1960s

A Spirit Rises by Sylvia Townsend Warner #SylviaTownsendWarnerReadingWeek

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Helen at A Gallimaufry is hosting another Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week, and I think I’ve managed to join in every year – my bookshelves are nothing if not replete with unread STWs. I have rather failed with many of her novels, and gave up on The Flint Anchor a few weeks ago – but I tend to have much greater success with her short stories. I bought most of the available collections in a spree in 2011, and am gradually reading through them – and 1962’s A Spirit Rises is brilliant.

In her novels, Sylvia Townsend Warner travels widely through time and space. In her short stories, she tends to stick to contemporary England – and this is doubtless one of the reasons I love them so much. She doesn’t need to take us to another world; she can turn her observant eye to the world directly in front of her. And nobody is as good as Warner at the slightly unexpected twists of wording that show deep below the surface of people and their relationships with one another.

It’s always hard to write about a short story collection, so I’ll just pick out some of my favourite stories. Right up there was ‘A Dressmaker’, about an older woman who decides to stop being a dependable relative (shades of Laura Willowes!) and set up as an independent dressmaker. She is mostly doing dull, everyday outfits, but finds most fulfilment on the rare occasions when she has been asked to make evening gowns. And then quiet Mrs Benson comes – seeming quite drab, but bringing extravagant fabrics and asking them to be made into fanciful, beautiful pieces. Here is a section of it – best read slowly, enjoying every word choice Warner makes:

Five months later, she reappeared, and once more it was an evening gown she wanted. Winter had done its worst to Mrs Benson, but had not tamed her ambition. She brought billows of glistening white gauze, splashed with vermilion and rose and lemon, together with a wide ribbon of mignonette green for a sash – ‘like an azalea bed’, she remarked. Mary was about to ask if Mrs Benson was fond of gardening – many ladies were, and looked the worse for it – when Mrs Benson went on, ‘And after this, there is something else I’ve been thinking about, something quite different.’

‘A spring tailor-made, Madam?’ Mrs Benson’s daytime appearance made this a natural assumption.

‘For sad evenings.’

The word ‘sad’ had secondary meanings. It can be used for cakes that have failed to rise, for overcast weather. Mary supposed that the next dress she would make for Mrs Benson would for those dusky, clammy evenings when one almost lights a fire but instead puts on a shawl, and she was glad to think that for once Mrs Benson was facing realities. Mrs Benson was doing no such thing. The silk she brought, patterned in arabesques of brown and mulberry and a curious dead slate-blue, was fine as a moth’s underwing. Held against the light, it was almost transparent, like a film of dirty water.

‘You’ll have a slip underneath, of course, Madam. What shade were you thinking of?

But for once, Mrs Benson had not got it all planned and settled. She stared at the stuff as people stare at slowly running water, and said nothing.

Nobody but Warner could have written this. There are so many things I love in it, but ‘those dusky, clammy evenings where one almost lights a fire but instead puts on a shawl’ stands out. Just wonderful.

As another example, here’s the opening paragraph of ‘Randolph’, about a man returning to his sisters after some time away:

The date of the glossy new tear-off calendar was January 1 but from the window behind the writing-table one saw the vaguely smiling sky of a London spring. It was a room on the first floor, square, and rather too high for its floor-space. The folding-doors in the back wall were open, and gave a view of the room behind – once the back drawing-room of a Victorian mansion but now furnished as a bedroom. Both rooms were inhumanly tidy and smelled of moth-powder. Two women came in and began unwrapping the parcels they carried. 

I don’t know about you, but I’m reeled in immediately. She sets up the small world of the short story so quickly. I said earlier that Warner was describing the world in front of her – but often it is a hazy, timeless world. There are few 1960s references – and I suppose many of the stories would have appeared in the New Yorker in the previous decade. Perhaps it was writing for an audience across the ocean that meant Warner didn’t put English culture too front and centre.

When I read a later collection of stories, The Innocent and the Guilty, for Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week a couple of years ago, I found it all a bit vague and abstract. Some of the stories in A Spirit Rises go a different way – it’s the only time I’ve seen Warner use the precision of the unexpected denouement. I’m not sure those perfectly suit her writing style. Better are those like ‘A Dressmaker’ or ‘The Snow Guest’, about an escaped prisoner in a snowy countryside, which end on a stray observation. Something with far-reaching implications, but which is only a moment in a series of moments – not a turning point or a conclusion.

