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T.H. White: A Biography by Sylvia Townsend Warner

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This week is Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week, organised by Helen at A Gallimaufry – I was mulling over which collection of short stories to take off the shelf when I decided to do a bit more of a curveball. I bought Warner’s biography of T.H. White (published 1967) nine years ago, and I can’t remember whether that was before or after I read her letters with David Garnett, in which they discuss it a lot. And, indeed, White’s letters – which Garnett edited.

Much like when I read Roger Fry by Virginia Woolf, this is one of those times when I’m more interested in biographer than subject – but a very intriguing portrait emerged nonetheless.

I’ve only read one book by White – Mistress Masham’s Repose, which is sort of a long-distance sequel to Gulliver’s Travels – but I probably saw the Disney Sword in the Stone at some point and he’s one of those names that is around a lot. For most people, he is best known for his Arthurian links – but I believe he has more recently taken on fame by association with Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk, in which he features.

Hawking is one of the passions that comes out in Warner’s depiction of White. She is not a biographer who gives equal weight to all the different stages of a man’s life. She zooms straight through childhood in a handful of pages (which didn’t bother me at all; I always want to find out about an author being an author, not a child). What she draws out is White’s love of animals and particularly hawks, his writing, and his isolation.

Some years are dwelt on for so long that I began to feel trapped – 1939, for instance – whereas others flash by. We learn that White’s one real love in life was a dog called Brownie, and she is perhaps the most vivid secondary character of them all. His grief when she dies is long and painful. We also learn quite a lot about his writing processes, mostly from his own perspective. Rather wisely, Warner relies extensively on quotation. Why paraphrase what already exists? The biography becomes almost a patchwork of other people – White’s letters and diary, the letters of others, the memoirs of others. It’s hard to say, at times, whether Warner is a biographer or a collagist.

Chief among these is White’s friend and encourager David Garnett, author of Lady Into Fox and much else. It’s hard to know whether he would be considered quite so significant a figure in White’s life if he had not also been such a good friend of Warner’s, and thus able to provide her with a great deal of written material. But if the share of perspectives is a little skewed, it is none the less interesting for that.

We chart White’s shifting interests and anxieties. There is a curious attachment towards the end with a boy called Zed, about which Warner is coy and oblique. It certainly raises disconcerting questions about the suitability of their relationship, and any more recent biographer would investigate the issue more thoroughly. Warner introduces it mysteriously and leaves it mysterious.

What we see, collectively, is that White was sporadically successful and seldom content. The sentence that sums up the whole comes near the end: ‘He had been unlucky with his happinesses’.

Warner writes biography in some ways like her fiction and in some ways not. It shares the tone of her fiction in the belief that everything is marvellous, in the true sense of that word, but that nothing is especially so. But it has fewer of those sentences that crystallise everything in a suspended moment. Fewer of those sentences that jolt you slightly by their unexpected rightness. But I did write down one such, about Brownie:

There are photographs of her in his Shooting Diary for 1934 -slender, leggy, newly full-grown, with the grieving Vandyke portrait expression of her kind.

I had expected something a little more distinctive stylistically from this deeply distinctive writer. But perhaps she decided not to make herself the star of the book. Yet she cannot help sometimes writing as an exasperated friend – ‘Of course, he should have gone to see her. Rush on by new projects, he didn’t.’ – and sometimes as a fellow author giving her opinion on a work in progress.

There is enough in here to delight the reader who comes because they love Warner. There could be more, and I would have welcomed it, but then it might have cloaked the emerging of the curious, sad, impassioned, conflicted, enthusiastic, inventive, restricted T.H. White.

B is for Baker

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This is part of an ongoing series where I write about a different author for each letter of the alphabet. You can see them all here.

Thanks for your lovely comments on my first post in this series, A is for Athill. I should have said – if anybody else wants to use the idea too, I’d be delighted to see which authors you come up with. And it’s a good gap-filler when you don’t feel inspired to review a book!

My choice of author today won’t surprise long-term StuckinaBook readers, and well done Andrea, who was the first to guess that Frank Baker would be the author I’d choose for B.

How many books do I have by Frank Baker?

