Author: StuckinaBook

Here’s an odd question…

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How do you all fancy being my Research Assistants for the afternoon?!

For my next chapter, I need to quote a 1920s middlebrow novel or two where a character talks about sex, and says ‘We’re all just animals, really’, or anything like that.  The sort of sentence I’ve read dozens of times in novels of the period, but now can’t remember any at all.

If you can think of one off the top of your head, that would be amazing – otherwise perhaps you could keep your eyes open, and let me know??  Anything published around the 1920s (shortly before or after is fine) which isn’t high modernist – oh, and is British – would be absolutely wonderful.

Thanks, folks!

Mrs. Harris Goes To Paris – Paul Gallico

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The Bloomsbury Group set of reprints remains, I believe, the best selection of reprints out there.  It doesn’t have the range of Penguin or OUP Classics; it doesn’t have quite the unifying ethos of Persephone or Virago, but there simply are no duds in their number.  Miss Hargreaves is obviously their finest publication, in my eyes, but as I work my way through the few I haven’t read, I continue to marvel at the treats they’ve brought back to a new audience.

For some reason, Mrs. Harris has been sitting on my shelf for two years without me getting around to reading her.  I even had a copy of Flowers For Mrs. Harris (the original UK title of Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris [1958]) before the Bloomsbury Group existed, but hadn’t read that either.  How could I have waited for so long?  Mrs. Harris is a joy, and her little novel is bliss.

Mrs. Harris is a London char, whose job is to clean other people’s houses.  She takes a deep pride in her work, is very good at it, and can pick and choose her clients.  She, and her good friend Vi, are much in demand, and when she decides that she has had enough of a client, she simply drops her key through their letterbox, and moves on.  Mrs. Harris is the dictionary definition of indomitable.  Nothing phases her, and she is an eternal optimist.  She also speaks somewhat like Dick van Dyke in Mary Poppins, par example:

“Ow Lor’.”  The exclamation was torn from Mrs. Harris as
she was suddenly riven by a new thought.  “Ow Lor’,” she repeated, “if
I’m to ‘ave me photograph tyken, I’ll ‘ave to ‘ave a new ‘at.”
Now, although she is a wonderful character, it would be a lie to say that she has many layers of complexity and an inner introspection dying to emerge.  Gallico’s novel is simple and sweet, and he doesn’t overburden himself with psychological strife etc.  There is one central motivation of the novel, and that is Mrs. Harris’s desire for a Christian Dior dress…

It had all begun that day several years back when during the course of her duties at Lady Dant’s house, Mrs. Harris had opened a wardrobe to tidy it and had come upon the two dresses hanging there.  One was a bit of heaven in cream, ivory, lace, and chiffon, the other an explosion in crimson satin and taffeta, adorned with great red bows and a huge red flower.  She stood there as though struck dumb, for never in all her life had she seen anything quite as thrilling and beautiful.

Drab and colourless as her existence would seem to have been, Mrs. Harris had always felt a craving for beauty and colour which up to this moment had manifested itself in a love for flowers.
Yet now, flowers have been replaced by this longing for a dress that costs £450 – and in 1958, of course, that was an astronomical sum.  Coincidence, luck, and much determination (for Mrs. Harris is pretty much built out of determination) and three years later she is on her way to Paris…

It’s such a fun story.  Scarcely a jot of it is realistic – Mrs. Harris’s good humour and spirited nature act much in the manner of fairy dust, transforming all those she meets – but the novel is so enjoyable and light-hearted (albeit with occasional kicks) that the reader allows him/herself to be whisked along for the ride.  The contrast between shabby London char and elegant Parisian fashionista is, naturally, wonderful – and Gallico makes full use of the potential comedy in the situation.

Oh, it’s lovely!  It certainly isn’t very deep, even with an attempt for A Moral at the end, in the way that American sitcoms like to conclude events – but writing something sprightly and enjoyable is probably rather more difficult than writing something introspective and traumatic, and is certainly rarer.  Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris is great fun, very short, and is a perfect way to spend a summer afternoon.

Mrs. Harris – the winners!

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Thanks so much for all your entries to the Paul Gallico giveaway – what a wonderful mix of destinations we want to visit between us!  Sorry not to hear the ideas of non-UK readers – perhaps one day I’ll ask the question again, without a giveaway, so we can hear from everyone.