My favourite collection of Warner’s remains Swans on an Autumn River, though this was at least partly because I read them in a castle in Dorset. A Spirit Rises isn’t quite as meteorically wonderful as that book, but it’s not all that far off – it certainly includes the finest writing I’ve read this year, and I know will reward careful, slow, luxurious re-reading. If you’ve only encountered Warner the novelist, please don’t hesitate in exploring her extraordinary talent as a writer of short stories.

The Faces of Justice by Sybille Bedford

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You probably know about Sybille Bedford, and maybe have even read some of her novels. She had a welcome resurgence of interest in the blogosphere when Daunt republished a few of her books a while ago, and I think she is a really interesting novelist. Lots of good stuff on small moments in child/parent relationships, as well as the drama of a larger scale journey. I enjoyed A Favourite of the Gods and A Compass Error enough to buy up more books by her – and four years ago I came across The Faces of Justice (1961) in one of my favourite bookshops, The Malvern Bookshop.

She starts off with a description of a trial of someone accused of stealing 32 cheeses. We are thrown, in media res, into the court case – a mixture of legal speak and very human reactions; a clash of the amusingly mundane and, for the defendant at least, the extraordinary.

This case, or one like it – it was a very ordinary case – came on some four or five years ago. Mutatis mutandis, it could come on this year and it could come on, God willing and if this particular judge has not retired, next year and the year thereafter. I walked in on it by chance when I was first trying to learn the ways of our law courts. I have sat since through many cases of all kinds, but that one was the first criminal trial and the paragraphs above, with a few enlargements, are what I wrote of what I saw at the time. Now, I propose to go through the case – in memory as well as words in black on white – with a fine toothcomb [sic!]. For I have decided to start on a journey to the law courts of some other countries, and I was a kind of yard-stick. Before going off to see how they are doing it elsewhere, I want to put down, if I can, commit to mind and paper, the look, the sound, the ways of some daily English trials.

And that is exactly what she does. Bedford is limited by the languages she understands – which are quite a few – and she goes to Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and France to see how their courts compare with England’s. But first, she will spend about eighty pages looking at England’s courts.

Of course, these comparisons are no longer particularly useful as a comparison of legal systems. England’s justice system of sixty years ago might as well be a foreign country. All manner of laws have changed – we still had the death penalty, for instance – and I expect an awful lot of other elements have also altered. But it is absolutely fascinating nonetheless.

Bedford doesn’t take any particularly structured approach to examining the justice system. There are occasional incidental descriptions of why certain things are happening, but it is mostly a series of snapshots of court cases. Some are trivial, some are rather more devastating. All the driving offences are rattled through in moments. Similarly, the prostitution cases are rocketed through as a matter of course. The wonder of this section is Bedford’s eye for humanity and her ability to condense those observations into a few words. I learned a little about the legal system, but a lot about how people felt appearing in court. And that just by Bedford’s transcriptions – if transcriptions they are – of the usually brief appearances each defendant makes.

Off she goes to Germany. And this is probably where her stated exercise of comparison rather breaks down. If she intended to compare, presumably she’d have sat in on similar cases, and pointed out similarities and differences. What she actually does, in Germany, is document one case at length, involving the shooting of a man believed to have repeatedly flashed girls and young women in a public park. It was a warning shot gone awry, apparently.

I should be clear – I absolutely didn’t care that the purported point of The Faces of Justice changed. Bedford is just as good at taking us through a more complicated and more serious case as she was with the trivial. She never intrudes her opinion, yet the framing she gives to everything is still pretty editorial. We never lose the sense that Bedford is our guide to these worlds, and I’m grateful for it.

The sections on Austria, Switzerland, and France aren’t quite as memorable as that on Germany, but Bedford could give me a tour of my own home and I’d find it surprising and original. I shan’t go through what happens in each place, but her ability to find humanity in any arena doesn’t falter.

The Faces of Justice will tell you nothing useful about today’s justice systems, and only fairly circumstantially will you learn anything about the ’60s, but it’s no less engaging, curious and oddly delightful a book for that. In anybody else’s hands, it might have fallen apart. But, with Bedford’s pen, she pulls together all the disparate and disorganised strands into one successful whole.

