1934

The Spring Begins by Katherine Dunning

StuckinaBook All , , , 21 Comments

Ad for electronics, 1930s

When Scott (aka Furrowed Middlebrow) raves about a novel, you take notice. Katherine Dunning’s little-known 1934 novel was his favourite read of last year and he wrote extremely enthusiastically about it on his blog – and, even better, he made sure a copy was in my hands. Naturally, he was right. The Spring Begins is an exceptionally well-written and engaging novel. (There aren’t any dustjacket images around, so the above image from Flickr isn’t very relevant but amused me.)

There are three heroines to the novel, whose lives sometimes overlap but are largely kept secret. We go between their three narratives in turn – first is Lottie, a nurse-maid for the Kellaway family and their young children. Lottie is a child herself, and manages to retain some carefreeness while having few childlike freedoms. She is naïve and kind and keen, learning about the world while almost preternaturally aware of her place in its rigid hierarchies. Coming from an orphanage and intimidated by anybody in power (and men particularly), she is privileged to have raised even to her lowly position.

“Now, then…” Isobel clung to her, trying to suit her steps to Lottie’s. Out in the corridor Mr Kellaway was passing down. Lottie flattened herself against he wall. She must never be disrespectful, she must always stand still and make herself as small as possible when the master of the house went by.

But Isobel was his own flesh and blood. She could stand before him balancing herself with delicately sturdy legs right in his way.

“Hello, Daddy!”

He put out his hand and ruffled her head. “Hullo, Monkey!”

Next is Maggie, the scullery maid, a little older than Lottie. Scott describes her as ‘racy, sensual’ in his review and that is perfect. Where Lottie is scared of men, Maggie is intrigued and impetuous. She seems unperturbed by others’ opinions – if Lottie’s carefreeness comes from a love of nature and a spiritual alertness, Maggie’s comes from an unabashed earthiness. I will confess, of the three main characters, I found her the least interesting. I enjoyed her company, but Dunning is a very psychologically astute writer and I think Maggie gave her less material than the others.

Thirdly – how appropriate that she is last in my list, as in so many things – is Hessie. She is of the impoverished gentlewoman type, at an age where marriage is not impossible but is increasingly unlikely. She works as a sort of governess, emphatically not the servant class but also not fitting in anywhere else. Her only equals are her mother and sister Hilda (all live together) and she is desperate for an escape. Lottie’s sections are the most enjoyable to read, but I think the Hessie sections are the best. The early-20th-century spinster is a well-worn type, but Dunning mines her desperation, her frustration, her hopeless hopes with a brilliance that makes it feel fresh. Here she is, talking to her mother:

“I’ve got to go out, too. I promised Rosie Bates I’d call at her house this evening. She’s got a book…”

“What book, Hessie?”

“Oh, just a book.”

“Don’t read anything that isn’t nice, Hessie,” Mother said.

“Rosie said it was good.”

“Where did she get it – from the Young Women’s Library? Can you remember its title?”

Supposing she screamed now. Just dropped the plates and opened her mouth and screamed. Hessie bit her under lip as she ran out into the kitchen. She laid the plates with a clatter onto the draining-board by the sink, and pressed her hands to her head. How could she live through Hilda’s wedding, and afterwards, too? Evenings alone with Mother, while Hilda sat with her husband, and afterwards Hilda and Albert went upstairs together. Hilda would be a wife, a married woman. Hilda would come back to see them, and she’d talk about ‘my husband’ and Mother and she would exchange meaning glances, leaving Hessie outside the fraternity of married women.

I’ve spent a long time telling you about the main characters, because there isn’t really a lot of plot. The Spring Begins is really a portrait of these three lives – what drives them, what holds them back; what they understand and don’t yet understand. It is rare for novels of this period to consider the lower-classes in any depth, yet in this novel it is the upper-classes who pass by in the background. Dunning treats all three women as deeply realised people, worthy of novelistic respect even if they don’t get it from everyone around them.

