-all memoir:

I want to begin these Disclosures by speaking of my childhood.

First let me talk of my parents. There were two of them, my father and my mother.

And I am now going to tell here something about my father which up till now I have never even whispered to a soul, namely, that he was born in Peterboro, Ontario.

My father seldom spoke of having been born in Peterboro. But I know he brooded over it. I remember once when I was quite a little girl he drew me to him and patting my head quietly he murmured, “I was born in Peterboro.” After that he sat silent, looking into the fire for a long time. Then he put on his hat and went out. And a little afterwards he came in again.

I found The Iron Man and the Tin Woman a mixed bag – and enjoyable, but with limits. Leacock is always diverting, and he has a real eye for human foibles and a gentleness, even a kindness, in the way that he teases them. But the premise of this book has its limits. When his vision of the dizzying future is 1950, it’s understandable that some of the impact is lost by 1950. For instance, he suggests people will be taking round-the-world tourist trips within a day by 1950 – and, the brilliantly observant bit, will be rather bored by them and glad to get home. Now, the humour relies a little on the possibility of this happening. 70+ years later, we know it hasn’t. It’s still fun, but without the frisson of possibility that a 1929 audience would have seen in the background.

The other thing that stands out, reading this almost a century after it was published, was how eternal the complaints about modernity are. Among the ideas that are highlighted in this book are:

  • too many cars on the road
  • marriage not being taken seriously
  • everything being too commercialised
  • young people not respecting their elders or being willing to work hard
  • advertising being devious

It just goes to show that every generation complains about more or less the same things. And, of course, every generation sees themselves as the pinnacle of modernity – for good and bad – as every generation is the pinnacle of modernity, until they are replaced. If The Iron Man and the Tin Woman is probably best read in 1929, it was still fun to read today. Definitely not where I’d recommend somebody start with Stephen Leacock, but plenty to enjoy for the existing fan.

Storm Bird by Mollie Panter-Downes – #1929Club

StuckinaBook All , , , 6 Comments

For years, the only novel by Mollie Panter-Downes that was available was her last – One Fine Day – which is also her masterpiece. By comparison, her earlier novels were extremely scarce. The British Library Women Writers series has reprinted My Husband Simon, and there must be question marks out there about her others. Are they worth reprinting? Well, I am in the fortunate position of owning all her novels, and Storm Bird happens to be a perfect candidate for the 1929 Club.

I was quite surprised when the main character of Storm Bird turned out to be a man who has recently been widowed. Martin Thorpe is old for 1929, though wouldn’t be considered so now – in his sixties. Florence is the wife who has recently died, and she immediately fades into the background. We don’t learn a lot about her along the way, and it seems that Martin began forgetting her long before she died. For the most part, the narrative isn’t particularly interested in her either, but I did think this passage was beautifully done:

It was a little cruel that when Martin Thorpe thought of his dead wife it was only as a woman who had made the last twenty-five years extraordinarily comfortable, for she had been a creature of quite a few memorable moments and much talent for a sturdy kind of companionship. Although she had never understood him, he had loved her deeply, yet when he tried to conjure up her fine dusky looks he found only a blurred impression of good food and a quiet skill in handling servants. Her ringing laugh was becoming increasingly difficult to remember, though the culinary triumphs of her dinners were as vivid in his mind as ever. He could even recall the clothes she wore better than the body which had once turned his feet from Mexico to Broad Street. Plunging into the chilly waters of death, she had left surprisingly few and trivial garments on the bank.

Florence’s real purpose is to have provided Martin with a daughter, Leslie, now an adult and rather dependent on her father financially and socially. We are not far into the novel when Martin spots Sara across the room at a party that is too bohemian and self-congratulatory for his liking. She is young and striking, and Martin is struck.

He stopped in the middle of his talk to ask her with startling suddenness how old she was. She told him ‘twenty-four’. He stared at the years separating them, and thought how hot, dusty, and jaded he must seem to her, glowing with that magic which he envied with an envy almost like hate.

The reader can see what is coming from the outset, though I have to admit I was rather hoping it wouldn’t. Perhaps there are good relationships in real life with around a 40-year age gap, but they just seem icky on the page. To me, at least. There is something so uncomfortable about an old man romancing a young woman, particularly with this wealth imbalance. Sara has been an artists’ model to make money, and her nude form can be found in paintings in exhibitions and homes. Martin is wealthy in a way that means non-wealth has barely appeared on his radar.

