1962

A Cat in the Window by Derek Tangye – #1962Club

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Cat in the Window - Tangye, Derek: 9780722183960 - AbeBooksWow, there are so many 1962 Club reviews coming in! I am behind with updating the page and not even managing to read all the reviews at the moment, but will go back and explore them. And I did manage to read one more, very short, book for my own 1962 Club contributions – A Cat in the Window by Derek Tangye.

I picked this up in a brilliant bookshop in Whitehaven earlier this year – they had an awful lot of books by Derek Tangye and I foolishly only bought this one. They all seem to be about his life in Minack, Cornwall, with his wife and a series of different animals. In the previous book in the series, A Gull on the Roof, he apparently introduced Monty the cat. And A Cat in the Window takes us back to tell us about Monty in more detail.

Novels about cats are very hit-and-miss in my experience, often being too fey or leaning into a kind of kooky magical realism that isn’t my cup of tea. But non-fiction about cats, like Tangye’s, are almost always wonderful in my experience. Because they are written by people who love and know cats – who appreciate their character, their dignity, their independence. And who form loving friendships with cats, knowing that the cat isn’t slavishly desperate to please them but, rather, any affection is earned.

But Derek was not such a man at the outset, as he confesses in this book:

Dogs, then, had been entities in my life. Cats, as if they were wasps with four legs, had been there to shoo away. They did not belong in my life nor in my family’s life. All of us were united that whenever we saw a cat the most important thing to do was to see it out of sight.

But as I moved slowly out of the environment of my family, I found naturally enough people and homes who accepted cats as we accepted dogs. Cats were not vulgar as, in some mysterious way, I had been led to believe. I began to note that cats were able to bestow a subtle accolade upon their apparent owners which made these owners rapturous with delight.

One such cat-lover was Jeannie – the woman that Derek fell in love with. And she, with the cunning of all of us who adore cats, introduced a little kitten to the household – saying that living with them was his only chance of survival. Derek is reluctant. He has never known the charm of a cat. He allows the kitten only if it stays outside and in the kitchen. Certainly Monty will not be allowed upstairs.

We all know what’s going to happen don’t we?

My capitulation was complete, and within a few weeks there was no pretence that Monty was a kitchen cat. Every room in the cottage was his kingdom; and at night, if his fancy was to sleep on the bed, I would lie with legs stiff so as not to disturb him while he curled in a ball at the bottom. I endlessly wanted to play with him, and felt put in my place when he was not in the mood, stalking away from me tail in the air showing he had something more important to do, like a vigorous if temporary wash of the underparts.

Nobody has the zeal of the convert. The rest of this slim volume is about the joy of living with a cat (one cannot say ‘ownership’). He understands Monty’s character beautifully, not fabricating things that are not feline. He also understands Monty’s place in the food chain – killing rodents, but also under threat from neighbourhood foxes.

Perhaps only a cat lover would love this book, but I heartily recommend it to anybody who understands the majesty of cats and the privilege it is to share a home with one or more. I certainly felt more affected by Monty’s death (thankfully at the end of a long and happy cat life) than by most human deaths in the books I read.

Reading for club years is always enjoyable for seeing how times have changed and what’s stayed the same. Most of the 1962 choices I’ve seen mentioned (including my other two reads for this week) couldn’t be written in the same way today. But A Cat in the Window could. Cats are happily unchangeable – and the way a felinophile would write about cats hasn’t changed at all either.

The Double Heart by Lettice Cooper – #1962Club

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I didn’t manage to read a huge amount for the 1962 Club, and I seem to have specialised in authors better remembered for other books. After Lynne Reid Banks, I’ve turned my attention to Lettice Cooper and The Double Heart, a book I picked up in a little sale box outside a church in about 2005. Its moment has come!

Lettice Cooper is best remembered for The New House, once a Virago Modern Classic and now a Persephone book. She had an astonishingly long publishing career, spanning 1925 to 1994 – so while The Double Heart came 26 years after The New House, it was far from a swansong in her bibliography. But she is not a early-century writer still turning out the same books after they have ceased to be fashionable: this feels very 1960s, and even a bit startlingly modern at times.

