1917

Mr Teddy by E.F. Benson

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Mr Teddy

I have a teetering pile of E.F. Benson novels I’ve not read – he was so prolific, and some of his books aren’t that easy to come across, so I always snap up any that I find in the wild. Most of the time, I love reading the results of this foraging – occasionally, some of his earlier novels haven’t worked as well for me. But mostly he has a witty view of small-town communities that revels in their competitiveness and bitchiness and interdependence, and I lap it all up.

Mr Teddy (1917)  – published in the US as The Tortoise – falls somewhere in the middle of his writing career. On the first page, ‘Mr Teddy’ – Edward Heaton – is shaving in the mirror and reflecting on the fact that he has just turned 40 years old. That felt apposite, as I am a few months away from the milestone myself. He is a decent, kind man who has enough wealth to make decency and kindness fairly easy on the whole, though he struggles to achieve his potential – his potential being artistic. He has made plenty of very good, half-finished portraits… and nothing more. The morning of his 40th birthday is a time for reflection on such incomplete achievements.

One area of his life where kindness is very much evident is in dealing with the true monster of the book – his mother, Mrs Heaton. I say ‘monster’. She is also the novel’s greatest delight, for me. In her, Benson has created an exceptional portrait of long-suffering, where the suffering is entirely confected and the complaints about it weary everyone around her. She is constantly saying that nobody must consider her feelings, that they clearly don’t care about her opinions or her anguish, all the while refusing to allow anybody to help her and deliberately misinterpreting anything as a personal barb.

“I know I have have no say in the matter,” said his mother, instantly proceeding to have a pretty good ‘say’,”because you are master of this house, and I am your pensioner. Whether that was or was not a kind and considerate way of your father to leave his money, so that I was necessarily dependent on you for the ordinary comforts of life, I hope I have too great a loyalty to his memory to say. Nothing shall induce me to open my lips on that subject. You will perhaps tell me when you have decided what room to give Robin; and if you settle to give him my bedroom, I’m sure I will sleep wherever you choose to put me without a murmur – not that I sleep much at the best of times.”

Benson is so adept at this sort of character, and Mrs Heaton is both consistent and infuriating. Edward puts up with her in a manner befitting a saint, only occasionally allowing impatience to creep into his voice (and being made to pay for it). Perhaps a little more impatience would have made him a little more realistic. Certainly, I found myself deeply frustrated by Mrs Heaton – in a way that I loved reading about.

Teddy’s dearest friend is a younger woman called Daisy, in and out of their house constantly in the manner of villagers who have known each other forever, and who belong to the very select upper class of the community. (The lower classes may as well not exist except as servants, in Mr Teddy, and there is no indictation of their experience of village life.) While notably younger than Teddy, she has reached an age where she considers herself on the shelf – somewhat south of 30. But if Teddy were to ask her…

A fun side plot is Daisy’s sister’s career as an author. Her novels appear in instalments in the parish magazine, and from thence are published under a pseudonym and pretty popular with the wider public. As publishing approaches go, I suspect that was always unusual. Marion takes her writing career extremely seriously, not least as the moral compass of her readers. She considers it both shocking and an enormous responsibility when one of her characters loses her Christian faith (though she will resume it after a decent interval). Benson – and Marion’s readers – take her career rather less seriously.

Now in late October the era of ‘winter dessert’ had begun, and while Daisy ate a small green apple, which quite resisted the cutting edge of a silver knife, Marion chose a hard ginger-nut which was nearly as intractable to the teeth. She announced about this period the news of the impending salvation of Mrs Anstruther.

“Well, that’s a great relief to me,” said Daisy. “I have often felt quite depressed in thinking of her. I wondered if you would find you could touch her heart.”

“Yes, but I think she must die,” said Marion.

Speaking of dying – a spoiler for about a third of the way through the novel – Mrs Heaton’s self-pity for once is justified, and she dies. Her behaviour is, indeed, rather more tolerable during this trying period. Like so many self-obsessed nuisances, she deals better with crises than with everyday inconveniences. Sadly for Mr Teddy, I think this is where the novel loses a lot of its momentum. In the remaining two-thirds of the novel, new neighbours arrive and Edward’s possible romantic life becomes more significant. I enjoyed Mr Teddy right through to the end – but it had lost its main spectacle.

We are often told that conflict is necessary for action in a novel, and I think that is only true if ‘conflict’ is considered in the loosest possible manner. It’s perfectly possible to write an excellent novel without anybody as dislikable as Mrs Heaton. But her selfishness is not only an exceptionally good, funny portrait – it also, somehow, gave the novel its momentum. If only to see which character might finally snap and murder her. With Mrs Heaton off the page, it became a pleasant, witty comedy of manners – but without any obvious driving force.

