A moving memoir of racism, poverty, and abuse

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I recently finished a memoir, read by the author as an audiobook. It was a really striking portrayal of growing up as a mixed-race child in America in the ’70s, with violence, poverty, and uncertainty.

The narrator was the youngest of three, and can barely remember a time when her parents were together. Their relationship was volatile, and they had divorced by the time she could remember – leaving her with some resentment of her older brother and sister, who had got to experience something close to a happy family. In turn, they resented the narrator – not least because of her paler skin. Though they had the same parents, the narrator was lighter skinned than her siblings – and could often ‘pass’ as white, or perhaps thought to be Latino. This meant she dodged some of the racism that her siblings experienced – though certainly got her fair share too.

She recounts one of the first times that she remembers her race being an issue – taking a white schoolfriend to visit her Black dad. The schoolfriend had only known the narrator’s white mother before – and when the door to the apartment building was opened by a Black man, started crying and screaming and refused to go in. The narrator, a young girl at the time, was confused and hurt – not least by seeing the hurt on her father’s face.

Sometimes the pain she faced came from within the family too. There are extraordinary, vividly written scenes where she relates her sister – whose life had somehow derailed so that she was addicted to drugs and was selling her body – trying to pimp her out when she was only fourteen. Luckily someone the narrator knew happened to stumble across the scene, saving her from who knows what. And her brother became increasingly violent, so that the narrator never felt safe at home. Sometimes her mother would have to call the police, and the narrator would have the terror of a Black brother being at the mercy of cops. All she dreamed of was a time of safety and love at Christmas, a day that seemed more than any other to mark the difference between her family and a perfect one. It never came.

Perhaps a third or a half of the autobiography consists of this examination of childhood. It is revealing, painful and so well written. You long for her to get somewhere safe where she can begin to live properly. And her career does start to take off with incredible speed – her hard work and some luck making her more successful than she could imagine. She charts every moment that led there, so it’s hard to remember she is only in her late teens when it all begins to fall into place – albeit against the backdrop of the legacy of that childhood.

But things don’t fall into a happy ever after. She finds herself in a controlling marriage – richer than she ever imagined, but without any freedom. Her husband won’t let her see anyone or decide her own time. There are cameras in every room of the house. She is followed by security wherever she goes. Her husband is never physically abusive, but she is subjected to emotional and control abuse for years.

She does manage to get out, and the second half of the autobiography is much more about her career. After this, you probably do need to have an active interest in her work, otherwise the details are not very captivating – but the first half of the book is an extraordinary insight, whether or not you care about her career. And the problem is that this will probably be largely overlooked by people who’ll see the name of the author and decide the book isn’t for them. Which is why I’ve waited until the final line of this review to tell you that the autobiography is The Meaning of Mariah Carey by Mariah Carey.

The Stone of Chastity by Margery Sharp

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I was VERY excited when I saw that the Furrowed Middlebrow series from Dean Street Press will be reprinting many Margery Sharp and Stella Gibbons titles in January. Do I have many books by both these authors still unread? Yes, of course. But it’s still great to be able to get easily available copies of books that have eluded many fans for years – most notably Rhododendron Pie by Sharp, something of a golden fleece for book bloggers.

Dean Street Press have kindly sent me that as a review book, but I have started with the other one they sent – one I’ve had my eye on for a while: The Stone of Chastity by Margery Sharp, from 1940. I had high hopes, because the next novel she wrote is probably my favourite of the seven Sharps I’ve read, Cluny Brown. And the premise is irresistible: there is a little village called Gillenham where there was reputed to be a ‘stone of chastity’ in the stream. It was a stepping stone that any ‘unchaste’ woman would stumble on – sort of like one of those medieval witch trials, though believed to have been around in the time of the current population’s grandparents.

Professor Pounce arrives in the village, with his widowed sister-in-law and his young adult nephew Nicholas, intending to investigate the legend. Oh, and there’s also the beautiful, distant Carmen, whose presence is not quite explained. It’s a delightful set up – because the Professor can’t understand why anybody would find his investigations impertinent or insulting. As his sister-in-law points out, people might be offended at his prurient questions about their grandmother’s purity – but he has only science in mind. Nicholas, meanwhile, has other things in mind – and begins to fall both for Carmen and for a Bloomsbury-type who is staying in the village and writing terrible verse-set-to-music.