Pomp and Circumstance by Noel Coward

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It seems odd to me that Noel Coward wrote something in 1960. To me, he seems hermetically sealed within the 1930s. As it happens, he lived until 1973. but it’s still quite bizarre to read a novel by Coward – I think perhaps his only novel, though the internet is proving cagey on that – in which Elizabeth II is on the throne.

Pomp and Circumstance is set in the fictional British island colony of Samolo, somewhere in the South Pacific, and the ex-part dignitaries are preparing for the arrival of Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip. Perhaps it isn’t too big a spoiler to say that the novel ends before they turn up – this is all about the preparation, which must take place in the midst of the island’s other events, secrets, and gossip.

The narrator is the bizarrely named Grizel Craigie, an official’s wife who is used to the ex-pat community of upper-class Brits who’ve grown used to living a fairly luxurious life in a fairly insignificant place. The dinner parties, social niceties, and hierarchies of England have all been exported to this island – which does, indeed, feel rather like it is living in an era two or more decades earlier. Whether this is because Coward is holding the pen or because it is an accurate portrait of this sort of community in 1960, I have no idea.

Their lives revolve around Government House, which is described in the opening lines of the novel:

There’s no use pretending that, architecturally, Government House has anything to recommend it at all because it hasn’t; it is quite agreeable inside with nice airy rooms and deep-set verandas, but outside it is unequivocally hideous. Viewed from any aspect it looks like a gargantuan mauve blanc-mange. It was built in the early nineteen hundreds after the old one had burned down and nobody knows why it should have been painted mauve in the first place or why it should always have been repainted mauve since.

Again, it might be 1960, but any Edwardian comic writer could have written that paragraph.

The novel starts with a neighbourly dispute about children, and there is something of the Provincial Lady in the way that Grizel attempts to manage her husband, her neighbours, their respective children, and somewhere in the middle of it all lies the truth of what happened. But this is just scene setting before she hears the news that Her Majesty is on her way – and news spreads like wildfire across the island. Well, again, the ex-pat community. We here surprisingly little from or about native Somoloans, and it’s about as racially insensitive as you might imagine whenever they are mentioned. Well, perhaps not quite as bad as the worst you can imagine, but certainly any 21st-century editor would put a red pen through a lot of it.

But Grizel can’t dwell on this for too long – because a different visitor is coming before the royals arrive: Eloise, the Duchess of Fowey. She has a longstanding affair with a man called Bunny, and Grizel is called upon to try and keep their affair secret by officially housing Eloise. Reluctantly, Grizel agrees.

When Eloise does come, there is all manner of fun with clandestine meetings and ‘sleepovers’, the spread of scarlet fever that puts paid to these plans, and a diabetic nurse who cheerfully tells people to force sugar into mouth, however much she protests, if she has an episode.

There are a lot of typically Cowardian elements in Pomp and Circumstance, from elaborate set pieces to immoral people being wittily frank about their immorality. Grizel is an entertaining narrator, caught between callousness and social decency, and endlessly frustrated with the admittedly frustrating people around her. But mostly Pomp and Circumstance shows how good Coward was at plays…

While there are some funny lines and situations, and the prospect of a royal arrival is a fun idea to throw the island into a frenzy, there is an awful lot of padding in the novel. It moves with glacial slowness, and often dozens of pages would pass without anything of note happening, or the same conversations happening again and again in slightly different ways. There must be some reason that this became a novel rather than a play, but it feels as though there is only a play’s worth of words at the centre of this much-longer book. The rest is rather surplus to requirements.

So, I enjoyed reading certain sections, and the opening paragraph gave me hope that it would be a silly delight. In the end, it was more of a slog to get between amusing moments. I will say that the end is a delight, with the sort of momentum I’d hoped for throughout, but it’s a long way to go for that pay-off. On the whole, I don’t think it much matters if you stick to seeing Coward on stage.

T.H. White: A Biography by Sylvia Townsend Warner

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This week is Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week, organised by Helen at A Gallimaufry – I was mulling over which collection of short stories to take off the shelf when I decided to do a bit more of a curveball. I bought Warner’s biography of T.H. White (published 1967) nine years ago, and I can’t remember whether that was before or after I read her letters with David Garnett, in which they discuss it a lot. And, indeed, White’s letters – which Garnett edited.