I’ve done the draw now, and the eight sets of Mrs. Harris MP and Mrs. Harris Goes To Moscow will be going to… (drumroll, if you please):

Estelle / A Bookish Space

Margaret /  Books Please
Agnieszka
Sakura / Chasing Bawa
Ann P
David H / Follow the Thread

Mystica
Daphne (who entered by email)

Congratulations, one and all!  If your name is there, please email me at simondavidthomas[at]yahoo.co.uk with your address, and the subject line Mrs. Harris Giveaway.  Once I’ve got all the addresses, I’ll forward them on to lovely Bloomsbury, and they’ll send out your books.  What fun!

And this is a Mrs. Harris themed week, as my post on Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris will be appearing at some point… when I next have internet access!

Jane Marcus on the non-canonical

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I don’t currently have the internet at home, so I’m popping up scheduled posts when I can – so this is something to ponder on over the weekend.  The painting is Woman Reading in an Interior (1915) by Vaclav Vytlacil, which isn’t remotely related to the quotation I wanted to post (except that both intrigue me.)  It’s a potentially controversial, but interesting, excerpt I read by Jane Marcus (feminist theorist)…

I
would caution against fundamentalist feminists’ over-literal reading of texts
without the radical unsettling processes which contemporary theory has provided
to keep us honest intellectually.  I am
nervous about producing a generation of students who have never been to the
library, who practice refined techniques on a body of texts already chosen by
their professors – not the canon, but the highly-privileged
“non-canonical.”  I do not want to read
another paper on “The Yellow Wallpaper” or The
Awakening. […] Since aesthetic value is not at issue here, other sets of
lost texts might enliven our debates and bring about a dialogue which is not
about mastery or decoding of texts but about reading and writing together.

Thoughts?  I think it lends support to feminist reprinting by Virago and
Persephone, and also cautions against non-canonical texts becoming
canonical by virtue of their accepted ‘outsider’-ness…

Ivy Compton-Burnett: A Memoir – Cicely Greig

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My favourite thing in the blogosphere in 2012 has been Claire discovering, and loving, A.A. Milne.  Every time one of her AAM reviews come out, I more or less burst with glee that somebody else has found out how funny and delightful his many and various books are.  Most of my AAM reading happened before I started blogging (I’ve read about 25 books by him) so you haven’t witnessed my love of his books as much as you would have done had you engaged me in conversation in 2002, but – it is there!

So, that’s one favourite author off the list.  Back when I started blogging in 2007, it seemed that nobody much liked Virginia Woolf either – but plenty of people have come to the blogosphere since who share my love of Ginny.  And there’s never been any shortage of those who’ll wax literary over E.M. Delafield, Barbara Comyns, and Persephone & Virago etc.

But… but… as of yet, I haven’t found a blogger who loves Ivy Compton-Burnett as I do (although I think Geranium Cat is more in favour than not?).  There is no-one who gets as excited as I do about her novels; most people, indeed, have either never read her, or run screaming from the thought of having to read her again.

Picture source

Which is why it is so wonderful to find books which match my enthusiasm for Dame Ivy.  Earlier in the year, I read Pamela Hansford-Johnson’s enthusiastic pamphlet on Ivy Compton-Burnett – and now I’ve read something I loved even more.  In fact, it’s in my top two or three books of the year so far.  AND it’s available from 1p on Amazon.  It’s Ivy Compton-Burnett: A Memoir (1972) by her typist and friend, Cicely Greig.

Had I know that Greig was Ivy Compton-Burnett’s typist, I probably would have read this book much sooner (according to the date I scribbled inside, I’ve had it for nearly three years.)  It’s such an interesting perspective on this fascinating author.  Gradually they became friends as well, but the Victorian/Edwardianism of Ivy’s novels extended to her understanding of social mores, and it took quite a long time for her to unbend enough to treat Greig as a friend.  As Greig writes, Ivy Compton-Burnett just couldn’t quite understand her position – as a woman who had to earn her living, but wasn’t a servant.  The mechanics and background detail of writing fascinate me, and Greig is uniquely able to provide firsthand experience of certain aspects of Ivy’s writing process – as the first person to be given the novels in longhand:

I had not yet opened her parcel with the manuscript of her novel.  We
said goodbye to each other at the front door, and I flew back to the
sitting-room.  When I opened the parcel I found fourteen school exercise
books of the cheaper kind, blue paper covers and multiplication tables
on the back cover.  I remember thinking this last detail quite a fitting
logic for a book of Ivy’s.  Her books so often have a sort of
inexorable logic about them, like twice one is two.