Nicholas’s objections to distributing the Professor’s questionnaire are disregarded, and he sets off to an unsympathetic local community. Here’s a sample of Sharp’s delightful prose:

Wobbling down the road next morning, on a borrowed bicycle with the bundle of questionnaires stacked in its carrier, Nicholas Pounce felt himself to be, both literally and figuratively, in a very precarious position. He was practically certain that only the front brake worked, and he was extremely apprehensive as to the effect upon its recipients of his Uncle Isaac’s questionnaire. By a curious chance all the villagers he passed were able-bodied males. Some of them said “Mornin'” to him, and Nicholas said “Good morning” back. He said it ingratiatingly. In each stolid pair of eyes he detected, or thought he did, a complete lack of scientific interest and a fanatic regard for the good name of woman.

As I’ve said before, Sharp is equally good at funny and poignant – and in The Stone of Chastity, she is in full comic mode. It reminded me a lot of R.C. Sherriff’s equally delightful The Wells of St Mary’s – a local village dealing with the unexpected introduction of the miraculous, and responding with the sort of village politics that have changed little in the decades since. Factions are formed, rumours spread and, yes, the stone itself turns up.

Thanks so much, Dean Street Press and Scott from Furrowed Middlebrow, for bringing back this wonderful novel – like so many of Sharp’s books, it deserves to be a modern classic. Incidentally, it seems to have reprinted a number of times – check out the range of cover images it has received over time.

Four more mini reviews

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Mini reviews – you know the drill. Let’s do this.

Limbo by Dan Fox

I bought this from Fitzcarraldo’s enviable essay series because it starts with mention of the 25-foot shark that seems to be flying into the roof of a house in Headington, just outside Oxford. I used to live a couple of streets from this shark-house, and it was always fun being on the bus and watching the reactions of people who weren’t expecting it to appear.

From here, Fox looks at different types of limbo – the sort of word that English academics get very animated about, and I daresay the same is true in many disciplines. But it isn’t all philosophising – there’s some great autobiography in here, from his relationship with his often-absent brother to his experience as one of two passengers on an otherwise commercial ship. It’s a very slim volume, but jam-packed with thoughtful ideas and is the sort of book that will doubtless warrant revisiting.

Them by Jon Ronson

I love Ronson’s funny and courageously researched books into strange worlds – from bizarre FBI techniques to psychopaths to, my favourite, his exploration of mob justice on social media in So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed. This earlier book, Them, looks at many different types of extremists – including those who actively hate Ronson for being Jewish. Central to the book is the conspiracy theory that all powerful people in the world meet together in secret. Which it seems… they might do.

It’s as informative, odd, and enjoyable as ever. My only qualm is that Ronson surely can’t be quite as nonchalant and blasé in all these extraordinary, often dangerous, situations as he seems to be? And he finds the humour in any event or person – I think the idea is showing how ridiculously normal issues still face extremist groups, like not being able to organise an event properly. But sometimes I wish he had been a little less objective. Some of the people he meets are truly determined to harm many other people, and I’m not sure I want to laugh at that.

Awakenings by Oliver Sacks

It’s no secret that I love Oliver Sacks – and this is probably his most famous book after The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. It covers a group of patients who survived the sleeping-sickness epidemic of the ’20s, but had post-encephalitic illnesses to various degrees of severity. Some were hardly able to move, while others had severe speech restrictions, and there is a huge range of other symptoms. Sacks is head of a trial of a new drug L-DOPA – and, again, the range of reactions is dizzying. Some recover immediately but then get worse. Others develop a whole new series of symptoms affecting their movement, speech, and fundamental character. It is all extraordinary, and must have been difficult to know how to organise it. Sacks does it by patient, writing about their lives before the illness, as he always does – seeing them as people, not medical cases.

In this early book, Sacks has yet to develop the tone for the layman – sentences like ‘She appeared to have a bilateral nuclear and internuclear ophthalmoplegia’ meant nothing to me – and Awakenings hovers somewhere between scientific paper and accessible account. The stories of many of these patients pop up elsewhere, such as in his autobiography, and he has found the tone then. Structurally, by going patient-by-patient, Sacks hasn’t quite nailed the idea of an overarching arc – and I don’t think I’d recommend Awakenings to Sacks newbies. But, yes, truth certainly is stranger than fiction in this one.

