Macaulay

I Would Be Private by Rose Macaulay – #1937Club

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For a long time, I tended to see Rose Macaulay only mentioned in relation to her final novel, The Towers of Trebizond. That shifted a bit when Vintage brought back some of her novels, and other publishers (including the British Library Women Writers) have reprinted some of the more obscure ones. But, my gosh, Macaulay was prolific. I’ve read a couple of biographies of her and 12 of her books, and I still keep coming across titles I’d forgotten existed. I don’t remember anyone ever talking about I Would Be Private, but apparently I bought it ten years – and the 1937 Club has got it down from my shelves.

You could guess for hours and not come up with the premise of the novel. It’s… an ordinary couple having quintuplets, and being so beset by the press and the public that they move to a Caribbean island. Sure, Rose, why not?

Ronald is an honest, kind policeman and his wife, Win, is about to have a baby. In these days before ultrasounds and the like, they don’t know how many – but suspect it may be twins. As it happens… she has five. Ronald, standing safely outside the bedroom where this is happening, in the manner of a 1930s husband, is perturbed. His emotional mother-in-law is on hand to reassure…

Mrs Grig was wiping her streaming eyes.

“Don’t you get fussed, son. That’s the lot now. Doctor says so.”

Ronald, who thought he should have said so at least three babies back, felt suspicious.

The central conceit of the novel is perhaps rather flawed. Yes, people sometimes have five babies at once. It would probably make the local news and then be quietly forgotten. In Macaulay’s world – and in the words of the doctor – ‘My dear fellow, you can’t keep quintuplets private. It’s a public event.’

It does require some suspension of disbelief that they would be beset by paparazzi outside their house, quoted at length (in fabricated quotes) by the press, and used as the testimonies for advertising anything from baby food to furniture polish. I don’t mind suspending some disbelief, but so much of the motivation in I Would Be Private rests on this rather unlikely scenario, and it rather weakens the narrative.

The new father doesn’t feel very attached to his offspring. He and his wife debate sending at least three of them off for adoption, and it doesn’t seem to be a decision with any emotional ramifications. Macaulay often writes on the edge of satire, but I Would Be Private dances a little uneasily between emotionless satire and real human behaviour. But she is at her best (for me, at least) when she is using the narrative voice to undermine her characters. I love the word ‘observed’ here, for instance, as the babies are addressed:

“Cheepy cheep,” Mrs Grig observed. “Five ickle dicky-birds all in a row. Was they, then, was they, yum yum yum.”

“Wee wee wee,” the nurse added.

The main pair are rather lovely creations. Despite his unfatherliness (at least at first), Ronald is a simple and upstanding young man, and his wife is kind and slightly overwhelmed by her mother and sister. She’s also, mostly, exhausted. Her mother, Mrs Grig, is obsessed with the quintuplets but doesn’t let her cherishing of them stand in the way of potentials to make money. Win’s sister, meanwhile, is even more after cash – and has the rather brilliant profession of getting payments by finding companies who are breaking Sunday working laws. Only Macaulay would put in a character like that.

Anyway, after seeing no future in which they can be private, Ronald and Win set off with their offspring to a Caribbean island… and part two of the novel begins, with a whole heap of new characters.

We don’t see all that much of the island’s inhabitants, but there is a British immigrant community there – a minister and his two adult daughters, and various fairly interchangeable highbrow artists and writers. Macaulay has a lot of fun at their expense – e.g. John the painter:

John was not sure how good his technique was, but his subjects – or rather his objects – he thought superb, and his particular school of art put the choice of objects and their arrangement definitely above the mere technique of brushwork.

There’s a very funny scene where John is trying to make a seaside scene as abstract as possible, and one of the vicar’s daughters insists on trying to translate it literally. Later there’s another very-Macaulay conversation between Francis, a writer, and Ronald, who tolerates this community without feeling any affinity with it:

“Good writers and bad may sell well; bad writers and good may sell badly. People will sometimes tell you that a bad literary style and a lack of any quality but sentimental ardour will make a best-seller. That’s just second-hand middlebrow cant. Don’t believe them.”

“No one,” said Ronald, “has ever told me that.”

“It’s no truer than that literary merit will either sell a book, or make it unpopular. Or that publishers’ advertising, or reviewers’ puffing, will necessarily sell it. It’s all a fluke, a fortune, a gift of the capricious gods, and no one knows on what it depends.”

Ronald and Win are still prominent, and discovering that even a Caribbean island isn’t really a place for privacy – but there are probably too many characters and plotlines introduced in this half. It’s all a bit dizzying, and it’s not clear where the heart of the novel is, or even if it’s meant to have one.

There is a lot to enjoy, nonetheless, for people (like me) who love Macaulay’s very distinctive style. Who but Macaulay could write the sentence ‘Dorothea took the path up the hill to the lunatic asylum, to see if Lindy was there, annoying, as usual, the young men’? And who but Macaulay would use the words technorrea, pleontecny, and tertologise – none of which seem to exist, at least according to a Google search.