The marriage of Martin and Sara is dealt with cleverly by Panter-Downes. We don’t see much of the development of the relationship. It is sprung on us with suddenness – in the same way that it is sprung on Martin’s daughter Leslie. Unsurprisingly, she is not particular won over by the idea. If the reader is reacting the same, then one line of dialogue might be intended to chastise us:

“If only she wasn’t so young! That’s what makes it -“

“If only,” said her father softly, “your objections weren’t so distressingly conventional.”

After this, it’s a novel about what happens when two people from different worlds marry, with clearly few people on their side. One of the things I found interesting about it, as so often in club years, is how certain societal trends are considered to be at an extreme – when we know, from our 21st-century vantage, that it was simply the tip of the ice-berg. In this instance, I’m thinking about this line:

Divorce was so easy in these days; all her friends slipped in and out of marriage as though it were a shoe which pinched here or was too loose there.

As you’ll have seen from some of these lines, I think Panter-Downes’ writing is often very good in Storm Bird. You can certainly see signs of the observational, detailed prose writer she’d become. I think where the novel falls down a little is in character and plot. It often feels quite cartoonish, or derived from melodramas and penny romances. That is to say, people behave like characters in a book, rather than people.

I looked up how old Panter-Downes was when she wrote this – 22. About the age of Sara, but choosing to focalise the novel through Martin. And what does a 22-year-old know about being widowed after a long marriage? It’s clear that, at this stage of her writing career, Panter-Downes was learning from books rather than from life. And it shows. There is no psychological depth to Storm Bird; it is more histrionic than moving.

It’s interesting as a way of seeing what Panter-Downes would become – and only two years later she would write a rather better book in My Husband Simon, perhaps because it is so clearly autobiographical. In Storm Bird, she was trying to put herself into another life – as great writers always have – but simply wasn’t good enough to that yet.

Speedy Death by Gladys Mitchell – #1929Club

StuckinaBook All , , , 11 Comments

I’ve been meaning to read some Gladys Mitchell for years, and have had a couple on my shelves for at least eight years – what better opportunity than the 1929 Club, where I can encounter her detective Mrs Bradley in her first mystery.

I am familiar with some of the many Mrs Bradley mysteries through the TV series of them, starring Diana Rigg, that was on in the late 1990s. I see from the Wikipedia page that there were only five episodes made, which is odd as I remember there being far more. The first of them was, indeed, Speedy Death – though I don’t remember how accurately the script follows the original text. Something that definitely isn’t accurate is the casting. Here is the description of her, given by one of the characters:

Then there is Mrs Bradley. Know her? Little, old, shrivelled, clever, sarcastic sort of dame. Would have been smelt out as a witch in a less tolerant age. I believe she is one. Good little old sport, though.

Elsewhere she is described as a ‘playful alligator’. And every time she is mentioned, the narrative mentions her ugliness, her appalling outfits, her witchlikeness. Not necessarily somebody you’d naturally think noted beauty Diana Rigg should play?

Besides her looks, Mrs Bradley is chiefly notable for her love of psychoanalysis – very much on-brand for 1929, where Freudianism was discussed everywhere, even if it wasn’t believed by all that many people. ‘The Oedipus complex was a household word, the incest motive a commonplace of tea-time chat,’ as D.H. Lawrence wrote in 1923. Mrs Bradley is an author of books on this topic, and cheerfully cynical about human nature.

“We are all murderers, my friend,” said Mrs Bradley lugubriously. “Some in deed and some in thought. That’s the only difference, though.”

I haven’t mentioned this particular murder. It’s your classic mansion set up – a family have invited various notables to come and stay for a house party. Among them is the groom-to-be of the daughter of the house, who is also a noted explorer. Not long after everyone descends on the house, he is found dead in his bath – only it turns out that he is, in fact, a woman.

From here, things follow much as you might imagine from a Golden Age detective novel – at least in terms of plot. There are numerous suspects, there are police questionings, there is at least the possibility of more corpses along the way.