Exquisitely drawn characters is one of the reasons that The Spring Begins is a masterpiece. The other is Dunning’s writing. Throughout the novel she writes about the world with sensitivity and beauty, perfectly judging the balance between poetic writing and readability. The reader is never tripped up by over-extended imagery or self-indulgent prose – it is striking in a way that makes us more appreciative of the possibilities of observation. Of course, I have to give an example:

The blue in the sky was deepening a little. It was a clear soft blue that started high up and went on and on, up and up until the sky looked like a lake of crystal blue air. There were no clouds anywhere. The fields and hedges had a young, refreshed appearance about them, still cloaked with the coolness of dew and protected by the softness of the early sunshine.

Ahead of them Mr Kellaway’s big car rolled along, very smoothly and silently. The children watched it eagerly, calling to Mr Andrew to hurry-hurry when it disappeared around a corner. It was agonising when they came to double bends in the road and the big car slid round the second bend before they were properly around the first.

By eleven o’clock the sun was shining strongly. They were travelling no main roads now, and the hedges looked dark beneath their covering of white dust, the fields parched and tired, the woods aloof as if hoarding their shade and silence and dignity for themselves alone. 

Illustration of a 1930 car

I’m so grateful to Scott to have had the chance to read this novel. I’m confident it will be among my favourite books of 2024. Sadly, it is currently extremely hard to find. I’ve already recommended it to the British Library Women Writers series – of course they’ll have to agree, and get the rights, but I have everything crossed that it’ll appear in the series one day. It’s a crime – an often-repeated crime, of course – that a writer as good as Dunning has been so neglected.

Gerald: A Portrait by Daphne du Maurier #ABookADayInMay No.12

StuckinaBook All , , 14 Comments

I usually try to join in Ali’s Daphne du Maurier Reading Week, though I wasn’t sure how I was going to make it work with finishing a book a day in May, since none of the candidates on my shelves were very short. Then I had a brainwave – I could finish an audiobook one day in the car, and spread reading a Daphne du Maurier out over two days.

So, which to choose? Eventually I alighted upon Gerald, Daphne du Maurier’s biography of her father – published in 1934, the year that Gerald du Maurier died. Daphne du Maurier was only 27 – she’d published three novels, but none of them are the ones that would make her name as a writer of fiction. According to the not-too-subtle cover of my 1950 reprint, it was apparently Gerald that initially brought her fame as a writer.

And it really is a marvellous book. It has been sitting on my shelves for a very long time and I had never been particularly tempted by it, but it is an exceptionally good read. It is not a biography in any traditional sense of the word – certainly she does not treat Gerald du Maurier with any criticism, which is unsurprising from a grieving daughter. But this is not even a hagiography – it is a novel, based heavily on fact, in which Gerald is the flawless hero. And because it is a fantasy of a person, it doesn’t matter that we only see one side. There is something in the tone that goes even past novel. It is a fairy tale of a person’s life, and enveloping in that way that only a fairy tale can be.

Daphne du Maurier starts even before Gerald is born, and we see scenes of their childhood – anecdotes that were clearly passed down through the generations are turned into stories told by an omniscient narrator. This continues as Gerald gets older – his unsuccessful engagements and his eventual courtship with Muriel (‘Mo’) are shown with a novelist’s detail. Woven into the narrative are letters that may well have been preserved, but they sit alongside full conversations that du Maurier must have made up. Here, she pictures her only parents in their early days of romance (where ‘Mummie’ is Daphne du Maurier’s grandmother):

Up to the present they had been in rooms, and during the early part of the summer had taken a cottage at Walton-on-Thames, which was a happy refuge from the from the hot weather. “When I’m not picking green-fly off rose heads, I’m picking the black fly off dwarf beans,” Gerald gravely wrote to Mummie. “Everything is doing very well except Japanese iris and parsley. I haven’t been outside the estate yet, but Muriel manages both indoor and outdoor servants with marvellous tact, and even the stable-boys worship here.” (The cottage really had about three rooms, and a tiny square of garden.) Mummie nodded her head an smiled. Darling Gerald was so funny. And it was a wonderful thing to see him happy like this.

Dear Muriel was obviously taking great care of him. She had not seen him looking so well for years. He had got quite brown, too, not that horrid washed-out colour she was used to. Her never took his eyes off Muriel.

The bulk of Gerald, though, is about his acting and theatre producing career. I had always thought of him as primarily a theatre manager, and hadn’t realised how much he had acted – and how influential he had been in this world. But Daphne du Maurier takes us through his ascent to fame, and then his triumphs and failures, each considered as though she had seen the play in question – even when that would be impossible. His big break-through was playing a villain in Raffles in 1906.