For Greig was not solely a typist, but also an ardent fan.  This was how she got the job: she wrote to Ivy Compton-Burnett (and, incidentally, Rose Macaulay) expressing her admiration and asking that they consider her for future typing.  Macaulay didn’t take her up on it, but months later Ivy Compton-Burnett did.  As an admirer of Dame Ivy’s work, Greig combined professionalism with the sort of mad joy that any of us would feel at this privileged position with an author we loved.  Greig echoes Pamela Hansford-Johnson when writing about her love of Ivy:

Why did I like her books so much?  I have been asked that question many times, sometimes with a note of incredulous exasperation.  With Ivy one is either an addict or an abstainer.  I became an addict from the first chapter of A House and Its Head.  Most of my friends, unfortunately, are abstainers.  Suggest her, and if they have ever tried to read one of her books their reply can be an indignant refusal.

She really is love or hate.  Greig goes on to explain her own love of Ivy Compton-Burnett, not quite as astutely as Pamela Hansford-Johnson does, but still in a fascinating manner.  But it was her firsthand interaction with Dame Ivy which makes this book so thrillingly interesting to me.  Greig has no illusions about Ivy Compton-Burnett’s fairly terrifying character, but she also recognised the fondness behind it.

Her fierceness, when it showed itself, and when I provoked it, was always short-lived.  Any breach of normal decorum, and her standard was perhaps exceptionally high, was annoying to her, and she never failed to let this be seen.  But having let it be seen, the matter was over.

Ivy Compton-Burnett was always keen for Greig to visit, and expressed an interest in her life which was far from perfunctory.  They could not meet as equals, nor did they even use each other’s first names for many years, but there was a genuine affection and (more characteristically) curiosity from Ivy.  One gets the sense that Greig’s other friendships were more free and easy, but that perhaps this was one of the most valued – and while Ivy Compton-Burnett wanted to meet Greig’s friends, Greig felt she could only bring people who also admired Ivy’s writing; few and far between.  So, although Greig also grew to know Ivy’s dear friend Margaret Jourdain, theirs was mostly an exclusive friendship, in a vacuum, as it were.  Ivy’s life, aging, and death are shown sensitively, from the angle of a friend who saw her all too rarely, and Greig balances Ivy’s life and work excellently, being herself fascinated by, and involved with, both.

I would have been scared rigid of Dame Ivy, I’m sure.  Obviously manners maketh man, but decorum and etiquette often baffle me – and Ivy Compton-Burnett’s standards were positively Victorian, as though she were part of the world she so often depicted through fiction.  Ivy Compton-Burnett is one of those authors (like Virginia Woolf, like Muriel Spark) whose writing and personality I adore, but with whom I cannot imagine being friendly or even at ease.  And yet I lap up their comments and views of the world, whether or not I agree – and Greig’s perspective offers greater potential for these.  A brief observation Ivy Compton-Burnett made to Greig is one with which I do very much agree, for her time but more especially for ours:

“Yes, that’s the worst of writers today,” Ivy said.  “They will write about something.  Instead of just writing about people, about their characters.”

That’s probably one of the wisest things I’ve ever read about writing, and if more writers today considered it then we wouldn’t have the deluge of issue-driven books, which doubtless market well but prove rather uninspiring, to me, at least.

When people ask me where they should start with Ivy Compton-Burnett, I usually recommend either Pastors and Masters (as it is an early work; a sort of Ivy-lite) or simply say that they’re all more or less the same, so it doesn’t much matter.  I’d now be inclined to suggest they start, in fact, with this book.  Jumping straight into Ivy Compton-Burnett can be an intimidating prospect; I think becoming acquainted with her through Cecily Greig’s eyes is a great halfway house, and one which (through Greig’s infectious enthusiasm and personal insight) might well pique a reader’s interest, and make Ivy Compton-Burnett’s novels feel not only accessible but an absolute must.  These sorts of books are rather hit or miss, but Cecily Greig’s is one of favourite reads this year.  Hurrah!