Much like when I read Roger Fry by Virginia Woolf, this is one of those times when I’m more interested in biographer than subject – but a very intriguing portrait emerged nonetheless.

I’ve only read one book by White – Mistress Masham’s Repose, which is sort of a long-distance sequel to Gulliver’s Travels – but I probably saw the Disney Sword in the Stone at some point and he’s one of those names that is around a lot. For most people, he is best known for his Arthurian links – but I believe he has more recently taken on fame by association with Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk, in which he features.

Hawking is one of the passions that comes out in Warner’s depiction of White. She is not a biographer who gives equal weight to all the different stages of a man’s life. She zooms straight through childhood in a handful of pages (which didn’t bother me at all; I always want to find out about an author being an author, not a child). What she draws out is White’s love of animals and particularly hawks, his writing, and his isolation.

Some years are dwelt on for so long that I began to feel trapped – 1939, for instance – whereas others flash by. We learn that White’s one real love in life was a dog called Brownie, and she is perhaps the most vivid secondary character of them all. His grief when she dies is long and painful. We also learn quite a lot about his writing processes, mostly from his own perspective. Rather wisely, Warner relies extensively on quotation. Why paraphrase what already exists? The biography becomes almost a patchwork of other people – White’s letters and diary, the letters of others, the memoirs of others. It’s hard to say, at times, whether Warner is a biographer or a collagist.

Chief among these is White’s friend and encourager David Garnett, author of Lady Into Fox and much else. It’s hard to know whether he would be considered quite so significant a figure in White’s life if he had not also been such a good friend of Warner’s, and thus able to provide her with a great deal of written material. But if the share of perspectives is a little skewed, it is none the less interesting for that.

We chart White’s shifting interests and anxieties. There is a curious attachment towards the end with a boy called Zed, about which Warner is coy and oblique. It certainly raises disconcerting questions about the suitability of their relationship, and any more recent biographer would investigate the issue more thoroughly. Warner introduces it mysteriously and leaves it mysterious.

What we see, collectively, is that White was sporadically successful and seldom content. The sentence that sums up the whole comes near the end: ‘He had been unlucky with his happinesses’.

Warner writes biography in some ways like her fiction and in some ways not. It shares the tone of her fiction in the belief that everything is marvellous, in the true sense of that word, but that nothing is especially so. But it has fewer of those sentences that crystallise everything in a suspended moment. Fewer of those sentences that jolt you slightly by their unexpected rightness. But I did write down one such, about Brownie:

There are photographs of her in his Shooting Diary for 1934 -slender, leggy, newly full-grown, with the grieving Vandyke portrait expression of her kind.

I had expected something a little more distinctive stylistically from this deeply distinctive writer. But perhaps she decided not to make herself the star of the book. Yet she cannot help sometimes writing as an exasperated friend – ‘Of course, he should have gone to see her. Rush on by new projects, he didn’t.’ – and sometimes as a fellow author giving her opinion on a work in progress.

There is enough in here to delight the reader who comes because they love Warner. There could be more, and I would have welcomed it, but then it might have cloaked the emerging of the curious, sad, impassioned, conflicted, enthusiastic, inventive, restricted T.H. White.

Told in Winter by Jon Godden

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Each Christmas, the Thomas family take it in turn to open the parcels under the tree – most of which have come from each other, or family and friends that we all know. And every year there’s a little pile of parcels to me from somebody none of the others know. And that person changes each year. It’s the LibraryThing Virago Modern Classics Secret Santa! [The group is devoted to VMCs – the Secret Santa books don’t have to be VMCs.]

This year, I was lucky enough to get Dee as my Santa, and chose a lovely selection of books. Among them was Told In Winter (1961) by Jon Godden – Rumer Godden’s sister. Since I wanted to read it in winter, and because that gorgeous cover was calling to me, I polished it off in January. I didn’t quite have the snow depicted on the cover and in the book, but it definitely felt suitably wintery.

Snow had fallen all night and the house in the woods was already cut off from the road and the village by a four-foot drift at the bottom of the lane. Snow lay along the branches of the firs that made a dark ring round the house, and the lawn was a smooth white lake.

