1937

I Would Be Private by Rose Macaulay – #1937Club

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For a long time, I tended to see Rose Macaulay only mentioned in relation to her final novel, The Towers of Trebizond. That shifted a bit when Vintage brought back some of her novels, and other publishers (including the British Library Women Writers) have reprinted some of the more obscure ones. But, my gosh, Macaulay was prolific. I’ve read a couple of biographies of her and 12 of her books, and I still keep coming across titles I’d forgotten existed. I don’t remember anyone ever talking about I Would Be Private, but apparently I bought it ten years – and the 1937 Club has got it down from my shelves.

You could guess for hours and not come up with the premise of the novel. It’s… an ordinary couple having quintuplets, and being so beset by the press and the public that they move to a Caribbean island. Sure, Rose, why not?

Ronald is an honest, kind policeman and his wife, Win, is about to have a baby. In these days before ultrasounds and the like, they don’t know how many – but suspect it may be twins. As it happens… she has five. Ronald, standing safely outside the bedroom where this is happening, in the manner of a 1930s husband, is perturbed. His emotional mother-in-law is on hand to reassure…

Mrs Grig was wiping her streaming eyes.

“Don’t you get fussed, son. That’s the lot now. Doctor says so.”

Ronald, who thought he should have said so at least three babies back, felt suspicious.

The central conceit of the novel is perhaps rather flawed. Yes, people sometimes have five babies at once. It would probably make the local news and then be quietly forgotten. In Macaulay’s world – and in the words of the doctor – ‘My dear fellow, you can’t keep quintuplets private. It’s a public event.’

It does require some suspension of disbelief that they would be beset by paparazzi outside their house, quoted at length (in fabricated quotes) by the press, and used as the testimonies for advertising anything from baby food to furniture polish. I don’t mind suspending some disbelief, but so much of the motivation in I Would Be Private rests on this rather unlikely scenario, and it rather weakens the narrative.

The new father doesn’t feel very attached to his offspring. He and his wife debate sending at least three of them off for adoption, and it doesn’t seem to be a decision with any emotional ramifications. Macaulay often writes on the edge of satire, but I Would Be Private dances a little uneasily between emotionless satire and real human behaviour. But she is at her best (for me, at least) when she is using the narrative voice to undermine her characters. I love the word ‘observed’ here, for instance, as the babies are addressed:

“Cheepy cheep,” Mrs Grig observed. “Five ickle dicky-birds all in a row. Was they, then, was they, yum yum yum.”

“Wee wee wee,” the nurse added.

The main pair are rather lovely creations. Despite his unfatherliness (at least at first), Ronald is a simple and upstanding young man, and his wife is kind and slightly overwhelmed by her mother and sister. She’s also, mostly, exhausted. Her mother, Mrs Grig, is obsessed with the quintuplets but doesn’t let her cherishing of them stand in the way of potentials to make money. Win’s sister, meanwhile, is even more after cash – and has the rather brilliant profession of getting payments by finding companies who are breaking Sunday working laws. Only Macaulay would put in a character like that.

Anyway, after seeing no future in which they can be private, Ronald and Win set off with their offspring to a Caribbean island… and part two of the novel begins, with a whole heap of new characters.

We don’t see all that much of the island’s inhabitants, but there is a British immigrant community there – a minister and his two adult daughters, and various fairly interchangeable highbrow artists and writers. Macaulay has a lot of fun at their expense – e.g. John the painter:

John was not sure how good his technique was, but his subjects – or rather his objects – he thought superb, and his particular school of art put the choice of objects and their arrangement definitely above the mere technique of brushwork.

There’s a very funny scene where John is trying to make a seaside scene as abstract as possible, and one of the vicar’s daughters insists on trying to translate it literally. Later there’s another very-Macaulay conversation between Francis, a writer, and Ronald, who tolerates this community without feeling any affinity with it:

“Good writers and bad may sell well; bad writers and good may sell badly. People will sometimes tell you that a bad literary style and a lack of any quality but sentimental ardour will make a best-seller. That’s just second-hand middlebrow cant. Don’t believe them.”

“No one,” said Ronald, “has ever told me that.”

“It’s no truer than that literary merit will either sell a book, or make it unpopular. Or that publishers’ advertising, or reviewers’ puffing, will necessarily sell it. It’s all a fluke, a fortune, a gift of the capricious gods, and no one knows on what it depends.”

Ronald and Win are still prominent, and discovering that even a Caribbean island isn’t really a place for privacy – but there are probably too many characters and plotlines introduced in this half. It’s all a bit dizzying, and it’s not clear where the heart of the novel is, or even if it’s meant to have one.

There is a lot to enjoy, nonetheless, for people (like me) who love Macaulay’s very distinctive style. Who but Macaulay could write the sentence ‘Dorothea took the path up the hill to the lunatic asylum, to see if Lindy was there, annoying, as usual, the young men’? And who but Macaulay would use the words technorrea, pleontecny, and tertologise – none of which seem to exist, at least according to a Google search.