The novel didn’t open super promisingly, in my opinion. Hervey is a failing playwright (my second failing playwright for the 1962 Club!) and meets a beautiful young woman called Bell, short for Belinda. This is their moment of encounter:

Then Jonathan moved and beyond him Hervey saw a girl, who turned round on her stool and glanced towards him. She was very young, with smooth fair hair falling round her long neck, with large, light grey eyes under heavily painted lids. She wore a close-fitting black jersey and a green tartan skirt that belled out round her stool. She was half listening to Jonathan, obviously bored. She looked full at Hervey. He felt he jolting shock of a collision. He stood still returning her stare. Her lips just parted, hardly smiling. It was as though she had lowered a gangway for him. He walked towards her across the room.

Love at first sight might happen in real life sometimes, but it’s very tedious in a novel. More tedious still is the sort of things they say to each other almost immediately. Because there is a pesky little obstacle to their era-defining romance: Bell is married with a young son. She decides that she isn’t happy in her marriage with Lucas, and starts to psychoanalyse herself in the bar.

“I still can’t partly because a person that Lucas expects me to be. I know now that I don’t want to, and so I do it badly. I’m neither one thing nor the other, and it makes me half hate Lucas, though it’s not his fault. And I don’t want to hate him, he’s not a person to hate. And then there’s Toby, my baby. I’m very fond of him, but he’s something tying me down to this life that isn’t really mine.”

It was at this point, on p.17, that I considered giving up on the novel. Nobody speaks like this outside of novels, and Bell and Hervey are tiresome, unpleasant people whose love affair I couldn’t care less about.

BUT – it turned out that Cooper was doing something much cleverer than I’d given her credit for. This sort of talk takes up the first chapter, and then the rest of the novel is really about the fall-out. How does it impact relatives and friends when two young people make a selfish decision? What are the knock-on effects?

First, of course, is Lucas. He is a slightly dull but dependable young man who is unbelieving and angry that Bell has left him in the most casual way possible. Despite the anger, he wants her to come home and quietly forget the whole thing. This all makes him sound like the staid villain of the piece, but Lucas really has out sympathy. He and Bell have had a fairly happy marriage so far, from his perspective at least, and he is ready to forgive and forget her curious blip. But he has a job and can’t look after baby Toby – and so he gets shepherded off initially to a lady in another flat (who is indignant) and next to Lucas’s mother.

Lucas’s widowed mother, Dorothy Marsden, is perhaps my favourite character. She is one of the few who could have stepped out of The New House. An eminently sensible woman, we meet her coming in from the garden with a dripping bunch of chrysanthemums to answer the telephone – couldn’t that be in any interwar middlebrow novel? She takes Lucas in with a mix of grandmotherly happiness and, as a person with her own life, a certain reluctance. We hardly get to know Lucas at all – he is a burden to outsource rather than a character on the page – but he certainly disrupts Dorothy’s life. The fall-out of Hervey and Bell’s decision even covers Dorothy’s dear friend Hatty – there are intriguing suggestions that their relationship might be more than friends, and Hatty is furious to be cast aside.

We also see Hervey’s mother – a fluttery, nervous woman who feels very overwhelmed by the situation. Then there’s Bell’s parents – an emotionless man whose main regret is marrying the beautiful young woman who fell pregnant with his baby and thus had to get an engagement ring. He resents Bell for being too like her mother (even though the pregnancy in question turned out to be a son, much more like himself than his wife.)

I’m racing through characters because there are an awful lot of people we get to know well – Lucas, Hervey and Bell also each have friends, some of whom have spouses and children to meet too. I think Cooper spread her net perhaps a little too wide, and sometimes I struggled to remember who people were or if we’d met them before. She is great at getting deep into someone’s personality, but slightly fewer people would have made this trait pay off a little better, in my opinion.