And yet there were those who believed that because Gerald did not hump his back, cover his face with hair, wear tights, and speak blank verse, he was therefore no actor. How many times, then and afterwards, did people exclaim, “But du Maurier, he does not act; he is always himself.” To act is to portray an emotion; to show the feelings aroused by some sensation, whether joyous or traffic; to make the man in the audience feel, either uncomfortably or happily, “That might have been me.” This is what Gerald, who started the so-called naturalistic school of acting, tried to do.

There are some famous names in du Maurier’s milieu, and it’s entertaining to read about how J.M. Barrie’s plays went over – and, indeed, how the adaptation of Trilby by George du Maurier (Gerald’s father) became such a sensation. Other of the plays mentioned were already fading from popularity by 1934, and have disappeared altogether now. Similarly, some actors mentioned would still ring bells – Gracie Fields, Gladys Cooper, Irene Vanbrugh, Celia Johnson – while others are no loner discussed. But to be still well-known a century and more later is quite the feat!

I love anything about the theatre, fact or fiction, so lapped up all of this. The brief interlude when Gerald becomes a soldier in the First World War is, indeed, brief. Partly because he didn’t enlist until 1918 and never left England, but also because it doesn’t seem like part of the life that Daphne du Maurier wants to focus on. For her, and for her implied reader, Gerald is a brilliant theatre impresario – and she also wants to show the great man at home. This does mean we get slightly curious, but still delightful, sections where Daphne du Maurier refers to herself in the third person:

As they grew from babies into children, and occasionally the little nursery storms came to his ears, he would settle disputes in strange, amusing ways, turning a scolding into a game. There was the famous time when Daphne pulled Angela’s hair and trod on her face, Angela replying with her peculiar death-grip like a bear’s hug. The joint shrieks of rage reaching Gerald in the drawing-room, he had them brought downstairs, and, dressing up as a judge, staged a court of law with the children as prisoners at the bar and witnesses in one. It lasted until past bedtime, and, when the nurse came to fetch them, the original quarrel had been long forgotten.

These sweet stories are enjoyable fluff – but there is a definite poignancy as she writes about her father when she is a bit older. A tell-all memoir wouldn’t reach the same level of emotion as this:

There is, alas, a world of difference between the girl of eighteen and the man of fifty, especially when they are father and daughter. The one is resentful of the other. The girl mocks at experience and detests the voice of authority; the man yearns for companionship and does not know how to attain it. They stand side by side, with the barrier of years between them, and both are too shy to break it down; both are too diffident, too self-conscious. They chant about superficialities, and avoid each other’s eyes, while all the time they are aware that the moments are passing, and the years will not bring them nearer to one another. Gerald was hungry for companionship; he longed for Angela and Daphne to tell him everything, to discuss their friends, to solve their problems, to share their troubles; but the very quality of his emotion made them shy/ They could not admit him into their confidence, and they drew back like snails into their shells.

It was not only Gerald’s tragedy. It is the tragedy of every father and every daughter since the world began.

What really sets the book apart, alongside Daphne du Maurier’s unique perspective, is her exceptional writing. That’s one of many things that make it feel more like novel than biography. From an objective biographer, these sorts of passages might be struck out as purple prose – in the world that Daphne du Maurier has created for us to enter, they are beautiful:

Gerald belonged to Wyndham’s; he was as much a part of it as the boards, the curtain, the heavy swing door, the row of stalls shrouded in their white and grimy covers, the cat in the dress circle, the backcloth and the false movable walls that were not walls, the dust in the passages, the intimate, indescribable, musty, fusty smell that was the back of the stage and the dressing-rooms and the front of the house in one.

Much of his personality is embedded in those walls. His laughter is still in the passage, his footstep on the stairs, and his voice calling for Tommy Lovell when the curtain falls. For all their passing away and the coming of other sounds – new voices, new laughter, other men and other memories – something of himself remains for ever amidst the dust and silence of that theatre; a breath, a whisper, the echo of a song.

