1964

The Initials in the Heart by Laurence Whistler

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I can’t quite remember why I bought The Initials in the Heart (1964) by Laurence Whistler back in 2012. It might be because of his connection with his brother Rex Whistler – though I didn’t know much about him then – or it might be because my friend Carol mentioned it. Either way, it spent almost exactly a decade on my shelves before I finally took it down. I don’t really know what I was expecting, since I didn’t know anything about it, but it certainly wasn’t this.

The Initials in the Heart is Whistler’s ode to his wife, an actress called Jill Furse. They courted and wed, but the marriage only lasted five years – Jill has ill health throughout their time together, and the end is written in from the beginning. We know, from the epigraph onwards, that this is a tribute from a man who only got to be a husband for a brief span.

Grief memoirs are very common now, and I find them fascinating and compelling. Whistler writes in a different mode. It truly is a tribute to a life, without dwelling on anything after the time they had together. It is less introspective, and perhaps less cathartic, but it does mean that joy and hopefulness can be experienced as Whistler experienced it. Here’s the opening:

The best thing my poetry ever did for me was to bring about the story of this book. But that is enough to compensate in advance for the inevitable death-bed recognition of failure.

To be. a poet! Not relinquishing this hope, from the age of fifteen or so until now when I was twenty-four, I published in November 1936 a third book of verse called The Emperor Heart, and at my elder brother Rex’s suggestion sent a copy to the novelist Edith Olivier at Wilton, that well-read, vivacious, slightly eccentric person who was his closest friend, though perhaps twice his age, and who lived in the Daye House, the converted dairy at one side of the park. Staying with her when it arrived was a young actress, then twenty-one, whose career of great promise on the London stage had been interrupted by illness—paratyphoid, it was said. 

Of course, I know many details about Edith Olivier’s friendship with Laurence’s brother Rex, from Anna Thomasson’s wonderful biography of them called A Curious Friendship. Maybe it was seeing Olivier’s name on the first page that made me buy this book, and my beloved author of The Love-Child does make occasional appearances throughout Whistler’s memoir. But this isn’t her story, and she chiefly serves as the introducer of the central couple.

There is a gentleness at the heart of this memoir. It is, softly and generously, a story of young love – of building a home together, and then several other homes as they move around. It is a story of war interrupting time together; it is a story of a young actress who is feted by many but whose health often denies her the opportunities she is given. Perhaps we see Jill in an idyllic light, from her husband who adored her, but the portrait of a kind, ambitious, thwarted woman comes alive. It is a skilled portrayal of someone who combined contentedness and discontent – somehow both resigned to her limitations while continually fighting against them. The illnesses she experienced are never completely clear, even down to the exact details of the one that cost her life. But those illnesses are the bare facts of Jill’s life: more important is the voice and the person. She kept diaries and wrote letters, and Whistler incorporates many of these – giving us a firm sense of who she was. Here is a passage she wrote while pregnant with their second child:

Last night I lay watching a troubled moon through the plane leaves, very peaceful and happy. There is something about a family house, ugly though it’s been made outside. I like thinking of my ancestors back in the 17th Century lying in bed and waiting for their children to be born. And particularly in the autumn it has a shabby melancholy that’s friendly and kind – great tawny drifts of leaves swirling in the weedy drive, and idiotic geese screaming in the wind from time to time. The leaves are beautiful, mobbing one’s feet in the wind, and lying like footprints on the stones. So I’m glad you arranged this. I have all your serene confidence to lean on. It’s stronger than anything else and makes me perfectly at rest.

Since this is the story of their relationship, and of Jill, other elements of Whistler’s story are skated over. He began to make money as a glass engraver (see, for instance, the cover of the book) but this path to success is only told piecemeal. He includes a little of his war experiences, but chiefly as they mean separation from Jill. I think this approach was wise. It means the story of Laurence and Jill is not diluted.

Whistler writes beautifully, with occasional striking turns of phrase. This moment, in his initial shock of grief, really moved me: ‘I went back to my room, knowing all privation in a moment, and as yet nearly nothing about it. It was like dying, I imagine – at once too strange and familiar to explain – and it was, in a way, dying.” Throughout, his prose is sensitive and perceptive, deeply personal while remaining calm and evenly paced.