I actually found the plot a little flimsy and frenetic – things dart from one crisis to another, with not much in the way of detection happening between them. Many of the characters are similarly flimsy, though no more so than you’d encounter in many different novels. While the solution is a bit haphazard, and Mrs Bradley’s detection techniques are unorthodox, what made me really enjoy Speedy Death was undoubtedly Mrs Bradley herself. I can certainly see why Mitchell thought she should keep going with this detective, and indeed keep going for many more decades. She is larger than life, but Mitchell is brilliant at controlling that largeness – she is exuberant, ridiculous, confident but always consistent. Mitchell knows exactly what she’s doing, and deploys this bombastic character to best effect.

Perhaps later Mrs Bradley novels have a slightly more sophisticated plot, and less of a feeling that everything has been flung at it – even Agatha Christie put far too much into her debut detective novel. I’m looking forward to finding out, and re-encountering the entertaining burlesque that is Mrs Bradley.

Paying Guests by E.F. Benson – #1929Club

StuckinaBook All , , , 23 Comments

I suspect E.F. Benson is like toffee – a little is a total delight, but you wouldn’t want to have too many in a row. It’s been a few years since I last picked up an EFB, and so I absolutely loved heading to Paying Guests for the 1929 Club.

Though the novel is called Paying Guests, the people in this book are very much living in a boarding house. ‘Paying guests’ or ‘PGs’ was a polite fiction that people used in the period to make the arrangement seem more genteel – often it would be just one or two people staying as paying guests in the home of people they knew, at least tangentially. Here, the residents are a mix of long- and short-term, mostly longer, and they aren’t likely to go anywhere any time soon.

The boarding house is run by two widowed sisters, one quite fluttery and inclined to panic, the other less invested and more inclined to enjoy seeing the worst in people. Their residents include retired Colonel Chase who nightly shares his triumphs in walking or cycling; Mr Kemp the hypochondriac and his daughter Florence who is permitted no will of her own; Miss Howard the amateur artist and musician who performs ‘improvisations’ that she has practised for many hours beforehand; Miss Bliss who is at Dolton Spa to take the waters but insists that Mind will heal her – and a handful of others, less prominent.

Like a lot of Benson novels, the joy mostly comes from the combination of people who have nothing to do but gossip about each other and try to come out top in a relatively amiable, never-ending tussle for dignity. Some have their eyes on something outside of this community – marriage, perhaps – but most have resigned themselves to staying exactly where they are. Or perhaps ‘resigned’ is not the right word – they are perfectly content with their minor gripes, antipathies, observations. It could be a much sadder novel if you didn’t suspect that most of the characters wouldn’t change a thing.

The biggest plot point in Paying Guests is probably Miss Howard’s exhibition of her paintings. Which is described with Benson’s typically merciless observation of the way a certain sort of person speaks:

“Are you going into town?”

“Yes. I’ve got to see about my little pickies being framed. Just fancy! I’m going to hold a little teeny picture-exhibition of some of my rubbishy sketches. So rash! But nobody would give me peace until I promised to.

This was approximately though not precisely true: Miss Howard had told the group in the lounge that Mrs Bowen had said that everyone was longing for her to do so, and the group in the lounge had all said “Oh, you must!” again and again and again. She had to yield.

“So frightened about it,” said Miss Howard, “I shall certainly leave Bolton the day before it opens, so as not to hear all the unkind things you say about it.”

The fate of this exhibition is probably the highest stakes in Paying Guests, and I did find it as compelling as much more dramatic plots in other novels.

The other element of the book I really loved was Miss Bliss and her Mind. Benson doesn’t use the term Christian Scientist, but she is certainly something of that ilk – trying to persuade everybody that their illnesses are illusory, and that even lost objects can be found with sufficient application to Mind. She herself is clearly severely unwell, but finds plenty of excuses to explain this away. Again, in another novelist’s hands this could have been desperately sad – but, in Benson’s, it is deeply funny.

I still have a few other 1929 titles on the go, but I think this is going to be my favourite 1929 Club read. Sheer fun.