There are two ways to answer this. On the one hand, there are twelve books in this pile – on the other, five of them are Miss Hargreaves. It’s my favourite novel and I get every edition I can find – I still don’t have the early editions with their lovely dustjacket, but maybe one day. At the bottom is the gorgeous Tartarus Press edition (which was published just after I recommended it to Persephone, who rejected it) – the blue ones are the Bloomsbury reprint that they did on my recommendation, which is still one of the most exciting moments in my life! Why two? Well, I lend it so often and don’t want to lose the Bloomsbury edition. And since I once had four of them, you can see why I’m nervous about not getting them back!

How many of these have I read?

I’ve read Miss Hargreaves, of course, and a handful of the others – Before I Go Hence, Stories of the Strange and Sinister, The Birds (which he claimed Alfred Hitchcock and/or Daphne du Maurier had plagiarised), and his autobiography, I Follow But Myself. I’ve also read Mr Allenby Loses The Way, in the Bodleian Library.

How did I start reading Baker?

I never particularly liked learning the piano, but I did discover that my piano teacher have very similar taste in books to me. Or, indeed, she helped form my taste. It was she who first lent me a copy of Miss Hargreaves (which has a lot of music stuff in it), and I was entranced. For the few who don’t know, it’s a novel about a man who invents an old, eccentric lady to get out of an awkward conversation. He and his friend give her all sorts of curious attributes, and send a letter inviting her to visit, as a joke. The joke turns on them when she arrives… it’s a book that really does make you laugh and cry. I’m so grateful to Lylah for introducing Miss Hargreaves to me, and vice versa.

General impressions…

Sadly, it’s rather diminishing returns after that. I was so excited to discover a new favourite author, but Miss Hargreaves is worlds better than the others I’ve tried. It’s hard to pinpoint what’s wrong with the others, but they just don’t have much spark or vitality.

My second favourite book by Baker is his autobiography, I Follow But Myself, told through portraits of various people he knew, including the famous (Edward Garnett, Arthur Machen) but mostly the unknown. It’s worth reading for the portrait of Amy Carr alone.

I still have three of his novels unread on my shelves, a couple of which have been there for nearly two decades. And several of his novels I haven’t found. Maybe lightning struck twice with Baker, and I’ll keep reading. But if it doesn’t, to have created Miss Hargreaves is more than enough for any author.

The City and The City by China Miéville

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You know those books that are always on the cusp of being read? Like a word on the tip of your tongue, you’ve constantly been ‘about to read it’, even if always remains fourth or fifth or fifteenth in the mental queue. Well, I got The City and The City (2009) by China Miéville for my birthday in 2010, and finally I’ve read it – I originally wanted to read it after reading a review by Sakura, who used to blog at Chasing Bawa.

The concept is what fascinated me. The narrator is Inspector Borlu, who lives in Beszel – those words should have an accent on the u and z respectively; please imagine them there. Beszel is a slightly run-down city somewhere in Eastern Europe – it also occupies the same space as the city Ul Qoma.

This isn’t fantasy, though. Rather, it’s a development of the sort of tension between cities that happened with East and West Berlin – taken to a logical extreme. Certain parts of the ‘glossotopia’ are Ul Qoma and certain parts of Beszel, but there is also a substantial ‘cross-hatched’ region, where the cities co-exist. And it is not an amicable coexistence.

Neighbouring houses might be in different cities. Pedestrians on the same street are citizens of different places. And acknowledging the other city in any way is illegal – and will get you taken away by Breach, a sort of secret police. Citizens of each city train themselves to ‘unsee’ the buildings and people of the other city – recognising, in a glimpse, an architecture or a style of dress that marks somebody as unseeable. Here is Borlu at the checkpoint between the cities:

Pedestrians and vehicles came and went. Cars and vans drove into it near us, to wait at the easternmost point, where passports and papers were checked and motorists were given permission – or sometimes refused it – to leave Beszel. A steady current. More metres, through the inter-checkpoint interstice under the hall’s arc, another wait at the buildings’ western gates, for entry into Ul Qoma. A reversed process in the other lanes.

Then the vehicles with their stamped permissions-to-cross emerged at the opposite end from where they entered, and drove into a foreign city. Often they doubled back, on the cross-hatched streets in the Old Town or the Old Town, to the same space they had minutes earlier occupied, though in a new juridic realm.