The Initials in the Heart is an unusual little book. It’s special.

The Hand of Mary Constable by Paul Gallico

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As mentioned previously, when I’ve written about Paul Gallico, he is an extremely versatile novelist. And, indeed, a prolific one. This is great – but does mean you never quite know what you’re going to get if, like me, you try not to read blurbs before you start a book. So, when I picked up The Hand of Mary Constable (1964), I didn’t have much to go on. The cover is just wording, and so my preconceptions of the book were based largely on connotations of the title – and I had assumed it was a ghost story. (I also didn’t realise that it was a sequel to Too Many Ghosts, which I own and have not read, but it turns out that the stories are pretty separate.) And I guess it sort of is, but mostly isn’t.

Here’s the opening paragraph:

The sheet of paper clutched in the hand of a backward twisting arm was being jiggled in front of the face of Alexander Hero, investigator for the Society of Psychical Research of Great Britain, and roused him from the doze into which he had fallen. The air in the B.O.A.C. jet airliner had that stale smell of narrow confines, too long occupied by human beings engaged in eating, drinking and sleeping.

I wonder quite why Gallico thought that a good name for his hero was Hero – it feels a bit like a stopgap name – but here he is. He is handsome, intelligent, and (importantly) simultaneously open to ideas of psychical research and keen to crack down on frauds. I liked that touch. Having a hardened cynic would have been less interesting than somebody who is chiefly motivated by the wish to rule out false options, to discover if psychical contact is possible.

Hero has been called over to America, from England, to investigate something – though he doesn’t know what. When he arrives, and talks to various people in the FBI, he learns that Professor Constable has been inducted into a circle of spiritualists who claim that they have contact with his deceased ten-year-old daughter. Mary Constable – for ’tis she, of the title – has apparently been speaking through the Bessmers, and has left (as proof) a wax cast of her hand. This cast even has her fingerprints on it. Is it genuine contact, or is it connected with a slightly confusing plot line about how Constable has influence over a nuclear deal with the Russians?

The Hand of Mary Constable could probably be considered a literary thriller, and there are certainly bits that pretty thrillery. There are even bits that have a James Bond seduction element to them. Those aren’t genres that I usually rush towards, but the mix of that with Gallico’s intriguingly quirky look at spiritualism made me really enjoy reading this book. He brings the sense of the darkly fantastic that made me love his novel Love of Seven Dolls, and is certainly good at creating scenarios that combine the strange and the pacy.

I shan’t spoil the ending, but it did get a little too drawn out with all explanations – the novel would have been unsatisfying without proper explanations, but I wish he’d found a subtler or more concise way to include it all – but I still think #ProjectNames is off to a good start, and I continue to find Gallico an intriguing and unusual writer.

25 Books in 25 Days: #21 The Pooh Perplex

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The Pooh Perplex (1964) by Frederick C. Crews is one of the books I’ve had longest on my shelves unread – about fifteen years – but I knew its day would come one day. And I’m rather pleased that it waited this long, because I certainly wouldn’t have understood or appreciated it as much fifteen years ago. As it is, it was a complete gem.

The book takes the form of a casebook for the children’s books of A.A. Milne – particularly, of course, Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner. Crews has crafted satires of different types of literary essay that are exquisitely done. We have the critic who diminishes all the others who’ve gone before him (from which the excerpt below). We have the Freudian, who reads dark things into honey jars. We have the essayist who only really writes to say how much better D.H. Lawrence is. There’s a Marxist, a context critic (who despises New Criticism), and the essayist who overwrites everything so confusingly that each sentence is a labyrinth. My favourite section was the one which identified Eeyore as the Christ figure of the stories.

We have, then, seen how Milne meant Winnie-the-Pooh to be read, and we can now appreciate the subtlety of technique that has beguiled three generations of fools into imagining that the book is nothing more than a group of children’s stories. Indeed, the more we ponder Pooh‘s complexity, the more we must wonder how any child could possibly enjoy these tales. Only a thorough versing in the Hierarchy of Heroism, combined with advanced training in the ironic reading of literary personae and a familiarity with multivalent symbolism, can prepare us adequately to approach the book. 