I don’t know if anybody else has written a biography of Gerald du Maurier. There was definitely a vogue for a while of writing enormous biographies that didn’t spare the subject, and the more invasive and unpleasant the more they were considered to be authentic. The tide, thankfully, seems to have turned a bit. Since it is impossible to entirely know a person through a book anyway, I would rather we get this subjective, overly generous, loving portrait than anything more callous. Gerald is a wonderful book by a sublime storyteller.

 

 

British Library Women Writers 13: A Pin To See The Peepshow by F. Tennyson Jesse

StuckinaBook All , , , 10 Comments

I think A Pin To See The Peepshow (1934) is probably the British Library Women Writers title that was best-known before being republished. It wasn’t a household name, of course, but a lot of people have come across it for various reasons – the 1980s Virago reprint, a couple of TV adaptations, or the fact that Sarah Waters cited it as helping inspire her novel The Paying Guests.

We were really lucky to get it for the British Library Women Writers series. Or, rather, the people at the British Library who are in charge of such things are very talented – I think it was complicated to sort out the rights (since the copyright holder from the 1980s has since died). But they did it, and this much-sought-after book is once again easy to get hold of!

If you’re new to the novel, it is heavily based on the 1920s Thompson/Bywaters murder case. To quote the opening paragraphs of my afterword…

Like many novels, A Pin to See the Peepshow starts with a disclaimer: ‘Every character in this book is entirely fictitious, and no reference whatever is intended to any living person.’ The note is more disingenuous than such notes usually are, but one part is true: neither of the two main characters on whom the novel is based were any longer ‘living persons’. Edith Thompson and Frederick Bywaters had both been killed by hanging 11 years before the novel was published.

Not all the details of their lives match those of Julia and Leo. Edith had a sister, and her father outlived her, for instance, and Tennyson Jesse slightly closes the age gap between the lovers. But the gist of the case was the same: a husband was murdered by a jealous man in the throes of an adulterous affair – and a jury determined that both halves of the affair were responsible, and should be hanged. The trial was a cause célèbre that everyone was talking about and everyone had an opinion on.

It is clear that Jesse is very sympathetic to Julia/Edith. Julia is an intelligent, articulate woman who suffers from a poor background, unsympathetic family, and unpleasant husband. When she starts an affair with Leo, it feels taboo but also like an escape from the drudgery that she has been unfairly condemned to. When the murder case starts – surprisingly late in the novel, and it would feel like more of a spoiler if the novel weren’t so closely based on fact – we remain on Julia’s side. But Jesse doesn’t paint a simple black and white case. Julia may be ultimately an innocent, but she is a complex, flawed one. She’s very good on class – and the fact that Julia’s precise place in the class pecking order condemned her fate:

If only she had been higher or lower in the world! In the class above hers the idea of divorce would not have shocked, and a private income would even have allowed her and Carr to live together without divorce, and no one would have been unduly outraged. Had their walk in life been the lowest, had they been tramps or part of the floating population of the docks down London River, they could have set up in one room together, and no one thought twice about it.

I think A Pin To See The Peepshow is an astonishing work – it might not be my favourite of the titles in the series, but I think there’s a strong argument that it’s the best.

In writing my afterword, I enjoyed delving into the details of the original case more – seeing which bits Jesse chose to leave out, or amplify. Comparing Julia’s prose and Edith’s actual love letters was particularly illuminating. I found it quite complex to write the afterword while keeping reality and fiction separate, but hopefully it all made sense and it was certainly easy to choose which topic to write about. (Incidentally – the episode of ‘Tea or Books?’ that I’m proudest of is episode 34, where Rachel and I compared Jesse’s book with E.M. Delafield’s novel about the same case, Messalina of the Suburbs.)

I’m always wary of suggesting too many books for the series that have previously been reprinted, and there are three or four that were Virago Modern Classics at some point – so those ones have to really justify their place in this series. A Pin To See The Peepshow inarguably does that. I really hope that, now it is back in print, it stays there.