And then there’s the title! It’s taken from this epigraph, allegedly from Roger Rampole’s Cheaping, though I can find no evidence of what that is, or if it even exists. Macaulay made up the quote that ‘The World My Wilderness’ comes from, so she may well have made this up too:

Press me not, throng me not, by your leave I would be private. Jupiter Ammon is a man not then free? What a pox, may he not choose his road, is he to be bethronged, beset, commanded, as he were a beast in a drover’s herd, or a zany in a fairman’s show? Stand back, you knaves, you buzzing flapdragons, give me leave to be private, by Cock’s death I’ll walk free or I’ll walk not at all.

The only place I can find this online is from a mention in the Houses of Parliament, when The Lord Bishop of Hereford quoted it in 1973, saying that Macaulay had, in turn, quoted it. With amusing delicacy, he admitted ‘by Cock’s death’.

Would I recommend I Would Be Private? Honestly, I think it should be a long way down the list of Macaulay novels you seek out. Something I haven’t mentioned yet, but should, is that it is rigorously racist throughout – which obviously makes it harder to read or enjoy. It’s also a premise that doesn’t really work – or, to work, needed to be played with a bit more surrealism, perhaps. There are too many characters introduced too late in the book, and too little momentum. It’s a shame, because a lot of the writing (particularly at the beginning) is really ironically funny, and the main two characters are delightful. It was a quick read, but not a book that I’d say anybody needs to go to major lengths to find.

EDIT: see the comments for a real set of quintuplets in the 1930s, whose experience may make this novel less far-fetched than I’d imagined! And maybe was the model for Macaulay’s novel.

Theatre by W. Somerset Maugham – #1937Club

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My first stop for the 1937 Club is Theatre by W. Somerset Maugham. I bought my copy in 2011, drawn (as ever) to any novel about the theatre. And what could be more about the theatre than a novel which is boldly given that one-word title? Incidentally, it was a title that was jettisoned for the 2004 movie adaptation, called Being Julia.

The adaptation’s title is a clue to the star of the novel: Julia Lambert. She is also a star of the stage, beloved by everyone from starry-eyed servants to the great and the good of London society. It is an era where film stars have begun to take ascendancy, but her dabbling in that arena has proved unsatisfactory and quickly forgotten – instead, she retains her dominance of London theatrical scene. And W. Somerset Maugham makes clear it is deserved. Julia is attractive (though not as attractive as her matinee idol husband, Michael), but more than that she is magnetic. She is extremely talented, loved as much by critics as by the public. She is also that most difficult of things for a female actress: middle-aged.

In the opening scene, Julia and Michael meet a young man called Tom Fennell. He is an articled clerk, working on audits for Michael’s accounts – and the encounter shows him to be a little bashful, a little in awe of the celebrities he is meeting.

“Poor lamb,” she thought. “I suppose this is the most wonderful moment in his whole life. What fun it’ll be for him when he tells his people. I expect he’ll be a blasted little hero in his office.”

Julia talked very differently to herself and to other people: when she talked to herself her language was racy. It was really rather wonderful, when you came to think of it, that just to have lunch with her for three quarters of an hour, perhaps, could make a man quite important in his own scrubby little circle.

Julia is, as you can see, a snob. But she is not merely a snob about class – she is a snob about significance. She is deeply conscious about her own fame and importance, and years of success have taught her to have a kindly benevolence to people who aren’t as successful as she is. It should be a deeply unappealing trait, but Maugham somehow makes her sympathetic throughout. Perhaps it is because she is no longer in her heyday. The fragility of her period of power makes her confidence in it feel a little sad, rather than unkind.

After this set up scene, Maugham takes us back to Julia and Michael meeting as young actors in a theatre company. He is very good at the different types of actor you will find in a theatre, and the varying types of performance that are needed of them. Michael is beautiful but not especially talented, and there’s certainly a place for that sort of actor, then as now.

He was well suited to drawing-room comedy. His light voice gave a peculiar effect to a flippant line, and though he never managed to make love convincingly he could carry off a chaffing love sane, making a proposal as if it were rather a joke, or a declaration as though he were laughing at himself, in a manner that the audience found engaging. He never attempted to play anyone but himself. He specialized in men about town, gentlemanly gamblers, guardsmen and young scamps with a good side to them. 

Maugham goes steadily through their courtship, the interruption of Michel experimenting (without success) in America and the bigger interruption of the First World War. They decide to set up in theatre management, with Michael as manager and occasional actor and Julia as the star. I found all this section of the novel a little tedious. I’m never a fan of an author starting with a significant scene and then labouring through a whole lot of ‘and here’s how we got here’. It always diffuses the narrative tension, and I found that Theatre lost a lot of momentum as we went through the years of Julia and Michael’s relationship. It was well written and quite interesting, but didn’t pull the novel forward.

The main thing to know, though, is that – by the time of the novel’s first ‘present day’ scene – Julia is no longer in love with Michael. She has no intention of disrupting their marriage, and is quite fond of him and admires him, but the passion has gone. From her side, at least.

Julia was surprised to discover in herself a strange feeling of pity for him because she no longer loved him. She was a kindly woman, and he realized that it would be a bitter blow to his pride if he ever had an inkling how little he meant to her. She continued to flatter him. She noticed that for long now he had come to listen complacently to her praise of his exquisite nose and beautiful eyes. She got a little private amusement by seeing how much he could swallow. She laid it on with a trowel. But now she looked more often at his straight thin-lipped mouth. It grew meaner as he grew older, and by the time he was an old man it would be no more than a cold hard line.