To be honest, I have no idea how much Crews’ book would appeal to someone who hasn’t read the sort of essays collected in this book – but I can vouch that, as someone who spent many years at university becoming rather familiar with all the types of essay represented in The Pooh Perplex, that it is done brilliantly, with exactly the right amount of exaggeration to show how devastating the satire is.

The Soul of Kindness by Elizabeth Taylor

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My book group recently read The Soul of Kindness (1964) by Elizabeth Taylor – I have a feeling I recommended it, although can never quite remember – and I don’t think we’ve ever had a more divided discussion. Some thought the whole thing uneventful and boring; some thought it a brilliantly subtle novel about realistic people and the way they interact. Guess which I was?

Well, if you’ve read my previous reviews of Elizabeth Taylor – you can see them all by picking her from that dropdown menu of authors over on the left, should you so wish – you’ll probably have guessed that I was in the latter camp. (As a character thinks: ‘men, she knew, are very interested in detailed descriptions of ordinary things’. Curiously unlike the usual division of men and women in stereotype – the masculine grand epic vs. the feminine domestic hearth.) The Soul of Kindness is an extraordinary novel and, just like her others, almost impossible to write well about.

The first thing I have learned with Elizabeth Taylor is that you can’t read her quickly. Well, you can – but so much is lost. Because not much happens, and it’s easy to skim through the calm conversations and quiet movements, and miss the spectrum of emotion playing under the surface, so cleverly told by Taylor.

The novel opens with a wedding. Flora isn’t paying much attention to her husband; she is feeding doves (note their influence on the beautiful cover to my 1966 Reprint Society copy):

Towards the end of the bridegroom’s speech, the bride turned aside and began to throw crumbs of wedding cake through an opening in the marquee to the doves outside. She did so with gentle absorption, and more doves came down from their wooden house above the stables. Although she had caused a little rustle of amusement among the guests, she did not know it: her husband was embarrassed by her behaviour and thought it early in their married life to be so; but she did not know that either.
That lack of self-awareness and observation is the central thread of the novel. Flora is the ‘soul of kindness’ of the title – as another character says, “To harm anyone is the last thing she’d ever have in mind.” She is a blonde beauty, doted on by her mother, surrounded by people (mother, husband, friend, housekeeper) who never dream of crossing her, and who do not see any darkness in her. For, indeed, there is no darkness in her. I thought the novel might be about a craftily vindictive woman, but Flora is just monumentally naive – with a naivety either born of selfishness, or a selfishness born of naivety. She wants to help people. She is (as Hilary notes in her fab review, linked below) not unlike Austen’s Emma – although Flora is less meddlesome. She just suggests things and engineers things, without seeming to give any great effort, and… mild disaster follows.

A marriage that shouldn’t have happened. A union between two friends that will never happen because the man is gay. The encouragement to a young man that he is a talented actor, when he is hopeless and will only meet failure on that path. Everything Flora does is well-meaning. There is a moment of crisis (I shan’t say what), but… by the end of the novel, most people haven’t changed enormously. Human nature doesn’t follow a brief and convenient narrative structure.

For that is what Taylor observes and depicts so brilliantly: truthful human behaviour. Some people at book group found the characters poorly drawn, and I do agree that we see them chiefly from the outside rather than the inside – but that is an authorial choice and (I think) a good and acceptable one. There are wonderful scenes where she draws up the difference between what people say and what they mean – and what other people think they mean. It is so (that word again) subtle, and done extremely skilfully. Perhaps the best, and certainly the most agonising, where those between Patrick and Frankie – Patrick being in love with the youthful, callous Frankie, and anxious for any possible attention from him, taking what he is thrown so gratefully.

Oh, and Mrs Secretan (Flora’s mother) is the best depiction I have seen of a hypochondriac – usually they are hysterical or selfish, but Taylor’s portrait shows the terror at the heart of the true hypochondriac, particularly the one who dreads the doctor. I speak as one who knows…

I should add that there are moments of lovely humour. I enjoyed this a lot, about Flora (and that naivety):

She sat gazing in front of her. On a table at her side was a piece of knitting which had not grown for days, and the book by Henry Miller Patrick Barlow had lent her, which she was reading with such mild surprise. (‘What does this word mean, Richard? ‘Truly? Well I suppose it had to be called something.’ How had she lived so long without knowing? he wondered.)
All in all, I thought The Soul of Kindness a brilliant example of an exceptional writer. There are, of course, different books for different moods. When I wrote about My Sister Eileen recently, I shouted my love for books that are unashamedly lovely. Well, this is not that. It’s for a different mood. But, in the right mood, you could hardly do better.



