1974

Sun City by Tove Jansson – #WITMonth

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I bought Sun City by Tove Jansson in 2007, at which point there wasn’t that much of Jansson’s work available in English. This was one of two novels that had been translated in the ‘70s, and then she had languished – until Sort Of Books started their noble work of publishing translations by Thomas Teal. Teal was also the translator back in the day, and did Sun City – so I knew I was in good hands with him when I finally took this off the shelf. To be honest, I couldn’t quite cope with the idea of running out of Jansson things to read – but if not for Women in Translation month, then when?

The setting of Sun City sets it apart from Jansson’s other books, and perhaps helps explain why it was picked for translating into English first. Rather than her usual Finnish islands or towns, we are in St Petersburg, Florida – at an old people’s home called the Berkeley Arms. The residents are mostly American, and it’s a world away from where Jansson spent her life. (I’ve read two biographies of Jansson and I still can’t remember if she visited America, but I’m almost certain she wasn’t there for any extended period.)

While Sun City was only Jansson’s second novel, she was already 60 by the time it was published (1974) – not old, but also not looking at this retirement home through the callous eyes of youth. The newest resident is Elizabeth Morris, intelligent and reserved and a little unsure about her new community, and it looks at one point like she might be the protagonist – but this becomes very much an ensemble piece. Much of the ‘action’ takes place in the rocking chairs outside, which are strictly assigned to individual residents, in practice if not in theory (‘To move your rocking chair is an unforgivable insult in St Petersburg […] Only death could move the rocking chairs in St Petersburg’).

Mrs Elizabeth Morris of Great Island, Nebraska, seventy-seven years old, had the second rocking chair from the railing by the big magnolia. Next to the magnolia was Mr Thompson, who pretended to be deaf, and on the other side was Miss Peabody, who was very shy. So Mrs Morris could sit and think in peace. She had come to St Petersburg several weeks earlier, alone, with a sore throat, and once at the Berkeley Arms her voice disappeared completely. On a page from a notebook Mrs Morris had supplied information about her name, her condition, and some antique furniture that was to arrive later. Silence protected her from the reckless need to confide in other people that can be so dangerous at the end of a long, lonely journey.

If you’re familiar with Jansson’s writing, you’ll recognise her tone – certainly in sentences like that last one. I like that the long, lonely journey could either be the one that has brought her from Nebraska to Florida, or could simply describe her life. It feels like familiar Jansson territory in the writing, if not the setting.

Sun City continues in an episodic way. An estranged spouse of one of the residents turns up; a couple of residents die; there is a trip away from the Berkeley Arms. There is also drama among the people working there, particularly one in a relationship with an eccentric young man who believes Jesus will soon return and is waiting to be collected by a fringe Christian organisation.

A lot of Jansson’s writing is episodic. There’s certainly a discussion to be had about whether her most famous work for adults, The Summer Book, is a novel or a series of interlinking short stories. Sun City is definitely a novel, but what makes it feel a bit different from her other work, and perhaps a little less successful, is that the moments that happen are all a little overly dramatic. It feels like, in transferring her canvas to America, Jansson has taken on board the idea that everything in America is bigger: the events are bigger, the reactions are bigger, the potentials for change are bigger. I have to be honest, I missed the gentleness of her Scandinavian backdrop, where lives are no less full but somehow the stakes seem to be lower.

If this were my first novel by Jansson, I’ve no doubt I’d have wanted to read more. Her sentences are still beautiful and insightful, and the partnership with Teal is reliably great – but the good news for people looking to explore Jansson is that the best stuff is already in print, in translation. This is an enjoyable coda, but Jansson is at her finest on her Finnish island.

Down the Kitchen Sink by Beverley Nichols

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The official author of my quarantine has been Beverley Nichols. Some have been great and others not-so-great – and then there’s Down the Kitchen Sink (1974), which combines high highs and – well, no lows, but definitely things I had less interest in. Its title is an homage to his famous book Down the Garden Path – and it is subtitled ‘a memoir’, but it is really only half that.

The opening is a typically Beverley concoction of nostalgia, dry wit, and whimsy:

It was an evening in early spring and underneath the Eros statue the steps were piled high with the gold of primroses and the purple of violets, which the flower-girls were selling at tuppence a bunch. In and out of the traffic, like figures in a ballet, darted the newspaper boys. selling sheets which have long since fluttered into oblivion – the Westminster Gazette, which printed on green paper and The Globe which was printed on pink; and The Star, whose pages needed no colour, for they sparkled and crackled with the brilliance of its prose. All at a penny a piece.