I’m putting in lots of quotes, but I also wanted to share this very contemporary-feeling section about Michael’s good looks. He has built his career on being handsome, and is desperate to preserve it. In an era before plastic surgery, airbrushing and the like, he has a regime that is nevertheless still recognisable. I thought it was quite novel that Maugham gives this vanity to the man, rather than the woman – and that it is an understandable vanity, since his continuing career depends on it.

Nor was he only vain of his business acumen; with advancing years he had become outrageously vain of his person. As a youth he had taken his beauty for granted; now he began to pay more attention to it and spared no pains to keep what was left of it. It became an obsession. He devoted anxious care to his figure. He never ate a fattening thing and never forgot his exercises. He consulted hair specialists when he thought his hair was thinning, and Julia was convinced that had it been possible to get the operation done secretly he would have had his face lifted. He had got into the way of sitting with his chin slightly thrust out so that the wrinkles in his neck should not show and he held himself with an arched back to keep his belly from sagging. He could not pass a mirror without looking into it. He hankered for compliments and beamed with delight when he had managed to extract one.

Theatre picked up a lot more when the main plot of the novel takes off. Julia embarks on an affair with Tom, the auditor who is visiting them in the first scene. It starts when he is something of a fanboy. He sends her flowers after a performance, and invites her to go for a cup of tea. In some ways, it has much in common with the dozens of invitations sent to her by starstruck young men and women – which Julia has always accepted as a touching recognition of her celebrity, but never considered taking up. Even on this occasion, she thinks to herself that it is an absurdly naïve request. But… she goes. And Tom shows himself to have more wherewithal than Julia had imagined. Suddenly, slightly to the surprise of both of them, they sleep together. And they keep sleeping together. 

Julia maintains her aura of superiority with Tom – or at least her appearance of having her act together. But she is overwhelmed by the emotions of it all – and here we see her with the only person she is mostly honest with, her maid Evie:

She had been as excited all the evening as a girl going to her first ball. She could not help thinking how absurd she was. But when she had taken off her theatrical make-up and made up again for supper she could not satisfy herself. She put blue on her eyelids and took it off again, she rouged her cheeks, rubbed them clean and tried another colour.

“What are you trying to do?” said Evie.

“I’m trying to look twenty, you fool.”

“If you try much longer you’ll look your age.”

I was surprised by how casually open some of the descriptions of sex were. Maugham doesn’t get into the nitty-gritty, but he also writes things like this:

For Julia was shrewd, and she knew very well that Tom was not in love with her. To have an affair with her flattered his vanity. He was a highly-sexed young man and enjoyed sexual exercise. From hints, from stories that she had dragged out of him, she discovered that since he was seventeen he had had a great many women. He loved the act rather than the person. He looked upon it as the greatest lark in the world.

Theatre isn’t simply some romantic tale of people meeting across a class and age barrier, though. Maugham takes this premise and has fun with it, and there are certainly some scenes of Tom and Julia enjoying themselves as they deceive the people around them – but it is relatively short-lived. Instead, Julia discovers the pains of jealousy for about the first time in her life. Tom continues working for Michael but, being much closer to the age of Tom and Julia’s 17-year-old son Roger, starts spending time with him instead of Julia. There’s even talk that gets back to Julia of him taking Roger on a double-date to lose the latter’s virginity. Things become even more tangled when Tom meets a beautiful young actress who hopes for a role in Michael’s latest production.

Maugham is so good at jealousy and pride and the things people won’t say to each other. Tom is too proud to acknowledge the big wealth disparity between him and Julia; Julia is too scared about her own disappearing youth and beauty, and turns this fragility into cruelty. There are some masterful scenes that play on these emotions and vulnerabilities, and Maugham is brilliant at taking his main characters’ hubris to their logical limits.

I’m not surely we fully get under the skin of Tom, beyond his vigour, his stubbornness and the charm he can turn on and off. But this is undoubtedly Julia’s book. Maugham writes a layered, fully convincing portrait of a woman who is not particularly likeable but is extremely sympathetic – in the sense that, when she does self-defeating or cruel things, you desperately wish she’d stop, for her own sake.

I think Theatre would be a more successful book if it had been streamlined a bit – cutting down all of the backstory about Julia and Michael, for instance, which could have been a few paragraphs rather than 70 pages. But overall it is a real success of a character portrait, as well as offering a glimpse behind the curtain at the theatrical world of the 1930s.

Two Thousand Million Man-Power by Gertrude Trevelyan

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Two Thousand Million Man-Power eBook by Gertrude Trevelyan - EPUB | Rakuten Kobo United Kingdom

One of the questions asked about Gertrude Trevelyan (the artist formerly known as G.E. Trevelyan) is why she has disappeared, when her writing is so good and her early reviews were glowing. One answer, of course, is that any number of brilliant writers disappear – and that’s why we should be grateful for reprint series like Recovered Books (edited by Brad Bigelow aka Neglected Books). Another reason, with this book at least, is that Trevelyan chose one of the worst titles imaginable. Please don’t let it put you off. Two Thousand Million Man-Power (1937) is so much better than the title suggests.

It comes from a quote about machine power in the US, and essentially how it will put an awful lot of people out of work. One of the men in danger of losing work is Richard Thomas – a research chemist whose work has largely been concerned with cosmetics, face creams etc. He is definitely at the commercial end of the research scientist world, which might be thought to help him in an era of increasing capitalism. And you’d be wrong.