And then there’s the title! It’s taken from this epigraph, allegedly from Roger Rampole’s Cheaping, though I can find no evidence of what that is, or if it even exists. Macaulay made up the quote that ‘The World My Wilderness’ comes from, so she may well have made this up too:

Press me not, throng me not, by your leave I would be private. Jupiter Ammon is a man not then free? What a pox, may he not choose his road, is he to be bethronged, beset, commanded, as he were a beast in a drover’s herd, or a zany in a fairman’s show? Stand back, you knaves, you buzzing flapdragons, give me leave to be private, by Cock’s death I’ll walk free or I’ll walk not at all.

The only place I can find this online is from a mention in the Houses of Parliament, when The Lord Bishop of Hereford quoted it in 1973, saying that Macaulay had, in turn, quoted it. With amusing delicacy, he admitted ‘by Cock’s death’.

Would I recommend I Would Be Private? Honestly, I think it should be a long way down the list of Macaulay novels you seek out. Something I haven’t mentioned yet, but should, is that it is rigorously racist throughout – which obviously makes it harder to read or enjoy. It’s also a premise that doesn’t really work – or, to work, needed to be played with a bit more surrealism, perhaps. There are too many characters introduced too late in the book, and too little momentum. It’s a shame, because a lot of the writing (particularly at the beginning) is really ironically funny, and the main two characters are delightful. It was a quick read, but not a book that I’d say anybody needs to go to major lengths to find.

EDIT: see the comments for a real set of quintuplets in the 1930s, whose experience may make this novel less far-fetched than I’d imagined! And maybe was the model for Macaulay’s novel.

Mystery at Geneva by Rose Macaulay #ABookADayInMay No.5

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Today’s book is a curio by a relatively well-known writer. Lots of us love Rose Macaulay’s novels, whether that be her famous Towers of Trebizond or the delightfully funny, wry books she wrote in the 1920s – Crewe Train, Dangerous Ages, Keeping Up Appearances, Potterism and so forth. Not so much talked about is Mystery at Geneva (1922)

It starts with an author note that we certainly shouldn’t take at all seriously:

Note: As I have observed among readers and critics, a tendency to discern satire when none is intended, I should like to say that this book is simply a straightforward mystery story, devoid of irony, moral or meaning. It has for its setting an imaginary session of the League of Nations’ Assembly, but it is in no sense a study of, still less a skit on actual conditions at Geneva of which indeed I know little. The only connection I have ever had with the League being membership of its Union.

Let’s be clear – this is not at all true. Macaulay is at her most satirical in this novel – a satire of detective novels, to an extent, but particularly a satire of the League of Nations. The hero is Henry Beechtree, a journalist for The British Bolshevist – and he has been sent to Geneva to cover a meeting of the League (which, at the time Macaulay’s novel was published, was still very much in its infancy.)

Along the way, Macaulay has a great time poking fun at newspaper men and the rivalries between them, as well as the mutual hysteria of journalists who cling to the far-left or far-right of the political spectrum. Macaulay is always wonderful when she is at her driest, and if the characters are very exaggerated then that doesn’t stop the prose being very funny.

Similarly broadly drawn are the delegates from different nations. Macaulay mostly manages to avoid anything that would feel uncomfortably racist today – the divisions are drawn chiefly along political lines (Irish Republicans vs Loyalists, for instance) and the good-humoured rivalry of adjoining European countries.

All is going more or less dully, and Henry is sending back sarcastic reports to the Bolshevist, when the mystery kicks in. The President of the assembly goes missing.

And then, over the next few days, more and more of the delegates disappear. We often see their final moments before disappearance – coaxed away by appealing to their particular weakness, whether that be wanting to help the poor, or getting involved in a political discussion, or finding a rare copy of their own book for sale. Rumours start to circulate that the whole thing is being done to undermine the League itself.

For what would be the use of getting rid of one man only, however prominent? The Assembly, after the first shock, would proceed with its doings. But what if man after man were to disappear? What if the whole fabric of Assembly Council and Committees should be disintegrated, till no one could have thoughts for anything but the mysterious disappearances and how to solve the riddle, and how, still more, to preserve each one himself from a like fate? Could any work be continued in such circumstances, in such an atmosphere? No. The Assembly would become merely a collection of bewildered and nervous individuals turning themselves into amateur detectives and, incidentally, the laughing-stock of the world. 

It should be noted that nobody is trying very hard to preserve themselves, as they do continually wander off into places where they are likely to be abducted. And there are so many characters, many of whom disappear before we know very much about them, that it is certainly more comic than tragic when they vanish.

Henry muses about the motives and perpetrators, but there isn’t really a sense that the reader is being given clues to disentangle. There is a solution, but ultimately it doesn’t really matter. This is first and foremost a satire on political and national grounds. The teasing of detective fiction is less successful because detective fiction was routinely so outlandish in the period that it’s almost impossible to satirise the lengths to which a plot can go. Of course, with most of the satire resting at a point in time in 1922, it is hardly a novel for all the ages. Some elements are recognisable, but others feel very much of a moment.