As for Hervey and Bell themselves – the lustre doesn’t last super long on their relationship, as anyone could tell. Hervey is monstrously selfish. He thinks it ‘makes sense’ for him to finish his play first rather than get a menial job, because then he will be a rich and successful playwright. But he hasn’t actually started the play yet, nor does he have any ideas for it. He lets Bell believe that her son will come and live with them, but secretly will refuse to allow this. He has, essentially, no redeeming qualities. Bell, on the other hand, is more floaty than selfish. She seems to live on another plane, where consequences of actions don’t quite exist. She means nobody any malice, but also doesn’t seem to walk with her feet on the ground. Perhaps the most touching relationship in this novel of flawed relationships is the platonic one she forms with a workman who shouts her a full English breakfast (because she has no money for meals) and they form an extraordinary friendship. It becomes the main plot of the latter section of The Double Heart, but I won’t say any more on that.

How representative of 1962 is this maelstrom of characters and storylines? It comes across when they talk about marriage:

“Your idea is what it [marriage] used to be. When our parents were young they could believe in things lasting. How can we, when it’s obvious that we shall probably all be blown up in a year or two?”

“I think the only to take that situation is to go on living as if it wasn’t going to happen. Just as a solider must behave as if he wasn’t going to be killed.”

Perhaps every generation thinks that the previous generation had more stability – and every generation thinks that theirs is more liberal in marriage. But only a handful would have had that genuine fear that they could be ‘blown up in a year or two’. I suppose that might be the sort of thing that would make someone abandon their family on a whim?

Whether or not the catalysing moment for The Double Heart is plausible, I really enjoyed what Cooper did with it. It’s an interesting way of looking at sudden romance that throws caution to the wind. Following all the people left hurt and disoriented by this caution-throwing gives opportunity for a compelling plot and a wide range of characters – and Cooper shows that she is every bit as adept at writing about 1960s society as she is at 1930s. Hopefully more of her books will be read and discovered – she’s far from a one-trick, or even a one-decade, pony.

An End To Running by Lynne Reid Banks #1962Club

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(I wrote this review before the recent shocking violence in Israel and Gaza, and that’s why it isn’t mentioned.)

One of my favourite books is Lynne Reid Banks’ The L-Shaped Room, which was also one of the first adult novels I discovered for myself. I’d loved her children’s books and it was a great step from one world of reading to another. I read the two sequels, but didn’t read all that many of her other novels for a long while – despite buying An End To Running back in 2002. (I should say – I got a bit of déjà vu reading it, but I think that’s because it has similarities to her children’s book One More River.)

This was Lynne Reid Banks’ second novel and there are elements that could remind you of her first. The male lead is a Jewish writer, for instance – but the female protagonist, Martha, is nothing like The L-Shaped Room‘s Jane. Martha is a no-nonsense, articulate, intelligent young woman looking for work as a secretary – preferably something literature-adjacent. As the novel opens, she is being interviewed for a job with Aaron Franks. She instantly dislikes him. He has a cruelty to his demeanour and a self-importance as a writer that comes across as childishly arrogant. But he is supported in this by his sister – the real power behind the throne – who believes Aaron to be a genius, and takes against Martha immediately.

Martha is offered the job, and takes it because she needs the money – and because she is undeniably intrigued by this man. She thinks the writing his sister most prizes is pretentious, meaningless waffle – but there is a novel about his father’s experience as a Jewish immigrant that seems clearer and deeper. In all honesty, Banks takes us from their initial mistrust and disdain for each other to a friendship rather quickly and slightly unconvincingly, but perhaps it is necessary for the plot.

Somewhere along the way, Aaron comes up with a ‘brilliant’ idea. Sick of his sister’s bullying and misguided views on literature, he decides to write a play entirely in the style that she likes. It is meaningless nonsense, and Banks clearly enjoys giving us excerpts from it. And it is an admirable pastiche of a certain sort of play. This is 1962, and presumably the stage of the day was suffering from an influx of playwrights trying to emulate works like Waiting for Godot (1953 in French; 1955 in English) and Harold Pinter’s (The Birthday Party was 1957; The Caretaker was 1959 etc.) Actually, two of the novels I’ve read for the 1962 Club have would-be playwrights as lead characters, so it was clearly in the air.