Solutions and Other Problems by Allie Brosh

If you know any internet memes, chances are you’ve seen the ‘Clean ALL the things!’ image that Brosh came up with on her blog ‘Hyperbole and a Half’. She was very big about a decade ago, and wrote a great graphic book under the same name as her blog. Her pictures are done in Paint or something like that, deliberately crude but with deceptive amounts of time put into getting the right expressions etc.

Her earlier book was mostly very funny, and Solutions and Other Problems has a lot of that same observational, slightly surreal, humour. I laughed a lot when she wrote about her dogs. But life has certainly been tough to Brosh since her first book. We are also given access to her debilitating depression, the death of her sister and her reflections on their strained relationship, and more. It all holds together really well, and I’m so glad Brosh is back writing.

Three mini reviews

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I haven’t felt much like writing book reviews recently, but my pile of books to review keeps piling up – so I’ll do another couple of mini round-ups. For some reason, I feel like I have to review all 2020-read books in 2020, but I suppose there’s no intrinsic necessity for that…

Mr Kronion by Susan Alice Kerby 

This novel from 1949, isn’t very easy to get hold of – but I went on a Kerby spree after loving Miss Carter and the Ifrit, republished by Dean Street Press under their Furrowed Middlebrow series. Well, I can see why they chose that one. Mr Kronion is about a Greek deity coming to live in a house in England – the title relies on you knowing that Kronion is another name for Zeus, which I did not, and indeed only just learned by googling it.

There is some fun to be had in his fantastic appearance, not least in the interactions with the professor who is acting as something of a guardian for him, but Kerby doesn’t make the most of it. Instead, there are all sorts of secondary characters and romantic subplot that take up too much of the novel’s space. This one ended up being rather a baggy disappointment.

The Picnic and other stories by Walter de la Mare

I’ve had this for many years, but picked it up when I read praise of his story ‘Miss Duveen’ somewhere. I forget where. Thankfully, the story is indeed in this collection, which is something of a ‘best of’ – and it’s a rather moving story about a young boy’s encounter with an eccentric local lady, and the waxing and waning of their friendship. Many of the stories in The Picnic are poignant – from the title story, of a woman whose one big romantic experience was a picnic where she was stood up, to stories of failing marriages against the backdrop of a childhood illness.

De la Mare is best remembered for his poetry – perhaps entirely for ‘The Listeners’ – but his short stories are good. He doesn’t have the piercing brevity of, say, Katherine Mansfield – but they manage to stay the right side of sentiment, often showing the strange and saddening moments in ‘uneventful’ lives.

This Other Eden by E.V. Knox

E.V. Knox, once known as ‘Evoe’ in Punch, shows that he is quite similar to many other comically grumbling essayists of the early 20th century, and that’s no bad thing. In this collection from 1929, he turns his attention to such commonly-used topics as golf, ‘modern woman’, motoring, and a spoof of the detective novel:

Mr Ponderby-Wilkins was a man so rich, so ugly, so cross, and so old, that even the stupidest reader could not expect him to survive any longer than Chapter 1. Vulpine in his secretiveness, he was porcine in his habits, saturnine in his appearance, and ovine in his unconsciousness of doom. He was the kind of man who might easily perish as early as paragraph two.

The only drawback to read This Other Eden almost a century after it was published is that nothing seems as frighteningly new as Knox believed. He is anxious about the idea of ‘talkies’, wonders how the world will adapt to the motorcar, and writes about women’s independence in a way that probably seemed progressive in the 20s, but certainly doesn’t anymore. I suppose they fulfilled the purpose of the time, and I still enjoyed reading them, but perhaps the key to longevity with the essay is making sure you don’t consider your own period to be the last word in futurism?

Tea or Books? #90: Good or Bad Reading Year? and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn vs O, The Brave Music

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Betty Smith, Dorothy Evelyn Smith, and a review of our reading years…

In the first half, we look back over a very unusual year and ask – was it a good reading year or a bad reading year? We’ve not talked much about the pandemic this year, because we want this to be one of the places people can escape from all that, but in this episode we’ve talked about how it affects our reading.