Something that does feel quite perennial is Macaulay’s (/Henry’s) comment on the way that magazines and newspapers write about women. It’s a theme she returns to often in her fiction and non-fiction, often in near-identical phrasing – but I love it every time, particularly the frustration that seethes beneath the surface humour:

All sorts of articles and letters appear in the papers about women. Profound questions are raised concerning them. Should they smoke? Should they work? Vote? Take Orders? Marry? Exist? Are not their skirts too short, or their sleeves? Have they a sense of humour, of honour, of direction? Are spinsters superfluous? But how seldom similar inquiries are propounded about men. How few persons discuss superfluous bachelors, or whether the male arm or leg is an immodest sight, or whether men should vote. For men are not news.

Mystery at Geneva is an odd, slightly silly and ultimately rather enjoyable book. I should think it would entertain anybody with an interest in 20th-century political history, particularly the way the League of Nations was considered by the everyman/woman. It’s not up there with Macaulay’s most accomplished and satisfying novels, but it does feel intended to be a jeu d’esprit rather than a substantial work. On its own terms, it’s a lot of fun.

British Library Women Writers #4: Dangerous Ages by Rose Macaulay

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I intend to write about each of the British Library Women Writers titles as they come out, though I’m already a bit behind because the brilliant Father by Elizabeth von Arnim is also out now!

I knew, when I was first asked about women writers who shouldn’t be out of print anymore, that I was keen to get some more Rose Macaulay back. She is well known for The Towers of Trebizond, her final novel, but I prefer her witty, spiky novels of the 1920s. Perhaps they are less of a tour de force, but they have an awful lot to say about contemporary (middle-class) society, and they’re a hoot. I’m pleased to say that Handheld Press and Vintage have also been bringing back some of her novels from that period and, who knows, maybe some others will find their way into the BLWW series at some point. But there was one obvious choice for a series that looks at how novels reflected women’s lives in the early 20th century: Dangerous Ages (1921) does it for a whole bunch of different women.

Those women are several generations of the same family. Neville is in her 40s (yes, ‘her’ – Macaulay often gave her female characters male names) and thinking about resuming her career as a doctor. Her daughter is part of a generation that dismisses everything pre-20th-century and talks a lot about ‘free love’ etc – in fact, let me interrupt this list to give a wonderful piece of Macaulay dryness:

“Marriage,” said Gerda, “is so Victorian. It’s like antimacassars.”

“Now, my dear, do you mean anything by either of those statements? Marriage wasn’t invented in Victoria’s reign. Nor did it occur more frequently in that reign than it did before or does now. Why Victorian then? And why antimacassars? Think it out. How can a legal contract be like a doily on the back of a chair? Where is the resemblance? It sounds like a riddle, only there’s no answer. No, you know you’ve got no answer. That kind of remark is sheer sentimentality and muddle headedness. Why are people in their twenties so often sentimental? That’s another riddle.”

Neville’s grandmother is in her 80s and pretty content with life. But the character I found most interesting in many ways was Neville’s mother, known always in the novel as Mrs Hilary.

Mrs Hilary is in her 60s, ignored by the world, craving just a little bit of attention from anyone – and one of the options she experiments with is psychoanalysis. That’s what I wrote about in my afterword for the book, because it was such a ‘thing’ in the 1920s.

‘What you really wanted was some man whose trade it was to listen and to give heed. Some man to whom your daughter’s pneumonia, of however long ago, was not irrelevant, but had its own significance, as having helped to build you up as you were, you, the problem, with your wonderful, puzzling temperament, so full of complexes, inconsistencies, and needs. Some man who didn’t lose interest in you just because you were gray-haired and sixty-three.’

Macaulay is very witty about Freudianism, as so many writers were at the time, but also sees the need that it is answering in Mrs Hilary and the way that society neglected her. Which is impressive, considering she was only in her forties at the time herself.

There is a lot going on in this novel, and more characters and concerns than I have covered in this short review, but what holds it together is Macaulay’s intense interest in her characters. She laughs at them, but she understands them too. Each portrait is affectionate and kind, even when the ridiculous is on show. And it’s a complete delight of a novel. I’m so pleased it’s back in print, where it deserves to be!

Potterism by Rose Macaulay #1920Club

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If I were thinking about my favourite authors, there’s a strong possibility that Rose Macaulay would be bubbling under on that list. While none of her novels are my absolute favourites, she is consistently very good. She’s now best known for The Towers of Trebizond and The World My Wilderness, I think, and I do really like those accomplished books – but I prefer her ironic comedies of the 1920s. She was very prolific at that time, and books like Crewe Train, Keeping Up Appearances, and Dangerous Ages are total delights. Indeed, Dangerous Ages is one of my choices for the British Library Women Writers series.

Potterism was Macaulay’s first book of the decade and was also her first bestseller – which, given the subtitle ‘A tragi-farcical tract’, might be rather unexpected. If it’s a tract at all, it’s a stab at popular journalism of the day – and, equally, a stab at those who opposed it.

The title comes from the name Potter. This Potter (later Lord something) is a newspaper proprietor and a straight-forward, kind, hard-working man who is somehow rather simple-minded while possessing great business acumen. In fact, let’s let Macaulay describe him:

Both commonplace and common was Mr Percy Potter (according to some standards), but clever, with immense patience, a saving sense of humour, and that imaginative vision without which no newspaper owner, financier, general, politician, poet, or criminal can be great. He was, in fact, greater than the twins would ever be, because he was not at odds with his material: he found such stuff as his dreams were made of ready to his hand, in the great heart of the public – that last place where the twins would have thought of looking.