The other main character in Two Thousand Million Man-Power is a schoolteacher called Katherine. The early sections of the novel chart their coming together and falling for each other, against a backdrop of youthful idealism and radicalism. While both have jobs, and are thus perhaps part of the machine of capitalism, they rail against it. They have hope for changes in the future, while also still enjoying any trappings of middle-class life that do come their way. Impressively, Trevelyan makes both Robert and Katherine deeply empathetic. They may have aspects of hypocrisy from the beginning, and they may be more earnest than is usual for a lovable fictional character, but we are invited into their lives in such detailed ways that it’s impossible not to care about them.

Throughout the novel, Trevelyan uses a conceit that must have been difficult to pull off, but is rather brilliant. After some pages of scenes of daily life for Katherine and Robert, she will give a list of significant world events happening – often hinting towards a war that was still a prediction rather than a reality when the novel was published in 1937. And she will then swoop from the broad to the specific, narrowing in on a simple action of Katherine’s or Robert’s. It’s like a camera panning in suddenly. Here’s an example from early in the novel:

The Protocol is coming. France rejects the notion that there is no such thing as a German air-force: air-ports springing up: Dutch, Danish, Italian and Russian establishments produce aeroplanes for the Reich. Powder and munition factories in Russia work full time under German engineers: ten thousand aeroplane programme. In Rome a great demonstration celebrates the sixth anniversary of the birth of Fascismo. Naval manoeuvres off Magdalena Bay – “greatest concentration of naval power ever assembled in the Pacific” – show America powerless to protect the Pacific coast against an attack of enemy air-force. The Government of Great Britain is unable to accept the Protocol. Katherine, with her paper spread out on the stuffy green cloth of the parlour table behind the ferns of 26 Verbena Road, feels terribly flat and wear, and all at once she knows that the one thing in the world she wants is to tell Robert Thomas all about it.

As the book spans from 1919 to 1936, these sections must have required a lot of research – or a lot of faith in her memory. I found them very effective, written with a Woolf-like rhythm and making the emotions of the two protagonists feel equally significant with huge world events. Because, of course, they are – in the eyes of Katherine and Robert. All of us still feel our everyday lives very deeply, whatever else is going on in the world. (The introduction and the afterword to this edition, which are remarkably similar in content, both mention that John Dos Passos had recently done something similar in his USA Trilogy – I haven’t read it, so can’t comment on how original Trevelyan was being – but, to my mind, it really sets the novel apart.) (Incidentally, the afterword also mentions a ‘near-complete absence of any mention of Trevelyan’s work in any sources I could locate online’, and I’m proud to say that I was one of the few exceptions – both on this blog and in my DPhil thesis, where I wrote about her novel Appius and Virginia.)

As the novel continues, and time passes, Katherine and Robert lose some of their idealism in the face of financial realities. Or, rather, everyday practicalities have replaced any fervour they had for effecting change. Their anxieties have moved from whether they’ll be seen together, unmarried, to whether or not they’ll be able to find work. There are sections of both going looking for jobs, and the reasons they are turned down. Their household objects are ranked by what can be sold. On the other hand, when anything looks up these objects are re-bought, and Katherine starts looking for nicer homes to move to. Their whole life seems to be guided by what they can or can’t afford, and the exact slot this puts them into.

They might always have been like that, he a coward and she not really caring about anything, but they hadn’t known it. That was what the machine had done to them, shown them one another. Each had seen the other as something the machine didn’t want. And now it had caught up Kath again and tired her out, so that she couldn’t think of anything but food and rent. It didn’t make much difference whether the machine caught you up or threw you out; it came to the same in the end.

Trevelyan is brilliant at taking the reader through these all-encompassing scenarios, so we feel the stakes as keenly as Robert and Katherine. Even the ‘newspaper headline’ style reminders that much else was going on in the world can’t compete. These two lives are the most significant things on the page. And while Two Thousand Million Man-Power certainly isn’t a happy book, it also didn’t feel too miserable. It helps that the writing is beautiful and the authorly control of the narrative is absolute, but ultimately the feeling I got from the book was that happiness and unhappiness aren’t the point. The novel ends up being about survival, and what the constant drive to keep head above water can do to a couple. And yet we get to know them too intimately to feel that this novel is about some abstract point. It’s about Katherine and Robert, and how they lost their identities.

Gentleman Overboard by Herbert Clyde Lewis (Novella a Day in May #12)

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Gentleman Overboard eBook : Lewis, Herbert Clyde, Bigelow, Brad, Szirtes, George: Amazon.co.uk: Kindle StoreWhen Brad of Neglected Books started recommending titles for a new series of reprints, from Boiler House Press, I knew we would be in for something special. Few people know more about overlooked literature than Brad, and he has a wide and varying taste. So I knew I’d have to read whatever output came – and first was a slim book from 1937, Gentleman Overboard by Herbert Clyde Lewis. I ordered a copy in December and it came last month, so… be careful where you order it!

Henry Standish is onboard the Arabella, sailing home from a period spent away from home. He has left his wife and young children behind in something that isn’t called a nervous breakdown, and perhaps isn’t that extreme, but certainly some mental instability has led to him wanting to get away from everything for a while. He is a successful businessman, sensible except when it comes to worrying about appearances, kind and private. (The ‘kindness’ we are told more than we see, but let’s give him the benefit of the doubt.)