 

No Love by David Garnett #1929Club

StuckinaBook All , , , 11 Comments

no love david garnett dj

Considering I wrote about David Garnett substantially in my doctorate thesis, it is a bit embarrassing how few of his novels I’ve read. In my defence, I wrote about his first books (Lady Into Fox and The Man in the Zoo), so his later books were less relevant – but I must have bought No Love more than ten years ago and had it waiting on my shelves. (The picture above is borrowed from Barb’s review.)

Garnett was particularly prolific in the 1920s, after his bestselling 1922 debut, and he’d already written another six or seven books by the time No Love came out in 1929. It helps that all his early books are so short. This one starts with an arresting line…

When in 1885 Roger Lydiate, the second son of the Bishop of Warrington, and himself a young curate, became engaged to Miss Cross, the marriage was looked on with almost universal disapprobation.

Roger and Alice are on honeymoon in the south of England when they head out by boat to Tinder Island – a location that I think is made up, though it might be a real place with a new name.

“Let us land here,” said Alice, and she was not disappointed when they found themselves wandering through an immense orchard of flowering plum trees. The petals were falling, and when the young people passed out of the first orchard into the one beyond it, they would have seemed to our eyes like a newly wedded couple standing on the church steps, though the thought did not come to them, since confetti was not used in England in the eighties.

It doesn’t take long for them to decide to live there, and Garnett writes (at this stage of No Love) with a sort of fairy tale tone that makes spontaneous, life-changing decisions feel par for the course. The practicalities of being the only inhabitants of an island are dealt with, but rather swiftly. A little work on the land and they are good to go in Tinder Hall – the island’s only, ancient house. They have a daughter, Mabel, and five years later a son called Benedict.

But before long they need more money – and so they sell a section to Captain Keltie, who is much wealthier, after he and his wife fall in love with the island after a serendipitous visit. They build an enormous faux-Elizabethan house.

From the first its size had alarmed the Lydiates; it was its size indeed which had led Roger to fear that it might ultimately be meant to serve as a training college for Dr Barnado’s boys. The house was far larger than seemed reasonable for a family of three. On the ground floor there were hall, dining-room, drawing-room, morning-room, library, billiard-room, conservatory, kitchen and offices; whilst upstairs two bathrooms, a nursery, and twelve bedrooms seemed to show that the Kelties intended to entertain largely.

At first, the Captain Keltie, his wife and their son Simon show no signs of moving into the completed home – but, once they do, the dynamics of the island shift forever. And the lives of the two families are equally changed. No Love follows what happens over the next few decades – on the island, and away.

Garnett often writes about love and tempestuous love affairs, and there are a fair few in this novel despite its title, but I think he is much more interesting on other topics. The friendship between Simon and Benedict is a case in point – we see how two young boys fall into adventures and risks together, but how the disparity in their wealth and their temperaments changes the friendship over the years. Their living arrangements mean they have something of the closeness of family but without its permanence. It’s a relationship that seems to linger even as the two get older and have no especial wish for it to continue – they can’t quite escape this quasi-brotherhood.

As mentioned, I am less interested when Garnett writes about romantic love – but some of his insights into the way characters love were certainly well done. For example…

He distrusted any happiness which came as easily as her love, suspecting it to be a snare to entrap him. All through life he had fought, and his enthusiasms had been met with mockery and he had learnt that the value of anything was proportional to the opposition it provoked; and instinctively he believed that since this was unopposed it could not be love.

I enjoyed reading No Love – Garnett has a natural lightness and gentle dryness to his prose that works best, in my opinion, when he is using it to approach slightly eccentric or unusual characters and situations. Particularly in the first half of No Love, there is plenty of opportunity for this. It works less well when he is trying to be searing or a little sordid. But, being 1929, nothing is too close to the bone – and I found a lot to enjoy here. It’s no Lady Into Fox, but that was a tour de force that would have been impossible and needless to replicate.

The Optimist by E.M. Delafield

StuckinaBook All , , 10 Comments

E.M. Delafield is right up there with my favourite authors, but there are still some of her books on my shelves that I’ve had for the best part of 20 years. I recently took down The Optimist (1922), one of Delafield’s earlier novels and one I haven’t seen an awful lot of discussion about.