He has made his money writing for a lower class of public who want their news given without affectation – his wife, a sillier version of him, does similar things for the popular novel reading public, under the name Leila Yorke. She was writing the sort of book that was extremely popular in the ’20s, and which perhaps we’ll hear more about as the week goes on.

[How like Macaulay to include ‘criminal’ there!] But the people who make up the term ‘Potterism’ are close to home – among them, the Potters’ children. His twins, mentioned in that quote,  Jane and Johnny are part of the Anti-Potterism League. The League is created by Oxbridge intellectual types who despise the general public and the humbug that is handed to them. To the minds of Jane and Johnny, despising Potterism has nothing to do with the affection for their father – and he is generous enough to find it amusing rather than appalling. Everybody goes through that phase, perhaps.

Macaulay is excellent at making fun of everyone at the same time. There are more tragic characters, like one of the Potters’ other child, Clare, who is not clever or contented. But mostly, we see youthful arrogance and close-minded, middle-class settling for mediocrity, and doses of hypocrisy all on much of an even playing field. I certainly didn’t ever get the impression that Macaulay was siding strongly with anybody, or writing to proclaim the truth of one viewpoint against the falseness of another. Rather, she is looking around at the highbrow vs middlebrow battles of the period – and finding everyone absurd.

Among many impressive things in this impressive novel is that way that it segues into something of a murder mystery, or at least a death mystery, without seeming inconsistent. The only thing that does threaten the tone of the novel is that Macaulay gives different sections to different narrators, with the first and last of the five sections being in the third person. It’s a technique that is used a lot now, but I think Potterism would have been a better novel had it all been in the third person – not least because two of the three narrators are fairly negligible members of the Anti-Potterism League, and the section narrated by ‘Leila Yorke’ is mainly an exercise in Macaulay having fun at the expense of a certain sort of over-dramatic person. Macaulay’s narrative voice is the most amusing and the most satisfying, and I didn’t want to lose it.

A very strong start to the 1920 Club, and a reminder that I must read more of the Macaulay novels on my shelves – and hunt for those that remain elusive. And, happy news, Potterism will be reprinted by Handheld Press later in the year – I certainly recommend getting hold of a copy.

The Towers of Trebizond by Rose Macaulay

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‘Take my camel, dear,’ said my aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass.

That quote often appears on lists of best opening lines, but it might be as far as most people get into The Towers of Trebizond (1956) by Rose Macaulay. She hasn’t exactly fallen out of fashion completely, as a handful of her novels remain in print, but it’s fair to say that the average person in the street won’t be able to tell you a lot about her. She’s an author I love, but I’ve had very mixed success with her novels. At the top of the tree are Keeping Up Appearances and Crewe Train, which are very funny while also being incisively insightful about mid-century society. At the bottom is the turgid Staying With Relations. The much-feted The World My Wilderness fell in the middle for me, being very well observed but lacking the humour she does so well.

Where would The Towers of Trebizond fall on my list? It’s among her best known, but various red flags worried me – since I don’t particularly enjoy books set in countries that the author isn’t from, and I particularly don’t get on with travel books. I wasn’t sure how I’d get on with this one… but I made my book group read it, so that I’d find out!

Laurie is the narrator and, for much of the book, she details the journey she takes from Istanbul to Trebizond, along with Aunt Dot (Dorothea ffoulkes-Corbett) and her friend Father Hugh Chantry-Pigg. Dot is there to improve the lot of women, while Father Hugh is hoping to convert the masses to his particular brand of High Anglicanism. Somewhere along the way, Dot and Hugh go missing – possibly to Jerusalem, possibly to Russia – and rumour spreads that they are spies.

Macaulay apparently referred to the writing as a ‘rather goofy, rambling prose style’, and I can see why. The tone is often a little detached, curious, and wry – with the same sort of lengthy, relatively unpunctuated sentences that make Barbara Comyns’ style so quirky. Here’s an example:

But aunt Dot could only think how Priam and Hecuba would have been vexed to see the state it had all got into and no one seeming to care any more. She thought the nations ought to go on working at it and dig it all up again, and perhaps do some reconstruction, for she belonged to the reconstruction school, and would have liked to see Troy’s walls and towers rising once more against the sky like a Hollywood Troy, and the wooden horse standing beside them, opening mechanically every little while to show that it was full of armed Greeks.

But I thought there were enough cities standing about the world already, and that those which had disappeared had better be left alone, lying under the grass and asphodel and brambles, with the wind sighing over them and in the distance the sea where the Greek ships had lain waiting ten years for Trojam incensam, and behind them Mount Ida, from which the unfair and partial gods had watched the whole affair.

The main topics she addresses are faith (and distinctions between different denominations), history, and travel. Much of the book is her musings on these, with plenty of contributions for her companions while they’re about. I think it’s largely commendable for how impressively of-a-piece it is. She does not let up this style – it is consistently well done and totally all-encompassing. I guess it’s then just a question of whether or not you like this style.