If someone needed to go to a house physically next door to their own but in the neighbouring city, it was in a different road in an unfriendly power. That is what foreigners rarely understand. A Besz dweller cannot walk a few paces next door into an alter house without breach.

But a book can’t just be its setting, of course. The story is about a horrific murder, of a Besz woman who had been an academic. Her particular area of interest was controversial: a rumoured third city, hidden between the other two and not known by either… Her parents come to the city/cities to try to find their daughter’s murderer, and naturally do not understand the divisions they must respect.

Police procedurals are not usually my cup of tea, and I did have to skim over some of the more graphic passages, but there aren’t many of those. Borlu is a good protagonist for this set up – obeying the rules of the city and its ‘hidden’ counterpart, while mentally thinking them absurd. He is not quite Winston Smith from Nineteen Eighty-Four, and he has no dawning revelation or rebellion against a corrupt and bizarre system. Instead, he has to work within the confines of this curious world, determined to find the killer. The quest for justice gets increasingly dangerous as fraught secrets threaten to become discovered…

The City and the City isn’t a novel I’d look twice at if it were just a modern crime novel, and the plot didn’t overwhelm me. But what kept me captivated was that brilliant concept. Somehow, Miéville kept it original and enthralling. I did wonder if it would be the same idea repeated over and over, burning out after a flare of novelty. but it’s not. Dealing with the nuances of simultaneous cities complicates the plot, but I could honestly have read Miéville’s descriptions of them and their inhabitants as much as he cared to write. A brilliant idea is fully realised.

Part of me wishes this idea was used for something other than a crime novel – but the two are really inseparable in the way the novel develops. Not my usual fare, but recommended for the extraordinary and sustained cleverness of the concept.

A is for Athill

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I thought I’d start a little alphabetical series, where I pick an author for each letter of the alphabet – sharing which of their books I’ve read, which I own, how I came across them etc.

IS there an author for each letter of the alphabet that I can do this for? No, of course not, but we’ll cross the bridge when we get to the back end.

I’m starting with Diana Athill, largely because everybody has all of Jane Austen’s books.

How many books do I have by Athill?

According to a quick sweep of my shelves, I have seven – which is a pretty high percentage of them, I think. One is fiction (the short stories published by Persephone), most are forms of autobiography, and there’s a collection of letters in there too. I used to own Alive, Alive Oh! but I think I gave it away after I’d read it.

How many of these have I read?

I have definitely read three – Stet, Somewhere Towards the End, and Midsummer Night in the Workhouse. There’s a real possibility that I’ve read Instead of a Letter too, but I’m not sure – she covers the main events of it in several of her other books, so the blurb might just be telling me things I already know.

How did I start reading Athill?

According to the notes in the front of these books, I bought Yesterday Morning in 2009, though I still haven’t read it. Most of the others came in some sort of Athill spree in 2013, which must have followed me reading my first Athill – the wonderful Stet. More on that in a mo.

General impressions…

Stet is the best book I’ve read about the publishing industry, though I haven’t read an enormous amount. It tells of Athill’s time working as an editor, and is a wonderful insight to that process – and, in the second half, she details her experience working with authors including Jean Rhys, V.S. Naipaul, and Brian Moore. It’s a delicious, fascinating, intelligent book.

I’ve had less success with her other memoir-driven books – largely because they are often about how she slept with married men, and wasn’t the wife silly and irrational to get upset about it. Obviously it takes two to tango, but it doesn’t feel like very edifying reading.

She is still a wonderful writer (or was, I should say, having died last year) – and I’ll keep reading these. I do find that a memoirist has to have an element at least of connection with the reader – you have to like them, in essence – and I deeply admire Athill, but don’t always like her. With those glasses on, I’ll keep reading. (As for her fiction – I remember enjoying the stories but they were a bit forgettable; it was not her metier.)

Next time – B is for…

I shan’t be deciding them in advance, but I suspect any long-term reader of Stuck in a Book will have no difficulty guessing where I’m leaning.

The Unnatural Behaviour of Mrs Hooker by Eileen Marsh

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I’ve always been intrigued when I saw mid-century novels by authors I’ve not heard of, and that’s particularly true since I’ve been scouting for titles for the British Library Women Writers series – and so I’ve started looking through my shelves for novels that are out of print and a little lesser known. Recently, I read The Unnatural Behaviour of Mrs Hooker by Eileen Marsh, from 1947.