Others who got Stuck into this Book:

“A Pin to see the Peepshow is a memorable and sometimes chilling work which gets under the skin; and it’s also a brilliantly written and constructed novel, which is compelling reading.” – Karen, Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings

“The most remarkable thing about this book though is the sustained insight it offers into a woman’s life and way of thinking, and how convincing the portrait of Julia is.” – Hayley, Desperate Reader

The Murder of My Aunt by Richard Hull

StuckinaBook All , , , 6 Comments

The Murder of My Aunt (British Library Crime Classics): 54: Amazon.co.uk: Richard Hull: 9780712352802: BooksI had a little blogging absence because I had a nasty cold – which I presumed might be Covid, given how everyone seems to have it at the moment, but a zillion tests turned out negative. Just a normal cold! Back to normal winter life!

Anyway, if you’re anything like me then feeling under the weather means you turn to very easy reading. I didn’t have the energy for books where fine writing or depth of character were the focus. So I turned to murder mysteries.

That’s probably unfair, because murder mysteries can certainly have great writing and characters, but it felt like a safe bet for an enjoyable, pacy plot. And the first one up was The Murder of My Aunt (1934) by Richard Hull, which I think I got as a review copy from the British Library in 2018. I was picking more or less at random from my piles of yet-to-be-read British Library Crime Classics, though I do also dimly recall someone recommending this one. If that were you, many thanks.

The novel is told by Edward Powell, a grown man who lives with his Aunt Mildred on the outskirts of a tiny town in Wales. It sounds idyllic, to be honest, but Edward is not a man who appreciates the countryside – still less does he appreciate having his freedoms curtailed by his aunt’s watchful eye, and his finances falling far short of his dreams for himself. Towards the beginning of the novel, they are in a battle over whether or not he will drive into town – which involves his aunt cutting off his petrol supply, and Edward concocting a lie about how he successfully got there nonetheless.

There is something of the Ealing Comedy about this – the stakes are high, but it is all affably ridiculous enough that they don’t seem high. Early on, Edward has decided he should kill his aunt – and the reader goes along for the ride. Murder feels like it’s rather playful here.

And does the aunt deserve it? Well, here’s an example of what annoys Edward so much:

My aunt, after studying the ordnance map with great care, tells me that you have to go up just on six hundred feet, and apparently it is a good deal. I can well believe her, but these figures mean little to me. It is, however, typical of my aunt that she not only possesses many maps showing this revolting country-side in the greatest detail for miles round, but that she can apparently find some pleasure in staring at them for hours on end, ‘reading’ them as she is pleased to say, and producing from memory figures as to the height of every hillock near by.

Frankly, as someone who loathes maps and being forced to look at them, I was fully on Edward’s side at this point.

From here on, he develops various ruses for offing his aunt, and shares them in the novel – which is really a diary of his attempts. Keeping a diary of your murder attempts probably isn’t the wisest move, but we’ll forgive it. As you can tell by the plural ‘attempts’, he isn’t very good at achieving his goal. I shan’t spoil whether or not he was successful, but I will say that The Murder of My Aunt was a delight throughout. Edward reminded me a bit of Ignatius J. Reilly in A Confederacy of Dunces, in that he considers himself vastly superior to the people around him – and reveals himself, through his own self-portrait, to be rather more ridiculous than he would like.

It’s not the sort of murder mystery where you are desperate to find out whodunnit – indeed, there is no mystery at all. But it’s a great reading experience, and Hull’s dry touch is perfect.

A Pin To See The Peepshow by F Tennyson Jesse

StuckinaBook All , , 8 Comments

A Pin To See The PeepshowAs promised when I wrote about E.M. Delafield’s novel Messalina of the Suburbs, I also wanted to write a review of the other book we discussed in our recent podcast episode (check out Rachel’s review) – two novels based on the same murder. F Tennyson Jesse’s A Pin To See The Peepshow was published ten years later than Delafield’s novel – and 12 years after the murder itself – and is, in many ways, strikingly different. It’s also extremely good.

Julia Almond is the name that Jesse adopts for the Edith Thompson character (despite a peculiarly disingenuous note at outset suggesting that ‘every character in this book is entirely fictitious, and no reference whatever is intended to any living person’). She lives with her mother in a working-class area, and is poor and a little neglected. Here the similarities with Delafield’s treatment of the character end – for Julia is entirely out of place in her background.

She is very intelligent and sensitive, artistically-minded and the prize of her class. If Delafield’s character spoke like the woman behind the tea counter in Brief Encounter, Julia is every atom Celia Johnson. Throughout the whole novel, people speak of her as being extremely special and unusual; a butterfly who should not be crushed on a wheel. It’s a curious decision on Jesse’s part – it works, but it lionises the Thompson/Bywater case into something that perhaps it was not.