Man and Superman – George Bernard Shaw

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One of the weirder tangents my thesis has taken me on is the depiction of Satan in 20th-century literature… not a topic I feel entirely at ease with, but needs must, and it has led me in the direction of some intriguing texts.  Most entertaining was George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman (1903) – which helpfully ticks off one of the tricky years at the beginning of A Century of Books.

Although I’ve read a few Shaw plays, I don’t think I’ve ever seen one performed.  This one would be great fun to watch, although it is apparently rarely performed in its entirety.  There are four acts – Acts 1, 2, and 4 are set in upper-class society with Shauvian topics of marriage and left-wing morals.  Act 3, normally excised, is… set in hell.  As you do.  But I won’t jump the gun – let’s rewind back to Act 1.

Ann has recently lost her father, and is waiting to hear whom her father appointed her guardian (for, although her mother is still alive, she seems fairly useless).  Most likely candidate is Roebuck Ramsden, a no-nonsense, traditional sort of chap, whose chief horror is the spectre of Socialism.  Said spectre is represented by Tanner, something of a pessimist but rather a wordy, witty one.  To Ramsden’s horror, Tanner and he have been chosen to be co-guardians.  Tanner sees through Ann’s guise of unworldly innocence, to the determined young woman inside:

She’ll commit every crime a respectable woman can; and she’ll justify every one of them by saying that it was the wish of her guardians. She’ll put everything on us; and we shall have no more control over her than a couple of mice over a cat.

A man who certainly does not see through this guise is poor hapless Octavius.  He’s very sweet, but utterly besotted with Ann and incapable of seeing her faults, even when Tanner points them out to him.  Especially then.  And we’re all set up for a lovely comedy of manners, with some handy dichotomies thrown in: right-wing/left-wing, conventional/’advanced’, romantic/cynical, serious/playful.  Being Shaw, it’s not quite as insouciantly blithe as it would be in the hands of some playwrights.  He gets his politics in – gently, in the first two acts, in the linguistic tussles of Ramsden and Tanner, which are great fun.

The big moral quandary comes in with Ann’s sister Violet, who (we find out) is pregnant.  Ramsden and Octavius are horrified, while Tanner congratulates her on her progressive nature.  All is not quite what it seems, and it’s a rather clever bit of playing with a common early-20th century dilemma.

Then Act 3.  Which is set in Hell, and features Don Juan, a statue, and the Devil (amongst others).  This act is almost invariably omitted from productions of Man and Superman, and one can see why.  Shaw intends to draw parallels between these characters and those of the play proper – indeed, the play started in response to the challenge to write one in the tradition of Don Juan – but it’s all a little heavy-handed (as Shaw can be) and probably rather costly to stage.  The Devil is not an unsympathetic character, and has very advanced views on warfare, considering this is pre-WW1:

In a battle two bodies of men shoot at one another with bullets and
explosive shells until one boy runs away, when the others chase the
fugitives on horseback and cut them to pieces as they fly.  And this,
the chronicle concludes, shews the greatness and majesty of empires, and
the littleness of the vanquished. Over such battles the people run
about the streets yelling with delight, and egg their governments on to
spend hundreds of millions of money in the slaughter, whilst the
strongest Ministers dare not spend an extra penny in the pound against
poverty and pestilence through which they themselves daily walk.

On and on this act goes, until eventually – with an intellectually improved audience, I daresay, but also a rather bored and confused one – we return to the characters we know and love, and witty wordplay becomes, once more, the order of the way.

And Shaw is witty!  He doesn’t specialise in those twisty, meaningless bon mots of Oscar Wilde, which are so clever and a little wearing (except in the incomparable Importance of Being Earnest) but a more extended pattern to his writing.  Wilde relies on the epigrammatic individual line; Shaw’s paragraphs flow, with ingenious pacing and regulated logic, and produce humour that way.  Just as an example, here are Tanner’s thoughts on marriage:

Marriage is to me apostasy, profanation of the sanctuary of my soul, violation of my manhood, sale of my birthright, shameful surrender, ignominious capitulation, acceptance of defeat. I shall decay like a thing that has served its purpose and is done with; I shall change from a man with a future to a man with a past; I shall see in the greasy eyes of all the other husbands their relief at the arrival of a new prisoner to share their ignominy.