[…]

I strolled thoughtfully across Piccadilly Circus – (in those days, the early twenties, one could still wander about London like a gentleman, without courting the risk of instant death) – counting my blessings. They were many. I was twenty-five, and almost aggressively healthy. I was wearing a new suit in the latest fashion, with very wide trousers, which were flatteringly reflected in the plate glass windows. I was glowing with the fires of the latest thing in cocktails – the ‘Sidecar’. I had consumed it in the long bar of the Trocadero – an enchanting grotto of delight, all gold mosaics and nouveau art, which should have been painted by Sickert, but never was. And only that morning I had corrected the proofs of my first entry in Who’s Who. Not a very long entry, merely a couple of lines. But something inside me, probably the ‘Sidecar’, which was made of equal quantities of brandy, Cointreau and lemon juice, persuaded me that as the year went by, it would grow considerably longer. Which it did.

Yes, I should have been very happy, but I was not. For at home somebody was waiting for me whom I dreaded to meet.

The person whom Nichols was waiting to meet was Gaskin – the man-servant that Nichols had just installed into his small house in a backstreet of central London, which he almost convinces us was not a sign of affluence at the time. Gaskin was only a few years younger than Nichols, and recently removed from his upbringing in Norfolk to this situation. But he is entirely at ease, in a way that Nichols is not – or professes not to be, at several decades’ distance. Gaskin seems to know what is expected in the master/servant relationship, and gives subtle approval when Nichols gets it right (and censure when he gets it wrong). He is preparing the first meal – having rejected the fish at Fortnum and Mason, he has found a good fish shop down the road. The proprietor came from Norfolk. Nichols quickly learns that, wherever they go, Gaskin will find a network of people who are from Norfolk, and trusts them.

This first half of the book was lovely. Nichols talks about the wonderful meals that Gaskin has produced at different times, and writes about them with a dizzying rapture. I enjoy that when it was about paradise-like desserts, say, but there was rather too much about meat and fish for this vegetarian to enjoy reading it. No, what makes the first half of Down the Kitchen Sink so wonderful is the portrait of Gaskin. As Nichols and Gaskin spent several decades together, their relationship was one of the most long-lasting in Nichols’ life. Gaskin emerges from these pages as a wonder in the kitchen, but also a delightful mixture of competence and wonder. The way in which he inveigles a kitten into the house filled my heart with joy.

The portrait ends, alas, with Gaskin’s death. And the pages where Beverley Nichols describes discovering that Gaskin has long hidden his alcoholism are beautifully, thoughtfully written. It’s wonderfully done, and I have seldom been as moved by the testament to a friendship – which was never an equal friendship but, in Nichols’ eyes at least, no less to be treasured for that.

The second half of Down the Kitchen Sink is less enjoyable, for me. It purports to be Nichols learning to cook for himself – and I thought it might be the sort of funny, self-deprecating narrative that Nichols is so good at. There are moments of that, and understandably, because Nichols is shockingly ignorant about everything in the kitchen. But before long it becomes more of a collection of recipes. Perhaps that is what Nichols had been commissioned to do, and he twisted it away from that commission into something more enjoyable. But by the final sections, it’s just him describing recipes – with a little context, but not much more.

If I wanted to recreate any of these dishes, then it would perhaps be a delight – but the 1970s are not renowned for their culinary excellence in the UK, and Beverley Nichols doesn’t seem to have opted for vegetarian dishes for very long. I wanted humour or poignancy, not instruction.

So, very much a book of two halves. And I shan’t re-read the second half. But I feel like I may well go back to that funny, touching delight of a first half.

Mrs Harris Goes to Moscow by Paul Gallico

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There are only four Mrs Harris books, but I’ve been gradually working my way through the series since 2012. Mrs Harris Goes to Moscow – known as Mrs ‘Arris Goes to Moscow in the US – is the final one of these, published in 1974, an impressive sixteen years after the first in the series.