As you may have guessed from the title – early one morning, walking the deck, he slips and falls overboard.

Standish’s thoughts during these seconds were strangely enough more concerned with shame than with fear. Men of Henry Preston Standish’s class did not go around falling off ships in the middle of the ocean; it was just not done, that was all. It was a stupid, childish, unmannerly thing to do, and if there had been anybody’s pardon to beg, Standish would have begged it.

The rest of the novella concerns the hours afterwards. Much of it is spent with Standish and his thoughts as he floats in the ocean – but we also go back to the Arabella and see the actions and responses of crew and passengers (curiously few passengers, helpfully for narrative purposes).

It is an unusual and very good book. I think the thing that makes Gentleman Overboard still feel vital is how timeless the idea is. Or, rather, being stuck alone in the ocean can have very few contemporary trappings. Back on board, there are some elements that remind us we are in the 1930s – but Standish, in the expanse of water, thinks thoughts that anybody in any decade or century might have thought there.

Lewis sustains the idea the perfect length – it is a short novella, and would have felt stretched if it were any longer. His writing is good – unshowy, with neat turns of phrase – but it is his psychological acumen that makes the novella work. And the subtlety with which he delivers it.

Certainly a premise unlike anything I’ve ever read, and a worthy start to a promising series.

The Nutmeg Tree by Margery Sharp

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Gosh, I love Margery Sharp. The more I read by her, the more I think she is one of the great underrated novelists of the twentieth century.

I first read her fifteen or sixteen years ago, buying The Foolish Gentlewoman because P.G. Wodehouse mentioned it as a book he loved in a letter somewhere. It wasn’t for a good number of years that I read more by her, but I’ve yet to read a dud – with Cluny Brown and The Gipsy in the Parlour being my favourite. She does funny, she does serious, she sometimes combines them. And we can add The Nutmeg Tree (1937) to the funny shelf, though it’s not without its moments of poignancy.

I don’t really understand why she chose this title. There is a nutmeg tree but it’s not particularly dominant, and I think the title of the film is much better: Julia Misbehaves. I haven’t seen the film, but am told that it is a very loose adaptation.

Julia is misbehaving in the first scene we see her – a glorious opening, where she is in the bath, surrounded by her few possessions. How’s this for an opening line:

Julia, by marriage Mrs Packett, by courtesy Mrs Macdermot, lay in her bath singing the Marseillaise.

We can already guess a little about her character from that ‘by courtesy’. But it takes a few more lines before we realise why her bathroom is filled with a table, a clock, and other potentially valuable items: it’s because the bailiffs are in, and she’s pretty sure they won’t intrude on a lady in the bath.

Julia is a chancer, and has had to be. As we see throughout the novel, she has had to spend much of her life seeking the next source of income – and that has involved a bit of deceit, a bit of flirtation, and a crowd of friends who wouldn’t be received in polite society and, though loyal, are sometimes necessarily fleeting. As she describes herself, she is ‘the sort of woman any one talks to about anything’. Which has its ups and downs.

And, yes, the reader loves her. This one did, anyway.

She is Mrs Packett by name, but the marriage lasted rather less than a year – a war bride, her husband was killed not long after their hasty wedding. Hasty because of war, but also because of Susan: the daughter they had. Her parents-in-law are affluent and kind, if not accustomed to women like Julia, and housed both daughter-in-law and granddaughter. But ultimately Julia decided she would be better off away from them, and that Susan would be better off – financially and otherwise – being raised by her paternal grandparents.

As The Nutmeg Tree opens, she has received an unexpected letter from Susan, now on the cusp of adulthood. She wants to get married, and her grandparents don’t approve of the speed with which she and Bryan wish to wed. Can Julia come and persuade them otherwise? And, with one eye on the bailiffs, Julia decides to go. She hasn’t seen her daughter for sixteen years.

It may be that ‘someone goes on a journey’ and ‘a stranger comes to town’ are the only plots in the world, but I think Sharp is very good at putting a cuckoo in the nest – with either comic or unsettling results. In The Nutmeg Tree, there is a lot of comedy to be got from Julia trying to behave, while not being completely able to keep her true nature hidden. She is the sort of person, for instance, who accidentally joins a circus on the way. But there is always an undercurrent of poignancy here too. Julia is trying to improve herself. She is not an unkind or dishonest person. She has simply had to do what she has to do. And she’s tired.

Once she arrives, she gets tangled in all the relationships there, and a handful of others yet to emerge. It’s just wonderful. Julia is drawn so consistently and with impressive nuance for a character that could have been simply bombast and delight. If the glorious initial scene isn’t matched by a series of equally delicious set pieces, the novel becomes more thoughtful than that opening might leave one to infer – without losing the humour.

Basically, Sharp is brilliant. She should be a household name, in my opinion, and it’s rare to find an author who is so varied and so good at different things. Julia, I’ll miss you, and it was a joy.