While they were travelling around, I found it all a bit muddy. I couldn’t really distinguish the different places they were going, and I certainly found the interpersonal bits much more interesting than her reflections on the places she was seeing. Without anything concrete to hang onto, it was all a bit – well, the most fitting word I can think of is, again, muddy.

I could still definitely appreciate the skill that went into the creation of this portrait, and I did find a lot of it funny. Being a Christian and having been brought up in an Anglican church, I did enjoy some of the discussions of faith – though I always find that it’s non-Christians who find denominations so fascinating, and we’re happy just to do our best to follow Jesus. Macaulay has a wonderfully arch tone, and the faux matter-of-fact style did work – I just wish she’d set it in England. (The section I found funniest was when she was reflecting on having often used a line from her phrasebook about not speaking Turkish, only to discover later that she’d mixed up lines and was actually asking to speak to a Mr. Prorum, or something like that – who did turn up at one point, nonplussed.)

And, indeed, the sections of the novel I liked best were at the end, when she has turned to the UK. There is a very odd sidestep into her trying to raise a chimp – complete with driving lessons – that I thought was marvellous. In fact, having now been to book group, it was one of those times when discussing it made me like it more – reflecting on all the funny scenes and the unusual way Macaulay presents them. It’s all an impressive achievement, for the way in which it is sustained, if nothing else – and, while it doesn’t quite rival my favourite Macaulays for me, I can see why other readers would consider this her masterpiece.

The World My Wilderness – Rose Macaulay

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I hope this will turn out coherent.  I wrote most of it a while ago, sent the book away to a friend, and am now trying to complete a review sans book and sans health.  Here goes…

Here, ladies and gentlemen, is my first overlap of A Century of Books.  Rose Macaulay’s The World My Wilderness was published in 1950, a spot which is already occupied on my list by Margaret Kennedy’s Jane Austen.  First come, first reviewed, so it’s Kennedy who’s on the century list.  But I’m still going to talk about Rose Macaulay, naturally…

This is the fifth novel (and eighth book) that I’ve read by Rose Macaulay, and she is becoming one of those reliable writers I know I can pick up and enjoy; the only dud I’ve encountered was Staying With Relations.  Wikipedia tells me that her final novel, The Towers of Trebizond (which I have not read) is ‘widely regarded as her masterpiece’.  I am edging ever closer to it, since The World My Wilderness is her penultimate book, and the other one which people tend to have heard of, if they’ve heard of Macaulay at all.

‘Reliable’ is just another word for ‘consistent’, really, and Macaulay does seem to write in a consistently dry, almost satirical style, pursuing a similar theme in each novel – albeit a theme so broad that she could have written two thousand novels and never needed to approach it from the same angle twice.  It is dangerous to summarise thus (and others may have said this before me – indeed, now I see that Karyn has) but I believe Macaulay’s broad theme across her novels is: ‘What does it mean to be civilised?’  In Keeping Up Appearances this is addressed through literary eschelons; in Crewe Train through the ‘civilised savage’; in Dangerous Ages through psychoanalysis, and so on and so forth.  In The World My Wilderness, the title alludes to this debate – and the setting, postwar France and England, offers the physical destruction and moral weariness that the word ‘wilderness’ suggests.  Macaulay includes an anonymous epigraph, from which she draws the title:

The world my wilderness, its caves my home,
Its weedy wastes the garden where I roam,

Its chasm’d cliffs my castle and my tomb…

The cast of characters is initially broad and confusing (or at least it was to me) and I pesevered by ignoring those who weren’t dominant in the narrative at any one time, then slotting them all together later.  There are so many children and stepchildren and half-siblings that I had to throw my hands up in the air in defeat.  Ok.  Stiffen the sinews, summon the blood.  Here goes.

Helen and Gulliver had Barbary and Richie.  Helen and Gulliver divorced; Helen moved to France with Barbary (leaving Richie behind) and married Maurice, while Gulliver married Pamela.  Helen and Maurice had Roland.  Maurice was drowned in mysterious circumstances, leaving Helen with a stepson Raoul.  Gulliver and Pamela had David, and Pamela is pregnant again.  Phew.  That will do – I’m leaving out mother-in-law and uncle, who make cameo appearances.

There are so many characters, but I’m only going to focus on the two I thought most important.

The novel begins with Barbary and Raoul moving to England (Richie visits his mother in France) and these two form the chief interest of the novel.  Macaulay is often quite playful with names, and I don’t think it’s any coincidence that ‘Barbary’ is so close to ‘barbarous’.  She is used to running amok with the French maquis, a group whose aim was to resist the invading Germans, but who extend this resistance to all forms of authority.  She has the same attitude in England, except now her companions are deserters and thieves, living their lawless lives in the bombed out old churches and houses of London.  Her old nurse warns her against being too trusting:

“And I ask, Miss Barbary, that on no account will you ever trust those young men, for of trust they will never be deserving.”