In the second half, in a slight change to the advertised pairing, we compare O, The Brave Music by Dorothy Evelyn Smith and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith. Both are coming-of-age novels set in the 1910s and published in the 1940s, though in very different environments.

We’ll see you in the new year – in the meantime, you can listen to this podcast on Spotify, via your podcast app, or at Apple podcasts. You can get in touch at teaorbooks@gmail.com and/or support the podcast at Patreon.

Thanks to Arpita of Bag Full of Books for her wonderful contribution to our Dorothy Evelyn Smith conversation!

Have a lovely Christmas and a happy new year – here’s hoping 2021 is better than 2020.

The books and authors we mention in this episode are:

Three Kings by Stephen Beresford
Present Laughter by Noel Coward
Have His Carcass by Dorothy L Sayers
The New Magdalen by Wilkie Collins
The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins
Dorothy Canfield Fisher
Willa Cather
Emily Eden
The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene
The End of the Affair by Graham Greene
Travels With My Aunt by Graham Greene
Brighton Rock by Graham Greene
Girl, Woman, Other by Bernadine Evaristo
Ali Smith
Square Haunting by Francesca Wade
Virginia Woolf
Business As Usual by Jane Oliver and Ann Stafford
John Buchan
A House in the Country by Ruth Adam
A Woman’s Place by Ruth Adam
Jack by Marilynne Robinson
The Swallowed Man by Edward Carey
Alva and Irva by Edward Carey
Little by Edward Carey
The Moor’s Account by Laila Lalami
Leila Slimani
Jeeves and Wooster series by P.G. Wodehouse
The Girl on the Boat by P.G. Wodehouse
Miss Plum and Miss Penny by Dorothy Evelyn Smith
Beyond the Gates by Dorothy Evelyn Smith
Proud Citadel by Dorothy Evelyn Smith
The Lovely Day by Dorothy Evelyn Smith
I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith
Guard Your Daughters by Diana Tutton
Miss Read
Tomorrow Will Be Better by Betty Smith
Expiation by Elizabeth von Arnim
Father by Elizabeth von Arnim

British Library Women Writers #7: O, The Brave Music by Dorothy Evelyn Smith

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Right, I’m up to date with British Library titles now! This is the one I’m most excited to have brought back into print – I only read it for the first time last year, but O, The Brave Music by Dorothy Evelyn Smith is a novel I know I’ll cherish forever. And the interesting thing is, looking at reviews elsewhere online and in the comments and emails I’ve had about it – a lot of people love this book for their whole lives. I’ve seen so many people say they read it many decades ago, and have come back to it time and again.

It’s a coming of age story for a young girl called Ruan, whose love of the moors is what sustains her through pain and grief and uncertainty. I’ve compared it to I Capture the Castle and Guard Your Daughters, but quite a few people have compared it to Jane Eyre more recently. It is certainly quite sombre and poignant, though there are comic moments, and it’s one of the most enveloping novels I’ve ever read. I shan’t repeat my whole review, since I wrote it less than a year ago – head over here to read the whole thing about why I love it so much.

Oh, and I got to talk to two of Smith’s grandsons while putting together the author bio and afterword. That was such a privilege. It was quite hard to find something to say in the afterword except that I loved it, but in the end I wrote about clothing. But mostly about how much I love it.

Sally on the Rocks by Winifred Boggs

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I bought a couple of books by Winifred Boggs, as she sounded like the sort of author I’d like, from the scant information I could find online – and the gamble has paid off. Sally on the Rocks, from 1915, is a really wonderful book with a heroine I won’t forget in a hurry.

Winifred Boggs starts us with the sort of village community that has been the basis for many of the great works of literature. Little Crampton is an insular world, assured of its own superiority, and not necessarily very welcoming to outsiders. But how few outsiders would be interested in it, because any village would be equally convinced that it is the first and best village in its region. Little Crampton is ruled over by Miss Maggie Hopkins – an unofficial position, but her gossiping, her rigid adherence to morality when it can shame others, and her determination to root out the truth in any situation mean that she is feared and also a vital source of information.