Mrs Harris is a London char lady whose exploits started (in Flowers for Mrs Harris, or Mrs ‘Arris Goes to Paris, or indeed Mrs Harris Goes to Paris) with saving up money to buy a Dior dress in France. After that, she went to America and became an MP (in separate books, naturally). And, finally, she’s off to Moscow to reunite one of her employers with his long-lost Russian love. That’s when things start to get ridiculous.

By a series of miscommunications, mistaken identities, and misunderstandings of what ‘char lady’ could possibly mean, Mrs Harris and her friend Violet Butterfield (the wonderful Vi, who wants none of the adventures that Mrs H seems to thrive on) are believed to be spies by the KGB and believed to be aristocracy by others high up in Russia. What they actually are is two lucky women who won some sort of raffle.

I was feeling in the mood for something silly and light, and Gallico’s series is entirely reliable for that. If you liked the others, you’ll certainly like this – if you can face reading about Russian collusion in the current environment (it did feel oddly topical). I continue to be fascinated by the extraordinary range that Gallico has in his writing, from dark to frothy, poignant to funny, and (indeed) very good to not at all good. This one sits in the thoroughly-enjoyable category – completely ridiculous, but also entirely fitted the mood I was in when I picked it up.

The Bottle Factory Outing by Beryl Bainbridge

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The Bottle Factory OutingIt’s Beryl Bainbridge Reading Week, guys! Somehow, I haven’t actually read any more books by Beryl Bainbridge since the last week organised by Annabel – during which I read Injury Time, Sweet William, and Something Happened Last Week, reviews of all of which you can find under my Bainbridge tag by clicking on the tag above or choosing ‘Bainbridge’ from the dropdown Browse menu. Well, I’m very glad that Annabel resurrected this reading week, as it has brought The Bottle Factory Outing (1974) to the top of my tbr pile – and it was everything I would expect from Beryl.

I actually read the whole thing on train journeys to and from London – i.e. it’s pretty short. And I even finally managed to stop calling it The Bottle Factory Opening in my head; it is, after all, focused on an outing rather than a grand opening. That is the main ‘event’ of the novel: all the workers at the bottle factory are going to go on a picnic, from the families of immigrants who put up with the low wages offered to the two women who are the focus of the novel, and who stick labels on wine bottles (while maintaining that all the wines are the same).

The Bottle Factory Outing would work very well with other novels I grouped back when I was doing Five From the Archive regularly (I must bring that back) and grouped together five excellent books about pairs of women. It’s chiefly about Freda and Brenda, who have a typically Bainbridgian dysfunctional relationship. They’re not quite friends – they moved in together after a moment of misunderstanding, and they’re not particularly compatible as housemates. Not even housemates: they share a bed, with a bolster and a line of books down the middle.

Freda is forthright and confident; Brenda is nervous and awkward. But nobody in a Beryl Bainbridge novel deals well with others (it seems) and she lends the same spikiness and discomfort to The Bottle Factory Outing that I’ve come to love elsewhere. There is affection and well-meaning alongside, but of the sort that cannot survive the awkwardness of everyday encounters.

Oh, and Beryl is funny. This awkwardness definitely permeates into both humour and unpleasantness. This paragraph combines the two…

She couldn’t think how to discourage him – she didn’t want to lose her job and she hated giving offence. He had a funny way of pinching her all over, as if she was a mattress whose stuffing needed distributing more evenly. She stood there wriggling, saying breathlessly ‘Please don’t, Rossi,’ but he tickled and she gave little smothered laughs and gasps that he took for encouragement.

‘You are a nice clean girl.’

‘Oh, thank you.’

It’s basically assault, of course, but the mattress comment is quintessential Bainbridge – a moment of levity thrown in that also illuminates the situation and gives a unique description.

And the outing? Well, it is not free from disaster. And it is the culmination of the different strands of the novel in a dramatic way that one feels Bainbridge has earned throughout; every moment leading up to it somehow both dramatic and mundane at once, wrapped together in her slightly distorted view of the world. She finds the bizarre amongst the ordinary, and somehow turns it back upon itself to seem ordinary too. It’s been great to get back to Beryl.