As the sun came up behind the hills, the back door opened and closed again. One of the house’s three inhabitants was now abroad in the morning; the cold air filled her lungs and cleared the last mists of sleep from her eyes. She shook her head, as if in amazement at the white world which confronted her, and moved cautiously round the side of the house keeping close to the walls. Every few steps she paused to look suspiciously across the untouched expanse of snow into the recesses between the trees. Nothing moved. Nothing threatened.

This is the opening to the novel – and I don’t know about you, but I already felt a really strong sense of place. Not just the snow, but the stillness, the isolation, the vastness. I love a novel that can make me feel like I dived into it – and because descriptions of landscapes etc usually don’t work for me, I want the bare bones of the physical environment to be filled with how it makes the observer feel. Not many authors can do it in a way that works for me, but I felt cold and isolated as I read the opening of Told In Winter – isolated in a positive sense. With a secure centre.

And have you worked out what’s unusual about the first character we meet? We learn, after a few more paragraphs, that this is Sylvie – and she is a dog.

In this isolated house are only three characters: Jerome, a writer who has had success with plays and less success with the novels he considers his true art. Peter, who was Jerome’s batman in the war and is now a sort of housekeeper. And Sylvie, the Alsatian who lives with Peter when Jerome isn’t there, but worships Jerome.

Godden builds this house so perfectly. Focalising through a dog might sound twee or annoying, but it is not that. She never treats Sylvie like a pet or a piece of whimsy – she gives us Sylvie’s viewpoint, with honesty and accuracy, and without ever slipping into the first person. That would have made it too fey.

If their little world seems almost idyllic, then the moods in it aren’t. Peter is recalcitrant and so loyal that he can’t help pointing out his master’s errors. Jerome is frustrated and cross, and grudgingly fond of Peter. Only Sylvie is content, and she is content only when Jerome is around.

Into this world, though, stumbles Una. She has lost her car in the snow and turns up, bedraggled and desperate. Peter is sickened by the thought of her. Jerome is shocked and tries to send her away – but lets her in. They have had a relationship of sorts, and she believes herself to be in love with him. She has come to this distant place to convince him to reciprocate that love.

Into a settled household comes a great disturbance. I don’t love a big age gap in a novel, particularly of the kind where the man is always saying things like ”You silly little thing”, and the girl is weeping and flinging herself on him. It would read like a middle-aged man’s fantasy if it weren’t written by a woman. Well, it might anyway.

But if we put that aside, there is something very interesting at the heart of Told in Winter. It’s the most intriguing take on a love triangle that I’ve read. A love triangle between a man, a woman… and a dog. Sylvie is deeply, openly jealous. And Peter is constantly trying to get her to behave with dignity and restraint, as he feels too pained at watching her undisguised jealousy.

In terms of plot, this is it. Godden’s writing is so beautiful that it doesn’t need more. We see Jerome use his control over the girl and the dog, ebbing too and fro between them. We share Peter’s growing rage and unhappiness. And we know there can’t be a happy ending for this disturbed trio.

I don’t know much about dogs, so I’m guessing about how accurate Godden is – but it certainly chimed with everything I do know. It reminded me of May Sarton’s excellent The Fur Person, about a cat, in the depth of its attempt to explore the psyche of the animal – putting aside any of the romanticised versions that humans might put on top of that. Are dogs really this possessive of humans? I’m going to assume so.

Told in Winter will stay with me a long time, and makes me wonder how a writer of Godden’s calibre ever faded away.

Conversation With Max by S.N. Behrman

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Yes, I’m still working my way through #ProjectNames reviews, and am likely to do so for a while longer! Conversation With Max is a 1960 book by S.N. Behrman, and if that name sounds familiar then you might have come across Duveen, which was reprinted a few years ago and which I reviewed for Shiny New Books. That was a biography of a bizarre art dealer, and this is a memoir of a friendship with Max Beerbohm – so Behrman is nothing if not eclectic.

Beerbohm is chiefly remembered today for his satirical novel Zuleika Dobson, about a woman so beautiful that all the undergraduates in Oxford drown themselves. I’ve read a couple volumes of his essays and have many more, but I don’t think I really understood what a cultural figure Beerbohm was in the early twentieth century – or at least according to Behrman.