As the novel opens, she writes to Sally, hinting that the curate, Mr Bingley, is looking for a wife. ”He’s so safe, and of course there’s the house and ‘perks’, as well as the fifteen hundred,” she writes, none too subtly. It is enough to bring Sally back to the village where she grew up, adopted by the vicar Mr Lovelady, who is still in residence but hears little from his ward. She is in France, wary of the probable coming invasion – for the war is underway – and she has is licking the wounds of an unsuccessful love affair. She comes back to Little Crampton.

As she says, ”You’re not out for romance at thirty-one; it’s a business.” She is truly fond of Mr Lovelady, but she does not want to end up dependent on him – rather, she sets her cap at Mr Bingley and is willing to do whatever it takes to become his wife. All is fair in love and war, perhaps – but there is neither love nor war here. It is a woman who has been broken by the world seeking to play the world’s rules against themselves. She is like a much more likeable Becky Sharp. She doesn’t seek power or position – just stability.

Sally on the Rocks is wonderfully feminist at many junctures. I shan’t spoil all the plot, but Sally’s lover from France comes back. When Sally is asked, by her ex-inamorato, if she can forgive him, she replies:

”There is no question of that, only you are a little illogical, aren’t you? You are to be permitted to forget, but never I. Yet you have paid no price. Your wife forgave you and married you just the same, as women, wise or foolish, do the whole world over. You look at the matter one way and I the other – the man’s and the woman’s way. You ran no real risk of losing your wife by confessing. I lose everything in this world; some think everything in the next. No, such things are not on the same footing, after all.”

Most wonderful is Boggs’ take on a love triangle. Mrs Dalton, a widow with a young daughter, is also keen to persuade Mr Bingley to marry her. We have seen, hundreds of times, the two women pitted against each other for the ‘prize’ of the man. Here, the women candidly agree that Mr Bingley is a repellent prospect but the financially savvy one, acknowledge that they will both fight hard to win his hand, but that they will play fair. There is a sense of comrades-in-arms between them that I haven’t seen in a novel before.

I should say, Sally on the Rocks is very funny, as well as having a lot to say about the status of women at the time. Sometimes simultaneously. My favourite, extended scene was when Sally takes Mr Bingley off on a walk in the woods, deliberately letting them get lost – her plan being that, lost alone with her in the woods, under a full moon, he will feel duty-bound AND romantically inclined to propose.

But much of the humour, as well as the enjoyment in the book, comes from Sally. She is determined, witty, bloody but unbowed. She is even rather ruthless, but there is plenty of humanity in her too – and, of course, there is another man who catches her eye. He is not at all the savvy choice. I shall leave it to your imagination to decide which path she ultimately takes…

It’s a joy to find a book so utterly forgotten and to love it. Or perhaps I am wrong, and there are many latent Boggs fans? I’ve now read another, with a better title and worse content, which was silly fun. And Sally on the Rocks is sold as being By the author of The Sale of Lady Daventry, which is an intriguing title. I couldn’t find cheap copies of many of her books, but I do have another on the way – I’m hoping to discover more and more joy from the unfortunately-named Winifred Boggs.

British Library Women Writers #6: Tea is So Intoxicating by Mary Essex

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When I was first asked to suggest titles for the British Library Women Writers series, one of the first titles that came to my mind was Tea is So Intoxicating by Mary Essex. Some authors are loved because they are great prose stylists. Others because they have something profound to say about contemporary society. And then there are people like Mary Essex who just know how to write a rattlingly enjoyable story. I say Mary Essex – her real name was Ursula Bloom, and Mary Essex was one of a handful of pseudonyms she used for her hundreds of books. Truly, an extraordinarily prolific woman.

I’ve read a few of the books she wrote as Mary Essex, and this was the first – back in 2003, I think. I bought it because of that wonderfully beguiling title, which I’m hopeful will also attract book shoppers when bookshops are open again.

The novel is about David and Germayne, who decide to open a tea garden in a village just after World War 2. David has some experience in teashops – albeit the business side rather than any hands-on experience – and Germayne is willing to come along, though obviously a little less enthusiastic. They met when she was married to someone else, and Essex is very witty about their coming together – how Germayne wanted somebody spontaneous and more exciting than her first husband. It’s that spontaneity that leads to this ill-fated plan.