Man and Superman ended up not being useful for my chapter, but it was great fun to read.  I think I might return to Shaw’s plays in December, if the 1900s and 1910s are still proving tricky years to fill…

And what happened to Ramsden, Ann, Violet, Tanner, Octavius and all?  I bet you can guess at least one outcome…

A Gallico Giveaway!

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The lovely people at Bloomsbury have got in touch with me: they have eights sets of Mrs. Harris MP and Mrs. Harris Goes To Moscow to give away, and decided that the wonderful readers of Stuck-in-a-Book were the right types to receive them!  Trâm-Anh knew that I loved Gallico’s novels Coronation and Love of Seven Dolls, and though somehow I’ve only just started Mrs. Harris series (halfway through Mrs. Harris Goes To Paris and loving it), it was always more in the way of saving-something-brilliant than uncertain-I’ll-enjoy.

So, if you live in the UK and fancy the chance to win those two books (pictured below, in situ in Bloomsbury’s offices – aren’t they striking and gorgeous?) just leave a comment with the place you’d most like to visit, but have yet to see.  (Mine, by the way, is vague – Scandinavia.)

I know that quite a few people have trouble commenting here – if you want to enter but can’t comment, email me simondavidthomas[at]yahoo.co.uk and I’ll put you in the draw.

In about a week’s time, I’ll do a draw.  Good luck!  With eight sets of two to win, your chances are pretty good… do feel free to spread the word :)

Dusty Answer – Rosamond Lehmann

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Despite packing and moving and all sorts, I have managed (just in time) to finish Dusty Answer by Rosamond Lehmann, and thus I am participating in Florence’s Rosamond Lehmann Reading Week!  I also realise I’ve been spelling it ‘Rosamund’ up until now.  Sorry, Ros.

I bought Dusty Answer (1927) eight years ago, and it’s been on holiday with me a couple of times, and yet I hadn’t read it (or any Rosamond Lehmann novels) until this week.  I had intended to read a different Lehmann novel, but then decided to start at the beginning, with the novel Lehmann had published when she was 26, the same age I am.  I’m glad I did.  Dusty Answer is brilliant, and fulfilled all the expectations I’ve been building up in my head over the past eight years.

The papier-mache dog (Pastey) was made by my friend Mel’s boyfriend…
Mel insisted that he make an appearance.

The novel concerns Judith Earle, an only-child who is mostly solitary, but who becomes friendly with the children who visit next door – and who end up figuring hugely in her life.  They are Mariella, Roddy, Julian, Charlie, and Martin – mostly cousins, but Julian and Charlie are brothers – and have a busy, high-spirited life which Judith joins in nervously but so very whole-heartedly.  They are her life, for a summer or two – and ice-skating a while later – and have a huge significance in her otherwise lonely upbringing.   It takes a talented writer to write about childhood without the novel feeling like a children’s book, and Lehmann achieves this wonderfully.  The cast is well-drawn – foolish but amiable Martin, above-it-all Julian, unusual Roddy, beautiful Charlie, and self-conscious Mariella.  Lehmann captures childhood, and the fleeting but all-absorbing interaction with other children, even when it lasts only a little while.  Although nothing exceptional happens in these chapters, the atmosphere is consumingly beautiful.  Part of me wishes the whole of Dusty Answer dealt with their childhood, from the subjective but astute gaze of Judith.  It would have been enough.

But, we learn in the first page or two, Charlie is killed.  The children grow up and don’t see each other.  Judith must start to make a life for her own – which she does, as a student at Cambridge.  This was the section I liked least.  The character who looms largest in Judith’s life at this point is Jennifer – they bond over insulting a chubby, ugly girl behind her back; they are essentially horrified by a lack of beauty.  This was where I lost a bit of sympathy for Judith.  But a novel – even one which looks through the eyes of one character – doesn’t fail or succeed on the sympathetic qualities of its protagonist.  Lehmann still writes engagingly and Cambridge life, but I missed the cousins.  I wanted them back.  That group was what gave the novel vitality for me.  And, luckily… they came back!  I shan’t spoil any more, but things get increasingly complex…