Meanwhile, Aaron is preoccupied with his Jewish identity. That’s a common theme of Banks’ work – and we mustn’t forget, of course, that this is only 17 years after the end of the Second World War. Characters like Aaron grew up with the most violent anti-Semitism being loud and clear across Europe. Early on, his sister rejects Martha’s suggestion that he write a play about Jewish people:

“Why not Jews? I want to understand this.” 

“Primarily because we want the play to be a success.”

“Why should Jewish characters hinder that?”

“Because it’s esoteric. It’s all right to put shaggy old East End pawnbrokers or sharp-nosed shysters or hand-spreading fat crooks into a play for laughs or a gentle tear or two. But you can’t write a serious play exploring Jewish feelings and expect anybody but Jews to understand it.”

Anti-Semitism is sadly all too present in 2023, but I hope no novelist would feel that the above dialogue was an accurate reflection of the arts today. As a sidenote, I can’t find out whether Lynne Reid Banks is Jewish or not, and it does make a difference to how I respond to her writing. She so often returns to ‘Jewishness’ as a theme, particularly people who are ashamed of being Jewish – which feels like a vulnerable thing to explore if she is Jewish, and… well, opinions vary on whether or not it’s appropriate if she isn’t Jewish.

Aaron writes his play and it is put on by a small theatre group – and, twist, it becomes a big success. Aaron at first finds this amusing – but Martha points out that his reputation as a writer is now settled. He can’t become a new novelist without this reputation. One thing leads to another, and they decide to move together to a kibbutz in Israel – a sort of communal living compound. They are able to move there under the then-rule that any Jewish person around the world could move to Israel (I believe it’s a bit more stringent now).

It was one thing not to be wanted in the place you were born in. That might not be enough to make you get out – it might only make you more stubbornly determined to dig in. But if there was a place that did want you – wanted you so badly it didn’t even ask whether you had tuberculosis or a criminal record, let alone whether you were popular in the place you came from or whether you liked yourself or whether you had the guts to stand on your own two feet – then what sort of a bloody fool would you have to be not to go there? Surely there, if anywhere, you could start again with nothing chalked up against you, even in your own mind.

Yes, it is a bit of a jump! But somehow it feels plausible in the novel. What works slightly less well is jumping to another country and another voice – because the first half has been in Martha’s first-person perspective, and the second half (such as that quote above) is from Aaron’s first-person perspective. By changing all the parameters in one fell swoop, it does feel like two very different novels.

Though Martha is not Jewish, they are accepted onto the kibbutz because they lie that they’re married. From the start, it doesn’t go well. Aaron is not built for physical labour, and finds the hours in baking heat harvesting vegetables both exhausting and mindless. He doesn’t particularly like the communal way of eating, or having other people’s children everywhere. Perhaps because he is escaping somewhere rather than being excited about the arrival, he resists everything. Even though we are in his mind, he is not a sympathetic character. It is evident that he considers himself too good for this.

Martha, meanwhile, is a better fit. She seems to have changed a lot from the first half – perhaps a convincing contrast of the way she sees herself, versus how Aaron sees her. She is more compliant, more liked. Banks lived on a kibbutz herself for a while, and she certainly conveys it very well. I can see why it’s a setting she returns to in several of her books.

I shan’t give any more of the plot – but I will say I liked An End To Running very much. Lynne Reid Banks is brilliant at enveloping you in a world and making it deeply familiar to you – bringing across both the pain and the discomfort of familiarity. My qualms about the novel are really that it is two novels, barely hinged together. If one were the sequel to the other, I think it could have worked. But as it is, the leap of perspective and setting, and the concomitant change of tone, means it’s hard to think of An End To Running as one whole.

And how representative of 1962 is this club choice? There are certain things that could only be from this period – from the vogue for a certain form of highbrow theatre to the relatively recent re-creation of Israel as an independent country. The cover does its best to seem racy, but this is a fairly minor part of the plot – it would have been shocking three decades earlier, but is pretty tame for 1962.