Such plot as there is seems to come in rather a rush at the end, and Benson does rather try to have his cake and eat it with some genuinely poignant moments – perhaps falling a little too near the writings by Marion that he is teasing about. I think Mr Teddy would have been more successful if he had kept his antagonist alive – and resisted a little self-indulgent bathos. But E.F. Benson is E.F. Benson, and I really enjoyed my time in this novel even with those quibbles. And there are plenty more on the Benson tower to enjoy next.

Uneasy Money by P.G. Wodehouse

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There are some authors I think of as ‘break glass in case of emergency’ authors. And I didn’t have a particular emergency the other day, only nothing I was picking up felt right. I had a few books on the go, but wasn’t in the mood for any of them. So… I went to my Wodehouse shelves.

As he was so prolific, and copies of his books abound cheaply, I have an awful lot of unread Wodehouse books. I picked Uneasy Money (1917) off the shelves more or less at random – and had a lovely time. I could write down almost any sentence from a Wodehouse novel as an example of his mastery of language – this is from the second page, as our hero Lord Dawlish is approached by someone asking for money.

For some minutes he had been eyeing his lordship appraisingly from the edge of the kerb, and now, secure in the fact that there seemed to be no policeman in the immediate vicinity, he anchored himself in front of him and observed that he had a wife and four children at home, all starving.

Lord Dawlish ‘has always looked on himself as rather a chump – well-meaning, perhaps, but an awful ass’, and he is accurate in that. Of course he is; he is a Wodehouse hero and they’re almost all like that. Being well-meaning, he gives the man some money – but appearances are deceptive. He might be a Lord, but he doesn’t have much money. He earns an income as a secretary at a club, though this is really pity money, and otherwise is stony broke. Much to the chagrin of Claire, his fiancée, who refuses to marry him unless he gets a better income.

It’s always relatively clear in a Wodehouse novel which characters are to be cheered on and which to be disliked, and Claire is in the latter camp. She is fixated on money, rigidly unkind to our Lord Dawlish, and we never for a moment dream that they will end up together. Though they do end up both heading off to America, unbeknownst to each other. Lord Dawlish is informed that anybody can make millions in the Land of the Free, while Claire goes to visit a friend (and also with her eyes set on a rich middle-aged bachelor whom she knows is travelling by boat at the same time).

All is set up for a fun plot – which gets all the more fun when Lord Dawlish learns he has inherited a million dollars from an old man whom he once helped with his golf swing. He is chuffed – but also horrified that thus is disinherited the old man’s nephew and (more to the point) niece. He somewhat disregards the nephew, but writes to the niece (Elizabeth) to offer her half the money. She, however, refuses. And Lord Dawlish makes it his mission to find Elizabeth and persuade her to take the money – albeit, for reason, under an alias.

The plot is as brilliantly worked and completely unlikely as any Wodehouse novel, and the characters come alive with his trademark vivacity and vim. I loved the whole lot of them, even the ones we weren’t meant to like. But the star of the show is, of course, Wodehouse’s writing. His mix of exaggeration and understatement is always brilliant; his pithy descriptions of people (‘his appearance was that of a bewildered drainpipe’) are always a delight.

As I’ve often said, and others have too, if Wodehouse had written a handful of novels, they’d all be classics we learn by heart. Because he was so prolific, and so consistently good, there aren’t many that are individually well-known. He is a victim of his own brilliance. But Uneasy Money is certainly up there with his most enjoyable of the 20 or so I’ve read, and now I’m going to have to work hard not to just chain-read Wodehouse for months…

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.

British Library Women Writers #1: The Tree of Heaven by May Sinclair

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The first lot of British Library Women Writers reprints are out! And in this uncertain and scary world, I think this series is more vital than ever, in these difficult times – bookshops are probably closed now, but the British Library are still delivering from their shop and lots of local indies are still doing postal delivery.

If you missed my announcement a while ago – this Women Writers series is reprinting novels by and about women from the first half of the 20th century, and I’m lucky enough to be series consultant! I’m also writing the afterword for each one, picking out a particular contemporary issue in the novel. For The Tree of Heaven, I wrote about suffragettes. I’m a bit nervous about my afterwords being out in the world, and hoping that people enjoy them – though of course the main thing is the novel itself.

I didn’t choose these first couple of novels, The Tree of Heaven and My Husband Simon – though they’re great – but I did choose the next batch. More on those soon! As they become available, I’m going to be putting up reviews.

The Tree of Heaven was published in 1917, and it’s always interesting to read a novel published during a World War, because obviously the author doesn’t know how or when it will end. It certainly has an effect on all the members of the family at the centre of the novel: there are four Harrison children, Dorothea/Dorothy, Michael, Nicholas/Nicky, and John. Sinclair is clever in the way that uses each of them to embody something major going on at the time, without making them seem too much like stock characters or simply there to represent a theme. Michael, for instance, is in the aesthetic set – all poetry magazines and being anti-patriotism – while Dorothea gets swept up in the suffrage movement.