Mrs Hooker lives in a small village where everybody knows each other’s business and usually makes it their business too. In the opening pages we are introduced to the community – vicar and wife, policeman, teacher, local aristocrats. The expected crowd of a village scene, though confusingly the women include Moya, May, Mary, and Maggy, which doesn’t make it particularly easy to remember which is which. Marsh has a light touch and quickly lets us know which characters will amuse and which will frustrate us. Though Mrs Hooker isn’t among this initial crowd.

She lives with her son Jim, who has just become an adult. During the war, they – like most people in the village – took in an evacuee. A young girl called Sylvia. The village – and seemingly the author – have some prejudice against London girls and their forward ways; their swaying hips and eyes that are asking for it, etc. Suffice to say, this sort of description would not be welcome in a novel now, and thank goodness.

Sylvia goes back to London for a bit, where Mrs Hooker visits, looking on her as a surrogate daughter despite the village’s distrust of her. She is rather upset by the indifference shown by Sylvia’s parents, not to mention the poverty she lives in. So when Sylvia unexpectedly returns to the village, she is welcomed by Mrs H. And she comes bearing news: she is pregnant, and Jim is the father. She is also only fifteen years old.

Jim denies that he ever slept with her, and says it must be some London dalliance. [Or – call it what it is, which the novel does not – statutory rape.] The village is divided in whom they believe of the pair. But the one person you’d expect to be on Jim’s side, and who isn’t, is Mrs Hooker herself:

“I don’t know why I should doubt the poor child’s word. I reckon she’s speakin’ the truth, poor lamb. No, it was Jim, an’ he’s got to stand the racket. I’d give my right hand for it not to be him – the disgrace of it – well, you know what folks are! But it is him, an’ she’ll make him a nice little wife an’ I’ll look after the baby for ’em an’ she can go out to work.”

This is the unnatural behaviour of the title: that she refuses to believe her son, and will not be swayed.

It’s an interesting premise for a novel, and a spin on the evacuee situation that I haven’t read before but must have been relatively common. The reason the novel didn’t quite work for me is that, after this set up, it’s incredibly repetitive. It’s less than two hundred pages long, but it keeps going in circles. Jim insists he isn’t the father. Sylvia insists he is. Various local people repeatedly refer to Jim as a ‘good, clean boy’. Mrs Hooker maintains that she is going to be a grandmother. I shan’t say what the truth is, but the reader does know it pretty early on – so we aren’t reading to find out the solution to a mystery. It all just got a bit samey – not to mention rather unpleasant to read, when people blame the fifteen-year-old Sylvia for being a hussy etc.

So, an interesting writer and a good village set up – but the theme of the novel hasn’t dated well, and the structure of the plot is severely lacking. But I’d still read something else by her, hoping for the best.

The Desert and the Drum by Mbarek Ould Beyrouk

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I can now claim to have read all the novels from Mauritania that have been translated into English – because it is one: The Desert and the Drum by Mbarek Ould Beyrouk, originally published in French in 2015 and translated by Rachael McGill in 2018.

The novel is narrated by Rayhana, a young woman who is only recently an adult – she is on the run from her Bedouin tribe, though we don’t yet know why. Not only has she run from her community, she has stolen the ceremonial drum that is the most prized object belonging to her tribe – and she is heading across the desert to safety and a new life.

It was time to detach myself from the old ways: I was no longer from here. I was from nowhere, and I was going faraway. Straight ahead.

The Desert and the Drum takes place in several timelines – one shows her escape to a city, which is quite insignificant as cities go, but feels enormous and crowded to her. Alongside, we see her life in the tribe and the events that lead to her wanting to escape. I shan’t spoil any of them, but Beyrouk is very clever in the way he tells us things in increments that are just satisfying enough to keep the mystery going.