Others who got Stuck into this Book:


“What I love about this novel is how subversive it is.” – Hilary, Vulpes Libris


“I found the characters not entirely convincing and actually quite irritating.” – Karen, Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings


“The subtlety of Elizabeth Taylor’s writing is masterly.” – Ali, Heavenali

The Garrick Year – Margaret Drabble

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I’ve bought up a few old Margaret Drabble titles over the years, all in slightly trippy old Penguin editions, but I’ve never actually got around to reading one of them before.  The one I really wanted to read was The Millstone, since I’ve heard complimentary comparisons to one of my favourite books, The L-Shaped Room, but it was 1964 that needed filling on A Century of Books, so I picked my second choice – The Garrick Year.  Cup-mark and all (not my doing.)

What drew me towards The Garrick Year was its theatrical setting.  As I’ve mentioned over the years, I am fascinated by the theatre and love reading about it in fact or fiction.  One of my Five From The Archive posts even covered the topic.  So I was keen to see how Emma and her actor husband David would get on when they move to Hereford for the opening of a new theatre.  And then it all went rather wrong.  No, not the plot, but my enjoyment of the novel.  Partly this was because of my reasons for reading it – I love to hear the theatre praised or teased, but treated always with affection, and even a little reverence.  Because that’s how I feel about it, I suppose.  Emma, however, just mocks it completely.

For those who have never heard actors discuss their trade, I may say that there is nothing more painfully boring on earth.  I think it is their lack of accuracy, their frightful passion for generality that rob their discussions of interest.  They were talking, this time, about that ancient problem of whether one should, while acting, be more aware of the audience of the person or person with whom one is playing the scene: I must have heard this same argument once a fortnight over the last four years, and never has anyone got a step nearer to any kind of illumination, because instead of talking rationally they just wander round the morasses of their own personalities, producing their own weaknesses for examination as though they were interesting, objective facts about human nature.
I don’t think I realised quite how much I do revere the theatre, until I bristled at this sort of blasphemy!  And, oh, what a cow Emma is.  I know some say it shouldn’t matter how likeable a character is, but I always maintain (as others have said before me) that it does matter if the author clearly sets up a character to be likeable, and fails.  And, after all, I often like books because they have charming characters, so why shouldn’t it work the other way around?

I have to confess, I had a problem with Emma as soon as she admitted preferring London to the countryside.  But things get worse than that.  Emma is one of those miserable people who moans all the time about everything, but does nothing to change her life.  She has no paid employment, and whines about looking after their two children – which would be fair enough, if she didn’t have a full-time, live-in nanny.  Quite what she does with her day is unclear, but later she manages to fill the hours by thoughtlessly embarking on an affair with the producer of the theatre.  She appears to have no concern at all for her marriage vows, having declared earlier that the only reason she hadn’t committed adultery was that she hadn’t had the opportunity.

There isn’t much plot or narrative drive in The Garrick Year.  It’s mostly Emma’s introspective, self-pitying waffle.  Thankfully it’s at least well written, which is the only reason I persevered with what is, in fact, a slim novel.  Although Drabble isn’t quite as good a writer as I’d expected – I’d argue she’s not as good as Lynne Reid Banks – but it isn’t clunky or cliche-ridden or anything like that, and she creates the background characters rather well: among them is Sofy, an ambitious young actress whose talents (if any) do not lie in the direction of acting, and I rather enjoyed any moment that Emma and David’s young daughter was on the scene – she could be quite funny.  In terms of structure, Drabble went (I am sorry to say) for one of those last-minute-big-events which seem the last ditch effort of a novelist who knows their novel hasn’t been very exciting yet – you know the sort?

Perhaps I’ll enjoy Drabble more when her topic is different, or her character less selfish and awful. I wondered, while I was reading this, whether it might be her second novel – and, lo and behold, it was.  It has neither the inspiration of a first novel, nor the assured confidence of a later book – so hopefully I just picked up a dud, and there will be plenty more to try later.  I do recognise that she is a good writer, and I’m not giving up on her yet.  Any suggestions?