Owen Quintillian is a boy when he first spends time with the Morchard family – led by the calm dictator Canon Morchard, and accompanied by three of his young daughters (Lucilla, Flora, Valeria) and and one young son (Adrian), with another son David away at school. Canon Morchard acts as a tutor for Owen, but really this is a substitute family. Adrian is naughty and wilful, Valeria and Flora are romantic and emotional, and Lucilla is sternly obedient. Owen is perhaps the least categorisable; he is the onlooker, and almost takes the role of the reader.

I was reminded a lot of May Sinclair’s Anne Severn and the Fieldings, both in this section and in the rest of the novel – Owen, like Anne, is the only child who is both insider and outsider in the new community. He is expected to live by the rules of the household and understand its different mores and characters, but there is also a tacit understanding that he is a temporary participant.

Years later, when Owen has spent two years fighting in the war and a period recovering from shell shock in hospital, he returns to the Morchard family. Each child has grown, but the traits that were there before are still recognisable. Lucilla is still obedient, though with a weariness that wasn’t there before. The other sisters have romantic entanglements that include Owen in disastrous ways. Adrian and David are more enigmatic, being away at war – with everything that entails for the waiting family.

But the most dominant character – the ‘optimist’ of the title, mostly relating to patriotism and pro-war sentiment – is the Canon. He is a fascinating portrait of a domineering man slowly squeezing life out of his family, but not in a violent or ogreish way. Rather, as George Simmers wrote in his excellent review on Great War Fiction back in 2007, ‘Morchard is revealed as a monster of selfishness, manipulating his family by a form of moral blackmail – they are terrified of inspiring the pain he expresses when they cross him in the slightest particular.’

In fact, I will quote the same passage George used to illustrate this point:

“Valeria!” The Canon’s voice, subdued but distinct, came to them from without. “My dear, go to your room. This is not right, You are acting in defiance of my known wishes, although, no doubt, thoughtlessly. Bid your sister goodnight and go.”

Val did not even wait to carry out the first half of the Canon’s injunction. She caught up her brush and comb and left the room.

“Are my wishes so little to you, Valeria? Said her father, standing on the stairs. “It costs so small an act of self-sacrifice to be faithful to that which is least.”

“I’m sorry, father. We both forgot the time.”

“Thoughtless Valeria! Are you always to be my madcap daughter?”

His tone was very fond, and he kissed her and blessed her once more.

Valeria went to her own room.

She sat upon the side of her bed and cried a little.

His edicts always come from a firm moral code – one that sees himself as instructor and protector of the household. He is not just hurt but astonished if anybody contradicts or disobeys him, or even has a contrary opinion to him – there is one instance, later in the novel, where Lucilla must use long-learned manipulation to do what she believes is right, and he believes is wrong. In the Canon’s defence, he holds himself to the same high standards as everyone else, and repents and apologises if he contravenes them.

Owen is trying to establish himself as a writer, particularly one in revolt to most standards of Victorian behaviour, belief, and society. There is a clash here, when the Canon reads Owen’s magazine article on ‘The Myth of Self-Sacrifice’. While the narrative is largely on Owen’s side, it seems, there is also the suggestion that Owen’s views can be as self-indulgent and blinkered as the Canon’s, albeit from a different direction.

It’s a fascinating portrait of a family, and Owen is an excellent device for being both inside and outside the circle – it is only as The Optimist develops that we start to see more of Owen’s own character and flaws, and question some of the assumptions he has made about members of the family (and which we may have unquestioningly followed along with).

This is one of Delafield’s more serious novels but, being Delafield, there is a lightness of touch and an ironic sensibility that is never too far away. This sentence is quintessential Delafield, who always seems to return to the topic of self-(un)awareness in everything she writes:

Lucilla, for her consolation, reflected that few people are capable of distinguishing accurately between what they actually say, and what they subsequently wish themselves to have said, when reporting a conversation.

In George Simmer’s review, he concluded that The Optimist is ‘one of the most thought-provoking novels of the 1920s’ and among Delafield’s best. I think it is certainly one that would merit re-reading and thinking more deeply about. It is not among my favourite of Delafield’s, perhaps because that occasional lightness of tone isn’t reflected in the plot or characters and I prefer her in slightly more comic mode, with slightly more heightened characters – but I think there’s a very good argument that The Optimist is one of her most intriguing and complex novels.