Dusty Answer spans Judith’s life from childhood to her early twenties (I think) and Lehmann is convincing at the subtle ways she changes as she ages – and the same for all the children as they become adults (except poor Charlie, of course.)  Only Julian and Roddy got rather confused in my mind, and we might be able to lay the blame at the door of the hot weather this week.  As a central character, Judith is convincing in her thoughts and responses, irksome in her self-consciousness and occasional hysteria, and an odd (but believable) mix of concern for the lives of others and intense introspection.  Perhaps common traits of the only-child with distant parents.  One character sums up her approach to life rather well:

Have you ever been happy?  No.  Whenever you come near to being, you start thinking: “Now I am happy.  How interesting… Am I really happy?”
Yet, although she has a few off-putting qualities, these only serve to make her more interesting and rounded as a focal pair of eyes for the novel.  She seems to have been based on Lehmann herself.  None of the characters are saints or sinners; the good do not end happily and the bad unhappily – Lehmann’s novel reflects the highs and lows, obsessions and irritations of life itself – albeit rather heightened at times.

But the reason I loved Dusty Answer was Lehmann’s writing, especially in the first section.  It’s another of those novels which starts with a little bit of prolepsis (starting with some information, then skipping back into the past) but it worked well here, because we are going back to Judith’s childhood.  The effect lends an air of added nostalgia to the early chapters.  It actually reminded me of a couplet written by Miss Hargreaves (!) – her poetry is usually nonsensical, but there was a definite sense at the beginning of Dusty Answer of ‘Halcyon, halcyon, halcyon days / Wrapped in high summer’s indigenous haze.’    And Lehmann writes so, so beautifully.  As with Sybille Bedford, it’s difficult to pinpoint sections which are especially brilliant, because all of it flows exquisitely.  Karen (whose review is here) wrote on the LibraryThing discussion of Rosamond Lehmann: ‘What beautiful, dreamy, atmospheric prose she writes!’  And she’s spot on.  As I say, picking out an excerpt is tricky – indeed, it somehow seems rather like purple prose in isolation, which it never does in context, but I thought I’d better not write a whole review without any quotations…

Into the deep blue translucent shell of night.  The air parted lightly as the car plunged through it, washing away in waves that smelt of roses and syringa and all green leaves.  The moon struggled with clouds.  She wore a faint and gentle face.

“I shouldn’t be surprised if there was rain before daybreak,” said Martin; and, reaching at length the wan straight high road, accelerated with a sigh of satisfaction.

“Faster, Martin, faster.”

Faster and faster he went.  She settled herself close against him, and through half-shut eyes saw the hawthorn and wild-rose hedges stream backward on either hand.  The night air was a drug from whose sweet insinuating caress she prayed never to wake.  Soon, through one leafy roadway after another, the headlights pierced a tunnel of green gloom.  The lanes were full of white scuts and little paws, paralysed; and then, as Martin painstakingly slowed down, dipping and twinkling into the banks.  Moths flickered bright-winged an instant in the lamplight before being dashed to their fried and ashy death.  Once or twice came human beings, objects of mean and foolish design, incongruous in the night’s cast grandeur; and here and there, under the trees, upon the stiles, in the grass, a couple of them, locked face to face, disquietingly still, gleamed and vanished.  She observed them with distaste: passion was all ugliness and vulgar imbecility.
But I think the only way to see whether or not you’d like Dusty Answer is to pick up a copy and start reading.  Since it was on my shelf for eight years, you’ll have gathered that a synopsis alone doesn’t sell it as a must-read.  But if, like me, you’ve somehow gone through your life without reading any of Rosamond Lehmann’s output, then – hie thee to a library!

Thanks so much, Florence, for running Rosamond Lehmann Reading Week and for making me finally read this novel.  It’s so, so good!

A Favourite of the Gods – Sybille Bedford

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Let’s take a moment, before I begin, to praise how beautiful this book is – the book-as-object, I mean.  Well, you can only see the picture – sadly, you can’t feel it.  It is beautiful to read.  The cover flips closed with a beautiful soft clunk; the pages slip beautifully together.  It is a little soft to the touch.  It’s delightful.  This is why I love books, not just reading.  This is why I won’t get an e-reader.