Barbary, experienced in discredited young men, had never thought of trusting any of them.  Lend them something, and you never had it back; leave anything about near them, and you did not see it again.  If they could derive advantage from betraying you, betray you they would; these were the simple laws of their lives, the simple, easy laws of the bad, who had not to reckon with the complication of scruples, but only with gain and loss, comfort and hardship, safety and risk.
[…]
“Oh no, Coxy,” Barbary said, in surprise at the eccentric idea suggested to her.  “I should never trust them.  I mean, trust them with what?  Or to do what?  There couldn’t be anything…”
Barbary is a very Macaulayan character, if you’ll excuse me coining the term: she is something of an outsider, straight-talking, independent, but uncertain of her place in the world.  And the apple hasn’t fallen too far from the tree – but while Barbary’s inability to cohere with society turns her into a restless, waif-like exile from civilisation, her mother Helen is the selfish, self-absorbed type whose callousness hides behind a veneer of grace and elegance.  She claims to have a ‘phobia of being bored’, and very little breaks through to her heart.  Helen is overtly uncivilised, as Barbary is, but she respects none of the values of civilisation – preferring, instead, a reckless and ambiguous love for beauty.

“As to one’s country, why should one feel any more interest in its welfare than in that of other countries?  And as to the family, I have never understood how that fits in with the other ideals – or, indeed, why it should be an ideal at all.  A group of closely related persons living under one roof; it is a convenience, often a necessity, sometimes a pleasure, sometimes the reverse; but who first exalted it as admirable, an almost religious ideal?”

“My dear Madame, not almost.  It is a religious ideal.”  The abbe spoke dryly, and did not add anything about the Holy Family at Nazareth, for he never talked in such a manner to his worldly, unbelieving friends.
It is worth noting that Macaulay delights in giving her characters views that are not her own.  She signposts this with a motif running through her novels; that of looking down on writers and novels.  Some readers always want authors to be making a point, moral or otherwise, in their writing; I am happy if a writer can convey characters acting believably.  That is ‘point’ enough for me, and I think for Macaulay too – it would be a mistake to extrapolate too much from her writing, other than an examination of the way that certain characters behave in certain circumstances.  She extends beyond this, to questions as vast as the role of civilisations, but she doesn’t attempt to answer these questions.  Nor could she.

Speaking of her writing… Macaulay has a dry, ironic tone which I’ve preferred in other of her novels.  Sometimes, in The World My Wilderness, she seemed to get a bit carried away with a romanticised, flowing, almost baroque writing style.  Perhaps that fits into the themes – but it did include this section, all of which is one sentence:

In this pursuit he was impelled sometimes beyond his reasoning self, to grasp at the rich, trailing panoplies, the swinging censors,of churches from whose creeds and uses he was alien, because at least they embodied some cintuance, some tradition; while cities and buildings, lovely emblems of history, fell shattered, or lost shape and line in a sprawl of common mass newness, while pastoral beauty was overrun and spoilt, while ancient communities were engulfed in the gaping maw of the beast of prey, and Europe dissolved into wavering anonymities, bitter of tongue, servile of deed, faint of heart, always treading the frail plank over the abyss, rotten-ripe for destruction, turning a slanting, doomed eye on death that waited round the corner – during all this frightening evanesence and dissolution, the historic churches kept their strange courses, kept their improbably, incommunicable secret, linking the dim past with the disrupted present and intimidating future, frail, tough chain of legend, myth, and mystery, stronghold of reaction and preserved values.
This isn’t particularly representative of The World My Wilderness – 200 pages of this would have driven me crazy – but it does pop up now and then, and adds to the richness of Macaulay’s writing, if you can cope with this sort of thing.

I’m afraid this review is going to peter out rather, because I seem to be heading towards semi-consciousness… so, in summary… I liked it, but I think Macaulay newbies might be better off with Crewe Train or Keeping Up Appearances.  Let’s hand over to some other folk, who might have been more conscious whilst writing their reviews…

Others who got Stuck in this Book:

“[…]it is despairing, and unrelentingly sombre and pessimistic.” – Karyn, A Penguin A Week 

“It’s a beautifully written and nuanced story that’s filled with amazing (in the fantastic sense) imagery of a post-war London” – Danielle, A Work in Progress

“It’s a stunning, well-written novel.” – Katherine, A Girl Walks into a Bookstore

Personal Pleasures

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I’m currently, and slowly, reading Personal Pleasures by Rose Macaulay, one of the books I bought under Project 24. It’s a collection of paeans to the m
any and various delights Macaulay encounters in life – from believing to disbelieving, from doves in the chimney to improving the dictionary. It’s a hodge-podge, or perhaps a hotch-potch, and certainly good fun. It does feel a little over-written compared to Macaulay’s novels, with elaborate expressions and fanciful imagery. You can imagine Philip Sidney penning it, whilst not musing on Astrophel and Stella. Having said that, Macaulay delights in pulling the rug from under your feet, and each section has a little turning-point where she considers the flip-side.

This isn’t really a review of the book – that would be foolish, since I’m not even halfway yet – but I thought I’d treat you to one of the sections which tickled me. AND this prepares you for some Macaulay news coming later in the week…

‘Departure of Visitors’

An exquisite peace obtains: a drowsy, golden peace, flowing honey-sweet over my dwelling, soaking it, dripping like music from the walls, strowing the floors, like trodden herbs. A peace for gods, a divine emptiness.