Rayhana only knows her tribe. Her father left years ago, but she is from one of the more important families of the community. Only desperation can take her from the safety of this communal lifestyle, and the confusion she faces in a city is done very well. That confusion leads quickly to distaste for the ways of life that are acceptable, and the way that city-dwellers have forgotten their past:

I began to feel disdain for the town and everyone in it. People seemed to have forgotten what they’d been only yesterday, what their fathers and their fathers’ fathers had been. They were content to no longer be nomadic, to no longer feel the sun on their heads. They were happy to eat new dishes made not with their own wheat or barley, or with the meat or milk of their own animals. They were proud of all that; they thought it meant they could look down on those of us who had stayed as we were, who hadn’t succumbed to the temptations of the new.

Meanwhile, change also came to the Bedouin tribe’s encampment a while earlier – what turned out to be workers on a government contract, drilling for resources.

Monsters of iron and steel appeared one day from nowhere. no one had warned us thy were coming. First we heard an enormous roar. Some people thought it was thunder, but the sky remained an unblemished blue. Others turned their eyes towards the mountains; the faraway summits stood steadfast and serene. The earth began to tremble beneath our feet. We listened, worried, and strained our eyes towards the horizon. In the distance, a cloud of ochre dust rose towards the sky. We remained immobile, gaping at this sight for which we had no name. When we realised the rumbling and the storm were coming towards us, panic spread like wildfire: people ran to hide behind dunes or collect livestock, men went to get their guns, women grabbed their children and ran inside tents. The tribal drum sounded to summon those who were away from the camp. We watched, stunned and powerless, as the terrible unknown thing approached.

I said at the beginning that this novel was ‘from Mauritania’ – it’s by a Mauritanian, about Mauritania, but I note in a comment from the translator on A Year of Reading the World that it was initially published in Tunisia. And the book certainly expects the reader to be unfamiliar with the mores of Bedouin people. It’s a difficult balance to strike: maintaining a first-person narrative of someone who has group up in her tribe and to whom customs obviously aren’t a surprise, while also making them accessible to the reader who knows nothing. Beyrouk finds this balance brilliantly, explaining from the inside – writing for the outsider, but without ever dropping the intimacy of Rayhana’s lived experience. This is particularly notable when he is writing about traditions surrounding weddings – Rayhana says what they are, but in sentences about how the individual acts are affecting her. They are gently introduced and explained, but in a way that would also make sense in the context of a conversation with somebody who knew them all already. It must have taken some doing, and it works very well. He finds the emotions of the moment, not an anthropological thesis.

That is true throughout. While the author is a man with far more education that Rayhana has at this time, there is a feeling of authenticity and immediacy throughout the novel. I certainly felt that I understood a great deal more about one way of life than I had before – and about clashing ways of life in a Mauritania where traditions and modernisation can collide, without either being ‘better’ than the other, just jarringly different to someone like Rayhana trying to make the leap between them.

I suppose the marker of an excellent translator is that you don’t notice their work, and I certainly never found the translation an obstacle to the excitement and insight of the novel. I really liked it, and I’m hoping that his other two novels might also get translated…

Regiment of Women by Clemence Dane

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Clemence Dane 01.jpgIn 2011, I bought an enormous book called Recapture by Clemence Dane – largely because her name was familiar to me from my research into the Book Society of the 1930s – a book of the month club of which she was a panel member. I might have opened it then, but it basically went on the shelf and I’d forgotten what was in it. I thought maybe it was a trilogy anthology.

Well, turns out it has eleven works in it – mostly plays, and two novels. One of those is Regiment of Women (1917), which is Dane’s first novel and probably her most famous work after Broome Stages. It’s set in a girls’ boarding school, and is largely about the relationships and power dynamics that happen within it. It’s also a really impressive portrait of an almost Machiavellian creature: Clare. As a world, the boarding school is almost hermetically sealed from the outside, and this exaggerates all emotions and relationships within it.

The present boarding-school system of education ousts the mother from that, her natural position; renders her, to the daughter steeped in an alien atmosphere, an outsider, lacking all understanding. Invaluable years pass before the artificial gulf that boarding-school creates between them, is spanned.

Clare is obsessed with power, and is blessed with a personality that bewitches many – though there are also those who see right through her. She is one of the teachers who has been there a while, officially below the headmistress in the hierarchy, but managing to bend the will of the school to her own. And she does it by charming people – by making them care deeply what she thinks of them. Her main targets are Alwynne, a 19-year-old who is a new teacher at the school, and Louise – a young girl who has been put up a couple of classes because she is so intelligent.

