Delafield

E.M. Delafield was astonishingly prolific in the first few decades of the 20th century – she managed to write about 40 books in less than thirty years. And so there are quite a few years where two books appeared – since 1920 is one of those years, I decided to read ’em both. Tension and The Heel of Achilles both bear many traits of Delafield’s novels, and are recognisably from the same author, but they are also extremely different.

Tension

Apparently I read this in 2004, but I got to the end of it without remembering a single detail – and I’m glad I re-read it, because it’s brilliant. The main characters are Lady Rossiter and Sir Julian Rossiter, and when Delafield created them I suspect she had half an eye on Mr and Mrs Bennet from Pride and Prejudice. They have very little fondness for each other, though Sir Julian usually restricts himself to silently laughing at Lady Rossiter’s nonsensical sayings and gossip. Where she differs from Mrs Bennet is that Lady R is also hypocritical and a little cruel – though she would always see it as doing her duty. That is one of the main tensions of Tension.

But all starts off very amusingly – here’s the opening of the novel:

“Auntie Iris has written a book!”

“A book!” echoed both auditors of the announcement, in keys varying between astonishment and dismay.

“Yes, and it’s going to be published, and put into a blue cover, and sold, and Auntie Iris is going to make heaps and heaps of money!”

“What is it to be called?” said Lady Rossiter rather gloomily, fixing an apprehensive eye on the exuberant niece of the authoress.

“It’s called ‘Why, Ben!’ and it’s a Story of the Sexes,” glibly quoted the young lady, unaware of the shock inflicted by this brazen announcement, delivered at the top of her squeaky, nine-year-old voice.

Could there be a better fake title than Why, Ben! – I love it, and all the comedy around how horrified everyone is by the idea of this book is glorious. Delafield might also have Austen in mind with her style in this novel – she does lots of sentences with the balance and irony of an Austen sentence, laughing at everyone involved and never saying quite everything – leaving the reader to fill in the gaps and thus feel on the side of the author.

The children (whom the Rossiters unite in loathing, though Lady R would not admit it openly) are neighbours, and the offspring of harassed, jovial Mark. Their mother is (whisper it) a ‘dypsomaniac’, shut away but very much not dead. And that is why Lady Rossiter takes an officious concern when a young woman moves to the area and starts working with Mark – because, surely, it is the same Miss Marchrose who once broke off an engagement when her fiance became disabled…

Delafield often enjoys poking fun at people who ‘Don’t want to gossip, but…’ – and sometimes she shows the dark side of it too. Tension is always an extremely funny book, particularly if you like dry, character-based, and dialogue-heavy comedy (which I definitely do), but it gets darker as it goes on. Lady Rossiter is ruthlessly determined to ruin Miss Marchrose, all in the name of protecting those around her and not wanting to gossip. She never does anything outright. She just quietly and subtly makes the situation impossible for Miss Marchrose. And Delafield is so clever at not making Lady Rossiter a deceitful character – she genuinely does believe she is doing what is right, and has an answer for every exasperated accusation Sir Julian makes. Which isn’t that many, because he follows the path of least resistance.

Delafield is brilliant when she unites comedy and tragedy, and I think Tension is one of her best books. It’s certainly stylised, but it’s a style I loved.

The Heel of Achilles

The Heel of Achilles was published the same year, and also republished as a Hutchinson’s ‘Pocket Library’ edition – but appearances are a bit deceptive because it is MUCH longer. The font is tiny in these pages. It’s a Bildungsroman about Lydia Raymond – whom we meet in the opening lines:

“I am an orphan,” reflected Lydia Raymond, with immense satisfaction.

She was a very intelligent little girl of twelve years old, and she remembered very well that when her father had died out in China, three years ago, it was her mother who had been the centre of attention and compassion. People had spoken about her poor dead father, and had praised him and pitied him, but their real attention had all been for the widow, who was there under their eyes, pathetic and sorrow-stricken. Lydia herself had been “poor little thing,” but Grandpapa and her aunts and uncle had all told her that it was her mother who must be thought of now, and she knew that they kept on saying to one another that “the child will be a comfort to poor Mary.” Her own individuality, which she felt so strongly, did not seem to count at all, and Lydia had, quite silently, resented that intensely, ever since she could remember anything at all.

She grows up with that Grandpapa and aunts and uncle – the dominating character is Grandpapa, though. He is selfish, brusque, and very weak even at the beginning of the novel – though, given how long he lives for, he must have only been about 60 when his age meant he needed to be assisted across the room. He certainly isn’t pleasant, but he takes an interest in Lydia and tries to coach her – chiefly, never to talk about herself, because people aren’t interested. Always let others talk about themselves. (He never really addresses what happens if both interlocutors are taking this approach…)

There are some funny interludes when she goes to stay with some boisterous, sporty cousins who classify anything sentimental, artistic, or even ordinarily sensible, as ‘nonsense’. Delafield sends them up brilliantly, along with Lydia’s confusion and resentment of the new world she is thrown into. She does much better at school, where her aptitude for maths apparently gets her all the friends – would that my school’s popularity system worked on maths and not sports!