The Siren Years by Charles Ritchie

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One of the greatest pleasures I have had in blogging is getting to know Claire’s blog. We all know and love her as The Captive Reader, and I am lucky enough to have very similar taste to Claire – we have both followed up each other’s suggestions, and have only had the occasional mishap. When I received Charles Ritchie’s The Siren Years: A Canadian Diplomat Abroad, 1937-1945 (1974) as a gift in the post, I was very touched – and a little nervous. I trust Claire. But… I thought she might have made a mistake. A book about politics? Me? And the cover did nothing to convince me… Lucky for me, I was wrong and Claire was right. Which makes a total of no recommendations from her that have turned out to be duds.

Ritchie often seems more like a society gossip than a diplomat, and that – you will not be surprised to learn – makes him much more up my street. He describes the people around him with a catty tone, albeit one au fait with national and international politics. Not to mention literature; Elizabeth Bowen was a large part of Ritchie’s life, and he is a sensitive interpreter of people.

And who can fail to be moved by any war memoir? The experiences of war, even on the home front, are so foreign to those of most of us today that any description of life then is both fascinating and poignant. Indeed, it is perhaps more so on the home front – because the places, relationships, and roles are recognisable, but thrown into extraordinary relief.

Since it’s been far too long since I read this wonderful diary, I shall just give you a series of quotations I noted down from it. After all, I am only going to say ‘I love this’ after each one, if I elaborate any further.

On public figures from Eton…
What happens to them at Eton? However innocent, stupid or honest they may be they always look as though they had passed the preceding night in bed with a high-class prostitute and had spent the earlier part of the morning smoothing away the ravages with the aid of creams, oils and curling tongs.

On politicians
[…] a few senators and political big-shots whose faces give one a feeling of familiar boredom like picking up an old twice-read newspaper.

On work rituals
Being a Private Secretary is a busy unreal sort of life – unreal because it makes one’s day such a programme of events. One does things in a certain order not because one feels like doing them at the time or even because this is the order of their importance, but because they appear in that order on the day’s programme. This programme is dictated by the engagements of the Chief, who is in turn a victim of his engagements and spends most of his day in doing unnecessary things which he does not want to do. Yet neither of us is unhappy. We feel that the ritual of our lives is obligatory – we grumble but we submit with satisfaction to the necessity. A day of telephone conversations, luncheon parties, notes acknowledged, visitors received, memoranda drawn up. Exhaustion is merely staleness – we return with zest to the game. What an extraordinary amount of time is spent in saving our own face and coddling other people’s vanities! One would really think that the people we deal with were a collection of hypersensitive megalomaniacs.

On war in London
Never has there been such a colourless war – not a drum, not a flag, not a cheer – just sandbags and khaki and air-read shelters and gas-masks and the cultivated, careful voice of the B.B.C. putting the best complexion on the news. London is waiting for the first raid like an anxious hostess who has made all the preparations to receive formidable guests – but the guests do not seem to be going to turn up. Every time the door-bell rings she thinks, “At last there they are,” but it turns out to be the grocer’s boy delivering a parcel. So the day pass. We look at our watches, turn on the wireless, pick up a novel and wait.

On Oxford, and a building I used to work in
The moment I stepped out of the station I smelt the familiar smell of Oxford. What nonsense the woman was talking the other day when she said that it did not matter if a city were destroyed physically, if its soul lived. Cities are nothing without their bodies. When you have destroyed Paris and Oxford what happens to their souls? Oxford rebuilt in this age! It would be easy to see what it would be like by looking at the new Bodleian Extension – that blankly commonplace hulk which they have dared to plant in the face of the Sheldonian. That is the most distressing thing about Oxford – for the rest the changes are temporary.

On Elizabeth Bowen
“Take it from one of the best living novelists that people’s personalities are not interesting,” Elizabeth said in a dry voice; “except,” she added, “when you are in love with them.” Her books show much that you would expect if you knew her only as an acquaintance, he intelligence, her penetrating eye, her love of houses and flowers. These things you would have gathered from talking to her in her drawing-room. But there are certain passages in which her peculiar intensity, her genius, come out, which would be hard to reconcile with this cultivated hostess. That purity of perception and compassion seems to come from another part of her nature of which she is perhaps not completely aware.

On wartime
We have long ceased to find the war thrilling – any excitement in the movement of historic events is gone. There is a vague but persistent worry in people’s minds about the coming air raids this winter, but like everything else this is accepted as inevitable. The truth is that the war has become as much a part of our lives as the weather, the endless winter, and when the ice does break there will be no cheering in the streets.