I’d never recommend this as the best place to start with Lynne Reid Banks, and it certainly won’t dislodge The L-Shaped Room in my affections – but I do think, beside that novel, she is not as widely read as she deserves. Perhaps her interest in Jewishness means her novels are more vulnerable to dating poorly, but she is an exceptionally good writer and I hope more people read her.

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 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…

Cassandra at the Wedding by Dorothy Baker

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The always-reliable Daunt Books have recently reprinted Cassandra at the Wedding (1962) by Dorothy Baker – and it inspired me to get my copy down off the shelf. Mine is a Virago Modern Classic that I bought in London in 2011 – not my first Baker novel, that was Young Man With a Horn, but I’d heard great things about this one. And it is, indeed, great.

I told them I could be free by the twenty-first, and that I’d come home the twenty-second. (June.) But everything went better than I expected – I had all the examinations corrected and graded and returned to the office by ten the morning of the twenty-first, and I went back to the apartment feeling so foot-loose, so restless, that I started having some second thoughts. It’s only a five-hour drive from the University to the ranch, if you move along – if you don’t stop for orange juice every fifty miles the way we used to, Judith and I, our first two years in college, or at bars, the way we did later, after e’d studied how to pass for over twenty-one at under twenty. As I say, if you move, if you push a little, you can get from Berkeley to our ranch in five hours, and the reason why we never cared to in the old days was that we had to work up to home life by degrees, steel ourselves somewhat for the three-part welcome we were in for from our grandmother and our mother and our father, who loved us fiercely in three different ways. We loved them too, six different ways, but we mostly took our time about getting home.

This is the long, winding opening paragraph – it’s Cassandra speaking. She is driving home for her twin sister’s wedding – and she hasn’t seen her twin, Judith, for nine months, after previously being constantly together. In case that “only a five-hour drive” didn’t clue you in, they’re in America. Cassandra hasn’t met her sister’s fiancee, and she hides her uncertainty and wariness behind a show of ironic bravado.

The plot of the novel is pretty slight – though there are also a few dramatic moments in among the everyday. It is all about the characters, and the way they try to understand and relate to each other. Cassandra is spiky and a little unkind, pretending not to remember Judith’s fiancee’s name and dropping in hints that she could still give up on the wedding; Judith is patient but also keen to assert her independence. Their grandmother hovers in a manner that is both conciliatory and domineering. There is always the spectre (not literally) of their dead mother – whom they always refer to only by her first name.

It’s a truly extraordinary novel. Baker is so subtle, so brilliant in both the narrative and the dialogue. Inch by inch, she unveils the characters and their similar but slightly colliding worlds. And, my goodness, she is good at twins. I was surprised to discover she was an only child, as she she perfectly understands the complex relationship of twins. How they (we) tread the path of being separate people but with identities that cannot be entirely separated – and the joy and, occasionally, the pain of establishing those dynamics in adult life. Cassandra’s fears of losing her sister, and self-destructive methods of trying to maintain their relationship, are drawn so perfectly.

Impressively, Baker is equally good at the moments of high drama. I won’t spoil what those are, but one in particular is dealt with so expertly – showing us the range of emotional responses in finely-observed style. Fine observation while maintaining pace and drama is a very admirable feat.

It’s a short book, but must be read slowly to be truly appreciated. The writing is so rich, so beautiful, and so intelligent that it feels like a reminder of what literature can achieve in exploring and depicting humanity. If that feels like a wild overstatement, I apologise – but reading it felt like a revelatory experience. Don’t be surprised if you see this one on my end of year Best Books list…

The Chinese Garden by Rosemary Manning

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Chinese GardenRemember when I went to Edinburgh last year and every review for months seemed to start with ‘this is another book I read in Edinburgh’? Well, the same thing might happen here – since I read six books during the week that I was in Ludlow. Let’s kick off with Rosemary Manning’s The Chinese Garden (1962). It’s a book I’ve had waiting on my shelves for about 15 years, I think, so it was about time.