Fair Quiet, have I found thee here,
And Innocence, thy Sister dear!
Mistaken long, I sought you then
In busy Companies of Men. . . .
Society is all but rude
To this delicious Solitude.

The easy chair spreads wide arms of welcome; the sofa stretches, guest-free; the books of gleam, brown and golden, buff and blue and maroon, from their shelves; they may strew the floor, the hairs, the couch, once more, lying ready to the hand. “I am afraid the room is rather littered….” The echo of the foolish words lingers on the air, is brushed away, dies forgotten, the air closes behind it. A heavy volume is heaved from its shelf on to the sofa. Silence drops like falling blossoms over the recovered kingdom from which pretenders have taken their leave.

What to do with all this luscious peace? It is a gift, a miracle, a golden jewel, a fragment of some gracious heavenly order, dropped to earth like some incredible strayed star. One’s life to oneself again. Dear visitors, what largesse have you given, not only in departing, but in coming, that we might learn to prize your absence, wallow the more exquisitely in the leisure of your not-being.

To-night we shall sleep deep. We need no more hope that you “have everything you want”; we know that you have, for you are safely home, and can get it from your kitchen if you haven’t. We send you blessing and God speed, and sink into our idle peace as into floods of down.

But you have unfortunately left behind you, besides peace, a fountain pen, a toothbrush, and a bottle of eye lotion with eye bath.

Dangerous Ages

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I’ve got half a review saved away in my draft posts, but it’s late and I’m heading bedwards, so instead I thought I’d share this delicious quotation from Rose Macaulay’s Dangerous Ages (1921). It’s a conversation between Gerda and Neville (who are, confusingly, mother and daughter. Or perhaps aunt and niece – I got a little confused.) I think it’s a fun little satire on thoughtless 1920s Bohemianism…

“Marriage,” said Gerda, “is so Victorian. It’s like antimacassars.”

“Now, my dear, do you mean anything by either of those statements? Marriage wasn’t invented in Victoria’s reign. Nor did it occur more frequently in that reign than it did before or does now. Why Victorian then? And why antimacassars? Think it out. How can a legal contract be like a doily on the back of a chair? Where is the resemblance? It sounds like a riddle, only there’s no answer. No, you know you’ve got no answer. That kind of remark is sheer sentimentality and muddle headedness. Why are people in their twenties so often sentimental? That’s another riddle.”

Keeping Up Appearances by Rose Macaulay

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It’s always nice to feel oneself in like-minded company, so I was pleased (and not entirely surprised) to see that a lot of you felt the same way that I do about Catcher in the Rye. I rather think today’s book will be more up your street…

Although I read Keeping Up Appearances (1928) by Rose Macaulay back in December (around the time I reviewed Crewe Train) I’ve recently been using it as part of an essay, so hopefully it’ll be fresh in my mind… Those of you familiar with a certain BBC sitcom of the same name may recognise the reference in today’s subject title – but while Hyacinth doesn’t make an appearance, Macaulay’s novel has similar ideas of class and how pretending to be above one’s station will only end in complications…

The central characters of the novel are half-sisters Daisy and Daphne, who are worlds apart in character. Daphne is 25, a cultured intellectual who is never put-off by any situations, and moves through high society with ease and grace. Daisy, 30, is plagued by self-doubt and comes from rather commoner stock. Though she tries to engage in the same social circles as Daphne, and is far more snobbish and class-conscious, she has none of Daphne’s confidence, bravery, and charm. She also lives in constant fear that her secret life as popular novelist Marjorie Wynne will be unearthed by the highbrows and intellectuals amongst whom she moves. But she realises that this isn’t likely, as (when she tests the water) they seem completely unaware of Marjorie Wynne’s existence. Macaulay uses these bits to satirise her own position as popular novelist (though one read by middlebrow and highbrow alike, I believe). In fact, throughout Macaulay’s writings (including the novel of hers I’ve recently started, Staying With Relations) she is very teasing of novelists, and quite amusingly so. This, for instance, is in a collection of her essays called A Casual Commentary:

Novels are among the queerest things in a queer world. Chunks out of the imagined life of a set of imagined persons, set down for others to read. For this is what you have to produce if you are a novelist. You will find it quite easy. Anyone can write novels, and most people, at one time or another, do so. One novel is much like another, so you need not worry very much about what kind of novel to write.[…] The great advantage of writing novels is that some people read novels. They are not, on the whole, very clever people, so yours need not be clever novels, and, indeed, had better not be.

I read the Keeping Up Appearances as part of my research about the development of the concept of ‘middlebrow’, and it is a very interesting look at the interaction of different social strata, especially when it comes to literary circles and their inability to understand each other. It’s also a lot about perspective – for example, Daisy considers her role from two different vantages:

Mother’s clever girl, earning her living by writing for the London papers, writing such bright, clever pieces, that people always liked to read. One of those vulgar little journalists who write popular feminine chit-chat in that kind of paper that caters for mob taste. Oh, what matter? She was either, according to her environment. Go to East Sheen, be Mother’s clever girl, petted and admired; go to the newspaper office, be one of the smart young women journalists, writing good live articles; move along Folyots and highbrows, and be as one not realised by nice highbrows, and only recognised by less nice highbrows as a target for unkindly jests.

