Novella a Day in May: Days 22 and 23

Day 22: Grand Canyon (1942) by Vita Sackville-West

I re-read Vita Sackville-West’s novella set in an alternative 1942 where Nazi Germany has successfully taken over Europe, and refugees have fled to America. This book focuses on the occupants of a hotel on the edge of the Grand Canyon – and what happens when bombs come to the hotel. I won’t say anymore because Rachel and I will be discussing it on an upcoming episode of ‘Tea or Books?’.

Day 23: The Empty Room (1941) by Charles Morgan

In about 2003, a lady in the village called Marion lent me three books that she thought might set me off on paths of discovery. She knew I liked older books and, being 17, hadn’t formed my taste as an adult yet. The three books were Bulldog Drummond by Sapper, Strong Poison by Dorothy L Sayers, and A Breeze of Morning by Charles Morgan. I liked the Sayers, disliked the Sapper, and really liked the Morgan. Over the years since, I have owned and given away a few Morgan novels, but it’s taken me almost two decades to finally read my second book by him. Which I have in a proof copy – this is what proofs looked like in the 1940s!

Like Sackville-West’s novella, this was written in the midst of war – though Morgan’s is set in the contemporary world, rather than an alterative version of it. Richard is working on the development of a bomb-sight – I had to look up what that was, but essentially something that helps bombs be dropped more accurately. The novella starts with him working alongside other men who are in kept professions, most of whom fought in the previous war.

“I assure you, Flower,” Cannock answered, “this is paradise compared with the last war. And yet, you know, it’s extraordinarily like; that’s the devil of it. People wasting the same time and talking much the same nonsense. The same jokes, the same optimism – it’s like going to a play by a dramatist who may produce an exciting plot but whose style bores you to death. As yet we aren’t half-way through Scene One…”

Morgan is very, very good at describing the experience of finding oneself in the midst of war, and how it affects different people. All the quotes I noted down were about that, I now realise, and it’s particularly impressive to write so vividly about something that, even in 1941, had been described endlessly. Though The Empty Room turns out not really to be about the war – instead, it is about a family Richard meets because of it. There is a fellow worker whom Richard recognises from an earlier acquaintance, who invites him to move in rather than find impersonal barracks. Henry is a widower with a daughter who has not long become an adult. She, Carey, never knew her mother, but there is a portrait of her on the wall showing how similar her daughter looks. Besides this image, little is said of her – though the empty room of the title is Carey’s mothers bedroom, left as a sort of silent shrine to her.

Richard and Carey are about 20 years apart in age, but become close. It’s less icky than it sounds, though perhaps not ick-less. Anyway, it’s another opportunity for Morgan to write so perceptively about the war:

His was a generation different from hers in more than the years that divided them. This was his second war; after it, there would be for him no starting again, only a continuance to the end of a life already doubly broken; but for her it would become an incident of her youth, a point of departure from which her life would stretch ahead, still limitless, still expectant of an ordered fulfilment.

And here’s another example, about the end of the phoney war:

Every good thing became more precious; even things that were, in themselves, neither good not bad – an account-book lying on the table, a packet of old letters in a drawer – became extraordinary because they were inanimate, because they had existed before the break and lay in their places, still unconscious of it. There was a stab of wonder in every carefree movement of a bird, in the stream’s unbroken continuity, in the aloof and unswerving process of Nature.

What starts as a novella about wartime activity turns into a domestic psychological tale – the sort of thing Henry James would write if he could have composed a readable sentence. I did find it weird that such a short book would have the lengthy framing – I think it would have worked equally well, or perhaps better, if Richard had been more quickly introduced to this household. From here, it is a tense and well-written story – what really happened to Carey’s mother, and what is the mystery of the empty room?