Fans of Elizabeth Taylor’s Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont may recall a moment in it where she refers to there being two novelists called Manning (and one character always gets them confused at the library). Olivia Manning is perhaps the more famous of those – but I’m assuming Rosemary Manning was the other. I don’t think I’ve heard of her anywhere else – but The Chinese Garden is an interesting idea for a novel, even if it never quite comes together.

It’s about a girl’s schooldays – she is sixteen, intelligent, bookish, and torn between a growing loathing of the strict rules of the school she will soon be leaving – and the love and respect she holds for certain teachers, not to mention uncertainty about what will happen after she graduates. Here’s how it begins:

I was at boarding school for my sixteenth birthday, for it falls at the beginning of November. I climbed out of bed very early that morning, wrapped my dressing-gown round me and went to the window. The other members of the dormitory were still sleeping under bright red blankets. The window, as always in our spartan establishment, was wide open top and bottom, but I could hardly have been conscious of the cold air streaming in, for the room was never filled with anything else and my lungs had been breathing deeply of it all night. After four years, the code of Bampfield had fixed its iron bands around my spirit, and my innate puritanism so welcomed it that I found a deliberate pleasure in a mortifying regime of cold water, draughts, outdoor drill and bad food. Although I now look back on that regime with repugnance, I can summon up my gratitude for the trained indifference to discomfort and cold which enabled me to sit almost naked at an open, November window, and watch the sun rise.

I never quite worked out who all the different teachers were, but there are some that Rachel feels a deep, sometimes slightly confusing affection for – and some that she sees as symbolic of the restraints she is hoping to be freed from. Most significant, and the most memorable, is the headteacher – a woman who insists on being referred to as ‘Chief’, calling her all-female student body ‘boys’, and wanting her school to be run as closely as possible on the lines of Eton or the like. And then there’s the little friendship trio Rachel is in – Margaret, the mysterious and secretive friend who doesn’t seem to value Rachel’s friendship in return, and Bisto, the clingy, slightly sad friend whom Rachel will tolerate when Margaret isn’t around.

Rather confusingly, the novel starts in the first person – the first few chapters are all from the viewpoint of Rachel, looking back to her schooldays – and then shifts to the third person, still about Rachel. After that, there are occasional moves back to the first person for a few paragraphs, then back to third… maybe it’s meant to be borrowing modern techniques, or playing with free indirect discourse, or something – but it’s a bit clumsy, and doesn’t really work.

What does work is the Chinese garden itself – though it takes a long time to turn up. In proper secret garden style, it’s a garden in the grounds, boarded up and seemingly inaccessible. Though Margaret and Rachel have independently found their way into it – and the description of the garden is rather lovely. She walks about its Chinese bridges and pools with enthralled wonder, and Manning is at her best when describing these scenes. Here’s a bit:

Rachel crossed a creaking, dilapidated bridge, and went into the tiny pagoda. Bells were still hanging under the painted eaves, their copper green with age, shrill and fragile when she touched them with her hand. It was inhabited only by spiders. The floorboards were rotten, and covered with bird droppings, and the once bright paint was blistered and faded. The quiet pools, greened over with weed, never-disturbed, the dense overgrown shrubbery which hedged it from the world without, the incongruous oriental appearance of the pagoda and its bridges, created an indescribable air of secrecy and strangeness. She entered an exotic world where she breathed pure poetry. It had the symmetry of Blake’s tiger. It was the green thought in a green shade.

If you have heard of The Chinese Garden, it’s probably in the context of its being considered a lesbian classic. There is an overt moment of lesbianism late in the book, and some more implicit moments in Rachel’s thoughts about her friends and teachers – but I rather suspect that the locked Chinese garden is a metaphor for much more than initially seems.

I suppose my problem with the novel – which I certainly did enjoy, and thought was well written, so please don’t think I disliked it – was that it never quite felt developed enough. I appreciate the delicacy of metaphor, and I don’t think Manning should have been any more heavy-handed, but perhaps the novel just needed to be longer – and the garden to come a bit earlier, and be explored a bit more. A rare case where I want a novel to be longer!