The village are not very pleased to have these outsiders coming in, and they have to try and placate various other people – from the doyenne of the village to the pub owners who claim the tea garden is stealing their business. Many things in village life have not changed since 1950, when this book was published, and I certainly recognise a lot of the sparring. Things only get more animated when Mimi is hired as a cook. She is a refugee from Vienna, and not above using her feminine wiles to get attention. As the narrator drily notes, her English gets more broken the more she wishes to charm her interlocutor.

Essex handles the whole thing wonderfully – it’s just a joyful romp, with quite an unexpected ending that I shan’t spoil here. It was quite difficult to find any contemporary issue to write about in the afterword, so I chose to write a bit about rationing. But this isn’t in any way an ‘issue novel’ – rather, it is a dollop of fun in a year that needs all the fun it can get.

The Faces of Justice by Sybille Bedford

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You probably know about Sybille Bedford, and maybe have even read some of her novels. She had a welcome resurgence of interest in the blogosphere when Daunt republished a few of her books a while ago, and I think she is a really interesting novelist. Lots of good stuff on small moments in child/parent relationships, as well as the drama of a larger scale journey. I enjoyed A Favourite of the Gods and A Compass Error enough to buy up more books by her – and four years ago I came across The Faces of Justice (1961) in one of my favourite bookshops, The Malvern Bookshop.

She starts off with a description of a trial of someone accused of stealing 32 cheeses. We are thrown, in media res, into the court case – a mixture of legal speak and very human reactions; a clash of the amusingly mundane and, for the defendant at least, the extraordinary.

This case, or one like it – it was a very ordinary case – came on some four or five years ago. Mutatis mutandis, it could come on this year and it could come on, God willing and if this particular judge has not retired, next year and the year thereafter. I walked in on it by chance when I was first trying to learn the ways of our law courts. I have sat since through many cases of all kinds, but that one was the first criminal trial and the paragraphs above, with a few enlargements, are what I wrote of what I saw at the time. Now, I propose to go through the case – in memory as well as words in black on white – with a fine toothcomb [sic!]. For I have decided to start on a journey to the law courts of some other countries, and I was a kind of yard-stick. Before going off to see how they are doing it elsewhere, I want to put down, if I can, commit to mind and paper, the look, the sound, the ways of some daily English trials.

And that is exactly what she does. Bedford is limited by the languages she understands – which are quite a few – and she goes to Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and France to see how their courts compare with England’s. But first, she will spend about eighty pages looking at England’s courts.

Of course, these comparisons are no longer particularly useful as a comparison of legal systems. England’s justice system of sixty years ago might as well be a foreign country. All manner of laws have changed – we still had the death penalty, for instance – and I expect an awful lot of other elements have also altered. But it is absolutely fascinating nonetheless.

Bedford doesn’t take any particularly structured approach to examining the justice system. There are occasional incidental descriptions of why certain things are happening, but it is mostly a series of snapshots of court cases. Some are trivial, some are rather more devastating. All the driving offences are rattled through in moments. Similarly, the prostitution cases are rocketed through as a matter of course. The wonder of this section is Bedford’s eye for humanity and her ability to condense those observations into a few words. I learned a little about the legal system, but a lot about how people felt appearing in court. And that just by Bedford’s transcriptions – if transcriptions they are – of the usually brief appearances each defendant makes.

Off she goes to Germany. And this is probably where her stated exercise of comparison rather breaks down. If she intended to compare, presumably she’d have sat in on similar cases, and pointed out similarities and differences. What she actually does, in Germany, is document one case at length, involving the shooting of a man believed to have repeatedly flashed girls and young women in a public park. It was a warning shot gone awry, apparently.

I should be clear – I absolutely didn’t care that the purported point of The Faces of Justice changed. Bedford is just as good at taking us through a more complicated and more serious case as she was with the trivial. She never intrudes her opinion, yet the framing she gives to everything is still pretty editorial. We never lose the sense that Bedford is our guide to these worlds, and I’m grateful for it.