They grow realistically from children to adults over the course of the novel, and there is a middle section called ‘the vortex’ where each of them finds that their particular interest or allegiance might lead them into a ‘vortex’ that removes their individuality:

For Dorothy was afraid of the Feminist Vortex […] She was afraid of the herded women. She disliked the excited faces, and the high voices skirling their battle-cries, and the silly business of committees, and the platform slang. She was sick and shy before the tremor and the surge of collective feeling; she loathed the gestures and the movements of the collective soul, the swaying and heaving and rushing forward of the many as one. She would not be carried away by it; she would keep the clearness and hardness of her soul.

There’s a lot going on with signing up – or not signing up – to fight, and there’s a subplot about the disputed parentage of another character. There’s a lot going on and, being the 1910s, there is a slightly heightened emotionality to everything – but Sinclair weaves all the strands together really well. I think she’s better at women than men, or at least I found more to engage me in Dorothea’s uncertainty about whether the means justifies the ends in militant suffragism than I did in the different boys’ decisions about whether or not to fight. Not that that isn’t an important discussion, but it felt like Sinclair was a little less invested in it herself, and it’s high and low points lean a little closer to emotional cliche.

But it’s a really engaging, enjoyable, and moving novel. If you’ve only read Life and Death of Harriett Frean then there is a great deal more to love about Sinclair – and this one isn’t as melancholy, though it certainly isn’t a chuckle-fest!

I promise my afterword was more thoroughly researched and diligently edited than this outpouring of thoughts late on a Sunday night ;) – something to compare and contrast if you do get a copy! I’ll be back with more on the other books in the series soon – and revealing which books will be published in the series in the autumn [though if you’re impatient, they’re all in the British Library catalogue and listed on Amazon already].

The Village that Voted the Earth was Flat by Rudyard Kipling

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The nice people at Ampersand Publishing got in touch recently, and asked if I’d like to review any of the Ampersand Classics series. Well, you know I can’t resist reprinted classics – so I took a look through their catalogue, and decided upon Rudyard Kipling’s The Village that Voted the Earth was Flat, first published in 1917.

Before I talk about it – do go and see the sort of things Ampersand do. They’re really beautifully produced – square paperbacks, affordable, and would make great little gifts alongside a birthday card. And the selection is really interesting. It’s a bit disheartening when yet another publisher reprints the Dickens, Austen, Hardy etc that we all know are classics, but don’t need new editions of. Ampersand have dug around in the archives, and come up with lesser-known works by famous writers (Mary Shelley, Robert Louis Stevenson, F Scott Fitzgerald etc) as well as international authors I hadn’t heard of (Henri Barbusse, Pu Songling). They’re ‘short works’ – straddling the line between short story and novella, I think. The Village that Voted the Earth was Flat is about 100 small pages.

And, going through the catalogue, how could I resist a title like that? The story is a side to Kipling that I haven’t seen before (I’ve read The Jungle Book, The Just So Stories, Kim, and one short story, ‘They’, but that’s it) – it’s extremely funny.

It’s actually a revenge tale. A group of friends are caught speeding by a mercenary local MP, who has set up a speed trap on the long, straight road into his village, Huckley. He glories in their misfortune – and is anti-Semitic to one of the group. They vow that he won’t get away with it. What they have to hand is ingenuity, and a handful of newspapers under their control… subtly, step by step, they manage to turn Huckley into a national laughing stock…

I shan’t say much more, because it’s fun to see how Kipling progresses the story – but it’s done with excellent logic and structure, and we manage to stay on the side of the revengers. It’s all rather silly, but in the best possible way. And there is something very 21st century about trying to avenge speeding tickets (of which, I hasten to add, I have never had any). It certainly makes me want to see what else Kipling has written in this line…

This Is The End by Stella Benson

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A Shiny New Review from Shiny New Books – of an old book, now reprinted by Mike Walmer. I loved I Pose by Stella Benson (review here) and leapt at the chance of reading her next book, This Is The End. Even though I kept singing ‘Skyfall’ every time I picked it up…

Here’s the beginning of my review:

One of the more unusual novelists being reprinted at the moment is Stella Benson. Her work is issued by Michael Walmer, a one-man publishing house that is reprinting various neglected novelists in the order their novels were originally published. This Is The End is Benson’s second (from 1917), and comes immediately before the one that is probably most remembered now,Living Alone, about very curious witches.
I want to say that This Is The End is not supernatural, but any definite statement about a Benson novel feels like a trap waiting to happen; the reader never quite knows which genre they’re reading, or what sort of response is required. Except that laughter will always be involved somewhere.