Though Keeping Up Appearances isn’t as funny as Crewe Train, nor quite as memorable, it does present a clever idea. Because, dear reader, I haven’t told you the central concept which surprises the reader and twists the interpretation completely, which comes about halfway through the novel. And I’m not going to, you’ll have to read it yourself (carefully avoiding reading the blurb on the inside, if you have my edition – which is that pictured above. I don’t know about you, but it reminded me of Picasso’s The Three Dancers).

Without giving that away, I can say little more – except that Rose Macaulay deserves a wider audience. Capuchin Classics have recently republished one of her novels, I believe, and perhaps other publishers will take up the baton. But there are plenty of secondhand copies available of Keeping Up Appearances and Crewe Train, and I daresay that libraries will have them – for a funny, clever, and well-written view of 1920s class issues and literary society, you can do no better.

 

Oh, Mr. Porter…

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Rose Macaulay first hoved onto my horizons when I read Nicola Beauman’s wonderful book A Very Great Profession (which I discover, rather to my horror, I’ve never blogged about – it’s essential reading for anyone remotely interested in Persephone books or any interwar domestic novels). On the strength of that, I bought Told By An Idiot in Pershore market, and… I still haven’t read it. This is the story of so many of my books, of course, but Told By An Idiot (like, for some reason, Rosamund Lehmann’s Dusty Answer) has been close to the top of the tbr pile on numerous occasions. It’s come away on holiday with me, been placed by the bed, somehow never quite been read…

And I still haven’t read it – but I have read a Rose Macaulay novel. While researching my middlebrow stuff, Crewe Train by RM was mentioned a lot, especially in an interesting and newish book by Wendy Gan called Women, Privacy, and Modernity in Early Twentieth-Century British Writing. My curiosity piqued, I got hold of the novel and read it, and isn’t it good? I don’t know if I’m last to the party on Rose Macaulay. I had read some of her letters, but that was it, so forgive me if everyone else has read everything she ever wrote. Those whom I’ve asked seem to have been almost universally put off by The Towers of Trebizond…

Crewe Train (1926) takes its name from the popular rhyme:
Oh, Mr. Porter, whatever shall I do?
I want to go to Birmingham, but they’ve sent me on to Crewe!and is about Denham, who has got onto the wrong path in life. Brought up by her clergyman father in Andorra, she has instincts and a lifestyle which are fairly primitive. Or so they seem when her father dies, and she must move to live with relatives in London, the Greshams, who live in high society and all write or publish or at least read books. That sort. In Denham’s view: Books were mostly dull enough, but criticisms of books were quite unreadable. The Greshams all read them, but then they appeared to be so constituted as to be able to read anything. It was nearly a disease with them.Imagine! Denham is mystified by most of their activities, which seem to her to make no sense – the solemn dancing, the table manners, most of all the need to visit each other and hold conversation all the time. She is at a loss to either initiate or join the sorts of conversations that her relatives’ circle expects of her – the only successful topic she lands upon is puddings – and she believes that people should stay in their own home, and not bother each other all the time.

But nothing is simple, of course, and Denham finds herself in love with (thankfully distant) relative Arnold – and they marry. The tidal wave of first love is enough to get them through a lot, but then the differences start to spring up. She is desperate not to live in London, and he can think of nowhere else to live. She never reads anything but maps, he writes stream-of-consciousness novels (one, Lone Jane, is a cruelly funny pastiche of Joyce et al, to which comes the response: “I suppose,” said Denham doubtfully, “Jane did think like that. I suppose she was a little queer in the head.”) Though never openly antagonistic, their marriage becomes a struggle – whose lifestyle and wishes will be sacrificed for the other, or will they reach an unhappy compromise?

If this sounds bleak, then it’s only really bleak for the characters. The author and the reader are mostly having a whale of a time – Rose Macaulay has that affectionate, ironic voice which is so characteristic of the time, able to expose the ridiculous aspects of her characters without making them wholly ridiculous people. She uses the extremes of society to comment wryly on all of it, and uses Denham’s unusual perspective on good manners and protocol for good comic effect. For example, when Denham’s mother-in-law is instructing her on good house-management:

“It’s the only way of getting everything done in order. Monday morning clean the silver, Tuesday the knives, Wednesday, the paint, Thursday, the taps – and so on through the week. No day without something cleaned. And one room thoroughly turned out each day, too – that’s most important.” “Turned out…” Denham repeated it vaguely. “Yes, turned out. The things all taken out of the room and put back again, you know.” What for, Denham silently wondered. The same result would surely be achieved, with less effort, by leaving the things where they were. But the maids would not then have done a morning’s work; that was of course important.All in all, as well as being useful for my research, I found this a really fun novel, and I’ll definitely be reading more. In fact, I like Keeping Up Appearances even more so far, it’s very clever. If you haven’t read any RM yet, do give Crewe Train a go. Of course, it’s not in print… but there are plenty of 1p copies available on Amazon. And, who knows, Rose Macaulay might make a last minute addition to my Best Books of 2009, which I drafted the other day….