But, thankfully, it didn’t end there.  A Favourite of the Gods (1963) is also a really good novel, which Daunt Books kindly sent me a few weeks ago, along with the sequel A Compass Error, which I’ve yet to read.  You might already have spotted Rachel’s enthusiastic review of the books – and I’m jumping on the same bandwagon, because I think Sybille Bedford might be something rather special.

A Favourite of the Gods concerns three generations of women – Anna, Constanza, and Flavia – over several decades, dealing with Italian and English society, living lives governed by different moral systems, yet somehow inextricably bound together, even when understanding each other least.

The novel opens with Constanza and her daughter Flavia on a train to Paris, intending to meet Constanza’s fiancée.  Everything goes rather awry when the train stops and Constanza realises she has lost her ruby ring… they get off the train and stay locally for a while.  And then we leap back to the beginning of the story… as with Wise Children, this technique irked me a bit, but I’ll let them get on with the show…

Since the plot is the least important part of the novel, I’m going to whizz through part of it… Backtrack to 1870s American Anna – who heads off to Rome and falls in love with an Italian Prince, as you do.  Marriage and a baby girl, Constanza, swiftly follow.  Some years later, Anna discovers something that makes her whisk Constanza away to England, forbidding to let her ever see her father again.  When Constanza becomes of age, she resolves to see him anyway, now she is no longer under her mother’s well-meaning but possessive control – only, war is declared.

Right, that’s as far as I’ll go – but, obviously, somewhere along the way Constanza’s daughter Flavia appears…

Thinking back over the novel, there are a few significant moments, but for the most part the events don’t particularly matter.  Bedford writes, instead, about relationships between mother and daughter; how people come to understand the world around them, while relating their new-found understanding to their upbringing; how children grow to see their parents as people, and not simply parents; how events affecting the whole of Europe can equally affect tiny family units.  And, throughout all this, Bedford has an astonishingly subtlety.  Nothing is overstated; a lot is barely stated.  Bedford depends upon her fine character drawings, rather than exclamatory narrative interjections.  Anna is dignified and calm, but very proud; Constanza is more rebellious, but ultimately loyal.  Their mother/daughter has a thousand shades in it, and is wholly believable.  I loved how Bedford managed to convey this with tiny linguistic decisions.  For example…

Constanza said: “There hasn’t been one word of marriage; and there won’t be.”

“But dearest girl, why?”

“One doesn’t marry like that,” said Constanza, “just like that.  For a bit of love.”

Anna chose to laugh.  “You don’t know yet, my dear, what one marries for.”
I think the ‘chose’ is really clever there.  A lesser novelist would elaborate about Anna’s shock and discouragement, and her decision to put a brave face on matters – but Bedford captures it all in a word.

It must be so difficult not simply to show how these characters are and interact, but how they change over the years.  We see Constanza growing from a baby to a mother, and Bedford writes her life without a false step or unbelievable move.  Often characters seem the same from cradle to grave, but Bedford is cleverer than that.  Here is Constanza as an adult, and a passage about change:

She had learnt to travel light.  In her youth she had looked at fate as the bolt from the clear sky, now she recognized it in the iron rule of time on all human affairs.  Today is not like yesterday; the second chance is not the first.  Whatever turning-points are taken or are missed, it is the length of the passage, the length of the road that counts.  She realized that she would never again entirely belong, but also that a large part of her belonged nowhere else.  Once more she basked, volatile and melancholy: the sun, the fruit, the colour of the stones were her inheritance as well as the sad pagan creed of carpe diem and stoicism for the rest.
In terms of her writing, Bedford belongs (to my mind) with the small and disparate group – as diverse as George Orwell and Elizabeth Taylor – whose style does not clamour and shout, but has a rich beauty in its consistent balance and measure.  It is difficult to point out a phrase which is exceptionally brilliant, or a piece of wit which ought to be repeated – but she is a subtle prose stylist par excellence all the same.

The best novels are the most difficult to write about, I find, especially where the novelist is not highly stylised – there are no grotesques or eccentrics in Bedford’s writing, however welcome these features may be in the hands of other novelists – so I don’t think any review could quite convey the feeling of reading A Favourite of the Gods any more than I can make you understand how it feels to hold the book.  But I hope I’ve encouraged you to seek out this book.  We’ve heard a lot this year about how Elizabeth Taylor is a Well Kept Secret and a dazzling writer.  Well, I think it’s time that Sybille Bedford stepped out onto the stage.