25 Books in 25 Days: #19 The Land of Green Ginger

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When my dear friend Stilo asked if I’d read The Land of Green Ginger, I said no but thought she was talking about the Winifred Holtby novel of that name. I also haven’t read The Land of Green Ginger (1937) by Noel Langley, but it had the added distinction that I hadn’t heard of it. I’d only heard of Langley’s novel Cage Me a Peacock, and had read nothing by him – and was only about 70% sure he was a man.

Well, Stilo said she and her mum loved it, and lent me her copy – illustrated by the wonderful Edward Ardizzone. It’s a sort of sequel to Aladdin, about his son Abu Ali (who can talk from birth).

“I understand you called the Queen Mother a Button-Nosed Tortoise?” he inquired.

“That’s not quite true,” replied his SOn and Heir politely. “I only said she had a Face like One.”

“He only said you had a Face like One, Mamma,” Aladdin explained weakly.

“And what right had he to say even that?” demanded the Widow Twankey indignantly. “Even if there were such a thing as a Button-Nosed Tortoise; he hasn’t seen one!”

“True,” agreed the Son and Heir, “but I’d know him as soon as I saw him!”

“How?” the Widow Twankey challenged him.

“It’d look like you,” said the Son and Heir simply.

Fast forward a bit and as a young man, he has to go on a quest to win the love of a fair maiden. Yes, it’s a children’s book – but it’s extremely funny. I love any author who can get humour from mixing tones successfully. Playing with the expectations of register, and distorting them, is the sort of whimsical wit that I rush towards – and The Land of Green Ginger was great fun. I’m keen to see what other sorts of things Langley wrote…

Hunt the Slipper by Violet Trefusis

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Last Bank Holiday weekend, I decided to go and spend a bit of time at a National Trust property, enjoying the sunshine and reading a book or two (or three). None of the books I was reading at that juncture felt quite right – and so I scouted round my shelves until I found something that did. And I chose Hunt the Slipper (1937) by Violet Trefusis.

I’ve read a couple of other novels by Trefusis before. I loved Echo, and quite quickly read Broderie Anglaise, which I didn’t much like. Then I came to impasse and waited a few years, clearly. The cover to Hunt the Slipper was enough to persuade me – that, and the fact that it fitted one of my empty years in A Century of Books.

Trefusis’s novel is about privileged, artistic, middle-aged types – experimenting with love and with detachment. At the centre is Nigel Benson, on the cusp of 50, and living with his sister Molly. He has been something of a lothario, but is becoming a little more interested in fine furniture and architecture. Into his life – because she is the new wife of his close friend Sir Anthony Crome – walks a young woman called Caroline. She has little time for manners, airily says what she thinks, doesn’t really understand the mores of his world. And they fall awkwardly, uncertainly in love. In Paris, of course.

Trefusis has a rather assured and engaging tone – quite arch, witty, and the right level of detachment from her characters. Here’s the opening paragraph:

Molly Benson was clipping a small yew with a virtuosity, a flourish that would have put many a professional topiarist to shame. The click-click of her secateurs, monotonous, hypnotic, was sending her brother to sleep, the newspaper on his knees had slithered to the ground, and his head lolled… Molly had hoped this would happen. Poor pet! He gets so little, she thought, meaning sleep. She was glad to contribute to that little. An excellent sleeper herself, she was rather proud of his insomnia. It set him aside as a superior being. Like Nietzsche, he only obtained by violence what was given others freely.

It’s her wonderful writing style that stands out. And particularly the ways that characters observe and misunderstand each other – and how they see a whole scene, including crockery, sideboards, walls, landscapes. They each build their own interpretations of surroundings, and Trefusis convinces us that they are whole people. Often her turns of phrase and small similes are perfect – and this helps elevate the story above the traditional love triangle tropes. I rather liked this excerpt:

“Well, good-bye, my dear,” he said, with a sickly heartiness. “I shall look forward to seeing you in May. Don’t forget my address is the Grand Hotel, Florence.” 

“Good-bye, Nigel. I can never forget all you’ve done for me.” They were like guilty correspondents who imagine that so long as the end of their letters is above-board, nobody will inquire into the rest.”

I certainly preferred the sections of the novel that weren’t about love affairs. It’s something I find rather tedious to read about, and is the reason Broderie Anglaise was a misfire for me – but she is rather more clever about it in this book. We don’t get pages of people pouring their hearts out, or a narrative that expects us to weep when they weep. The characters are no less sincere, but Trefusis knows better than to expect us to buy into it completely.

Incidentally, the title is explained at one point:

He did not suspect that by one of Love’s infallible ricochets she was behaving to him as Melo had behaved to her. Her cruelty was Melo’s legacy; her indifference to him was out of revenge for Melo’s indifference to her. Love had passed from one to the other, furtive, unseizable, like the slipper in ‘Hunt the Slipper’.

I still wish I could read a Trefusis novel where she’s not writing about romantic love – because I think she’s better and more interesting on other topics – but I’ll keep reading whatever she has written. She might mostly be remembered now as a footnote in Bloomsbury love triangles, but I think she deserves more than that.

A Diet of Dame Agatha

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For the sake of updating my Century of Books, and because I have precious little else to update Stuck-in-a-Book with at the moment, here’s a rundown of the Agatha Christies I’ve been reading of late. I imagine there will be another update to come soon, but hopefully I can extend my reading range a bit soon, as I need to read Asleep in the Sun by Adolfo Bioy Casares for book group next week!