 

The Pumpkin Eater – Penelope Mortimer

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Sorry to disappear suddenly – I went off to Somerset for an Easter weekend (the most dramatic moment: Sherpa getting stuck on the roof; eventually I pulled her through the bathroom window, with Our Vicar on a ladder and Our Vicar’s Wife & Colin holding a tarpaulin like a firefighters’ blanket).  Now I’m back in Oxford, and eyeing up the growing pile of books I’ve got waiting to review for you.  First up – one of those pesky Penelopes.

I had intended to read Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting, as part of my vague project to read more of my unread Persephones, but it clashed with another title on my Century of Books – so instead I picked up The Pumpkin Eater (1962) in this beautiful NYRB Classics edition.  But, oh, aren’t they always beautiful?

I thought the image on the front was simply abstract, until I realised that it was a pram full of faces – Downhill in a Pram by Susan Bower, to be precise.  And that is apt for the recurring theme of The Pumpkin Eater (and possibly my favourite thing about the book) – the number of children the unnamed narrator has.  Cleverly, Mortimer gives us a heroine who has a lot of children – but by never specifying quite how many, we get the impression that they are numbered in their dozens.  People are always shocked by how many there are; her various husbands (she’s not short of them, but at least the number is given: four) baulk at them, and only one name is vouchsafed to us: Dinah.

The novel starts with the narrator in a therapy session.  These recur throughout the novel, and are very amusing (in a dark way), mostly because of the lack of progress that is made in them.  The therapist follows the narrator around in circles, expecting her to feel something about her husbands and children – but she is steadfastly stony-faced.

“And then?” he asked coldly.

“Then?  Well, then I married the Major, but since he was going overseas we went back to live with my parents.  I had Dinah there.  Of course he was dead by then.”

“And did that upset you?”

“Yes.  Yes, I suppose it did.  Naturally.  It must have done.”

He slumped in his chair.  He seemed tired out.  I said, “Look, need we go on with this?  I find it tremendously boring, and it’s not what I’m thinking about at all.  I just don’t think about those husbands except…”

“Except when?”

“I never think about them.”
She has something of a Barbara Comyns heroine about her – that undaunted matter-of-factness – but Mortimer does reveal some of her emotional fragility as the novel progresses, and Jake the current husband is knocked from whatever pedestal her might have briefly mounted.  “One’s past grows to a point where it is longer than one’s future, and then it can become too great a burden,” as she says in the narrative, towards the end.

And then there is the enormous glass tower Jack is building for them in the middle of the countryside.  It’s a curious part of the novel, and I don’t know how we are supposed to interpret it – as Freud would? As Ibsen would in The Master Builder? Or is a tower sometimes just a tower?

But, as with many of my favourite novels, the important feature is voice.  Mortimer does this brilliantly.  We are immersed in the worldview and experience of the unnamed narrator, even without for a moment believing that she could plausibly exist in the way she is presented.  Her upsets and anxieties are certainly real, but the character is more than that – the centrepiece of a black comedy with only a toe in reality.  And, designed that way, it is a glorious novel.

A Couple of Capuchins

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Well, hasn’t it heated up? Anything above polar leaves me manically fanning myself and drinking gallons of water, so I welcome the cool evenings. My computer is also heating me up, in as much as it is slower than me in a marathon at the moment… if you’re reading this post, then the unlikely has occurred, and I have battled my way to posting it….!

I’ve had a little pile of Capuchin Classics to review for a while (click here for an interview that Emma, who runs Capuchin, did for Stuck-in-a-Book). First two out of the starting blocks are The Green Hat by Michael Arlen, and An Error of Judgement by Pamela Hansford Johnson…