The sections on Austria, Switzerland, and France aren’t quite as memorable as that on Germany, but Bedford could give me a tour of my own home and I’d find it surprising and original. I shan’t go through what happens in each place, but her ability to find humanity in any arena doesn’t falter.

The Faces of Justice will tell you nothing useful about today’s justice systems, and only fairly circumstantially will you learn anything about the ’60s, but it’s no less engaging, curious and oddly delightful a book for that. In anybody else’s hands, it might have fallen apart. But, with Bedford’s pen, she pulls together all the disparate and disorganised strands into one successful whole.

Pin A Rose on Me by Josephine Blumenfeld

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I was intrigued when I first read Scott’s review of Pin a Rose on Me (1958) by Josephine Blumenfeld, mostly by this line of his: “a bit like one of E. M. Delafield’s Provincial Lady diaries as penned by Morticia Addams, or perhaps it’s like one of Shirley Jackson’s wonderful humorous memoirs of domestic life, if Jackson had let loose all the more morbid gothic impulses of her fiction instead of keeping them fairly muted.”

Well, how could I resist?

I think it ended up being a cross between the Provincial Lady and Barbara Comyns, for me – the sardonic domestic memoir combined with a matter-of-fact observation of bizarre things. Very little is given any sense of being unusual, rather we rocket through her experiences without much pause for breath.

Mrs Appleby is the first-person narrator, who has a handful of adult children and doesn’t much care for them or their progeny. As the novel (let’s call it that, though I’m not sure it quite qualifies) opens, she is more focused on her dog Fanny and her coquettishness for dogs of the opposite sex. The line ‘Tarts don’t have Fannys’ on the first page might rather make this one impossible to reprint in England…

There isn’t a plot, really, it’s just Mrs Appleby’s life – which seems crammed with movement. At one point she rather suddenly goes off to America by sea (if I understood it properly), while elsewhere she embarks on a volunteering career in a hospital. Very little is forewarned, and the eccentricity of the structure matches the eccentricity of the character.

Essentially, it is an exercise in tone. Here are a couple of examples of it…

After dinner the others play bridge and say, ‘The rest are mine’, while I do my occupational therapy, a rather revolting piece of tapestry I am doing for my nephew and his wife who don’t want it but who daren’t say ‘no’. It has gone wrong somewhere, it rises to a tight peak in the middle and is lopsided.

“It’s pretty, isn’t it?” people say sadly. “But isn’t there something a wee bit wrong? Haven’t you pulled the wool too tight? You’ll have to have it stretched, won’t you?”

I shan’t have it stretched, I shall throw it into the sea the day we leave. But now while the others are writing their log books and we are drifting about between the islands, it is infinitely soothing to push coloured wools in and out of any old holes I feel inclined, and it keeps my mind off the rough seas.

And another…

Sad friend sends white hand-knitted shawl for my birthday.

“It will go well with your dark hair, my dear,” she writes. “It was originally meant for Derek’s wife, but things didn’t turn out to plan as you know, so I feel that you should have it for your birthday.” She goes on to say she has arthritis in all her fingers and is finding it more and more difficult to get through her tea cosy orders. “The doctor says I should winter abroad. What wild ideas they have.”

The shawl is beautiful, wide, long, soft and miraculously woven in the shapes of giant cobwebs and open roses. In a shop it would cost a lot. Sad friend wouldn’t get a lot from a shop, but she will get nothing from me as it is my birthday present and I can’t pay for my birthday present.”

Sometimes the tone worked really well – sometimes the deliberate inconsequential nature of Mrs Appleby’s descriptions of life were, well, too inconsequential. Overall, it is exuberant and odd, and it doesn’t quite cohere into a full novel, but perhaps Blumenfeld is trying something completely different. It certainly felt pretty dizzying to read, and there were plenty of moments that made me laugh – as well as times I had no clue what was going on or where we were. Mrs Appleby’s determined forthrightness, and total absence of anything resembling etiquette or regard for others, made her an enjoyably eccentric protagonist to spend time with. She would be a nightmare in real life, but some of the best protagonists would be.

I think I’ll re-read one day and see if I can work out what’s going on a bit better. But it’s great fun and very unusual – not quite consistent enough to warrant becoming a classic, but a tour de force that may have influences of Delafield, or even Comyns, but ends up being its own strange little thing.