This mathematical ability gets her a job doing accounts at a milliners when she leaves school, and we see her new world of a boarding house and a business, populated with its own mix of eccentrics, pathetic characters, and the odd sympathetic one.

Along the way, there’s a big jump of a decade or more, and we see the impact that a life of determined self-sacrifice has on Lydia’s family…

Delafield often returned to the idea that people who are always sacrificing themselves for others are a pain to be around. She does it very amusingly in some places (notably As Others Hear Us) and more poignantly in others – in The Heel of Achilles, it’s intended to be more poignant, I think. My problem with it is that Lydia’s self-sacrificial nature seems to come rather late in the day – the offshoot of the ‘don’t talk about yourself’ maxim, but perhaps not as thoroughly worked out a theme as it could be.

The Heel of Achilles is very good, but I think it should have been a third shorter. Delafield dwells for a long time in periods that don’t enhance the story much, and everything felt rather slow – in contract to Tension, which zips along and keeps momentum. It’s nowhere near as funny as Tension, nor is intended to be, though there are plenty of lines with that witty, ironical twist. It is, perhaps, the sort of novel to which Delafield returned most often – but, for my money, Tension is more successful.

Still, impressive that Delafield could turn her hands to two such different novels in 1920 – the main overriding theme being selfish women spoiling the lives of those around them…

I hope and suspect that most of us have read one of the books that E.M. Delafield published in 1930 – The Diary of a Provincial Lady. Rather less popular is the title that I picked off my well-stocked Delafield shelves: Turn Back The Leaves. I have quite a few unread Delafields among the many that I have read, and it was good to get one down.

Turn Back The Leaves is a very different novel from The Diary of a Provincial Lady. It is not at all funny, for starters. Often Delafield combines serious topics with some levity, but this is nearly absent in this tangled story of illegitimacy and secrets. And, above all, the tensions of a family maintaining Catholic mores.

The novel starts in 1890 and ends in 1929, though most of it takes place just before and after World War One. But that section needs a bit of back story, and that’s what Delafield starts us with. In brief, a woman with the extraordinary name Edmunda marries a man named Joseph, despite neither of them being enthused by the match. They are both ardent Catholics, and their families are keen for them to marry other upstanding Catholics. It is a loveless match, though neither of them have been and love and don’t particularly miss what they haven’t had. Except then, of course, Edmunda does fall in love with another man – and Stella is born illegitimately. Joseph forgives her; they have four other children; she dies. Stella is left alone in London with a paid governess and nurse, and the others grow up with Joseph and his second wife.

Fast forward a few years – and some rather unnecessarily detailed characterisation of characters we will never see again, along the way – and Stella moves back to live with her half-brother and half-sisters, though none of them know the connection. She is only there as a ‘family friend’. And has been taken in because Joseph and his new wife are keen to give her a ‘good Catholic upbringing’. Only… there are temptations in the way of her and one of her half-sisters. They both fall in love with Protestants. Marrying out of the Catholic church is not forbidden, but it is only allowed if the non-Catholic partner allows their children to be brought up as Catholics – ‘the promises’ – and the prospective husbands won’t allow this.

Delafield’s author’s foreword reads that ‘this book is in no way intended as propaganda either for or against the Roman Catholic faith. It purports only to hold up a mirror to the psychological and religious environment of a little-known section of English society as it has existed for many years, and still exists today’. This is pretty disingenuous. As with quite a lot of Delafield’s novels, particularly the early ones, this is clearly motivated by some distaste for her Catholic upbringing. It isn’t a bitter book, but you never get the sense that the author is ambivalent.

But the Catholic characters are not monsters by any means. Sir Joseph is rather domineering, but others are motivated by their love for their church and their eagerness to do right. And it’s a very engaging, well-written novel, with vivid characters who only slightly lose their vividness by the author’s attempt to have slightly too many focuses. Stella should really be front and centre, but disappears towards the end when Delafield wants us to empathise with the rest of the family too.

I don’t know much about Catholicism, and I don’t know if inter-marrying is still as big a deal, or if the official line is still that no other Christian denomination is properly following Christ. I do know that Protestants still follow the beliefs of the Protestants in this novel – that following Christ is the important bit, not the specific church. As Delafield writes in her foreword, the Catholic angle was a niche point even in 1930 – and many readers might be uncertain that their interest could be sustained in a novel which revolves around the Catholic/non-Catholic angle.

Which would be a pity, because I think Turn Back The Leaves is very good indeed. At her best, Delafield is great at giving a novel momentum as well as psychological complexity and empathetic characters. Her writing is not unduly fancy, nor does it have the hilarious phrasing of the Provincial Lady books, but she does use the quiet, unshowy prose to pull the rug from under our feet. We are suddenly hit by observations and emotional moments, in few and precise words, that we might not be expecting. I think this is the 25th novel I’ve read by Delafield, and it’s up there among the ones I’ve enjoyed most. It feels odd to read one in which she is almost never humorous at all – but perhaps she wanted to make her 1930 output as distinct as possible. And the Provincial Lady this ain’t!