The structure of Conversation With Max belies the singular ‘conversation’, in that Behrman returns several times to Beerbohm’s house – to hear stories of his long writing career and his life. The former apparently started when he wrote an impassioned piece about make-up in an Oxford undergraduate magazine, which seems as unlikely a start to a writing career as any.

I have a soft spot for memoirs of writers that come from a specific and subjective angle – whether that be H.G. Wells from the perspective of his children’s governness, Walter de la Mare from someone who went to tea, or Ivy Compton-Burnett through the lens of her secretary. (Yes, those are all real examples of books I have actually read.) Behrman perhaps forges his own connection, as a fan and journalist, but there is a definite sense of sitting in Beerbohm’s home, hearing his stories, and being in the presence of a biographer who is happily overstating the importance of a single cultural figure. He is not pretending to be objective. Here’s the opening:

The hero of J.D. Salinger’s novel The Catcher in the Rye judges authors by the simple test of whether he has an impulse, after reading something, to call the author up. It seems to me that all my life I have felt like calling up Max Beerbohm. I first made Max’s acquaintance, one might say, in the Public Library on Elm Street, in Worcester, Massachusetts, when I was a boy, and I later deepened it in the Widener Library, at Harvard, so that long before the Maximilian Society was organized by his devotees on his seventieth birthday, in London, I was already a Maximilian. When, as a young man making my first visit to Italy, I looked out the window of my compartment on the Paris-Rome Express and caught a flashing sight of the station sign “RAPALLO” (the Paris-Rome Express does not stop in Rapallo unless you arrange it beforehand), I felt a quick affinity for the place because I knew that Max Beerbohm lived there. I felt like getting off, but the train was going much too fast. On subsequent trips to Rome, I always looked for the flicker of that evocative station sign. That I would one day actually get off at Rapallo for a prearranged meeting with its renowned inhabitant never remotely occurred to me. But life is seething with improbabilities, and so, in the summer of 1952, it came about.

(The book also seems to have appeared as a series of articles – the first is available online, if this opening has caught your attention.)

At the time, Beerbohm was known as much for his drawn caricatures as his writing. It’s hard to recognise the impact that individual caricatures could have, in this era where every public figure is open to ridicule or affectionate mockery at any moment of any day. I suppose, also, that the sphere of intellectual life was smaller and more insular. Whether or not you are interested in Beerbohm’s output in art and literature, there is a lot to enjoy in the way Conversation With Max presents one artist/writer’s life through nostalgia and anecdote.

And that’s what made this book special to me. Not so much the individual examples chosen, but that a book of this sort exists – affectionate, leisurely, and somehow revealing the life of a writer more intimately than the most tell-all biography. Because, by the end, we also feel like we have been invited into Beerbohm’s home, and have become his friend.

The Quest for Christa T. by Christa Wolf

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For quite a few years, I’ve spotted too late that German Literature Month was happening in November – run by Lizzy’s Literary Life. And this year I also spotted it pretty late in the day, but I didn’t have any emergency reading to finish for book group etc., so decided to see what I had on my shelves. Even better if it qualified for Project Names. So I was very pleased to dig out The Quest for Christa T by Christa Wolf, originally published in 1968 and translated into English shortly afterwards by Christopher Middleton.

It’s a short novel in which the main character is Christa T, but her life is told entirely in retrospect. Her friend is the narrator, although we don’t learn much about her – instead, she gives us a fractured portrait of Christa as she knew her [pronouns are going to be tricky in this post!].

We know from the outset that Christa died young, and we keep waiting for further hints that might explain how. And since we start in Hitler’s Germany, there is the constant threat of Nazis being the answer to that question. Especially since Christa is alarmed by the rampant nationalism she sees around her – the placards and the shouting.

But this is not what kills her. We move on into post-war Germany, as Christa meets various suitors, and tries her hand at teaching. Hers is an ordinary life in extraordinary times. An ordinary and not very ambitious life, that becomes exceptional because of Wolf’s way of writing this strange novella. It resists every norm of writing the usual Bildungsroman – it is, as the title suggests, a quest. Christa might be dead, and she cannot be physically sought, but the narrator is on a quest to compile an understanding of her – for letters, papers, and memories.