It’s difficult to write properly about detective fiction, and it’s even more difficult to write differently about lots of detective fiction, so I’ll just give you a couple of impressions per book.

The Seven Dials Mystery (1929)
Very Wodehousian beginning, and Christie does humour well.  But I never like Agatha as much when she’s doing gangs and spy rings and all that.  (I also wonder how recently she’d read The Man Who Was Thursday.)

Elephants Can Remember (1972)
I was warned off this one after I’d started, but I actually loved large chunks of it – Ariadne Oliver (a detective novelist with a famous Finnish detective) is a wonderful opportunity for Agatha Christie to talk about her own career wittily, and (having met her for my first time in Hallowe’en Party) I loved seeing her again.  But the plot was pretty flimsy.

Curtain (1975)
Poirot’s last case, written some decades earlier, it’s amusingly anachronistic at times, but has a good plot and the ever-wonderful Captain Hastings.

Mrs McGinty’s Dead (1952)
More Poirot, more Ariadne Oliver! And a good plot, although perhaps not one of the very best. Or perhaps I’m just saying that because I guessed part of the ending, and I always prefer to be fooled.

Murder in the Mews (1937)
Four novella length stories about Poirot, one of which (the longest) was very good, ‘Dead Man’s Mirror’. The others were fine, but I got the impression that Christie hadn’t considered the ideas good enough for a full-length book.

I have four more Christies out of the library, so I’ll fill you in when I’ve rushed through those… and then hopefully I’ll have broken my Reader’s Block!  Thank goodness there is an author I can turn to during those periods, where it seems inconceivable that anybody could actually finish reading a book (so many WORDS!) as otherwise I’d be going mad.

Dumb Witness – Agatha Christie

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I’ve mentioned a few times that I have spent the past couple of months immersed in Agatha Christie, being the only author who was able to circumnavigate my reader’s block – everything else I tried was abandoned after a page or two, but I could tear through a Christie in a day or two.  Thankfully (for my general reading) I’m now having more success getting past p.1 with other authors, although it’s still a bit impeded, but I did enjoy getting into Christie mode and wolfing them down.

I haven’t blogged about them, partly because Christie novels are often very similar and partly because you can’t say much without giving the game away – but in the spirit of my Reading Presently project (reading and reviewing 50 books in 2013 that were given to me as presents) I shall write about Dumb Witness, because my lovely colleague Fiona gave it to me when I left my job at OUP (which, incidentally, I am missing furiously.)  It was (is?) published in the US under the rather-better title Poirot Loses A Client.

We had quite a lot of chats about Agatha Christie over the months, but the reason Fiona picked Dumb Witness as my leaving gift wasn’t only because she knew I hadn’t read it – it was because of the dog on the cover.  We had lengthy cat vs. dog arguments (publishers, it turns out, tend to prefer dogs – librarians and book bloggers definitely fall down on the cat side) and this was Fiona’s funny way of making a point – so, of course, I used a bookmark with a cat on it.  Sherpa, in fact, painted on a bookmark by Mum.

Dumb Witness is a Poirot/Hastings novel, which is my favourite type of Christie after a Marple-takes-centre-stage novel (she is sadly sidelined in a few of her own novels).  You may recall an excerpt I posted from Lord Edgware Dies, in which the delightful relationship between Hastings and Poirot is perfectly illustrated.  More of the same in Dumb Witness – Hastings constantly makes suppositions and conclusions which Poirot bats away in frustration, never revealing quite why Hastings is wrong (other than his touching readiness to believe what he is told by almost anyone) and holding his own cards close to his chest.

I shall say very little about the plot, because (unlike most novels I read) the plot is of course crucially important in a detective novel – so I’ll just mention the premise.  Poirot wishes to follow up a letter he has received Miss Emily Arundell, asking him to investigate an accident she had – falling down the stairs, after tripping on her dog’s ball.  Her letter isn’t very coherent, but she seems to be suggesting that it may not have been an accident… Although she recovers from the minor injuries sustained in this fall, by the time Poirot receives the letter – mysteriously, two months later – she has died from a long-standing liver complaint.  Poirot decides to accept the posthumous commission into attempted murder…

As far as plot and solution go, Dumb Witness has all the satisfying twists, turns, and surprises that we all expect from a Christie novel – it certainly doesn’t disappoint on this front, and this is one especially excellent twist, albeit with a few cruder details that are not worthy of her name on the cover.  But, alongside that, I loved Poirot’s determination that attempted murder should be investigated and prosecuted, whether or not the victim was dead – Hastings, for all his gentlemanly bluster, can’t see why it is a matter of importance.  Poirot’s moral backbone is one of the reasons I find him such a fantastic character.

And the dog?  Yes, Fiona, the dog (Bob) is rather fun, and Hastings is predictably wonderful about him – although I did find the amount of words put in the mouth of Bob a little off-putting.  It reminded me of Enid Blyton’s technique of including passages along the lines of “‘”Woof’, said Timmy, as if to say ‘They’ve gone to the cove to fetch the boat’.”  There, I believe, I have spotted the major flaw with Dumb Witness – or at least, an aspect where it could be improved.  It would be a far superior novel, had it featured a cat.