For the same pathway is trod in this book as in the other – in essentials, at least. Julia marries older, respectable, boring Herbert. It is partly for security, partly to get away from home (which her interfering female cousin has invaded), and partly because she has already felt the pain of love when it is dashed: Jesse invents a beau who is killed in war. But where Delafield made the husband an ogre, Herbert is much harder to dislike. Julia does not find him interesting or attractive, and makes this clear to him – not wanting to hurt him, but holding him to an agreement they made before, that they needn’t share a bed when married. Once the ring is on her finger, he thinks this was a silliness that they needn’t keep to. Both are realistic, relatively sympathetic portraits of people locked in an unhappy marriage.

Parallel with this storyline is one I found equally interesting – Julia’s rise in the shop world. The real Edith did work in a shop, and it was really captivating to see how Julia’s affinity for style and design found a home in this world. Jesse does a great job of giving all the different staff members fully-realised characters, and if Julia’s rise through the ranks is a little Cinderella-esque, then it also gives us the chance to travel with her to Paris catwalks.

And along comes Leonard. It’s not actually the first time we meet him (more on that later), but he comes back into her life: a younger, handsome, beguiling man. It isn’t long before Julia and Leonard are having an affair – and Julia has given her heart to him, writing him letters which reveal too much, and planning out a future for the two of them that cannot happen while Herbert is still married to her. Leonard is drawn brilliantly – making the reader uneasy and suspicious even while we see him through Julia’s loved-up rose-tinted glasses.

And, of course… Herbert is killed by Leonard, in a drunken rage. Like Delafield, Jesse paints an innocent portrait of Julia – innocent of murder at least. But, where Delafield finishes her novel before the story is over, Jesse takes us to prison with Julia – through the appeals and the desperation and to the final denouement – though I shan’t spoil what this is. By carrying on in this way, Jesse builds a really complex psychological portrait. Her novel isn’t quite the page-turner that Delafield’s is, but it is much more nuanced – Jesse has put far more emphasis on depiction of character, though there is still plenty of drama and sensation too. It’s rather a masterclass in how to take a real story and turn into a novel – one which must include plenty of supposition and elaboration, but with such bravado that you don’t feel you can question it without damaging a beautiful construction.

And Leonard? He first turns up as a child at school, where Julia is a slightly older child. He has a toy peepshow that she is intrigued to see (slightly ashamed, for she might be too old for that); she must give a pin in payment to look at it, because the children have started ‘a purely arbitrary rite decreed by fashion’ of collecting pins.

And at once, sixteen-year-old, worldly-wise London Julia ceased to be, and a child – an enchanted child – was looking into a fairyland.

The floor of the box was covered with cotton-wool, and a frosting of sugar sprinkled over it. Light came into the box from the red-covered window at the far end, so that a rosy glow as of sunset lay over the sparkling snow. Here and there little brightly-coloured men and women, children and animals of cardboard, conversed or walked about. A cottage, flanked by a couple of fir trees, cut from an advertisement of some pine-derivative cough cure, which Julia saw every day in the newspaper, gave an extraordinary impression of reality and of distance. This little rose-tinted snow scene was at once amazingly real and utterly unearthly. Everything was just the wrong size – a child was larger than a grown man, a duck was larger than a horse; a bird, hanging from the sky on a thread, loomed like a cloud. It was a mad world, compact of insane proportions, but lit by a strange glamour. The walls and lid of the box gave to it the sense of distance that a frame gives to a picture, sending it backwards into another space. Julia stared into the peepshow, and it was though she gazed into the depths of a complete and self-contained world, where she would go clad in snow-shoes and furs, and be able to tame savage huskies and shoot bears; a world of chill pallor, of an illimitable white sky, both only saved from a cruel rigour by the rosy all-pervading light.