She wasn’t aware of the effect she had, I know. I’ve seen her later, walking through other towns, with the same stride, the same amazed look in her eyes. It always seemed that she’d taken it upon herself to be at home everywhere and a stranger everywhere, at home and a stranger in the same instant; and as if from time to time it dawned on her what she was paying for and with.

The writing is so unusual. Fragments of recollections are spread on the page, interspersed with guesswork and extrapolations. She is piecing together a life from what she knows and what she imagines – and the reader is always chasing a little to keep up. It’s like an impressionist painting, but where nothing quite coheres. The Quest for Christa T reminded me a lot of Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, but where that exercise in piecing together a life flows in beautiful, poetic sentences, like the coming in and going out of tides, there is no similar beauty in Wolf’s writing. It is beautiful, but in a different way – a stark, disjointed, abstract way. Each sentence is set at slightly the wrong angle to the next one. So, even when the words are profound or lovely, they don’t quite settle before we see Christa from a different vantage. We are putting together an impression of a life at one remove, with jigsaw pieces that don’t quite align.

As such, it isn’t an easy or quick read. I found I really had to concentrate as I read it. But it definitely rewards the effort. It’s not the sort of novella that I think I’ll remember in terms of the details – but I’ll certainly remember an impression of Wolf’s novel, and what it felt like to read it.

 

The Wells of St Mary’s by R.C. Sherriff

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I was a little late in the day to R.C. Sherriff, but have now read and loved all three of his novels that Persephone publish – with Greengates being my favourite, I think. And naturally it made me want to read more of his. Bello have republished a few as ebooks and POD, but I got this quirky little paperback online relatively cheaply – and, while on holiday, read The Wells of St Mary’s (1962). It’s a few decades later than the Persephone novels, but every bit as good.

Our narrator is Peter Joyce, who lives in a large house on the outskirts of a village called St Mary’s. He is a magistrate and retired colonel. The Joyces have lived there for many years, but being landed gentry doesn’t bring the same riches it once did. Joyce is rather down on his luck financially, at least compared to his family’s former wealth – he does still have a butler – and its made him a bit cautious to invite old friends to stay. But one old friend does come – Lord Colindale (whom he also calls Colin – is his name Colin Colindale??) They haven’t been in touch for a while, and when Lord Colindale arrives, Joyce sees why – Colindale was renowned for being a powerful man of politics, journalism, and public life, and now he can’t move more than a few feet without the use of crutches. His vitality has been taken by rheumatism.

Don’t stop reading, if you think a novel about rheumatism doesn’t sound very gripping! I should also mention that, very early on, Joyce says that the account he is writing is connected with a murder. We don’t know who will be murdered, and we are constantly watching out for developments in the novel, to see who the victim and perpetrator will be, and why.

While taking his friend on a short tour of the village, they come across St Mary’s Well. It is on Joyce’s land, and still manned by an old man who has worked for the family since Joyce’s grandfather’s time – if ‘worked’ is the word, since he is often drunk and very few people come to the wells. It has been used since Roman times, and there is a building around the well, but the locals wouldn’t dream of going – and the number of tourists fighting their way down the overgrown path to the well is dwindling. But it has supposedly miraculous health-restoring qualities, and Colindale decides to take a drink.

And – yes! He finds the next morning that he doesn’t need his crutches. He is miraculously cured by the water of the well!

From here, things in the village start to change. Colindale uses his public position to tell the world about the well – and the next day the roads are jammed with cars getting there. The village puts together a committee to decide how they will make the most of this potential windfall, and most of the villagers sink their savings into shares. After all these highs, obviously not all will go well… but that’s all I’m going to say. And it’s obvious from early on, because Sherriff ends an awful lot of chapters with things like ‘but that was before the worst day of our lives’ etc.

I love fantastic fiction, and the premise of this novel puts it in that category. But more than that, I love Sherriff’s writing. In all of his novels, he is so, so good at unshowy writing that just drags you in and keeps you captivated, while being constantly gentle and character-led. It’s a real gift, and the sort of talent that doesn’t come around all that often. Whatever his genre or his idea, he gets us right in the midst of the community – he can sell any premise without the reader blinking an eye, and there is as much nuanced humanity in his sci-fi post-apocalypse as in the tale of a retired couple buying a house as there is in this novel about a miraculous well.