The Outward Room – Millen Brand

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A long, long time ago (I can still remember) I was sent Millen Brand’s The Outward Room (1937) to review – in fact, I had asked for it – and it has taken me absurdly long to read it, and a couple months longer to get around to reviewing it.  But it is really very good indeed, and worth the wait.

The reason I asked for this NYRB edition was (apart from the fact that all NYRB editions are beautiful and belong on my bookshelf) that I remembered The Outward Room being mentioned once in a Persephone Quarterly – and it fixed in my mind.

The Outward Room starts with Harriet Demuth’s life in some sort of mental hospital, having suffered a nervous breakdown as a result of a family tragedy.  Estranged from her parents and frustrated by her doctor’s blinkered obsession with Freudian analysis, Harriet’s life has been sucked dry of anything but routine and confusion.  Her ability to articulate her personality and self have been stifled by illness and by the unsympathetic institution which came as a consequence to it.  Brand writes this section very well, but it is necessarily claustrophobic and begins to stifle the reader.

But Harriet escapes.

She makes her way to New York, pawns her brother’s ring, and lives hand-to-mouth for some time.  The Great Depression has given the city a desperate air, and she struggles to find the means of supporting herself – her first ‘job interview’ is for a single day’s work, and consists of standing in a long row with many other women, and not being pointed at.  There are some poignant scenes where Harriet first rents, and then must leave, a tiny apartment.

After about 100 pages, Harriet is sitting in a late-night cafe, unable to afford a cup of coffee, when a stranger approaches and offers to buy her the drink.  John (for this is his name) invites her back to his house for food and shelter and – desperate, and a little naive perhaps – she goes.  At this point I expected awful things to happen to her, or for John’s apparent kindness to (at least) be revealed as covering ulterior motives.  What I wasn’t prepared for was a gentle, gradual, and quite beautiful love story.  Through simple, ordinary scenes of everyday life and undramatic conversations, Harriet and John fall in love and become necessary to one another.  We see some of Harriet at work, and the friend she makes Anna; we see a neighbour or two – but the beauty of The Outward Room is the quiet unfolding of a believable, unassuming relationship.

I don’t normally just give all the plot in a series of paragraphs like that – I usually try to break it up with some of my thoughts about the author’s approach, etc. – but it seemed important to lay out the  structure of The Outward Room and the direction the novel takes before addressing the issue of style.  They are so interrelated.  At the beginning, Brand opts for quite a lot of the disjointed and fragmentary prose that is often used to represent mental disharmony or any kind of mental illness.  Personally, I find it very easy to overuse this style.  Stream of consciousness has of course often been used to portray thoughts, especially of a disturbed mind – but I think it has to be done exceptionally well (we’re talking Woolf-standards well) to work, otherwise it can simply seem sloppy.  These were the sections of The Outward Room which I found least convincing.

However, when Brand didn’t concentrate this effect into single chapters, he used a more successful variant on it – by simply omitting verbs and pronouns.  It’s a bold way to start a paragraph, giving a sense of both immediacy and uncertainty, and it think it works well within a sparser descriptive mode:

Dark, the smell of stairs.  She began to notice the stairs as she had not the day before.  She leaned and looked down the dark stairwell.  These stairs were not solid; their treads sagged, the staircase was pegged to the walls with iron rods at each landing.  The house was old.  She went down and when she came into the light of the lower open house door, she looked around her.  She saw only a bare hallway; on one side was a large metal barrel with a warped cover, on the other a table on which were several letters – evidently this was where mail was left for those in the house.  Except for this, the hall was vacant; scribbled on the plaster were a few names – “DIDOMENICO 2nd” “LICORA” —
Brand moves between this fairly straightforward narrative and a fluid, more consciously beautiful prose.  And that is the result (and the cause) of the relationship between John and Harriet.  Which comes first?  I don’t know – the gentle unfolding of their love is both mirrored and created by the gentle unfolding of touching imagery and emotional explorations.  This paragraph was picked more or less at random, but hopefully it gives you a sense of what I mean:

Breathing the air deeply, she looked down at the courtyard.  Hardly changed, a little dirtier from melted snow, the tinge of winter.  Frost had made new cracks in the cement, in the so-called paving.  Yet the evidences of winter were small only to be seen, like the signs of spring, by the heart that feels small changes.  The room too had its changes from winter, but because of her need of its permanence they too were small, only what had been absolutely necessary.

It is incredibly difficult to write about this sort of novel, because it is of the variety which can only be appreciated once one is reading them.  Perhaps that is true of any book, but it seems especially so of The Outward Room.  And that being said, it is especially impressive that Peter Cameron writes such a good afterword in the NYRB edition.  Good afterwords and introductions are hard to find, aren’t they?  One thing Cameron writes will strike home with many of us:

It’s somewhat frightening to learn that good books – even books heralded in their time – can disappear so quickly and completely.  We like to think that things of enduring quality and worth are separated from the dross and permanently enshrined, but we know that this is not true.  Beautiful things are more likely to disappear than to endure.  The Outward Room is such a beautiful thing.  
None of us are surprised when we find that wonderful, beautiful books have fallen by the wayside – we all know too many examples.  Despite having an initial print run of 140,000 copies (wow!), The Outward Room has fallen victim to this disappearing act – its peculiar qualities are those which can so easily be overlooked.  Thank you NYRB for bringing it back – the novel definitely deserves it, and I hope you give it a chance too.