Firstly – what a great paragraph. Secondly – it’s interesting that Jesse chose this image for the title of her novel. It’s a curious novel, and presumably this moment is supposed to illustrate much more. It could be lots of things – showing Julia’s rich sense of fantasy life? Her blurring of reality and illusion? Her own eventual status as a spectacle for the watching world? I’m not sure – perhaps all. It’s an element of mystery that seems to sew the novel together – into a rich, enticing, and detailed portrait of a person who (fittingly) can’t quite reflect the real Edith Thompson. Jesse, too, has overlapped fantasy and reality until you can no longer see the seams,

Voyage in the Dark by Jean Rhys #ReadingRhys

StuckinaBook All , , 12 Comments

I had enthusiastically signed my name (figuratively) for Jean Rhys Reading Week run by Eric and Jacqui, back whenever it was announced, and promptly put it to the back of my mind – and hadn’t spotted that it had started until I saw people tweeting about it. Luckily I had Voyage in the Dark (1934) on my shelf – thankfully it’s short, so I was able to read much of it on the train to London yesterday.

reading-rhys

Voyage in the Dark is one of the rare copies I have where I have omitted to write where and when I got it inside, so I have no idea when I picked it up – but I do know that I’ve been mulling over reading another Rhys novel since I read Wide Sargasso Sea when I was 18, and liked it at least to an extent (though my impressions have mostly left me now). How very many people have read Wide Sargasso Sea and nothing else by Rhys? I suspect it’s a common refrain this week.

The novel – novella? – tells the tale of Anna Morgan, who has moved from her West Indies home to England and has recently lived with a stepmother who clearly considers her more of a burden than anything else. Anna is one of those characters who combines naivety with worldly wisdom – things have not gone well for her, but she retains something of a childlike optimism about the world. Or maybe just a childlike view of the world.

Anna must fend for herself – but (though at times this involves a rather haphazard training as a manicurist and a stage performer) this chiefly means relying on men. She skirts on the edge of being no better than she ought to be, let us say, but she also falls in love with an older man – Walter – who lavishes her with attention, but is never quite trusted by the reader. Discussions about men and women and their interactions are given in the bawdy, cynical voices of Anna’s friends, or the conservative tones of her stepmother or landlady, but we seldom hear a narrator’s perspective – or even much of Anna’s own. She is fixated on Walter alone, rather than men in general – though does get immersed in this sort of conversation:

“My dear, I had to laugh,” she said. “D’you know what a man said to me the other day? It’s funny, he said, have you ever thought that a girl’s clothes cost more than the girl inside them?”

“What a swine of a man!” I said.

“Yes, that’s what I told him,” Maudie said. “‘That isn’t the way to talk,’ I said. And he said, ‘Well, it’s true, isn’t it? You can get a very nice girl for five pounds, a very nice girl indeed; you can even get a very nice girl for nothing if you know how to go about it. But you can’t get a very nice costume for her for five pounds. To say nothing of underclothes, shoes, etcetera, and so on.’ And then I had to laugh, because after all it’s true, isn’t it? People are much cheaper than things. And look here! Some dogs are more expensive than people, aren’t they? And as to some horses…”

“Oh, shut up,” I said. “You’re getting on my nerves. Let’s go back into the sitting-room; it’s cold in here.”

Voyage in the Dark seemed to me to fuse comedy and tragedy in the way of a certain sort of interwar novel. Indeed, it blends fairy tale and realism in a manner that should cause disjunct in the reading experience, but actually blends very effectively.

voyage-in-the-darkActually, the writer I was most reminded of was Barbara Comyns – who does the same matter-of-fact depiction of harsh realities almost as though they were fantasies. Rhys has a greater simplicity to her tone – and, I have to confess, much though I enjoyed reading the novel and was impressed by her handling of character, I was a bit surprised. Rhys is so often mentioned as being among the greater writers of the period, and this novel felt like a very good example of something that a lot of people were doing in the 30s, 40s, and 50s – rather than an example of unique or unusually excellent authorship.

In Eric’s excellent review, he writes a lot about the influence of the West Indies on Anna’s life and on the novel. I have to confess I saw these only in fleeting moments, and I daresay a lot of the questions of identity were lost on me – but that certainly doesn’t prevent me valuing the book, and being very glad that I’ve read more Rhys. Perhaps it is all a matter of expectation. I’m not sure I’d elevate Rhys to the highest echelons of writers, based on this novel alone, but I am certainly more likely to return to her again now that I’ve better made her acquaintance.