I was a bit worried that there wouldn’t be enough fiction on my end-of-year list, but this would be a worthy addition. And now I need to track down the rest of his novels, evidently…

The Romance of Dr Dinah by Mary Essex (25 Books in 25 Days: #23)

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I stumbled across Mary Essex’s books in a charity shop a long time ago, and started with the delightful and funny Tea Is So Intoxicating. I’ve read a few since then, and the final one waiting on my shelves was 1967’s The Romance of Dr Dinah. With the cover you see, the title, and being published by the Romance Book Club, I was a bit wary that it might not be quite as up my street…

Mary Essex was one of the pen-names used by Ursula Bloom, who wrote a staggeringly high number of books. Over 500, I believe, which is some sort of record. And this one turned out to be rather enjoyable – though definitely her with a different persona than some of her other novels.

Apparently one of the genres she wrote in was medical romance. One of her many pen-names specialised in this, while this authoritative site tells me that the later Essex novels also fell into this sphere. Taking a look at some of the titles she wrote as Essex, we can see a theme: The Love Story of Dr Duke, Doctor on Call, Date With a Doctor, Nurse from Killarney, The Hard-Hearted Doctor, A Strange Patient for Sister Smith, Doctor and Lover etc. etc.

Before you get visions of fluffy Mills and Boon, The Romance of Dr Dinah isn’t quite like that. Indeed, the book is much more about her career than her love life. Dinah is the daughter of a doctor who doesn’t think much of her prospects. Keen to prove him wrong, she becomes a medical student – which is where she meets and falls in love with another medical student, Mark. But when he lets her take the blame for a potentially fatal mistake (and also gets grumpy even when she does), she starts to see him in a new light. At which point she heads off to cover for a rural doctor who is having an operation.

There is a romantic element to the novel – or, more accurately, a relationship one. But it is never gushing, and she is pretty clear-eyed about the flawed Mark. I found it much more interesting as a novel looking at the way female doctors were perceived in the 1950s (when this is set), and there are also an interesting section on plastic surgery – it’s not all stuck in a Lark Rise to Candleford world, by any means.

But the main difference between The Romance of Dr Dinah and the Mary Essex novels I’ve enjoyed most is that this one isn’t funny. It’s not trying to be funny, but the dry wit of the other books was sadly missing. At the same time, the writing is good, and would fit perfectly well alongside other middlebrow novels of the period.

Right, four Ursula Bloom names to go – only 496 to go!

Sergeant Cluff Stands Firm by Gil North (25 Books in 25 Days: #18)

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I tend to buy British Library Crime Classics whenever I come across them, and have been lucky enough to have quite a few as review copies – but it seems like I don’t get around to actually reading them as much as I’d like. So I went for the shortest one I own with a name in the title, for a meeting of projects – step forward Sergeant Cluff Stands Firm (1960) by Gil North. It was the first in a long series of crime novels with Sergeant Cluff at the helm.

I will say ‘crime’ rather than ‘detective fiction’, because North seems to be more interested in the psychology of the investigating sergeant, the victim, and the probable murder than with a twisty, turny novel. I prefer the twists, but I was willing to get on board – and I liked that Sergeant Cluff is a mainstay of his little village. When he begins to explore the death of Amy Snowden, we’re quickly aware that Cluff knew her, her recent (much younger) husband, her neighbour. He knows everyone, and they all know him – and his father before him – because this is rural England in the 1960s. It’s something that other members of the force can’t quite appreciate properly.

I did like Cluff and his humanness – his pity for the ill-treated, and his quiet thirst for justice. What I liked rather less is how misogynistic this novel is. At first I thought maybe it was just some characters who were misogynistic (why, for instance, is everyone transfixed with the idea of a woman marrying a younger man?) – but it saturated the novel. I am not exaggerating when I say that no woman is ever introduced without her breasts being described. This includes the dead woman. Seriously, there was one character whose breasts were mentioned every time she was mentioned. It felt like satire.

So, this wasn’t a massive success for me. If it had had a brilliant detective plot, I might have been able to latch onto that and set aside other elements of the novel – but since North was going for the higher ground, as it were, that option isn’t left to me. So… I guess I enjoyed some elements of it, but it left a nasty taste in my mouth? I’d definitely read another Sergeant Cluff novel, because I liked him – but I hope that the author has grown up a bit in the interim.