The Green Hat first. I hadn’t heard of 1920s vogue novelist Michael Arlen (real name Dikran Konyoumdjian) but was swept in by the opening sentence: “What kind of hat was it?” And, more importantly, whom the wearer. In this Green Hat, Iris Storm makes her entrance – watched by the novel’s narrator – as she visits the recalcitrant Gerald March. What a simple way this novel begins, and yet what a whirl it takes one through – from simple domestic beginnings, we are whisked off over the country, through Europe, through philosophy about marriage; pondering on purity; the drama of near-death illness and the wit of the self-reflective. It’s impossible to describe succinctly the plot of The Green Hat, so I shall instead try to tempt you with its style. It’s the sort of novel we are assured that the 1920s are full of, and yet which I have never before read. It is the sort of novel which demonstrates how wrong those ‘writing experts’ are when they say never to use a metaphor where the truth will suffice; never to use five words where three will do, and preferably cut the whole chapter. Arlen luxuriates in his loquacity, and would not be ashamed to say so in words of comparable length.

There are sparks of humour, hyperbolic quips, which make you think he is of the Wodehouse school – then, twisted with a sardonic aftertaste, which brings Wilde instead to mind – and finally he will take the line into an entirely unexpected emotion or thought, which leaves you certain that this could only be described as ‘Arlen’. It is brilliant, and only occasionally wearying – like reading witty treacle.

Of course, all that warrants an example, and I can find nothing to fit – but I noted down this:

‘I said to the taxi-driver: “Hell can know no torment like the agony of an innocent in a cage,” and when he had carefully examined his tip he agreed with me.’

The characters are studies in fashionable absurdity; sincere caricatures. Arlen introduces these figures in a dramatic and unique manner – for example:

Hilary was a man who had convinced himself and everyone else that he had neither use nor time for the flibberty-gibberties of life. He collected postage-stamps and had sat as Liberal Member for an Essex constituency for fifteen years. To be a Liberal was against every one of his prejudices, but to be a Conservative was against all his convictions. He thought of democracy as a drain-pipe through which the world must crawl for its health. He did not think the health of the world would ever be good. When travelling he looked porters sternly in the face and over-tipped them. His eyes were grey and gentle, and they were suspicious of being amused. I think that Hilary treasured a belief that his eyes were cold and ironic, as also that his face was of a stern cast. His face was long, and the features somehow muddled. It was a kind face.

Some will say this is all show, and it probably is. People say true art conceals art, but the 1920s disagree – for a lavish, luxurious, and often hilarious read, but one which holds the emotional and painful experience of Iris, a character with depth behind the decadence – you can do little better than The Green Hat.

Onto An Error of Judgement. Pamela Hansford Johnson is one of those names which has been skirting around my consciousness forever, though never enough to actively seek out one of her novels. Written in 1962, An Error of Judgement is an odd mixture – on one hand it is a slanted comedy of manners, a depiction of an ailing marriage – but at the centre of the novel is a gruesome and senseless murder (described, thankfully, in a brief manner). The narrator, Victor, has a fairly average marriage to Jenny – as the novel opens, he has been to see a Harley Street doctor, Setter, and discovered that nothing is wrong with him: he imagines returning with this news – ‘I saw Jenny running toward me, her face alight with hope and fear. I saw her transformed into Maenad joy when she heard my good news, clutching at me, clawing at me, in the force of her delight nealy spilling us on the linoleum.’ In actuality:…

I put my key in the lock. Jenny came walking towards me.
“Darling,” I cried, “I’m all right! I’m all right!”
“I never thought you were anything else,” she said, replacing my constant image of her by the equally constant reality, “And what did all that cost us?”

Alongside the dynamics of this middle-class relationship, Setter is quite a grotesque character. He confesses to becoming a doctor because of his love of pain – both preventing and inflicting it. The latter temptation he scrupulously avoids, but thinks he might have found justification when a macabre murder takes place, and he believes he knows who did it.

These two strands work alongside each other, in a portrait of moral decisions and human foibles. Varying in scale, they are nonetheless compatible storylines – though perhaps neither are dealt with quite satisfactorily. I finished the novel uncertain what Pamela Hansford Johnson had been trying to achieve, or whether or not it had been achieved. Certainly a thinker, as they say.

Well, this post has taken longer than I’d have thought humanly possible, and my laptop has made every effort to prevent it… so I shall take myself to bed.