Alwynne and Louise are besotted with Clare. Louise believes herself in love with Clare, and I have seen this described as a lesbian novel – well, it’s quite possible that Louise is experiencing her first lesbian attraction, but it certainly isn’t a two-way street. Clare intends to captivate her and make her servile – while also seeing extraordinary promise in her unusual skills in English and Drama classes.

Meanwhile, she is also determined to rule Alwynne – a kind, nervous, animated young teacher, not yet sure how to make the leap from pupil to authority figure. She lives with an aunt, a good woman who had taught Clare and sees through her. A power battle begins that Alwynne is not conscious of, and her aunt is barely fighting. Clare puts all her energy into it.

She intended to master Alwynne, but she realised that it would be a question of time, that she would give her more trouble than the children to whom she was accustomed. Alwynne’s utter unrealisation of the fact that a trial of strength was in progress was disconcerting: yet Clare, jaded and super-subtle, found her innocence endearing.

So, at the heart of Regiment of Women is an extraordinary and sustained portrait of somebody selfish, cruel, and charming. It is brilliantly done, in terms of character creation, even if it makes for nasty reading at times – and the book certainly gets quite dark.

Sadly, the heart of the book is surrounded by an awful lot of padding. There is a brilliant 20-page novel in this 345-page novel. But it takes so long to get going, with overly elaborate detail about the school – and every scene is bogged down with the same emotion or thought being played with in three different ways before we’re allowed to move on. It’s often frustratingly slow – and, indeed, is a product of the sort of baggy writing that characterises a lot of 1910s literature. The second half of the novel moves faster than the first, but there were many times in that first half where I almost gave up.

If you have more tolerance for that sort of bagginess, then I think you’ll be rewarded by the power of what is written inside it. But I would sympathise if you got to the end of the first chapter and thought it might not be worth the energy.

Which book should I have read by now?

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That was the question that Sheree from Keeping Up With The Penguins asked me, and a whole bunch of other bloggers – you can find all our answers in a really interesting and entertaining (though I says it as shouldn’t) blog post.

With the caveat that, yes, of course, there are no ‘shoulds’ in reading – which book would you answer that question with? (For yourself – but you can also tell me what to read if you want to!)

Stuck in a Book’s Weekend Miscellany

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Happy Saturday to everyone! I’ve been a bit under the weather this week but I’ve also been really excited by the news that single-adult households can form bubbles with another household, in England. My brother and I have formed a long-distance bubble, which means we can visit and go inside each other’s houses and have a hug! Something I hope I never take for granted again – since it’s now three months since I touched another human. What do humans even feel like??

Anyway, a book, a link, a blog post… in fact, two blog posts.

1.) The blog posts – here’s a great list of black authors published in the Virago Modern Classics series, courtesy of Juliana at The Blank Garden – and here’s a reminder from Helen at A Gallimaufry that Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week is coming up again soon. Week beginning 29 June, in fact.

2.) The book – I love the graphic novelist Brecht Evens, and I’m really excited that The City of Belgium is coming out soon. More info – and you can even read it now, if you can read the original Flemish.

3.) The link – how are bookshop owners feeling about reopening? Find out at the Guardian.

What connects these books…

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It’s not a particularly difficult quiz, but can you spot what connects the books in this picture?

Yes, I suspect you noticed it immediately – the titles are all questions!

At my working-from-home desk, I can see Who Was Sophie? in my eyeline, and it’s a really interesting book that I wrote about a couple of years ago. It’s got me thinking about other titles that are questions, and a quick look around my house brought these titles up (in case you can’t see the bottom left one, it’s What Next? by Denis Mackail, and the top-right cover is deliberately printed upside down).

I had a handful of others that either didn’t have the title on the cover or are in compendiums, but I was quite surprised that my c.3000 books didn’t have more question mark titles. There are some famous ones I don’t have – N or M? by Agatha Christie, Can You Forgive Her? by Anthony Trollope – but can you think of others? Do you have others on your shelves?

I think it’s a fun way to write a title, and often extremely intriguing. Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? is one of Christie’s most beguiling titles, even if it isn’t one of my favourites of her books. Publishing industry, authors – why not more of these?